I decided to try my hand at the Comic Life application that came with my Mac Pro. I suspect you’ll be seeing more of these. Click for the full-sized comic.
This site’s been broken for several months now, but what with me studying for quals and my crack team of personal assistants embroiled in a legal battle over some comments I made at Jerry Falwell’s funeral, there was precious little time to do anything about it. I took, and passed, my quals about a week ago, so this seemed an opportune moment for reviving my precious online presence.
Jared Casper, a fellow second-year, generously volunteered his server for the task. Even though I have moved off of Eddie’s server, aquatica.mit.edu, I want to thank him for hosting this site for almost four years. He tolerated my belligerent requests and foolish questions with the patience of a saint. Thanks, Eddie.
You will also immediately notice that the appearance has dramatically changed. My blog is now driven by WordPress instead of MovableType. The theme is a modification of the Mandigo Theme by tom; the header image is credited to Marc-André Besel.
OK, it’s been four months, let’s do this:
- I went to May’s funeral in San Diego, and spoke at her memorial service at Stanford. I cried at the funeral, but not during my eulogy. Barely.
- I volunteered at Admit Weekend and lured numerous students to Stanford with my disarming charisma and unassuming charm. Also, sometimes, with bribes.
- Googlers from NYC took shifts visiting me in Mountain View. Daniel and I hit on a bunch of cute girls in SF, without noteworthy effect. I suspect they were turned off by my Eau de Geek cologne.
- I had papers accepted at DSN in Edinburgh, UK and ExpCS in San Diego. You can find them on my Research page.
- I attended IPDPS in Long Beach, CA, and was disappointed.
- I spent four months studying for my quals.
- I took my quals.
- I passed my quals.
I’m back, this time for reals.
May Zhou, a good friend and amazing woman, was found dead in the trunk of her car; she apparently committed suicide. These are the moments of her that I remember. Some words I saved. This is a eulogy, and an apology.
May:
I met you my freshman year at MIT. You were one of my first friends there. We tooled furiously on multivariable calculus problem sets in the study lounge of MacGregor House. We were a team; me, you, Hung, Goggin, Daniel. We were in that together. I made jokes about your name, jokes that you had heard a thousand times before and probably a hundred more times after, many of those from me, again. We took many of the same classes. I remember eating Thai Cafe in an upstairs lounge of my dorm while we struggled through some horrible mathematics. You told us about the Second Cultural Revolution in China, and how it influenced your parents, and how it influenced you. You survived MIT; we all did.
We both got into Stanford’s graduate schools. You were the best of the best. We went to IKEA when you arrived in Palo Alto so that you could buy some furniture. You invited me to the tours of the Stanford Libraries, and I nearly died from boredom. I haven’t been there, since.
11:17:40 AM adam: hey may, just making sure you’re still alive
It was funny, at the time. Now I wish I had made that joke again, too.
I dragged you from your studying for quals to get Japanese food. One time we went to Homma and you had brown rice sushi for the first time. I tried to get you to come out for drinks, but you refused. “i’m not smart enough/therefore i need to study/more than you”. That is what you said. You raped your quals. You were always smarter than me, and you still worked harder than me. I always admired you for that.
We were both honored with Stanford Graduate Fellowships and we attended the award dinner. You sat next to Prof. Boyd, whom you admired. In the light of dawn, one morning last quarter, we crossed paths in the Quad. Beneath the palm trees, we exchanged greetings and promises of another meeting. Soon. That never happened.
9:49:12 PM may: ok, thanks for keeping me sane
9:49:29 PM adam: that’s my job
I’m sorry, May. I’m so, so sorry.
Farewell.
It turns out that I’m still alive. The blog was broken for a while, which was truly the only reason behind its stagnation. Thanks to Eddie’s help, adam.oliner.net is reborn, and ready to serve up some tasty blog victuals.
Let’s see, what did you miss?
I went backpacking on the black sands of California’s Lost Coast. I gave a conference talk in Rhodes, Greece and waded barefoot through the clear waters of a Mediterranean beach beneath the shadow of a white-painted town and castle-crowned hill. I spent a memorable week in Oxford, England with Yong-Hwa: we celebrated May Day in the rain while a boys choir serenaded from a clock tower, saw the Queen, went to the English National Opera for La Belle Helène (looking posh), punted on the Thames while drinking fine Burgundy and champagne and watching the sunset, ate fish and chips in a British pub, took walking tours of London, feasted in the dining hall from Harry Potter, ate cake from a sword, and noshed on assorted goodies from a French market.
I spent the summer in Albuquerque, New Mexico at Sandia National Labs studying supercomputers and surrounded by surreal devices like the massive Z-machine, perpetual fighter jet traffic, and enough nuclear weapons to wipe the planet clean of life. My host, Jon, and I wrote a paper on our results. I hiked all over the state: climbed New Mexico’s highest peak, had a terrifying encounter with a tarantula hawk, saw ancient petroglyphs inscribed on stones, wandered (hopelessly lost) through a blistering hot desert, and once awoke deep in the wilderness to find an elk drinking from the stream near my tent.
I flew to Cairns, Australia for another conference talk. I went snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef and ate emu, crocodile, and kangaroo. I went to NYC to watch my friend Goose get married and subsequently drunk. My uncle underwent open-heart surgery and recovered like a champ.
I moved into a two-bedroom house in Mountain View, California that I share with a woman named Teresa and her adorable border collie puppy, Mollie. I learned that my office was Sergey Brin’s old office. I started learning Japanese. I got a paper rejected. Jon and I are trying our luck again elsewhere, which I hope will give me the opportunity to present the work in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Oh, and it’s my birthday. A quarter century; twenty five years of not dying, in a row.
The Writings and About pages have been updated, as has my resumé. The Gallery is borked.
It was a long and inevitable hiatus. It’s good to be back.
Confrontations are often turn-based, where each person ups the ante until the other backs down. Sometimes, however, one party decides to escalate the situation clear into the realm of insanity. Such was the case the other night, when another driver decided to run my father off the road. By this point my dad had done nothing more that look at this man (who we will call Mr. Crazy) as he passed him on the highway; Mr. Crazy responded first with wild gesticulations and then by following my father until he began to get off the exit ramp. It was at that point that the not-so-gentleman intentionally hit my dad’s car.
I’m proud of what my dad did next, and I like to think I would have done the same. To summarize: “Aw, hell no.” My dad began following Mr. Crazy, while simultaneously calling the police. He led my father on a winding tour of backroads, trying to lose him. With each turn my father updated the officers on Mr. Crazy’s location until the flashing lights became visible and converged on him like the closing hand of God. Four black and whites and an undercover car responded to the call. Mr. Crazy decided, against all logic and reason, to abandon his car and flee on foot into the backyards of Framingham suburbia. It is with no amount of shock that I report the man was quickly tackled and subdued. My father identified the man as the driver who hit him. Mr. Crazy was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and (shock!) driving while intoxicated.
On a positive note, congratulations to Ben Liblit on winning the ACM PhD Dissertation Award. Ben is a former student of my advisor, Alex Aiken. Slashdot carried the story a few days ago. I’ve been using his tools and hacking around in his code as part of my own work, which makes me feel special by extension. Leeched glory! (Ben suggests that I “try to pull off the same trick.” I’ll do my best, man.)
Here’s a link if you’d like to visualize where your tax dollars are going.
My time is otherwise occupied by finding a place to live in Albuquerque this summer, finding a dog-friendly place to live near Stanford next fall, finding a brilliant research topic, and reading scientific papers like it’s my job. Which, to some degree, it is.
This weekend I’ll be backpacking on The Lost Coast, a stretch of untouched coastline in Northern California. It should be cold, windy, rainy, and absolutely gorgeous. Don’t even act like you think I won’t take pictures. That’s just crazy.
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