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| Matt's World |
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 My friend Mike sent out a link to this picture. Pretty sweet, huh? I'm two people to the right of Adam's head wearing a gray shirt with a black strap on my shoulder. Mike, Armen, Adrian, and I were at the very front of the ellipse for the Nov 9 U2 concert at Oakland. We arrived at 8 am and waited in line to get those seats (standing room.) Since the concert started at 7:30 pm, I missed a full day of work and a bio lab session. Totally worth it. But I would do this for no other band. Well... maybe the Clash. I think one of the cooler moments of the concert was Bono singing the entire vocals for "Miss Sarajevo" (usually the operatic interlude is sung by Luciano Pavorati.) Bono certainly isn't a virtuoso tenor, but it's always great to hear him stretch his limits. He was possibly influenced by his late father's opera singing. As for the Edge, I appreciate his guitar playing as "minimalist" and "wasting no notes." But man it's such a huge relief to hear him bust into a bonafide solo, like he did for "Bullet the Blue Sky." Being only 4 feet away from his station, I also gained new appreciation for his incredible sound engineering skills. In other news, I couldn't get "Superstition" out of my head after hearing it on a jeans commercial, so I had to buy Stevie Wonder's definitive collection. And I tested for my blue belt yesterday. Kind of funny I've stuck with taekwondo for a while now. To end, this will have to be my last entry before implementing some kind of calender system. This page is getting way too cluttered. But I have NO motivation to do any web stuff at home after doing it at work all day. Wednesday October 26 I'm a bio nerd Just returned from another marathon cell biology study session at Happy Donut's. What's sad is I found myself pretty interested in a certain 10 pages in the book that had no chance of containing material on the midterm tomorrow and read them in place of sleeping. Okay I'm just being self-deprecating, I know I'm happy to be interested in something. And I would be happier if it weren't for a record number of bugs: 36 assigned to me in the course of one hour at work. Thought of the day: Since a baker's dozen is 13, I wonder if a baker's gross would be 169, or 145. Thursday October 13 Work conversations... Background: At Spark Networks the project I'm working on required building a database, to store information about future Spark members, in Microsoft SQL. Once I got it up and working a few months ago, it was time to test it with "mock" members before adding the real ones. But what fun would it be using normal test names like "Joe Average" or "Member One?" Coworker #1: "Hey Matt, so I need to go through and eliminate the fake members in the data base." Matt: "Oh sure, sorry about that." Coworker #1 (CW1): "Who is Dave Evans? Is he a real person?" Matt: "Oh yeah, he's the Edge .... the guitarist in U2..." CW1: "And Lokelani McMichael? Is she real?" Matt: "Well.... she's 'real' .... she's a Hawaiian Ironwoman" CW1: "So she's not a real member." Matt: "Nah, I just put her in to have some members" CW1: "And Paul Hewson?" Coworker #2 (CW2): "Gosh, don't you know who Bono is????" CW1: "Well yeah... but it said Paul Hewson..." CW2: "Can't you tell by the picture????" Good question CW2... I like where you're coming from.... And a quote relayed from my friend Cliff from an engineering manager representing Texas Instruments: "This looks good, except I keep getting a weird error, what does 'Stan is GHG' mean?" And finally.... Quote of the day: "Dance like it hurts. Love like you need the money. Work when people are watching." - Dogbert of Dilbert (Scott Adams) Monday September 19 Mrs. Hurst I found out only a few minutes ago that my favorite elementary school teacher, Mrs. Hurst, has passed away from kidney failure. Not that me posting in my sub-par website does any sort of justice to how great a teacher and person she was, but I felt the need to at least remember her somehow. By the time I had completed fifth grade, I was the nightmare of all my teachers at Del Paso Manor Elementary School in Carmichael. I had been suspended for a day, given a citation, and heard the "3 strikes and you're out" line at least 100 times. My crimes were, well, mainly talking too much and telling too many jokes that disrupted the class. Imagine that. More importantly, I never had many friends. Anyway, I managed to straighten out my act by sixth grade, which is really when I started to do well academically, and more importantly develop social skills. It is no coincidence that Mrs. Hurst was my sixth grade teacher. At our graduation party, she said one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me, "When Matt came in to my class, he had a reputation with the teachers. I kept waiting for him to live up to that, but he never did." I haven't seen Mrs. Hurst much since then, other than going back to teach her class for a Chemistry class project in high school, but I have heard a lot about her. She was diagnosed with lupus, and ultimately received a kidney transplant. Since then she had volunteered extensively to support transplant patients, as well as winning a silver medal in biking at the transplant games. She will be missed. |