C-Objectively

Last night we had a release night at work. Matt was working the “A-Shift” as we call it. I had gone to the Sonics and Rockets game, but afterwards I decided to drop by and see how things were going with the release. One hour turned into two and, before I knew it I spent the whole night there with everyone else that was working.

It is easy to get bored sitting around a conference room all night waiting just in case something goes wrong. So of course, Matt and I were exercising our “J Finger” in Google Reader. Matt pulled up a post on Lifehacker about some kind of vertical wall-mounted planter for plants. The following inadvertently funny sequence followed:

Matt: This is cool. I’d love to get one of these. If only I lived in a place that got enough sunlight to keep a plant alive.
Armen: What are you saying man? I have a plant at my place and it’s fine.
Matt: Dude, I’ve seen your plant and it’s not fine.
Armen: Whatever man, you caught it on a down cycle.

Well, he did. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Anyway, I suppose it’s only fair to show a picture of how my plant’s doing right now…

Oh and I’d say it’s about mid cycle right now.

P.S. Thanks to my Mom who gave the plant to me as a birthday gift a couple years back.

To those of you who have never ventured into the southern part of the U.S., the words Waffle House don’t mean much. But to the people of the South, the Waffle House is an establishment; like Starbucks in Seattle or In N Out in Southern California. Yet I can’t really compare it to anything we west-coasters know because I don’t think we have any place quite like it.

For starters, there are a lot of them. I mean they are everywhere in the South. You can hardly go a mile in a city and not run into the distinctive giant yellow block sign. Then of course, they are all open twenty four hours a day. That makes it THE place to go after a night of drunken partying. You never saw a place as busy as a Waffle House at around two in the morning. Or eleven in the morning. And the food there is CHEAP. So cheap I did not believe it the first time I went.

I have a theory that there is some town, farm, or factory assembly line where they are churning out the people who work at Waffle Houses. I have been to one in at least three different states now and the people working there are like clones of each other no matter where I go or what kind of town the place is in. They say a picture is worth a thousand words…

Since we’re talking about a restaurant I guess I should say something about the food. I can’t speak to the variety on the menu, although its definitely there. You can get breakfast, lunch, or dinner any time of day or night. I’ve only eaten one thing every time I’ve gone and its so damn good that I don’t know if I will ever bother trying something different: scramgled eggs with cheese, hashbrowns, raisin toast with apple butter (extra apple butter), and a side of country ham. That meal is probably a coronary served on a plate but I don’t know for sure and I don’t want to know.

As for the rest of the menu, I have no doubt it is great. How do I know without having tried any of it? Well that’s easy — Waffle House told me. In fact if you were to believe the signage at this place, you would think it was the finest dining establishment in the country. The claims made include, but are most definitely not limited to:

• America’s Best Coffee
• America’s Best Chicken
• World’s leading server of REAL hash browns
• World’s leading server of waffles

Hopefully that list gives you an idea of the important contribution Waffle House makes to enhancing America’s culinary reputation. I had trouble finding them in my copy of the Michelin Guide but I’m sure that’s because I have an out of date copy. It is amazing that they can serve such great food at such dirt-cheap prices. My meal of choice can be had for between $5.50 and $6.50 depending on the area and it is a big breakfast! Those prices put IHOP, Denny’s, and any other wannabe late-night breakfast-serving place to shame.

Oh yeah, don’t forget all the immitators either. For those times when the Waffle House is too pricey, fancy, or busy you are welcome to try your luck at the local Waffle King or Omelet House. These places lurk notoriously close to their Waffle House brethren. They also sport block-letter signs that look a lot like the Waffle House one. I haven’t been to these places but natives tell me they’re even cheaper and grimier than the standard-issue Waffle House.

Despite (because of?) all this, I have to say I love the Waffle House. I love the food, the hours, the cookie-cutter locations and people, and the kitschy small-town diner feel of it. I wish we had one on every corner out west just like back in the South. But I doubt we would be able to recreate them out here. I don’t think we have the people out here to run them and I doubt anyone would dare serve my cheese and eggs breakfast for anything less than $10 in Los Angeles. I guess my cravings for country ham will just have to wait for my infrequent visits to the South then.

A couple of weeks ago there was a total lunar eclipse. Fortunately, it was one that could easily be seen from the USA, clouds permitting of course. And when it comes to Seattle and clouds well, let’s just say that you better get friendly with them if you live here.

At the end of last year, I bit the bullet and repurchased a digital SLR camera – the same one I lost in Europe. The eclipse gave me the perfect opportunity to trot it out and see if my night-time photo taking chops had improved. I set up the photo op with a buddy from work, Nick, who is into photography even more than I am.

It was a bit cloudy in Bellevue so we figured to drive east to get away from the clouds and light pollution of the city. As we got to North Bend though, we were faced with some of the darkest blackest clouds I had seen in a while. Thinking we would have to call the whole thing off because of clouds, we headed back home. Back near Bellevue though we noticed that we could clearly see the sun setting to the west. That was our cue to go as far west as possible before it got too late.

We pulled on to Admiral Way in West Seattle with no time to spare. There was a view point along the street and about fifty people were lined up along the railing alternately admiring and photographing the newly orange moon. We got our gear out and set up; Nick was kind of enough to loan me his 400mm lens to use, while he busted out the monster 600mm.

It took a bit of getting used to using such a long lens but pretty soon I was snapping some shots of the moon that were putting huge smiles on my face. Meanwhile, there was a line of people waiting to look through Nick’s telescope. Eventually the eclipse was over and I swapped to my wide-angle lens to snap some photos of the Seattle skyline, which we also had a fantastic view of. Finally, I did a 180 and messed around with taking my first “light trails” photos with the traffic on Admiral Way behind us.

I was pretty pumped about some of the shots I got and even though I froze my butt off standing out there, you can bet I’d do it again.

You can check out all the photos at my Lunar Eclipse and Seattle Night Sky gallery.

Last year for Thanksgiving week I took a trip out to the east coast and visited family and friends in Boston, New Haven, and Washington DC. I had a terrific time. Tonight I’ll be leaving on another trip to try and top last year. I’ll be spending a week in Cancun, then heading over to Nashville to spend Thanksgiving there with Matt’s family.

Expect some pictures of this trip, and some others I have been going on since I last posted, when I return! Happy Thanksgiving!

Loyal readers will have noticed that I have been M.I.A. for about two months now. The biggest reason for that was the planning for, going on, and recovering from a whirlwind two-week backpacking trip across Western Europe. I had wanted to take a trip like this two years ago when I finished at Cal but, with my Let’s Go Western Europe book in hand, plans fell apart at the last minute. Now, two years later I had the vacation time, the money, and another chance to go on just such a trip — let’s take a moment to celebrate not being college-student-poor anymore. Add to that Ara was wrapping up his time at Cal and looking to go on a big trip before sinking the next few years into investment banking. Oh and add to that my buddy Anurag also wanting to join in on the European fun. The time was clearly ripe for a backpacking trip to remember.

So we spent mid-to-late June hightailing it across a bunch of places all over Western Europe including:

• London
• Paris
• Amsterdam
• Berlin
• Nurburg
• Munich
• Barcelona
• Girona

Overall the trip was great; we all had a ridiculously good time and I’ve got memories from this trip that I will cherish forever. As I sort through the photos from the trip, I intend to put up a series of posts, one for each country probably, with some of my thoughts on the places we visited and of course, some funny stories.

That point also brings me to probably the only low point of the whole trip. While in Munich, near the end of the trip, and after snapping 600+ of probably some of the best photos I have taken yet, I left my camera unattended for about 30 minutes and it was stolen. Although I didn’t write about it here, I had finally taken the dive into the world of SLR photography by procuring my own Canon 20D. I thought it was an awesome camera and I was having a lot of fun learning how to best use it to expand my abilities as an admittedly amateurish photographer. You can see some of the shots I was able to take with it in my photo gallery here and here. Anyway, the point is that although I will be posting a bunch of photos from the trip soon, I cannot take credit for taking the vast majority of them; that credit goes to Ara and Anurag.

Stay tuned for more Euro action.

A couple of weeks ago on a harmless April Friday, we held our first Hack Day at work. It was totally inspired by and loosely modeled after Yahoo’s Open Hack Day, with the notable exception that ours was not “open”. I think Yahoo’s Hack Day was a great idea and I was very excited to see us doing something similar.

Given the fact that I hadn’t done any serious programming for a while — sorry Expedia Dashboard widget, you don’t count — I was itching to enter the contest to stretch my coding skills a bit and, of course, blow everyone away with something so cool we had to win. Lucky for me I had some friends at work who were interested in doing the same. So armed with two rock star developers and two crazy program managers who code (”why would PM’s write code??? they say), we formed an elite black ops unit that began to meet and discuss the details of our project.

Hack Day came around and we hacked our little hearts out. I learned JavaScript tricks I never knew existed, we became intimately familiar with the Prototype library (don’t write JavaScript without it!) and writing object oriented JS, and we wore out the JS debugger and other tools in Firebug — the Firefox extension sent from the heavens unto web developers everywhere.

Working day and night through the weekend on our project (yes I know it was Hack Day but they said if we wanted to work all weekend, more power to us) took me back to the nights spent in Soda Hall on the Berkeley campus trying to finish up one of our many CS class projects a few nights before it was due.

Lots of lines of Java, XML, JavaScript, and CSS and three days later we had completed our vision for a next-generation travel shopping experience. We showed our prototype at the judging the following Wednesday and it was a big hit. Since the initial presentation we’ve been inundated with questions and requests for demos for various groups. Tonight we found out that we won and tied for first place. We had a lot of fun working on the project and I can honestly say I’m very proud of the work we did.

Anyway, if you were wondering why I had been MIA the last couple of weeks, now you know what I was doing pretty much that whole time. I can’t post screenshots or videos of our prototype here but if you know me and are interested in hearing more about this, get in touch with me. Hopefully someday soon I can point to something on the live site and say it was inspired by (or is!) our Hack Day project.

I have been busy working on a couple of other web sites. One of those is ready for the world and had its “grand opening” yesterday.

Fight Critic is a blog where I’m going to continue posting my thoughts about mixed martial arts news and events. The couple of posts I made here on C-Objectively were fun to write and were popular enough that I decided it was something I wanted to keep doing.

I hope my readers here that are interested in MMA or combat sports will give Fight Critic a shot. And tell your friends!

Last Saturday night we were out in Seattle and on our way to Joe’s Hot Dog Stand for our customary end-of-the-night hot dogs. I’m driving and we’re getting the usual Seattle sprinkling from the skies. We’re stopped at a traffic light, probably discussing how we need to make it to the hot dog stand before it closes, when all of a sudden I’m shaken and pushed forward. “Hmmmm… there is no way that Matt kicking the back of my seat would have made the whole car shake, so clearly there must be another… DOH! I’ve just been rear-ended.” Of course, it had been way too long since I had to deal with the annoyances of uninsured drivers, filing insurance claims, and shady body shops for the bump to be anything else.

I get out of the car to see a sloth of a car behind mine, a 1992 Cadillac Eldorado, with another sloth sitting behind the wheel. I ask the fool for his license and insurance information; a seemingly simple task. I end up waiting a solid three minutes in the rain while he fumbles in his dash and wallet, struggling to coordinate his fingers enough to pull the card out. He can’t maintain eye contact with me and he is a man of few words. Basically, he is drunk.

While I am standing in the rain jotting down the information from his half-legible, copied, and expired insurance card a couple of Seattle’s Finest happen to drive by and slow down to figure out why I am standing in the road. I tell them what’s up and ask them to come check things out. After spending some time talking with the both of us, one of the cops comes over to me and the conversation was as follows…

Cop: So what would you like us to do here?
Me: Uhhh, what do you mean?
Cop: Basically we can do one of two things: 1) We could write him up for a DUI; but he doesn’t look that bad and his eyes aren’t shaking much.
Me: And the other thing?
Cop: Or we could write up a report on the incident and that’s that.
Me: So you’re asking ME to decide whether that [obviously-drunk] guy [who-just-crashed-in-to-the-back-of-my-car] should get written up for a DUI?
Cop: Yeah.
Me: Isn’t that your job? I don’t think I am the one to make that call, am I?
Cop: What do you want from us?
Me: I just want your report in writing so my insurance company doesn’t second guess my story.
Cop: Okay. *walks across the street to his patrol car*

I am utterly bewildered at what just transpired and turn to Matt and Anurag to say so when the cop turns around and yells across the street to Me: “That’s how we do it in Washington; we ask you.”

Apparently that is how they do it in Washington. The question I’m asking the Seattle police is, “Why?”

Epilogue: Everyone in the car was fine and the bump wasn’t that bad so it looks like the damage is confined to the bumper of the car.

Do you experience confusion? Anxiety? Feelings that your life is out of your control?

Televised advertisements for prescription drugs may be partly to blame, new research suggests.

The Annals of Family Medicine has published the results of a study that discusses the negative impacts of all the prescription drug advertisements we see on television. I discussed the same in a post I made back in November of 2005, “Here’s a pill, won’t you have another?”

On another note, Super Bowl XLI was incredibly lame. I did not follow the NFL season but I would love to know how the Chicago Bears even got to the national championship game with an offense that plays for the other team.

That is what happens when it snows in Seattle. Well, at least its *some* of what happens.

Oh you thought we were through with the freak winter in the Pacific Northwest this year? Not a chance. A couple of weeks ago on a nice (relative) Monday in Bellevue, the weathermen — nay, meteorologists — of the area predicted three inches of snow for Monday evening. Everyone quivered and shook in their Birkenstocks and Uggz and took off early from work to get home before the blizzard and the traffic. Turns out they were wrong as usual and we got maybe 0.1 inches of snow Monday night.

So Tuesday comes around and they once again predict doom and gloom for the Seattle area and multiple inches of snow. Fool me twice? Pshaw, I say. So I’m at work typing away around 4:30 as I hear the half-conversations of the people on the phone around me. “No kidding… the roads are all blocked up in Kirkland?… That much snow on the ground?…” Of course I glance outside from where I’m sitting and I see nothing but cloudy skies and oncoming sunset. A piddling fifteen minutes pass, the sun sets of course and we have nighttime darkness at 4:45, and I take a second glance outside to see… snow! Snow coming down probably as hard as I have ever seen snow come down. Well I try to pack up and get out of there as soon as I can but by the time I got to my car in the garage and got out, there was already a good half an inch to an inch of fresh powder covering the ground. I did okay driving around the outside portions of the parking lot but as soon as I took the left onto the slightly uphill street, my car didn’t make it more than 25 feet before going into spin city. Granted, I drive a rear-wheel drive sports car with ultra-low-profile summer performance tires on it, so this was not a big surprise to me (or those watching for that matter). I probably would have done better if I had waited for some of the snow to compact, harden, or melt off in an hour or two as cars drove over and past it. Anyway, I reversed over to the side of the road leaving my car for the night, and walked back up to the office, very much defeated by the weather gods.

Luckily for me my boss lives very close to my place and he offered to give me a lift home. He did not however spare any opportunities to make fun of the many more 3 Series or other similar vehicles also stranded on the side of the road as we took our 10-minute-turned-1.5-hour drive home. Thanks Mike. All I have to say to that is, “Yay, Armen!”

The events of that Tuesday weren’t all though; we got more snow again on Saturday and again a couple of days after that. Suffice to say that some side and back roads were well and frozen for over a week. This all gave me the opportunity to score what I think are some pretty photos.

Note, the roads seem snow-free because I didn’t snap this shot until Thursday morning, and this is a very high traffic road. Click through to my Flickr photostream to see a few more shots of the snow around my place. Unfortunately I do not have a picture of my poor car stranded on the side of the road for you to make fun of.

The last few days we have seen some conciliatory gestures by the weather around here; mostly clear days with some very light sprinkling tossed in. A few years ago I might have complained; this year I consider that a blessing. And please, if you live in an area where it snows, ever, learn how to drive (or when to pull over) in those conditions; unlike the idiot in the video up there.