Dateline: Stanford - Scott McNealy, Kerri Strug, and Job

Well, it's been a hectic week, and tomorrow is my first final. Here's a quick update.

Last Thursday, Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems gave a talk at the Stanford Business school. He is quite a character and it was really neat to hear his thoughts on the computer industry, especially since the AOL-Netscape-Sun deal just went through a few days earlier, and Sun's continuing involvement in the antitrust and Java cases against Microsoft. McNealy got an MBA at Stanford in 1980, but said he should have dropped out like Bill Gates and gotten a head start on the competition.

Also, I will start a part time job in January, working at SRI (Stanford Research Institute), working on Java component software for middle school math curricula. I'll be lowering my course load a bit for Winter and Spring quarters.

SRI pioneered areas such as modems, TCP (one of the first two nodes on the ARPAnet, predecessor to the Internet), magnetic ink encoding, hypertext, artificial intelligence, and wireless networks, among other things. I will also get a PowerBook as my computer, and be able to bring it home with me. :)

And the suspense is finally over... today I met Kerri Strug. She was just leaving to go jogging and I managed to catch her and say hi. She seemed like a pretty nice person.

Oh, and in sports news, the men's water polo team plays USC for the national championship today. And women's volleyball beat SE Missouri State and Notre Dame to advance to the Sweet 16. Next up is Texas...

OK, back to work...

Dateline: Stanford - Big Game & Star Wars

Well, the big news of the weekend was that the much maligned, embattled Stanford football team pulled out the 10-3 upset victory at UC Berkeley in the 101st Big Game to keep the Axe for the fourth consecutive year and spoil Cal's bowl hopes.

In other sports news: the women's basketball team beat #1 Purdue; men's water polo beat Cal as well; women's volleyball continued their PAC-10 dominance and clinched the conference championship by beating UCLA; men's soccer advanced to the next round of the NCAA playoffs; finally, men's basketball blew away SW Missouri State to head to Madison Square Garden for the NIT Semifinals. All in all, the Cardinal kicked some major butt this weekend.

Also this week, Lucasfilm released the trailer for the new Star Wars prequel which is due May 21, 1999. A QuickTime version was posted on their website and shortly massive network congestion ensued.

I am mirroring a few versions of the movie at different sizes and quality levels. There is an unofficial list of mirrors at:

http://countingdown.com/mirrorlist.htm

If you'd rather come directly to my computer, it's:

ftp://starwars:trailer@cable.stanford.edu/

Dateline Stanford: Sports extravaganza weekend

Well, it was a sports extravaganza this weekend. We went 3-0 in games that I attended. Friday night the women's volleyball team swept Oregon in three games. On Saturday, men's water polo demolished UC Davis 19-3. It was the final home game of the season. The football team managed to win their second game of the season 38-28 later on Saturday to move into second to last place in the PAC-10. I didn't go to the game.

And the big news of the week was that I was picked to get tickets to two men's basketball games in a lottery of leftover tickets. The first game was Saturday night versus UC Davis. I got to sit in the UC Davis section. :) Luckily for me, we beat them soundly 76-49. (Getting tickets to a men's basketball game is impressive because people were willing to sleep out for _two weeks_ to get season tickets. Stanford is ranked #3 and made the final four last year.)

And Sunday night I went to _There's Something About Mary_ at Flicks here on campus. Hilarious movie. The theatre was packed.

Today in White Plaza on my way back from class I noticed the band was playing. One guy was dressed up like the Crow and had impaled a teddy bear on the fountain. It's some sort of spirit thing for the big game against UC Berkeley, which is this weekend.