Sean's Blog

Today we did a lot of walking. We walked from the apartment at the bottom of the Latin District to the Jardin du Luxembourg, then across the river to the Louvre, then through the Jardin des Tuileries, and then up Champs-Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe. At that point our feet weren't feeling so fresh so we took the metro over to the Tour Eiffel to meet Audrey for lunch. We walked to the tower but decided not to attempt to go up because all the lines were really long. Then we met up with Audrey and had Japanese food. After all that we had walked about ~5 miles and my feet were angry. I didn't mention all the sites we visited/passed here so I encourage you to get a more complete view in my photo gallery.

Just before midnight last night the airline showed up at the apartment with out luggage. We were really excited and rushed downstairs to meet the delivery man, only to find out they had the wrong bag. After getting our hopes up we felt pretty dejected.

Early the next morning the airline called again saying they found our bag. This time we were a little more pessimistic and it didn't really sound like they had it. A few hours later though our bag was delivered just as I was getting out of the shower. It was such a good feeling to be in clean clothes again, particularly since I had expected to be putting on dirty ones.

Armed with our good fashion we embarked to visit Sacred Heart Cathedral. It was very impressive. I have lots of pictures of the outside but we were not allowed to take any inside. The outside is cool enough but the inside was just amazing. There were many giant mosaics on the walls and stained glass windows. It was all one gigantic chamber and the shear size was staggering.

After Sacred Heart we went to the Jewish District and had some good falafel. After that we were ready to go home and take a nap before going out to dinner at a Vietnamese Pho restaurant.

It seems like this is turning into my travel blog because I only post when traveling to foreign countries.

So now I'm in Paris for Spring Break. Irene, her mom, and I are staying with her sister Audrey who is working here. Everything seems nice today, but yesterday was a different story. When we got here it was cold and raining, but the really fun part was that the airline 'misplaced' our bag. It is a strange feeling to be in a big crowd at the baggage claim and then the next minute everyone clears out and you are standing there alone with no bag. Luckily I had all my electronics in my carry-on bag but I still have no change of clothes or toiletries. The airline was nice enough to give us a little bag with a toothbrush and other various items though. The bag came with a t-shirt too, but one thing was noticeably lacking, underwear. We arrived yesterday midday and they still haven't found where our bag is so we are probably going to buy some clothes today. I think that maybe the next time I travel I will dress a little nicer just in case. Last night we went to a really nice restaurant and I was wearing warm-up pants. At least I don't understand any French so I can't tell when people are making fun of me.

Well now I need to shower and then put my dirty clothes back on before we go out to see the city. More to come later and hopefully some pictures.

Another semester has passed and somehow I forgot to blog about it. Shame on me for not enabling no one to read about my life. Alas, I do have news though! Irene and I are moving in together. I have decided the most interesting way to chronicle this event is through pictures because I like taking them and they are more fun to look at than words. So with that I guess I should stop writing and give you the link...
http://www.seancarr.net/gallery/sean/2006/movingIntoApartment

so I need something to do until Irene wakes up. I figured I might as well recap the past 6 months since I haven't posted in a while. So here goes nothing.

School:
I took Graphics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Enjoyed both a lot. Also took an intro to film course so now I can act like I'm a film snob even though I've only seen one tenth of the movies the average person has. I continued working with GamesCrafters (released a new launcher for the games) and WLA (designed a totally new way to index lectures by topic). It's still under development but it was a pretty cool project and I learned a lot by doing it.

Summer:
I'm working at the Sprint ATL Research Lab. In the first few weeks I created an automated publication system for their website and redesigned it so it looked more sleek and professional. Now that I'm done with that I'm starting to work on some research.
The Sprint Lab is in Burlingame so it made more sense to live in Berkeley for the summer. As a result I'm living with Irene at Stebbins (her co-op). It's going really well. We have a huge room and it's really nice not being split between two places all the time.

Prius:
I got a 2006 Toyota Prius on April 19th. It's really awesome and I'm loving it. You can see details about my mileage here. I'm still in the "break-in" stage so my mileage is expected to go up soon, plus my first tank was pretty low.

I think that is most of the major stuff. If I missed anything, email me and I'll try to add it.

After only a 10 hour flight, Irene and I arrived safely back in California. The flight had some decent turbulence at points but the really shitty part was that Irene and I couldn't sit next to each other, not even close. We were 30 rows away from each other and only got to talk a few times during the flight. We couldn't get anyone around us to switch, even the lady traveling by herself who was sitting next to Irene.

The whole trip was a lot of fun though. I loved Taipei and want to go back next year to see more of Taiwan or even China. Most of my trip is documented by these 500+ photos since I like to take and look at photos more than read or write words. If you have any questions about the trip I'd love to talk about it but I don't want to write all the details here.

It has been a little while since I wrote something new. The weather and my cold have both gotten better. We've been eating more and more great food for what I think are crazy prices. My Sudoku times continue improving and I've been taking even more photos. The Dansui album is where we went yesterday and the walk in the parks album is from today.

It is 8 degrees outside and since there is no heating it is only 12 degrees* inside. I woke up with a cold and have been sitting around the apartment all day, taking naps frequently. This gave me a chance to do some more Sudoku puzzles, but I would rather be out seeing more of Taiwan and taking photos.


* degrees given in Celsius to make people in the US think it is colder than it really is

For lunch we went to eat at a Mongolian BBQ place with Irene's family and family friend, it was pretty good, I ate me lots of meat. Then we went to the Tech District of Taipei but I was sadly disappointed that the stuff in Taiwan isn't any cheaper than online in the US. But everything is made in Taiwan!! Oh well.

In the evening we went to the Shilin night market. I spent all the cash I had left on presents for some special people (wink). Irene bought a pair of really nice Pumas for only $20 US! Clothes and food are definitely cheaper here. We went to an all you can eat hotpot place for dinner, only $6 US per person. I could get used to this.

Today we went to the elementary school where Irene's mom helps teach English to 3rd and 4th graders. The kids were very surprised to see a white person. One girl stood with her mouth hanging open and starred wide-eyed at me as if I were a ghost. They were all pretty decent at English but I think there were a little shy to talk since I was there.

For lunch we went to a really good dumpling place near the public library and then proceeded on to the library. I spent most of my time at the library taking photos but then Irene found three photography books for me . Most of the afternoon I've been going through one of them and learning a lot. This was cut short though by an afternoon nap which I just woke up from.

No, really. I rode on the worlds fastest elevator today, and that wasn't even the reason for going. The elevator was inside the worlds tallest building, TAIPEI 101 (named so because of its 101 floors). It only took 37 seconds to go from floor 5 to floor 89 where the observatory is. The building is even more remarkable than the elevator though. There was so much technology integrated into every part of the building and there were backup systems for the backup systems for the backup systems. All in all an extremely impressive work of engineering.

After seeing 101 we went to see "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." I really liked it, particularly after reading the book only a week ago. As expected, the graphics were stunning. The one thing I wished they had done though was add something visual to Aslan's breath like in the old BBC versions of the Narnia movies. I must say Liam Neeson did an amazing job as the voice of Aslan though.

Walking to the MRT (rapid transit) station from the movie theater we saw this. I'm still confused.

If you haven't already looked at the photos from the Taiwan trip, they are located here.

In the past two days I have taken (and not deleted) 157 photos in and around Taipei. This means my book is already 157,000 words long. Since the average number of words per page is 250, my book would be about 628 pages currently. I don't feel like writing very much today and since I've already said so much with my photographs I'll just give you time to look at them. I will try to start naming some of the pictures and filling in the descriptions so you get a better idea what is going on.

My flight to Taiwan left at 12:05 am on the morning of December 30th. I arrived in Taiwan at 5:34 am on the morning of December 31st,, very surprised to realize it was already New Year's Eve. It seemed very unusual to me to “miss” a day like this. After all I was not traveling for all that long (my flight was only 13 hours and 29 minutes). So, at present time I feel inclined to sue the International Date Line (IDL) for the amount of time I lost. With any luck we will simply settle out of court and the IDL will agree to repay this time on my return journey, as that seems a relatively fair compensation.

Other things happened “today” (only a brief part of which can be considered December 30th) aside from my dispute with the IDL. First and foremost, I was on an airplane. On the plane I watched two movies and ate two meals (think domestic flights 10 years ago if you have trouble picturing this). If you do not want to be bored by the details of the meals, skip to the next paragraph (kinda like a choose your own adventure, but not really at all). I'm warning you, if you don't want to waste time reading a CS majors attempt at story telling with awkward amounts of sarcasm, I suggest you skip ahead. The first meal was not long after takeoff and was referred to as dinner even though it was being served around 1:00 am. Sadly, I had fallen asleep, I think around 12:30, and did not wake up until nearly 1:10, at which point the meal cart had passed me by. I felt kinda out of place sitting among a heard of people with their tray tables lowered and eating food while I was sitting there with my tray table in the upright position. So, I lowered my tray table to feel more comfortable, although I think everyone noticed it was still metaphorically in the upright position (if you understand what that means you must be a humanities major) since it was still sans a tray of food. I didn't want to interrupt the stewardesses from serving other people's dinners, so I waited until they finished serving everyone else before asking for my meal. This was a very long time since I was only five or so rows from the front and the plane was gigantic. By the time I asked, they were out of the chicken dinner (my first choice) and only had the fish dinner (my second choice) remaining. But as everyone who knows me knows, I eat just about everything and enjoy it all about the same, so fish would be fine. If you have read this far down this paragraph you must either (a) care about my life a lot and be a very good friend, (b) be family, or (c) have way to much time on your hands and have nothing better to do than read about the most boring details of my flight I could bare to spend my own time writing. If any of the three scenarios above apply to you, I'm sorry. For what? I'm sure you can think of something that applies. If not, then at least I'm sorry that you read this entire paragraph. Since this is the longest single paragraph I've ever written and I only got to the point of asking for my first meal I think I should forget the whole meal thing all together. In case you really need to know though, I was awake for breakfast and had the omelet.

If you don't want to know about the two movies, skip to the next paragraph. However, combining the fact that I never remember things from movies, and the fact that I really like food, and the fact that I feel kinda sorry for you if you read the entire previous paragraph, I expect this paragraph to be much shorter. There were a total of three movies on the flight. There was also a National Geographic piece on Sears Tower but that does not deserve to be called a movie, maybe a film, but not a movies. I only watched two of the movies. The first one was called something like “The Wool Hat” although it really had very little to do with the wool hat which the main character, William H. Macy (the guy from Fargo who wasn't Steve Bushemi), wore. In this movie the main character (WHM) was mute because of a bad car accident. He was the super for a shitty, run-down building and it was a lot of grief. He goes through a lot of shit, and this little girls mom ODs but the girl doesn't know, and WHM takes care of her, and they start to like each other, then she get taken to foster care, then he tried to adopt her but can't because he has a felony, so then he gets his dad to even though his dad hates him, but everyone lives happily ever after, except for the mom of the girl because she Oded. The next movie was Christmas with the Kranks starring Tim Allen. If you haven't seen this one, don't, unless you are really tired and have nothing better to do and you don't have to pay any money to view it. It's cute, funny, and filled with holiday cheer but my time probably could have been spent better sleeping, reading, doing Sudoku puzzles, or just about anything else one can do on an airplane. Sorry, longer than expected, but this paragraph is finished.

The other pieces of the flight were occupied either by me sleeping or reading this book called “Under the Banner of Heaven” about how fucked up beyond belief Mormon fundamentalists are as an example of how religious fundamentalism is crazy and not at all confined to Muslim religions or the Middle East but is actually prevalent and very violent in and around Utah (and some other places too). I couldn't read straight through because there was so much rape, killing, incest, and general fucked upedness that I was often to sad to continue. Even so, I still recommend the book and I'm looking forward to finishing it.

I finally gave in and created a blog about me, my life, the things I do, how awesome I think I am, how awesome I think the things I do are, and why everyone should give a shit about all of the above.

Let us be clear that I think the current obsession with blogs is disgusting and the bane of our otherwise still shitty society. Yes, blogs are useful and have gotten many more people involved in generating websites, but they existed before only they weren't called blogs. For years people have been dynamically adding and editing website content. Just because many more people are doing it now doesn't mean there needs to be a new word for it or that it should be treated like it is revolutionary. The widespread use of blogging software to generate and maintain websites is newsworthy, but the websites generated are still websites. Just because I created my website using Dreamweaver doesn't mean that I call my site a WYSIWYG generated site. It is just a damn website. If you are reading it why do you care how I posted/generated it, don't you just care that you can read it?

In conclusion, software which allows people to dynamically add and modify website content is very useful and simple. This is why I am using it to share information with you. However, all this buzz about blogs is bullshit because you don't need to know how I got this text onto my website. Why not just type this shit up in notepad?