R e - P e t e

¿Donde esta las Ramblas?

Traveling always makes for a great adventure, especially when it comes to language.

This morning, Emily and I set out to the nearby marketplace to get lunch stuff. We perused the endless stand of fruits, vegetables, meats and cheeses. Eventually we settled on one booth. We were nervous. I flipped through my trusty Rick Steve´s phrasebook to figure out all the right saying.

15 slices of chicken?
¿Quince rodajas *point finger*?

1/8th lbs of goat chees–
How do you say 1/8th?! They never taught us this in school!

Hmm I know how to say one quarter. I also know how to say one half. Maybe I can tell them to give me one half of one quarter. No way. Language barrier is one thing, but introducing a math question is recipe for disaster.

After a few panic-filled minutes, we realized that we should just ask for grams. Kgs to lbs.. do the math — do the math. Figured it out! Woo!

The transactions went mostly smoothly. We told them what we wanted. They responded in light-speed spanish. We responded with “no entiendo” (i dont understand) and they kinda just smiled. But we got what we wanted and came out victorious!

Towards the end of the day I had an experience similar to when I was in Florence. And this has to do with the ineplicable thing where people think I’m a local.

We were going into our hostal when an asian guys walking towards me goes:

“oh!! umm ohh!”

Something about it told me he was American (or Canadian).

“Donde esta Las Ramblas,” he said in Spanish that’s worse than mine.

I responded in english telling him where it was. It was all really funny.

Internet times up! Ciao, Pedro

still alive!!

hi everyone back home!!

i’m still alive and kicking! i’m in thailand right now waiting for a flight to ko samui. it’s rainy and HOT here! hopefully the weather clears up.

the last couple days were spent in hong kong with eugene. the weather was hot and humid and we got minimal rain. all in all it was very fun. hong kong is totally overcrowded. as em says, “it’s one big chinatown.”

anyway, hope all is well back home.

wanderlust pete

The streak is over

Cal (5-1) loses to UCLA (5-0) 47-40.

We were so close. We were ahead the whole game until the end. So many what-ifs. Kudos to the Bruins for a good game. Their defense really came through. They just better hope that Drew doesn’t get injured, given he scores 5 touchdowns for them.

A Plateau of Happiness

Courtesy of New York Times:

While the median incomein the US is higher than it was 30 years ago, people are not reporting increased happiness, polls show.

See for yourself.

Related article.

Nerd Rap

One fond memory I have of my days at Berkeley is an occassion where a CS 61c student wrote a “CS” rap. He talked about everything from recursive functions and MIPS and put it to a beat. It made for a good laugh at the time and is one of those great memories from the college days. It’s up there with the story of a brash student who was infamous for having an attitude for GSIs and eventually claiming that he got some action from a girl featured in the Playboy college edition (which turned into an even greater story when she responded to him on class forums).

Today I was surprised to find that “nerd rap” has found it’s way from the depths of Soda to geek popularity.

Rap Marketing Comes to Nerdcore
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,67970,00.html

One thing I found hilarious was a link to Monzy, a PhD student in the Stanford CS Dept.

So Much Drama in the PhD
http://www.monzy.com/intro/drama_lyrics.html

“…When I’m linear probing they’re like, “Damn that’s gigantic,”
I showed it to your mom and she used Hoare semantics.
She jumped like JNE up onto my erection
And I picked up that ho like straight garbage collection.

What’s wrong MC Plus Plus, am I making you nervous?
Even skanky fat hoes give you denial of service.
You’ll probably go to jail before you write your dissertation
So prepare your asshole for some internal fragmentation;
…”

Genius!