Dateline Stanford: Thanksgiving

The Thanksgiving break is over... and there's lots of news. Some of it is old...

So what am I thankful for this year?

Improving health:

For any of you who haven't heard, I broke my left collarbone about a month ago biking in the foothills. I was going down a steep bumpy hill, lost control and flipped sideways and landed on my shoulder. Anyway, I've been gradually regaining range of motion and function in my left arm and doing much better. I haven't been wearing any support or taking any pain medication for the past couple weeks.

Stanford football:

I must admit that after we lost our the opening game of the football season to UT by a score or 69-17, I really wasn't expecting much. But here we are, capping off an 8-3 season, winning the PAC-10 championship for the first time ever, and going to the Rose Bowl. Unbelievable. Oh yeah, we're also ranked #22.

I went to the Big Game last week which was a cool experience. We won of course (31-13), for the fifth year in a row. Berkeley students are starting to forget what the Stanford Axe even looks like. :)

Halfway through the third quarter about 100 police officers paraded in with billy clubs in hand and stood in front of the student sections for both sides. The announcer mentioned that there would be "zero tolerance" of anyone trying to rush the field after the game. Twenty Berkeley students were arrested for throwing bottles, rocks, and eggs at the officers, and no
one managed to rush the field. (I heard that two or three years ago some Berkeley students beat up the Tree and/or the band after Big Game, but it still felt a little totalitarian.)

Saturday, we beat Notre Dame on national TV, with a field goal on the last play. 40-37 isn't a pretty win, but we were on the other side of quite a few of those last year and it was great for us to pull it out.

Stanford athletics in general:

At halftime of the Notre Dame game, we were presented with the Sears Director's Cup for the fifth consecutive year. This award is presented to the NCAA Division I school with the best overall athletic program. Although we only got two national championships last year (compared to a record six in 1996-97), we had 6 teams finish second in the nation, and many more in the top 10. After the presentation of the award, the Temptations showed up in a double decker bus and sang a few songs, including "Rose Bowl" to the tune of "My Girl". And there were fireworks of course...

Friday night I caught the tail end of the women's basketball game vs. Tennessee. We had a two or three point lead with under four minutes to go, but Tennessee started a full court press and we couldn't get the ball past halfcourt. It was a close game, but Tennessee prevailed 79-73. Even so, I thought we gave the defending national champions a pretty big scare... and Maples Pavilion was totally full. People were standing in the aisles. I've never seen that for a women's basketball game before. Very cool.

Friends and Family:

(This means you...) Thanks for being there... don't be a stranger.

Quarter is almost over:

I managed to stay fairly busy with my TAing and keeping up with classes and the occasional fun. Less than two weeks to go until the break...

Dateline Stanford: Women's World Cup & Pictures

In case you missed it, yesterday the US Women's soccer team won the 1999 Women's World Cup down in Pasadena. It took overtime and a PK shootout, but the US won 5-4 with good PK shooting and a save by the goalie. (Too bad the goalie didn't get any more recognition for the save.)

The really funny thing was that I watched the game in the Blackwelder TV lounge, and the Chinese fans outnumbered US fans two to one.

Anyway, I went to the semifinal game where the US played Brazil last weekend... we had 73,123 in attendance, which is about twice the crowd we get for Stanford football games. So it was a packed house and a very exciting atmosphere. Everyone was chanting U-S-A and doing the wave, etc. The US won 2-0 and Briana Scurry (the goalie) had 6 saves and got the most valuable player award for the game. Natalie was in town and came to the game also.

I have expanded my old school pictures section on my web page. It is now sorted into three groups chronologically. Check it out.

http://www.stanford.edu/~jat/photos/oldschool/

Dateline Stanford: Summer!

Well, summer has arrived for me here at Stanford since I finished up my projects on Monday this week. If you want to see the slides from the junk email project, go to:

http://homepage.mac.com/townsend/lin239b/

Thanks for all the extra junk mail everyone sent! It was a great help. You can stop now. :)

I've also put up some more cool pictures on the web page. Thanks to Natalie, I now have a page of "old school" pictures. I also have some pictures from the top of the Hoover Tower of various parts of campus.

http://www.stanford.edu/~jat/photos/oldschool/

http://www.stanford.edu/~jat/photos/hoovertower/

In other news, we have our first public release of ESCOT Runner, which I have been working on part time since January. This will be used for three Problems of the Week on the Math Forum website this summer. If you have a relatively speedy
machine (at least PowerPC or Pentium based, faster is better) and at least 32MB of RAM (64MB is preferred) you can try it out. Also, please pass this info on to any middle school students you think might be interested.

I recommend downloading the installer with VM... most computers do not have recent enough Java support.

http://forum.swarthmore.edu/midpow/

http://cricket.ctl.sri.com/escot/dist/mathforum.2/Escot_EA2_Installers/install.htm

For more information on the project, go to this URL:

http://www.escot.org

Dateline Stanford: Star Wars, etc.

I saw _Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace_ this week. The cool thing about that is that I went to the 12:30 AM showing on Wednesday (Thursday morning technically) and only bought tickets an hour and a half beforehand over the phone. To think that some people camped out for over a month to go only 24 hours earlier than that seems sort of insane.

Anyway, I enjoyed it, and am looking forward to a second viewing in the next few weeks. I'll avoid spoiling any of the plot details for those who haven't seen it.

In other news, the Spurs defeated the Lakers 103-91 today to take a 3-0 series lead. Can you say "championship"? I knew you could.

Oh, and I also found out today that I got lucky in the housing lottery and will be able to stay on campus next year, possibly even keeping the room I already have.

Dateline Stanford: Junk mail

Greetings once again from sunny Stanford, California! Spring is upon us here and I am wearing shorts once again.

My project for one of my classes this quarter is to write a program to automatically identify spam (also known as junk mail). So please forward any unsolicited commercial email you receive to me. Really. I'm serious. The more training data I have the better.

Here's a cool picture from a while back that I scanned in for my web page:


Oh, and if you haven't seen _The Matrix_ yet, it is awesome. If you see only one movie before Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, this should be it. The super slo-mo "bullet time" effects are incredible.

Dateline Stanford: New Toys, Old Faces

Well, it's been a while since my last update. In the past couple weeks some cool things have happened here... for one, I turned 23 last Tuesday.

Also, I bought a CD Rewritable drive and some rewritable CDs so now I do a full backup of my computer once every week.

I also got an old PowerMac set up as a version control server (using CVS). So now I can put all of my programs in the server and keep track of changes very easily. It's also a huge help for team programming projects for class since it helps with merging everyone's changes together.

The other day I ran into Kurt Franke, a friend from high school who was on the math team with me. He's getting a PhD in Physics here after doing a dual major in Computer Science and Physics at Rice. Small world.

Obligatory sports news:

The men's basketball team clinched the Pac-10 title for the first time in school history (Pac-10 has been around for about 20 years).

Tonight, the women's basketball team beat Oregon... very intense and exciting game. Best attendance of all the games I've been to this year I think.

Dateline Stanford: Oh no, baby!

Well, Dick "oh yeah, baby" Vitale came to Stanford for the big game against #1 UConn today. The tents were up around Maples Pavilion again this week, and they had barricades in place for people waiting in line that showed up a couple hours before the game started.

With all that hype, it was pretty disappointing to see them lose a close game, especially since they came back to tie the game after being down by 18 points. Oh well. I watched on ABC...

Earlier today, I went to the women's water polo home opener. They took on defending national champion UCLA, and came out with the 4-3 upset win. It was drizzly this morning, and actually is still raining as I type this. A flood watch is in effect.

In other sports news, the women's basketball team traveled to Berkeley and beat the bears once again. Oh yeah, the men's basketball team beat them too. Not much of a suprise. We have a 15-2 record against them this year.

My only midterm was on Thursday. I think I did well. I watched _Pleasantville_ last Sunday. A weird, but cool movie. Kind of inspirational actually. That's about it I guess, other than lunch with Kerri Strug last Thursday...

Dateline Stanford: Back to the grind

It has been a while since my last update...

I'm settling in at work... I actually biked there one time last week. It's a good excuse for me to get in better shape and enjoy the outdoors here more. Plus parking is much easier that way, since I usually arrive at work around 10:30 and the good spots are all gone.

This past week I went to the men's basketball game against Washington State. At the end of the first half we had about a 10 point lead, but we blew it open in the second half, leading by as much as 50 at one point. It was still a cool game because they really put on a show making a bunch of three pointers and stealing and fast-break dunking. Saturday, Arthur Lee came up with a three pointer, a steal and some clutch free throws to put away Washington. I watched the game on TV. 13 wins in a row. Undefeated in the PAC-10. Can you say "It's Cardinal Chaos, Baby"? :)

Sunday I went to see _What Dreams May Come_ with Robin Williams. It was a very surreal movie. It felt like the whole thing was a dream.

Yesterday we had a mini poster fair thing in my Interdisciplinary Interaction Design class. The topic was Human-Food Interaction. My group did a poster on "Virtual Meality" - a restaurant chain with videoconferencing so you can have a meal with someone across the country.

BTW, if you're interested in Stanford athletics, you can point your web browser at www.gostanford.com.

In other news, be sure to check out Apple's ad in the SuperBowl on Sunday. It features HAL 9000 from _2001: A Space Odyssey_ and will air during the first commercial break after kickoff.