My trip to Europe - Day 4

Day 4 - Riding the Rails

On Day, Laritza and I headed over to the Hauptbahnhof fairly early to catch a 7:50 train to Fussen, so as to see the famed Neuschwanstein castle, the castle Walt Disney patterned Sleeping Beauty's castle after, and then subsequently the Sleeping Beauty castle at Disneyland. Our train ride included one transfer that was supposed to be, and turned out to be, quite simple. Just get out of the train with a bunch of other tourists and walk across the platform to the other train.

Upon arriving in Fussen around 10 am, we realized that the castles (there's Neuschwanstein and another called Hohenschwangau) were not in Fussen, but located at some distance from where the train had deposited us. A hotel clerk directed us to the Tourist Information building, and a girl there explained to us that it would take between 45 minutes and an hour to walk to Schwangau, the town closest to the castles where tickets are sold for tours. Or, if we preferred, there was a bus that traveled the approximately 5 km, but the next one wasn't leaving for another hour or so. Given that we didn't really feel like just sitting there for an hour, we opted to walk the 5 km over to the castles. And it really was 5 km, and of course it was quite warm.


A river we crossed on our way to Schwangau


Our first glimpse of Neuscwhanstein. You may need to look closely, but its there in the distance.

We arrived at Schwangau about 45 minutes later and bought tickets for the English-speaking tour of Neuschwanstein, which would be starting in a couple hours.


Hohenschwangau castle watches over the town of Schwangau

Then we took a shuttle bus up to a drop-off point a little ways above the castle, near Marienbrucke which is a bridge over a deep gorge that gives a spectacular view of the castle. After taking our fill of spectacular shots, we started off down the road to the castle.


From Marienbrucke


More from Marienbrucke

About halfway through the 15 minute walk, we stopped on a bench and ate the lunch we'd bought the day before at the grocery store.


Looking down at Schwangau and Hohenschwangau

We killed the rest of the time milling around a touristy shop and just taking pictures of the outside of the castle.


Looking down at the countryside


Front view of Neuschwanstein


Looking back at Marienbrucke from Neuschwanstein

Inside the castle, picture taking is not allowed, except for pictures taken looking out of the castle are the surrounding countryside. A few people on our tour were taking pictures of everything and only once did I see someone actually tell them not to. The castle is decorated with lots of art work based on the operas of Richard Wagner who was good friends with King Ludwig II who commissioned the castle (and several others in Germany). I thought the most impressive part was the throne room, which sadly never got a throne. The King only lived in this castle for about 17 days before he was declared insane by the government and found dead a few days later, under suspicious circumstances.


Another look down at Schwangau and Hohenschwangau Castle

After completing our tour, we didn't have tons of time remaining to catch our train back to Munich, so we returned to the shuttle drop-off point, rode back down to Schwangau and happened to arrive just as a bus back to Fussen was arriving. Looking at the bus schedule there, I can't actually imagine that we'd have had to wait an hour in the morning. Maybe the tourist information center had faulty bus tables or maybe the girl helping just misread them.


Looking back on the walk back to the shuttle


One last look up from Schwangau

After another sticky two-hour train ride back to Munich, we met up with Guilherme at the hotel and went out for dinner at (yet) another beer garden, this time one near a botanical garden, not far from the Hauptbahnhof. I was savvy enough at this point to actually order a steak with french fries, and managed to not eat sausage and sauerkraut for a 3 consecutive night.


This is the kind of scenery we enjoyed during our train ride.


More German countryside.

After dinner, we walked over to the Marienplatz to look for some gelato and from there we headed back to the hotel and got ready to head out to the airport the next morning where we'd meet up with one of our department faculty, Jon Hurdle, to drive down to Austria.


Guilherme and Laritza


Night time by the Fountain

More pictures from Day 4.

Coming tomorrow: Day 5 - Cruising on the autobahn

So far:
Days 1 & 2 - Exploring Munich
Day 3 - Mass Transit Extravaganza

My trip to Europe - Day 3

Day 3 - Outskirts of Munich

Having gotten a decent night's sleep, we got up in the morning ready to go see some of the further out parts of Munich. Lartiza had arranged to do some yarn shopping with someone she knew from Knitters without Borders, so Guilherme and I were on our own.

We headed to the Hauptbahnhof and figured out which tram we'd need to take to get to Nymphenburg, a palace on the outskirts of Munich. We boarded and were soon joined by a large number of school children who appeared to also be on their way to see the place.

When we got there, the building itself was under renovation, but we were still able to go inside and see some fancy rooms. But the real attraction there were the grounds. The gardens behind the palace are quite extensive and include a kilometer long canal surrounded by woods that surround other minor palaces and lakes. There were lots of trails through the woods and a good number of locals were taking advantage of them for jogging and walking. We also saw more school kids running around and jotting down information on various attractions. Must have been some kind of worksheet they had to fill out.


Front of Nymphenburg


Some swams in a pond in front of Nymphenburg


Nymphenburg Grand Hall


Nyphenburg Gallery of Beauties


Looking out at the gardens


Another swan


This photo of the pool at the end of the canal is one of my favorites. It also makes a nice desktop background, in my opinion.


Some kind of memorial rotunda in the woods

After spending a few hours at Nymphenburg, and walking nearly 5 kilometers in the gardens, Guilherme and I caught a bus over to the Olympic park, home of the 1972 Olympics that were held in Munich. You might remember a film by the name Munich that came out a few years ago, which had reference to the fact that Israeli athletes were taken hostage and killed by terrorists during the Munich games. We didn't have any kind of tour guide to explain the significance of anything to us, so we just kind of wandered through the Olympic park and paid a couple Euros to enter the stadium and walk around the concourse.


The distinctive architecture of the park ensure that it certainly wouldn't be mistaken for something else.


The spaceneedle-esque tower


A look at the main stadium.


After finishing there, we took the subway back to downtown, ate lunch at a turkish kebap restaurant, where we ended up with kebap platters rather than the kebap sandwiches we were trying to get, and then made it back to the hotel where we took a nap and did a few other things before collecting Laritza and heading to a supermarket to buy a few things. We had to get to the supermarket early as all markets in Germany and Austria close at 6 pm. Laritza and I bought some food to make lunch on the road trip we had planned for the next day.

After dropping our groceries off at the hotel, we headed out to dinner at the Augustiner beer garden, which felt much less touristy than the Hofbrauhaus. Under duress in the food line, I ended up buying more hotdogs and sauerkraut and being as I didn't see any non-beer beverages there, I made do with my trusty liter-sized bottle of water. One nice thing in both Germany and Austria is the presence of numerous fountains designed for filling water bottles as you travel around.


This truck drives around picking up used beer glasses from stations located throughout the garden.


Just to give a hint at the amount of people frequenting these places.

When Guilherme and Laritza started on their 3rd beers, I left them and headed back to the hotel stopping at the Hauptbahnhof along the way to buy a Fanta and some chocolate.


On the walk home


In the Hauptbahnhof

More pictures of Day 3.

Coming tomorrow: Riding the rails to Fussen.

My trip to Europe - Days 1 & 2

Okay, I've had enough time to settle back in to being home and working on my research project and have uploaded all the pictures I plan to for the time being to Flickr. So I finally feel ready to give a brief travelogue of what all I did on my trip.

Day 1 - Travel

The first day, I got up around 5:30 and my mom was kind enough to pick me up and take me to the airport. My passport still is valid, even if the photo is nearly 10 years old now.

The trip was pretty uneventful. Layover in Atlanta and then an all-nighter from Atlanta to Munich. I switched to an exit row seat for the overseas flight for the extra legroom and was happy that I did, although it turned out the flight was less than full and I probably could have stretched out just as easily in the back of the plane. I slept a bit, not sure how much and the next morning we were in Munich.

Day 2 - Munich

We had no trouble getting from the airport to downtown Munich via the S-train. Our hotel was just a couple blocks from the Hauptbahnhof (main train station) and upon arriving there around 9 or so, they even had one of our two rooms ready for us, so we stashed our luggage there and headed out to see the town. I guess I should mention at this point there were three of us: myself, Guilherme, and Laritza. A pretty diverse crowd, each of us claiming different home countries and languages, and ranging in age from 28 to 47 or so.

Anyway, Guilherme had been to Munich before and steered in the direction of the Marienplatz, a several block area of shops and sites in old town Munich.


Entrance to Marienplatz


Towers of the main cathedral that we went up in later.

We stopped into one of the cathedrals there and mostly just wandered around for a couple hours. We ate lunch there. I bought a pretty safe looking baguette sandwich and bought a liter bottle of water that came in handy throughout the rest of our stay in Munich. After lunch, we went back to the hotel, got Laritza checked into her room and settled in a bit. I napped for an hour or so and Guilherme talked to his wife and daughter in Brazil using Skype.

After recharging our batteries a bit, we took some pointers from the Fodors guide I'd brought and headed out on the town again. We walked through some kind of botanical garden and then went to the main cathedral where we marveled at the scale of the thing and then paid a couple Euros to climb a spiral staircase up to an elevator in one of the towers to get a nice view of the city.


View from the Cathedral Tower

After that, we headed out in search of the Englischer gardens, which are Munich's version of Central Park. We walked through there a bit, saw a bunch of people cooling off in the river, and then decided to head to the Haufbrauhaus, Munich's most famous beer garden, for dinner.

Raging Waters - Munich. Actually its just the river in the Englischer gardens.


Statue of Maximillian we came across in our travels


Hofbrauhaus - note the 1 liter mugs that about half of the beers come in.

I ordered a bratwurst that came with some mashed potatoes and sauerkraut for dinner, and was one of the few people only drinking lemonade.

After dinner we headed back to the hotel for a good night's sleep.

More photos from Day 2.

Coming tomorrow: Day 3 - Mass Transit Extravaganza

Up and At Them!

Well, I'm kind of back on Utah time, I guess, although I did wake up around 5 this morning. I'll probably be tired tonight, but hopefully by tomorrow things will start to be feeling normal again.

Looking around my apartment last night I had to wonder what would happen to some people if they had to live on their own. When I got home there was no toilet paper in either of the bathrooms that I share with my 3 non-master-bedroom roommates, so I was glad to have kept an emergency stash last time I bought some. Additionally when I woke up this morning I realized that I was cold. Not just cool, but really cold. I went down to check the thermostat and found that it was set to well below 70 degrees. I'm all for keeping the house cool, but I'm hoping the thermostat wasn't set that low the whole time I was gone.

Anyway, I'm in the process of uploading pictures to Flickr (click here to keep an eye on what I've put up so far) and will hopefully be giving you a rundown of the trip a couple days at a time, once I take care of a few other pressing matters (laundry, figuring out how much money I spent in dollars, etc.).

Back from Europe, Stay Tuned for Details

I got back from Europe this evening and I'm working hard at staying awake a bit longer so that I can get back to being on Utah time a bit quicker. This means that save for 2 30-minute naps that I took today, I've been up for the past 23 and a half hours. I've never really been up this long consecutively, and especially considering that the sun's been up the entire time and is just now going down.

I'll definitely be putting up a lot of pictures on Flickr, and I hope to give a fairly extensive description of my activities, especially given that I also need to write up my experience for the organization website anyway.

The EMF

You know how some girls have a guy friend who is always around, and clearly the guy is in love with her, but she either doesn't realize (how could she not?) or pretends to not realize because she either a) doesn't want to deal with the situation, or b) doesn't want to lose his friendship. I always think those guys must have no self-esteem. Usually they've either tried to date the girl and gotten shot down or haven't tried assuming they'd be shot down, and in the aftermath, are hanging on to the "lets just be friends" olive branch like a drowning man hanging on to a floating piece of debris. I like to think of this guy as the Ever-present Male Friend or EMF.

I'm never quite sure how girls fall for this tactic. Here's the truth: guys don't want to be friends with girls they are attracted to. They want to date them. If you break up with a guy and he says he still wants to be friends or he agrees to still be friends, its because he hopes that there's still a chance he can make it from "just friends" back to "more than friends". Its not because he just enjoys your company and accepts the fact that you aren't interested. And now that they are "just friends" they'll jump at any chance to spend time with their "BFF". In fact they are pretty much inseparable. Girls love someone who will listen to them and can also give a man's perspective on things.

Seriously, though, don't you have to kind of pity those guys? Its just not an easy situation to be in. Its much less of an ego-swallowing ordeal to just walk away from the situation than to just be friends. Maybe, given sufficient time, a guy can get past the feelings he had for her and move on, but its not happening overnight, and even then he's not going to want to be her best friend. And until he's been able to move on, the last thing he wants is to hear her talk about guys that she's interested in or watch other guys try to make a move on her. I think this is part of what leads to the everpresent-ness of this guy. He wants to do all he can to keep her from dating other guys or for other guys to become better friends with her than he is, even though its pretty much inevitable. I always think these guys have pretty much given up on dating, and the best thing that could possibly happen for them is for her to get married. Hopefully, marriage is a sufficiently clear signal that she's not changing her mind.

On occasion, the rare fellow does manage to get back into her good graces (see the Persistence Theory), although sometimes its more because he's been so effective at scaring off other potential suitors. And honestly, its a bit of a turn-off when a girl who has some hanger-on guy always calling her up to do stuff and always there with her at everything, even though they are "just friends".

Strangely I kind of found myself in this same kind of situation in the last year or so. There was a girl that I was into, and went on a few dates and then her interest started to wane and then finally she told me that maybe it was best if we didn't date any more. "Out of fairness to [me]" of course. But could we please still be friends. Because she really thinks I'm cool and that she has a lot of fun with me.

Now in case you've already forgotten, "guys don't want to be friends with girls they are attracted to." Anyway, in the aftermath of my own "lets just be friends" moment, I've really struggled with whether its worth hanging on and being "that guy" that I've pitied in so many other instances. I mean I really do enjoy spending time with this girl, and of course I think she's attractive. But I can't feel right pretending that I only want to be friends, and my ego doesn't really want me to be that kind of guy either.

I, mean, I do still call her and email her and on occasion have a longer chat with her, and part of me still holds out hope that someday she might change her mind. But I also hope I'm not being the EMF. I hope I've been pretty clear about what my feelings are, and I would never tell her that I'm fine to "just be friends" with her, and in the meantime I've been doing my best to meet other girls and date in the hopes of finding someone I can feel the same way about. But I guess if I actually believed that the EMF strategy would ultimately be successful I'd consider it more seriously. The honest truth is I don't think I could live with myself as that guy.

Thoughts?

Mental Aerobics

UPDATE: As of July 11th, Lumosity is no longer in Beta testing and they now want to charge exorbitant rates for their services. As a Beta user they offered me the super low special price of 2 years for $49.95, which apparently is a huge savings over the annual price and the non-Beta user price. At that kind of price I'm sure I can find better options for mental exercise.

Lately I've been enjoying a mental exercise site/game called Lumosity, where each time you come to visit it gives you a new set of exercises to do (assuming you've taken a minute to set up your login), and keeps track of your scores and overall progress on exercises from a few different categories (attention, processing speed, memory, etc.). There are 30 sessions to work through. I do one every day or so, and its fun to see how I'm doing. I've done about 20 of the sessions so far. Its kind of along the lines of things like Brain Age, but free, so if you are interested, you should check it out.

I'm checkin' in (checkin' checkin' in)

Okay, so I'm not checkin' in to a drug rehab clinic. Just checkin' in with you, loyal reader.

I had a fairly eventful weekend, including going to a rodeo and moshing at the Warped Tour in 100+ degree weather. I've got another week before I make my inaugural voyage across the sea to visit the continent from which continental breakfasts are to have originated from. And I also have an idea for what could be the most successful Big Digital weekly feature yet. Still trying to decide if I'll get the first out before the trip or if you'll have to wait until after, but either way, I think I'll enjoy it when it does show up (because after all if I don't enjoy it, why would you?).

Spending some time with Leland

Earlier this week I was able to attend our annual NLM training conference at Leland Stanford Jr. University aka Stanford.

Its not always the easiest conference to pay attention during because the topics presented are so broad and specialized as to sometimes be almost unintelligible unless its something very similar to what you are working on. Thank heavens for the USA Today puzzle page.

I know I haven't been blogging much lately, but I guess I've just had a lot on my mind, but not anything coherent enough to blog about. Anyway, here's some pictures from the trip:


The Hoover Tower, named for Hebert Hoover, one of the esteemed alumni of Stanford. Apparently he was a Geology major. I made a crack about him getting elected because he was "so down to earth", and offered to let the tour guide use it, but for some reason she declined.


Memorial Court, leading to the Main Quad and Memorial Church


Classic university look


There are a lot of casts of Rodin sculptures at Stanford. These are the Burghers of Calais, but apparently "Burgher" isn't pronounced the same as "Burger".


Inside the Memorial Church, which was really quite impressive.


Looking down from Hoover Tower, you can see the Main Quad and the front of the Memorial Church pretty good here.


I was asked to give a poster presentation. The conference organizers set up tables with display devices on top of them, but there were a lot of problems. First, the boards they had to mount the posters on didn't seem to fit right for the posters, so that some of the posters had to span from one board to another. Then the wind picked up and tipped nearly all of these boards over. I was glad that I hadn't pinned my poster to both boards or it probably would have been torn in half. Instead it just tore free of the pins and blew a few feet away. Anyway, in the end they moved us to a different spot, put the boards on the ground and had us stand by them in the hot sun for an hour. Thank heavens for a nearby tree that provided some shade to lurk in while people looked at my poster.

A Peculiar People

In case you've ever wondered what its like to go to a singles ward:

We just found out at church yesterday that our stake is being split, and that the dividing line will be practically a stone's throw away from my current location, and just by moving 3 blocks in February I've managed to put myself in the south half of the split. We're losing close to half of our ward due to this and a few other boundary changes that are coming along with the split, and then picking up some more people as they expand our boundaries southward (for the 3rd time since I've been in this ward).

Anyway, there'll be a lot of people that I'll miss, and right now it seems pretty hard to fathom what things are going to look like when we finally get back to our ward building in 2 weeks.

And let me just say its been quite the 12 months for the 30th ward. Last July, we moved from the stake center to our current building. Then in August we got a new bishopric, then in September our boundaries were changed. From October to January, we kind of got some time off, if you don't count the nearly 250 individual interviews I had to arrange for tithing settlement. Then in February the Relief Society split. In March we got a new Elders Quorum President, then in April we got a new Stake Presidency, and just two weeks ago our Elders Quorum was split. Now two weeks after that, our ward is getting cut in half, and we're getting a (nother) new stake presidency (because we will be in the brand new stake). To sum up, in the last year, we've had 3 relief society presidencies, 3 elders quorum presidencies, 2 ward boundary changes, 1 stake boundary change, 2 bishoprics, 3 stake presidencies, and will have gone in numbers from 170 to 320 to whatever we end up with after all this, maybe around 220 or so.

Needless to say, its been quite the year. I don't know how much more of this I can take. Some of my friends have been in 3 different wards in the last 10 months without ever moving. Hopefully things can settle down a bit now, once we replace all the leadership positions that have been left empty by this change.

Cable Jacked

Yesterday I feel like I totally earned some serious Man Points. I've been living in my current apartment for almost 4 months now and felt like I'd been there long enough to start rearranging some of the furniture to suit me better. Mainly, I wanted to get our TV into the living room instead of in the kitchen were there was barely enough seating to support the four of us who live here. So I spent an hour or two yesterday morning moving stuff around and finally got everything in place in a way that I thought was pretty decent.

Then I went to hook up the cable, and for some reason it wouldn't work. I had already been down to the basement and made sure that the cable marked "West Living Rm." was connected to the splitter that the "Cable" cable came into, but for some reason all I was getting was static. My roommate had said that he'd had some troubles getting the cable hooked up in his bedroom and that he thought some of the cables might be mislabeled, so I tried pretty much every other cable all with no results. Finally, and here's where I really felt manly, I decided it was going to take the cable jack off the wall in the living room and see if there was something wrong in there. And, in fact, there was. Turned out the cable jack wasn't actually connected to the cable inside the wall. A quick couple turns later and I was in business. To quote one of my favorite lines from Seinfeld, "I'm a man!"

Random Thoughts about Planning

Its been said that, "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail." Strangely though, if you plan to fail, you clearly have not failed to plan.

Weekend Update

I know its been a while since I posted, but since I did take my camera out with me to the baseball game this week, I thought I'd share some photos from that. (For those of you who keep up with my Flickr account, this is all probably old news, so to you I apologize.)

We sat on the grass and had to try to see the game while looking at the sun for the first while, but in the end it was nice and there was a great turnout, including more friends up in the stands, and at the end, I got to try out the "Fireworks" auto-setting on my camera. The verdict...it makes for cool shots, although perhaps not what I think of as traditional fireworks photos.

Anywhere, here's some pics:

The first few innings were kind of hard to see:






Which led to my "slipping" down the hill into some people seated below us:


There was some actual baseball played, with the Bees pulling out an exciting 10th inning comeback after giving up a solo HR in the top of the 10th.






And in the end there were some fireworks. I keep wondering how much it costs them to do fireworks at the game, because they have them almost every weekend they are at home it seems.

Threat Level...Blue

Those of you who read this blog out of the desire to glean some small bit of what's going on in my life (as opposed to those of you who enjoy sifting through the randomness that seeps out of my brain to stain the Internet) probably are wanting to know whats the deal with the yellow threat level alert issued recently.

Well if you've been waiting to know whats going on, there's really nothing to say, other than to say that sometimes things just don't work out. Sometimes they don't work out on my end and sometimes its on the other person's end. Suffice it to say that this time it was on my end. I thought there was a chance for this to work out, but for some reason I just couldn't get over the hump from Yellow to Orange, if that makes any sense. It never feels good to have to tell someone that, especially when they seem to think that I'm worth their time and emotional investment, but I guess its just one of the many risks you take when you take a chance on love.

Mom always said I was special

Today I was reading Ken Jennings' blog and there was a brief mention at the beginning about a condition known as synesthesia, which I was unfamiliar with, so I clicked through the link he posted to the Wikipedia article.

**TANGENT ALERT**

Can I just say, by the way, how much I love wikipedia. I realize that its not foolproof, but where else could you learn about synethesia and also find out which tracks have been announced for Guitar Hero 3?)

**TANGENT OVER**

Anyway, so I'm reading about synethesia which apparently is "a neurological condition in which two or more bodily senses are coupled." Not really making sense of that, I scrolled down to find examples. Among the most common is one in which people see letters and numbers with color. This is known as grapheme -> color synethesia. Also there's a similar one where people experience colors in connection with musical tones. (music -> color synethesia).

Anyway, I thought all this was interesting and wondered what that would be like, and kept on reading, when suddenly I came across this chart:



Apparently one form of synethesia, number form synethesia, is having a mental map of numbers. Until this moment, I never knew that there was anything abnormal about having a mental map of numbers. Or of the alphabet. Or of the annual calendar. I just assumed that everyone has one of those. Because I do. How else would people remember where things lie in relation to each other?

Mine isn't exactly like the one in this image, but I totally have a mental map of numbers. I've even thought about posting them on the blog, but wasn't quite sure how to draw them up, because while they are a map, they twist and turn through 3 dimensions in a way that would make drawing them all together quite difficult.

Even after reading about this, I'm still not sure that this concept isn't something that everyone else experiences. A second Wikipedia article refers to the fact that everyone has an unconscious number line, but mine are very much not unconscious. Anyone out there have some of these mental maps? I'll try to find a way to draw up mine, at least the alphabet and calendar ones, as their finite nature lends itself to a simpler map.

All Growns Up

Yesterday was my sister's graduation.


I'm sure its a strange time for her, but I'm excited for her to be looking ahead to college, where, if you ask me, life really begins. She's got one last summer to live it up without a rent bill to pay and food to buy. Oh, and since she's headed to the Y, this might be her last chance in a while to let boys use her bathroom. :) (Sorry, I'll let her go there, but I won't proclaim a moratorium on BYU jokes.)

Thats why I said "Wasn't It?"

If you haven't heard of Flight of the Conchords (New Zealand's 4th most popular folk parody duo), you should check them out. My good friend Randall Bennett, host of Tech Check Daily, encouraged me to check them out. Some of their songs have some swearing, but here's one that fun for the whole family.

Threat Level Yellow

The Dept. of Big Digital security has issued a relationship threat level advisory. The threat meter has been moved to Yellow, with the possibility of being upgraded to Orange within the next week or so. Please remain calm. Do not leave your homes or attempt to locate your loved ones. This is only a Yellow alert. In the event of a change in the current situation, the threat meter will be adjusted accordingly.

Did I miss a class on this somewhere?

Last week I was getting my haircut and my thoughts turned once again to the strange situation that I always find myself in there. Essentially, I go because my hair is too long and I want it cut. I mean "haircut" seems pretty straightforward, right? However, once there, the people who spend all of their working hours in this world of haircutting expect me to know all the technical terms to describe the manner in which I'd like my hair to be cut and to have strong opinions on each aspect of how things look in the end. I mean, when I go to Midas, they don't ask me how I want my brakes changed or in the end how I feel about what they've done. They don't even show me the new brakes. I just assume that they are in there. I don't even get to watch them change my brakes. I mean they are the experts, not me. I think the same ought to apply when I visit an establishment where the employees display licenses on the wall proclaiming their expertise in the field of cutting hair.

Granted I've been getting my hair cut for quite some time now, and you'd think that I'd have figured this all out by now, and to a certain extent I do -- one and half on the sides and back and finger-length on top. I just learned the finger-length part in the last year or so. Before that I would say "one and a half on the sides and back and a little longer on top". Even then, every hair cutting person (hairdresser?) that I know does things a little differently and so obviously its not going to be the same every time, especially given that I'm just walking into Great Clips and taking the next available chair. But really, I don't care too much. The only thing that really bugs me is when they cut the front of my hair (do men have bangs?) and I get home and find out that there are a few hairs that are clearly much longer than the surround hairs. Other than that, shorter = better, although I guess I'm not quite ready to shave it all off.

Always at the very end they ask me if I want it squared or rounded in the back. To be honest, I have zero preference on this, given the huge amount of time I spend seeing the back of my head. What I really want to say is whichever is easier for them, but I really have no idea, so I always opt for square.

So really, every time I get them to cut my hair shorter without feeling like a complete fool, I feel like I pulled a fast one. And 6 weeks later I'll be back to go through it all again.

#1 Again!

If you aren't familiar with the Baby Name Wizard tool, then you definitely need to check it out. Assuming that most of you web-savvy folks out there are already familiar with it, you should know that the data for 2006 has now been released and incorporated into the tool, and also is available at this site, which also allows you to do some other interested queries like looking at name popularity by state.

Most importantly, it should be noted that Jacob has once again managed to maintain its top spot for an unprecendented 8th year running. (It actually may have precedent, Emily is the top girls name for the 11th year running.) What important to know is that since I was born, the name Jacob has increased in ranking each year with nary a dip in my 28 years of Jacob-ness. (Whats not important to know is that its actually increased in popularity each year since 1967.)

Also of note, the name George is pretty much in the midst of a continuing slide toward obscurity. Which is only important if, like my older brother, you got that name handed down as a family heirloom. George is still popular (#153 for boys in 2006) mind you, but you know it really could use a face-lift when it gets beat out by Jorge (#120 in 2006).

Oh yeah? You don't say.

Being one summertime away from my 29th birthday and continuing to be a (faithful) single Latter-day Saint, I hear a lot about marriage. In fact, just this past Sunday, our high council speaker's wife felt like it was important for us to hear about the importance of marriage. She introduced her topic by saying she'd talked to a couple other single members of our stake and said that she was planning to speak about marriage. One, a guy, said "Please don't", and another, a girl said "Oh yes, please do." And she decided to side with the girl. I think at that point approximately half the men in our ward tuned out. When she launched into a talk from Elder Bednar that started with "Temple marriage is essential for our salvation", I'm pretty sure that the other half hit the mental snooze button.

Not to say that we don't care about marriage or don't realize its importance. I'm sure there are a few recalcitrant ones who don't agree to that or who really are putting off marriage because they don't think they can afford it right now. But I would say that the vast majority of LDS single men are not married because they haven't found what they're looking for, or when they did find it, it wasn't looking for them. Not because they figured they'd sail right on into the celestial kingdom without a spouse. Trust me, we're all well aware of the fact that only married people can go to the highest degree of glory. We hear it at least several times a year if not several times a month. So if you are worried that we aren't getting the hint, don't worry.

Along the lines of talks on missionary work, most talks on marriage fall into the camp of telling you how important it is, without giving you much in the way of how to go about doing it. Most marriage talks tell you that its important to be willing to be selfless and sacrificing and to treat your wife with the utmost of love and respect, and that qualities like a testimony and potential for being a good mother should be looked for above qualities like attractiveness. But rare is the talk that attempts to give a man some guidance in how to go about winding up with a wife in the end.

So essentially, several times a year, we get to sit and listen about how we need a woman to be our help-meet, and that she should be someone more spiritual than ourselves (a topic that deserves its own post), and that without her we're pretty much on the express train to ministering angel town, but without actually giving any counsel on how to actually get married, other than that we need to "date more". Keep in mind that most of the guys truly do want to be married. Pounding us over the head with how screwed we're going to be if we don't get married isn't going to do anything other than make us think that its not even worth trying any more. Meanwhile, the sisters get the whole "if things don't work out in this life, there's always the next" routine, as though if you haven't already gotten married by age 27, you must already be worried about your own personal salvation. (What happens to single people after age 30? Do they just leave the church? Has anyone ever actually gotten married in their 30s?)

Anyway, I'm sure there are topics here that could use some expansion, but for now lets just say that if you are worried that single adult men in the LDS church aren't aware that marriage is a requirement for exaltation, you can sleep easy knowing that we get the picture.

The Medium Digital

UPDATE: This morning I put my watch on and came to work. When I got here I looked down at my watch, and lo and behold, it had ceased to function. A mere 3 weeks or so after buying it, the display is blank, and no combination of button pressing has served to revive it back to life. Guess I'll be finding out about Wal-mart's watch return policy pretty soon.



Recently I suffered a blog-related tragedy. The Big Digital 3.0 suffered a crippling blow -- its band broke. Not just the little part that holds the two sides of the band together. That's always the first to go, and can be sufficiently replaced with a rubber band or a tape/plastic hybrid. No, this time, the actual band decided it couldn't take no more and tore all the way to one of the holes where the tongue of the band goes.

I've known for a while now that the time would come that I'd need to replace my watch, but I'd scoured the web looking for the correct model of Armitron, always unsuccessfully. I've found at least one on e-Bay, but it was being sold as part of a 17 watch bundle and it really wasn't worth the cost to buy (and ship) 17 watches. After having the band break this last time, I thought maybe I'd be able to be one of those of no-watch people who use their cellphones for time-telling purposes. I gave it a shot for a day or two and let me just say that they are not equally convenient. Digging into my pocket vs. looking at my arm -- no contest.

Having decided that I did not want to be watchless any longer, I made a stop by the nearby Wal-mart and browsed their selection of Armitrons. In the end, I settled on one with a reasonably big digital display (medium digital by comparison) and plunked down my $15.

This was about 2 weeks ago. So far its okay. You have to realize that The Big Digital was the only watch I wore (not counting the Fossil that I wear on more formal occasions) for nearly the last 7 years. I don't like the band as well as the other, and the numbers are not nearly as huge. It has a few more features that I'm sure I won't find a reason to use (2nd time zone?) and some icons on the face that I still haven't determined what they represent. The one thing I like that the Big Digital did not have is a little circle with the day of the month in it on the main face. No need to push a button to find out the date. Thats nice.

If Lost were like 24

I'll be honest, I used to love 24. I watched the second season religiously, taping it with a VCR if I was going to miss it, and re-hashing each episode with friends afterward. I had a few gripes with the way it was going, but for the most part I really enjoyed it. It was my first real taste of addictive serialized television. When the 3rd season started, I was super excited and waited with anticipation for the season to begin. I watched the few first weeks, and then I just quit watching. I’m not 100% sure why, but I think some of the gripes I had became more pronounced or the cumulative effect of the things I didn’t like continuing over a long period finally got to me.

Currently, I am a big fan of Lost (and Heroes), and despite not having a lot of patience for filler episodes, I’m guessing I’ll see this one through to the bitter end (or the zombie season, whichever comes first). This season, perhaps not so much lately, there’ve been some complaints about the direction of the show and some of the decisions they’ve made, and I agree with some of them to an extent. But I was thinking the other day that thankfully Lost isn’t directed the way 24 is, and thought of giving some examples of the way Lost would have gone if it was run like 24.

1) The survivors would have fought and defeated the Others, tamed the smoke monster, made it off the island and back to Sydney mid-way through season One, and would now be fighting aliens.

24 burns through plot lines before they ever have a chance to develop. Lost has kind of the opposite problem where we heard that Walt was special a couple years back and maybe by Season 6 we’ll hear why, assuming they even remember to address it.

2) Charlie would have killed approximately 75 Others by now.

By Desmond’s count, Charlie’s killed more of them they have of him. If this were 24, Charlie would have reacted to being strung up in a tree, not just by killing Ethan before we could get any answers of out him, but he would have crossed the island and unloaded clip after clip into random no-name Others.

Side note: Who is actually physically larger, Kiefer Sutherland or Dominic Monaghan? IMDB lists ex-hobbit Monaghan at 5’ 7”, while burly Jack Bauer comes in at a decidedly unthreatening 5’ 9½”. Any time some whose age isn’t counted in months includes ½ inches in their height, you know they’re lying.


3) The survivors would have had 6 leaders by now, each one in turn, turning out to be working for the Others.

Pretty much every season, whoever is running CTU turns out to be in cahoots with the bad guys. You’d think they have worked out a better background check process by now.

4) There would be a side plot where Claire and Kate fight over who gets to date Hurley.

I tried to come up with a set of Lost characters to mirror this scenario, but as far as I can tell only pretty women are allowed on the island. Maybe it’s one of its mysterious properties. On an episode of 24 this season, two male CTU employees were cat-fighting over Chloe, network television’s least attractive romantic female lead. Meanwhile, a much more attractive new hire at CTU goes unnoticed. All I know of all the things that don’t make sense on CTU, men fighting over Chloe ranks right near the top.

5) Every season the Survivors would manage to defeat the Smoke Monster and the Others, only to find out in the next season that there is yet another batch of Others on a different part of the island and that there are yet more Smoke Monsters.

Do terrorist have any tactics that don’t involve nuclear explosions?

6) The President – or one of his staff – would be behind it all.

I don't have a problem with conspiracy theories involving high-level government officials, but is anyone else capable of masterminding a nuclear explosion who doesn't work at the White House?

7) Jack, Kate, and Sawyer would have escaped back to the beach in the first segment of the first episode of Season Three.

I realize that they are now all back at the beach as Season Three comes to a close, but had this happened on 24, the first few minutes of the new season would have involved Jack, Kate, and Sawyer easily escaping as the Others simply left them unattended at the dock with bags on their heads. By far my biggest gripe with 24 was that there was always no-way-out cliffhangers every week that were resolved way to simply in the first moments of the next episode. The plane with Jack and Nina in it is shot down by missiles? No problem, our main characters survive without a scratch and only people we’ve never met die.

Prison Break took this to a whole new level, throwing in outlandish cliffhangers and their resultant resolutions at nearly every commercial break. Prison guard found your escape hole? No worries, when we return you’ll find out that actually one of our escapees is standing right behind him with a shovel.

8) Charlie could never have gotten high and Paulo would have had nothing to do.

Why? Because on 24, no one ever uses the bathroom. :)

Smells like young adult spirit

Last night, I was able to make it to the last hour of a Mos Def concert at the U (he only made it for the last hour and fifteen). It was a pretty interesting show, given that a) he's a socially conscious rapper, b) this was in Salt Lake City, Utah, and c) his music is pretty laid-back.

Anyway, we had a good time and it was definitely worth the $5 the tickets cost (for students). I think my favorite part was walking into the crowd and saying, "Hmmm...smells like college."

I'VE GOT 2 TOGETHER...at the Megaplex?

Anyone who's attended a sporting event where the cost of admission is more than free, has probably seen ticket scalpers offering "2 down low" or asking if anyone's "got tickets?" I always try to get these two people to talk to each as they are often standing right next to each other. Not sure what their deals is. (I'm kidding of course. If YOU don't know, I'll tell you sometime).

But how often have you ever been a movie on opening night only to find out that either a) the movie is sold out, or b) there's already a huge line of people waiting to get in. Its times like these, that it might be worth dropping a few extra bucks to jump to the front of the line, or to get some reserved seats that aren't on the very front row. Speaking of the front row, how can it be legal to let people sit that close to a gigantic screen? If sitting too close to a TV hurts our eyes, I can't imagine what kind of damage you suffer sitting 5 feet from a gigantic movie screen.

In the same vein, why does every seat at every movie cost the same amount? I realize that there are such things as matinees and dollar movies, but really what I'm saying is, should the first row of seats cost the same as better seats in the middle? and additionally, how can they charge the same price for a movie that cost $10 million to make as they charge for a movie that cost $200 million to make? Or even more to the point, some movies are crappy. If Shawn and Marlon Wayans make a movie, it shouldn't cost as much to see that as it costs to see a good movie. It almost seems unfair to make you pay the same amount to see a movie that's obviously gong to be terrible (anything starring Rob Schneider for example) as something that looks to be really good (anything starring Will Smith).

Movie theaters are the only place that works on this weird economy that I can think of, except maybe public transit (although bad seats on the bus are more about who you are sitting next to). The performing arts has determined that some seats are better than others. Sports entertainment has pricing based on seating, and also on the level of play. NBA games cost more than college games, and college games in turn cost more than high school games, generally.

I'm sure there's some kind of time honored system that makes this whole weird movie pricing phenomenon work, but it always makes me scratch my head.

Hey! Don't I Know You?

I'm sure you've all been in this situation before. Across the room, you notice someone who you remember from your past. Maybe they were in a class with you, or you met them at a conference, or they went to your church congregation. You recognize them, and maybe even remember their name. Then you wonder, "Do they remember me?" and then you wonder whether you should go up to them and say hi or not.

For some reason, this happens to me all the time. Partly, I've known a lot of different people in my time in Salt Lake and, for the most part, us singles tend to move around a lot, so you get a chance to run into people you haven't seen in a while fairly regularly. Secondly, I enjoy getting to know people and know about them, what they do and where they are from and what not; which, in turn, helps me to remember them. Finally, I also have been blessed with a pretty good memory. Lately, my short-term memory is starting to not be quite as sharp (I find myself needing to write things down more often), but I'm still pretty good at hanging on to things once they make it into my long-term memory.

Anyway, I find myself in the situation of seeing people that I've known in the past quite often. And often times, I happen to know quite a bit about these people. I almost never assume that people are going to remember me, and if they do, its more in a "I think I remember you from my ward" kind of way. I, on the other hand, often remember quite a bit about these people. So, usually, I pretend that I don't remember much about them either, because I think it would probably be pretty weird for someone you barely recognize to come up and know everything about you. I mean I think people will probably get a little creeped out and think that I've been stalking them or at the very least was overly interested in them at some point. And thats not the case, at least the stalking part. Occasionally I'll run into some girl that I'd had a crush on, but thats not the norm. I just remember things about people. And then later I pretend I don't know those things. Is that weird?

Back to Work

Hey, I'm back from San Antonio where I had a great time with my family. You can see some pictures if you click on this photo:



It was great to spend a week with my family and its good to be back at home as well.

Can you say adobe?

Ah-do-bay!

That's right I'm off to San Antonio to visit the Alamo (sans basement) and also my niece and her parents, along with my whole family. Should be good times. I'm sure I'll have tons of digital evidence to post on Flickr when I get back in about a week.