Katieblog

Song of the week

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 22:04:36 -0800

Because I've been obsessed with Deer Tick since I saw them a couple weeks ago: When you're in jail and you can't make bail, I got the money.

Tech review: undo

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 10:46:20 -0800

Google Labs is a place you can get nifty little apps to add on to Google pages. After a disaster of an email discussion which was accidentally sent out to a much larger audience than intended (not by me, phew), I enabled an app called "undo". You click send, then your heart jumps up because you accidentally put someone in the To field you didn't mean to. Click undo. You have about 5 glorious seconds. Thanks, Google.

Rhode Island boys, II

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:41:44 -0800

Nobody wanted to come see Deer Tick play in SF with me, so I went by myself. I got there at the start of an uninspiring set by a band who really wanted to inspire me, bless their hearts. I started getting sleepy. I didn't think I would make it through the night. Deer Tick came on, played the following cover, and announced that this was the first song on one of their favorite records, and the first song of one of their favorite shows. They could tell. And it was a great show. They covered everyone and their dog, whose songs I'm not always familiar with, and they played lots of their own songs too. The highlight by far was "Dead Flowers", a Rolling Stones cover. I wish I could find a video, but put on the Stones version, and then turn up heart to 11, and you might know what I mean: P.S. Only fucking rock stars can do a single, 1-song encore and have it be La Bamba.

Rhode Island boys

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:13:58 -0800

The Greek Theater is a Berkeley landmark, built in 1903 and privy to such events as a commencement address by Teddy Roosevelt, a speech by the Dalai Lama, concerts by Jerry Garcia, Guns N Roses, Iggy Pop, and Dave Matthews, and the annual College of Chemistry fire extinguisher training (see below). I extinguished it right after that photo was snapped. Last Friday, David Byrne played the Greek. The vampires that run the place wanted $70 for a ticket, so it was decided that we'd find the promised land in the hills above, from where one can both hear the show in excellent acoustics, and see tiny David prancing about on stage. It's the culturally advanced version of Tightwad Hill. We had every reason to believe it existed; could the East Bay Express be wrong? ("Wedged between the Greek's barbed-wire back fence and a pricey parking lot, it's shaded and pleasant and slightly elevated...") Joe found some cryptic instructions on Yelp.com, another dubious online source, and having packed John's home made burritos, several bottles of wine, and other assorted weekend supplies, I put on my hiking shoes and we headed up a path from the parking lot. We shortly came across two would-be tightwads heading to their favorite spot, a flat area covered with trash. One of them explained that it'd be a good spot without the trash, and she'd brought hefty bags. Adorable. She asked us if we were trying to see the show. "I've never seen the stage," she said. John replied that we were going somewhere she'd never been, and we trekked on. We trampled through the bushes for another half hour or so, asked the guard at the national lab on the hill if he knew where to go, and got covered with dirt and sand fleas. Finally, we settled on the retaining wall just above the upper parking lot, concluding that the Greek must have moved back the fences, making the original Greek tightwad location obsolete. We expected something like this: but all we could see was this: Never mind the view, the real story here is the sound. The sound was perfect. It was loud enough, crystal clear, and there weren't any jackasses behind me yelling for Psycho Killer. Well wait, I guess there were, but only because I'd sent an email out to my lab inviting them along. Byrne started out with a handful of tracks from Everything that Happens, which I loved. Then the Talking Heads show started. I'm kind of glad I couldn't see the stage when he started with the old stuff. He has trained his band admirably - it sounds just like the albums. Somehow it felt a little dirty though, a little sad, a little like a Talking Heads cover band, fronted by David Byrne. Which it was. At least since they were invisible to me, I didn't have to watch some imposter play bass. David saved the day by bringing out a full marching band at the end of the set. I don't know what they were doing, because they weren't mic'd, but I'm sure it was sweet. I can't reconcile these pictures with the experience I had. It must have been like some bizarre combination of Mark Twain sings the Talking Heads backed up by the Blue Man Group, who have all turned white.

The next 4 years

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:09:58 -0800

Nice to meet you, mr. horseradish peroxidase.

Bike heckling

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 15:24:29 -0800

Things that have been yelled at me while cycling: "You're not a car!!" (From the car behind me, while patiently standing in the left turn lane waiting for the green arrow.) "Your bike is hot!!" (While Kerry rode my orange singlespeed down 5th street on our way to the cherry orchards.) "You've almost caught them!" (While desperately trying to catch back on to the main group in Berkeley's hilly crit, yelled by my sister.) "Pfeiffer, Pfeiffer, she's our biker..." (While desperately trying to catch back on to the main group in Berkeley's hilly crit, yelled by my chemical engineering classmates.) "Don't wear spandex! You'll get a yeast infection!" (With the Cal women's cycling team, on our way through Walnut creek. Comment came from an adolescent boy who likely just finished the women's reproductive organ section in health class.) While yelling from motorists and onlookers is not always helpful to me in my bike-riding endeavors, it turns out that they're technically correct most of the time.

someone told me a funny story

Mon, 25 May 2009 09:13:03 -0800

A friend was working at her college job, cooking gyros at a street stand on Welch Ave in Ames, IA. It was winter, and cold, so it's always fun to watch the scantily clad sorority chicks shiver down the street in short skirts. One of them stopped at the gyro stand. "Can I get a warm pita?" My friend complied, and then asked her to move out of the way so the next person could order. "But... it's COLD!" Yeah, I know, but you're not really dressed in such a way that would make me take pity on you. Please move. *whimper whimper hover over hot stove* Listen you need to move out of the way, please. "But... I'm pretty!" Drunk sorority girl probably didn't realize what came out of her mouth, maybe the cold had slowed down her thought-voice filter to the point where she just said what she was thinking. My friend gave her the warm pita bread and she went on her way. Where that way will take her, god only knows.

"California may be too big to fail"

Thu, 21 May 2009 22:52:10 -0800

I wish I had something intelligent to say about California residents' resounding refusal to do its representative government's job for them, but I don't. So I'll refer you to Hank's excellent discussion of the issue: http://bucket-o-hank.blogspot.com/2009/05/bust-statewide-special-bucket-lection.html Good thing California is too big to fail. Too bad our high school aren't! Ba-dum ching!

Tech review: my new shorts

Mon, 18 May 2009 20:23:52 -0800

These are the best shorts I've ever worn: Giordana Formas. They're super soft, the edges are all seamless, they don't have the annoying rubber grippers on the legs, the chamois is comfortable for 4 hours + an hour on the couch eating a mexican sandwich. I'm going to have a hard time wearing anything else. Look out world, Katie's only wearing bike shorts from this day forward. If you want some of your own, which no doubt now you do, www.chainreactioncycles.com has them for about half the US cost. Love that exchange rate.

What is a chemical engineer?

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:23:17 -0800

Prof. Smit: A mathematician is a person who can turn caffeine into theorems. A chemical engineer can make excellent coffee in a swimming pool.

Giant leap

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:15:23 -0800

Caution: the views expressed on in this blog are the views of Katie, and not necessarily completely thought out, logical, or rational. They have likely been conceived of within the last hour. I saw Al Gore speak today; he was at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Richard Blum Center for Developing Economies. He was looking good - despite the red face he got each time the UCB Chancellor him "Our 46th President" (three times, corrected more hilariously each time. "Better to call the vice president the president than vice versa!" Maybe not in this case, Mr. Chancellor; I think that's a soft spot...). Al was talking about how there is a lot of poverty and income disparity, and how we can't solve our environmental problems until the poverty problems are also solved. Then he let out the worst analogy in the whole climate change - you could see it coming from a mile away. "You know, it was just 48 years ago that Kennedy challenged America to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely, within 10 years. 8 years later, blah blah one small step." So obviously we can solve this climate change problem we have, if we just want it bad enough. He also pointed out that since the industrial revolution, our society had turned much fossil fuel into much atmospheric carbon dioxide. That's true, but it wasn't what I expected him to say. I thought he was going to say that we'd turned all that fuel into knowledge, infrastructure, civilization, and population. Humans have proven themselves exceptionally capable of that - fossil fuels made the industrial revolution possible, which made the scientific advances of the 20th century and the society we live in possible. It made the moon shot possible. We're great at turning fossil fuel into knowledge and stuff and rearranged molecules. We are not so practiced at taking knowledge and turning it into stuff. We have a society that can support cities and skyscrapers and salads and big populations, and that society is made of fossil fuel. We've learned a lot, but we have not learned to make stuff from nothing, or from orders of magnitude less than we do now. Do you understand what I'm trying to say here? The moon shot was a simple matter of taking fossil fuel and turning it into a rocket ship and some mathematical equations that could get it to the moon and back. The energy problem is a matter of learning to make all the things our society can't do without, with very little. That is a problem of incomparable magnitude, and suggesting that it's not is irresponsible, naive, or a plain lie. Who knows though, the moon shot only took 8 years. Maybe if Al had been prez, we'd have this shit figured out by now.

Bianchi revival, f'in finale.

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:00:03 -0800

It took me a while, but it's done.

You know I never noticed before I did the bike, but the trim in my apartment is exactly the same tealy-blue that's sometimes called celeste.

The night the ninjas attacked my sister's car

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 01:45:07 -0800

My department is hosting our admitted students this weekend - we wine and dine and get them drunk in an effort to get them to come to Cal next year as new grad students. We were short a driver, so my sister let me borrow her car for the weekend. I picked it up last week, as she's been in Mexico, the midwest, etc for the last two weeks. Just to fill in the time gaps in this story, I parked the car in my driveway Sunday-Tuesday. Tuesday night I drove to San Francisco for a concert, parked near Market Street for about three hours, and drove back. It was parked in my driveway until Friday. I got pretty worried when I saw the first dent - a really big ding in the rear quarter panel. WTF, that was a really hard car door hit, shit, I am going to have to replace this panel and it's going to cost me as much as a new mountain bike. I was in the midst of ferrying students from somewhere to somewhere else, so I didn't think about it for long. I saw the second dent when I was on the phone with Kerry - the car was in the driveway, and I was outside improving my mobile phone reception. Then I saw the small dents all over the top of the car, and the ones on the trunk. What. The. Fuck. Could have possibly have caused this? Let me show you what I'm talking about:

As you can see, there was clearly a strike with some kind of solid object to cause the big dents in the back. And it looks like it hit half a dozen times, some harder than others. It's too high to be a car door; maybe one of those barriers that you go through in a parking garage, but I hadn't gone through any and I certainly hadn't been whacked repeatedly with one. Even more perplexing are the dents on top - smaller, and without any indication of a sharp impact. These ones look like someone was dancing all over the car, and kind of took a couple hard hops. Or like someone just beat on it really hard with their fists. Why would you do that, especially after you'd already run into it with some mysterious piece of machinery? The only explanation that makes sense is ninjas.

When John and I drove to San Francisco on Tuesday night, parking off Market for two or three hours, a roving pack of ninjas must have spotted it, and realized that it was the prefect location for a ninja fight. One of them had a big cane, and whacked the car with it whilst another ninja dodged out of the way. Throwing his cane aside, the two of them must have jumped on top of the car, fought for a while, made some dents, and continued on their way. I know this sounds far-fetched, but it's really the only plausible explanation. I talked to Teddy the next morning. I wanted to find out whether the car was fully insured before telling my sister. He assured me that he thought it was, and that just the week before Lisa had been hoping a tree would fall on it.

Really?

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 09:16:54 -0800

Seth Meyers on Michael Phelps, in case you missed it.

If horses were bikes

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 20:48:47 -0800

I used to do horse shows. Lots of people bring their expensive horses and expensive equipment and show off the skills they've spent hours, weeks, months, years perfecting. Bike races, it turns out, are kind of like that. Except a better workout and not so many belt buckles. And faster. We showed up in Palmdale on Friday night, hit the Motel 6 immediately and got to bed by 11:30. The race started the next morning at 7 am, so we were up at 5 the next morning. After several wrong turns, we made it to the course to enjoy Santa Barbara's techno jams in the dark, freezing desert. My bike computer said 24.8 F. Jesse thought he was going to die, and he made sure everyone knew it. Women's C's were off at 7:15, with a powerful peloton, 12 strong. I think four of them were B's. The course was a ~10 mile loop, C's did two laps. Half of it was a big climb, and half a long easy descent, with a mile long flat section connecting the two. We rolled easy for a few minutes on the flat draggy bit, and then split into two groups. I stuck with the first group for a few minutes, but was the first to be popped off on the long climb. At that point, I figured I was in for a very long solo time trial. I decided to eat the energy gel in my pocket, which was totally gross. Warm mandarin orange powergel felt a lot like a momma penguin was puking into my mouth: Near the top of the climb, a Stanford girl caught me from behind. I stuck on her and followed her down the hill. On the flat, I told her I'd work if she wanted to try to catch whoever may be so far up the road that they were invisible. I took a pull or two, when a girl from Occidental college rolled past us like we were standing still. Stanford was in front, so I yelled, get that wheel! She turned around and said "huh?" And I was all for christ's sake. So I came through and put in a big effort, getting us within a bike length or two. I told Stanford to come through, and promptly dropped myself. Goddammit. I. Am. An idiot. Stanford and Occidental rode off into the sunset together. After spending a few minutes desperately trying to catch back on, I resigned once again to spending the next lap on my own. I put my head down and made it back up the the finish line for the second lap. I caught Occidental girl on my way up; she descends like a rock but I guess it's hard to push rocks back up hills. I considered waiting for her so I could follow her down, but decided to try to make it on my own. I passed a couple Men's D's, who left a few minutes before us, and that was a big ego boost to get me over the hill. I think I scared Mason with a big 'Rooooooooooooooooollll on you Beaaaaaaaaaaaars" as I passed him on the climb. Sounds like it helped though as he dropped a couple guys on the climb himself. So now I'm all alone, coming down as fast as I can with my gears all spun out. Sure enough, near the bottom of the descent Occidental comes barreling past again. NOT THIS TIME. I managed to grab her wheel and tucked in behind in her ample slipsteam. After nearly falling over in the only corner on the course, I followed her up a draggy climb, and then came around. I told her to help me catch Stanford, but I guess she was cooked from the climb before and couldn't hang on. To my extreme surprise, I was able to bridge up to Stanford on my own. I caught her wheel stealthily, hoping she wouldn't notice me until she'd pulled me to the finish. When my idiotic broken water bottle cage started to rattle, she looked back and saw me clinging to her wheel. The road was dragging up, and Stanford slowed down to what my frozen bike computer probably would said was 10 miles an hour had it been functional. I figured she was waiting for me to come around, only to follow me in. So I gathered my remaining strength and unleashed a mighty attack, the likes of which she had clearly never seen. Or maybe she was just tired. At any rate, I made it past and she didn't seem interested in following with any speed. I kept riding until someone told me I'd passed the finish. I guess there was another C up the road with the B girls, because I got second. The next day were the time trials. Joanna cooked up a scheme to get me riding with her against the A's, leaving Anna and Denise to kick around the C's by themselves. Joanna and I warmed up a bit, and it became clear that I would be doing a lot of sitting on her wheel. When the race started, I was able to take some pulls until the little hill - she had to wait for me on top. When I caught back on, we were nearly to the turn, I thought I was going to barf, and I sucked wheel for most of the rest of the race. I think I came through twice after the turn, but I did what I could. We ended up bringing up the rear in the A category, but Denise and Anna kicked ass and won in the C's. Finally, after gorging on frosting covered cookies and veggie chips, I had the individual TT. I rode down the road to warm up, and my legs felt like cinderblocks. This was going to be ugly. I took off down the road, and after what felt like 30 seconds, the guy behind me with the disc wheel and pointy helmet passed me by. I then got caught up trying to do some calculations to try to figure out how many people should pass me. If Katie takes 40 minutes to do the TT, and it's 11 miles long, how many people will pass her? Assume the fastest rider finishes in 29 minutes, riders start every 30 seconds, and a normal distribution of times. The standard deviation is 3 minutes. Then I gave up and started singing this Queen song instead:

That helped. I finished in about 39 minutes, by my clock. I'm still not sure how I finished, but whatever. I rode as fast as I could. Lessons learned: - Cal > Stanford - Always bring cream cheese frosting to the race - Don't lose your license - Don't pull your competitors up to your other competitors and then drop yourself - Denise snores!