“How do Do the Asian Squat,” directed by Daniel Hsia.

Paul Groves and Jay Hunter Morris are hilarious. I don’t often get to hang out with 250 and 200 pounders from Texas and Louisiana. We (Geoff, Livia, Paul, and Jay) crammed into my car tonight and went out to eat at Chika, where they shared random opera gossip and stories with us (funny screw-ups, etc. Oh — and, we heard about the Lord of the Rings cast partying at Jay’s house after the debut in NY. crazy!). You should check out Jay’s new web site. He just finished it a couple of days ago. In particular, read this story about Jay spitting gum into the orchestra pit from stage. :)


My Dad was in town for a few days, meeting with a committee that advises the Department of Energy about nuclear fusion. (read more »)

This afternoon, I:

1. installed Windows XP Professional on my new main machine
2. installed Windows XP Home on the machine I’m donating
3. re-installed Windows XP Professional on my new main machine
4. installed Windows XP Professional on the machine I’m donating
5. lost my Baldur’s Gate II – Throne of Bhaal save game

But it’s ok, because I discovered Phoenix. It’s FAST. I can’t wait until it matures. :)

Last Thursday, I was on the phone with Livia, and she started to freak out about something in the sky: “Oh my god. What is that? It has a little tail! It looks… like a badminton shuttle, and it’s moving really slowly through the sky. It just exploded! What the hell was that?? I’ve never seen anything like before!” (more freaking out here)

Of course, we all thought she was insane.

And today, I happened upon Carlos’ journal:

At first, I thought it was a satellite plunging into the Earth’s atmosphere, or perhaps an asteroid. It sort of startled me because I had never seen anything quite like it before.

It basically looked like a large, fast moving object in the upper reaches of the stratosphere, with a brilliant, white glow eminating behind it and leaving a long spiraling trail.

After a few minutes, this object seemed to explode in the sky, and waves of light seemed to spread out in a circle but quickly dissipated!

But fortunately, Linda took a photo of this “dragon in the sky”, as she referred to it. And I feel this is a very good description of what turned out to be a test rocket, launched from Vandenburg Air Force Base, just north of Santa Barbara.

I guess it’s plausible that you could see something like that from Palo Alto, if Carlos & gang saw it from San Diego. Sorry, Livia! I believe you now. :)

“Kodak Professional Debuts DCS Pro 14n Digital SLR Camera with Industry-Leading 13.89 Million Total Pixels and Competitive Price Point Variable Resolution, Ease-of-Use Ideal for Portrait, Wedding Photographers.” – Steve’s Digicams

Here we go! With two full-frame digital slrs announced (the Canon 1Ds being the other one), “reasonably” priced ones should be here in no time at all. :) You can check out three sample images from the Canon 1Ds at Canon Japan’s website.

The St. Lawrence String Quartet is amazing. Geoff, Barry, Lesley and Alberto (their new cellist!) came over tonight to play an informal recital. They kept thanking me for the opportunity, which left me highly confused. We are the ones who are deeply indebted to them for the opportunity to hear them in such an intimate gathering. Duh! :)

They played Tchaikovsky 1 and Bartok 3 — brilliantly, of course. Alberto kicked some serious ass.

I managed to shoe-horn forty or so people into my place (a new record, I believe), and it was a great mix of people: (read more »)

I went out climbing with Amabelle this morning, and when I returned, there was a large envelope stuffed (partially) into my mailbox, which turned out to be the Stanford 1997 Class Book! It’s neat to flip through and see where everyone went. Unfortunately, a good number of people I wonder about didn’t submit anything. I guess they’re not likely go to to reunion next month, either. I had planned on going, but this Golijov tour will prevent me from attending. :(

I’ll bet that this post gets my site banned from China. Check out these hilarious photos of President Jiang Zemin, posted by Raymond.

I’m getting sick. :( Paul (who is in town for awhile to sing with the SF Opera), Geoff, Livia and I went out to Indian Oven tonight. The Haight is full of young people! I almost felt like I was in New York again. Man. I haven’t been out in public in a long time. I can’t remember the last time I met a new person (more than superficially, I mean).

Also, I got to hear Paul sing, at the dinner table. His “pop” dinner-table voice is pleasant, but I hear he’s amazing at the opera. I hope to see him perform soon. Photos –> (read more »)

Vienna‘s re-release of Waking Hour is available for pre-order. Check it out. :) She’ll be on tour in New York and Cambridge in just over a week, too, so all you East Coast folk can go hear her live!

Of course, no weekend with Kenny would be complete without spontaneous bouts of immaturity. We had lots of fun taking stupid pictures, once again, but I don’t think we achieved nearly the level we reached in Hawaii a few months ago. :) OK. I need to go to bed now. Livia picked me up from the airport and we drove down to Stanford to grab a late dinner (my second one today! heh…) with Geoff and Alberto. (read more »)

Portland, with Kenny Liu. None of you probably check his web page anymore, since he never updates it. I guess if I was deciding between sleep and posting photos, I’d choose sleep, too. :)

I guess we didn’t do very much over the weekend — I believe all we did was eat. Kenny had so much sleep-debt that it was all he could do to stay awake and pretend to be functional. Lori was kind enough to let me stay over at her place in a bed that was very, very comfortable. Thanks, Lori, for your hospitality! Thanks also to Ray and Gina for dinner. Their little boy Morgan is SO CUTE. I still have the little green smiley sticker he stuck on my nose this morning. :) Anyway, as always, some photos –> (read more »)

I was having lunch with Oliver and the Centerfleet guys last week down in Palo Alto, and it reminded me of why I moved up to the city. As you can see in the photo (read more to see it), of the 35 guys at Quizno’s, exactly THREE were women. Silicon Valley can be so depressing, at times…

My old friend Andy came into town for a few days for business, which was nice. We grabbed some dinner and caught up a bit. Blah blah blah. Photos: (read more »)

Adam Nash sent me a photo he took at Schrep’s wedding a few months ago. “I feel I have captured your essence here,” he says. Here it is –>
(read more »)

I just tripped on the string that holds the end-pin ‘donut’ to the chair — and ripped the thing out from under my cello. My heart just about came up out of my mouth.

Anyway, check this out. This is too cool. hehehe. It’s like the 3rd school “project” I’ve been involved with. Although… the first guy ended up being angry with me because I didn’t write back in time. :)

—–Original Message—–
From: Juan Flores
Sent: Friday, August 30, 2002 12:48 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: SCHOOL PROJECT NEED INFO ?

Hi my name is Juan, im writing you because I have to interview an important person in the marine world, and i wanted to interview some one that took underwater pictures of the many different species. my teacher recommended you as the best candidate. i have to think of the questions i can ask you so when you have time.please email me. well thank you for your time and have great day.

sincerely Juan Flores

My buddy Kenny tells me that he will be on TV tonight on “Trauma: Life in the ER,” at 8pm, on the Learning Channel. I’m going to record it. :)

kenny: i have no idea what footage they will show.
kenny: i hope it’s not embarrassing.
kenny: but it will most likely not be interesting.

I’m annoyed. My hosting provider decided on move echeng.com onto another server, which is fine… except that they didn’t notify me, and now my e-mail has been down for three days. It’s not that I can’t check it — it’s that mail is actually bouncing when people try to get in touch with me. In addition, cgi scripts are failing, and my forwarders and mailing lists had to be re-created. It’s really frustrating. So much for their 100% uptime guarantee. (read more »)

This is insane. A Dell Dimension 4300 is $729 + shipping – $150 rebate = $694.16 shipped. I bought one. Actually, we have quite a few here at my place now, since we’re working from here. I’ll have to get some more RAM for it, I guess, but RAM is cheap these days, too.

Pentium® 4 Processor at 2.40GHz with 533MHz system bus/ 512K L2 Cache
Memory 128MB DDR SDRAM
Keyboard Dell® Quietkey® Keyboard
Video Cards 32MB ATI® Rage Ultra Graphics Card
Hard Drive 40GB Ultra ATA/100 Hard Drive
Floppy Drive 3.5 in Floppy Drive
Operating System Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition
Mouse Dell® 2-button scroll mouse
Broadband Ready/ Ethernet Network Card 10/100 PCI Fast Ethernet NIC
CD or DVD Drive 16x Max DVD-ROM Drive
Sound Card Integrated Audio
Software Bundles Microsoft® Works Suite 2002 w/Money Standard, etc.
Mail-In Rebate Offer $150 Mail In Rebate (Free Memory Upgrade Offer not available)

09.03.02 – Photos from Steamboat Springs, Part III (read more »)

09.02.02 – Photos from Steamboat Springs, Part II. We say three guys in camo, carrying an Elk head back from North Derby. Who carries around Elk heads?! (read more »)