Observations from this weekend:

--I was in SoCal this week to visit friends as Hai needed to attend a panel in the IE. Coming along for the ride were Claire, Jenny, Alex, Steve for a couple of days and Akshay on the last day. For a change, it was actually cloudy most of the weekend, so it wasn't really beach weather.

--Some of these pictures above are from me and others are from Alex and Claire. You could probably find more at their sites.

--American Eagle must be very efficient. They were always on-time for the round-trip but they charged for pretty much everything. The cashews are $2! To add injury to insult, they're always found at the end of the terminal so they're a good 15 minutes away from the security checkpoints. In Orange County, they're actually based out of a portable outside. Outside! You gotta go up and down 4 flights of stairs between the terminal and the plane.

--I sat in Hai's little panel discussion on the poems of Emily Dickinson. The other people on the panel didn't really contribute too much. One freely admitted she poorly analyzed her thesis while another was a little more concerned about the animations on her power-point presentation. Even the panel leader made up the word scannation.

--Steve's bachelor pad is pretty sweet. The star of the show has to be the voice-activated dimmer switch. Yell out computer: low and you get a dimly lit room to set the mood. Apparently, it's only $20 if you want one. We also visited his workplace which was the set of Saul of the Mole Men, finishing up its run on Adult Swim. Okay, so the set is one room with a green-screen, but still.

--Hollywood and Highland is actually a much smaller place than you see on TV. This intersection is home to Grauman's Chinese Theatre, the Kodak Theatre (where the Oscars call home), and the El Capitan Theatre (where Jimmy Kimmel does his show). Once there, we found one of those R2-D2 mailboxes people were talking about. Pretty cool.

--Any weekend with me is usually about the food and there was no shortage of that. There was the steak at Gaucho Grill, a good Argentinean steak house, the seafood at the chain Joe's Crab Shack, a bowl of bun bo hue, and of course, the Angus Third Pounder at McDonalds. I didn't take any food pictures...Claire took care of that. The yogurt shop Pinkberry is good, but I don't think it's worth it to stand in some of the lines this place is notorious for.

--Yes, when you're driving with me, I'm gonna drive like an old man. I'm sorry but that's how I'm going to get you from point A to point B.

--Our time with Steves ended with a nice stroll on the beach. With our cell phone lights. In the midst of jumping around, Steves lost his keys, so here it was at 8:00 in the pitch black that we were combing the beach. Lucky for us, Jenny found them or else we would have been there forever.

--Our ulterior motive for being down there was to tour the colleges. Hai and Jenny are choosing from a few and so we visited Riverside, Irvine, and UCSD. Riverside is just how I remembered it. Way back when my brother went there, I never wanted to stay. So cross this one off the list. Irvine is big and quiet with plenty of Asians walking around, if you find people walking around. Even with the scholarships these two schools offered me in 2000, I still chose Berkeley. That's why of the three, UCSD seemed to be the best. Nice campus, plenty of people and parking. During our short time with Akshay, he gave us the grand tour from his Civic. And he knows a lot about the campus...one class left til graduation and his 7 year journey to a degree will be over. I think he's been waiting for me to hit it big.

--So today, here I am at work. Coming back, I got a few messages from IT stating that they should be able to fix the problem I was having with some software yesterday. Funny, I wasn't at work yesterday. Yep, these are my co-workers.

--The rest of my pictures can be found at Flickr.