Phil’s blog

(Not counting the faulty headlight switch for which there was a recall)

After coming home from SES two Wednesdays ago my car wouldn’t start.  I diagnosed it as a dead batter and decided to jump start it later when I needed to use it, and in the meantime ride my motorcycle.  So last Saturday rolled around and I needed to use the car, so I got my housemate to jump start it and proceeded drive around a while to charge it up.  At one point I turned on the headlights while driving under an overpass and the car died, and not only wouldn’t start, but none of the electronics worked.  So I was blocking one of two lanes of a busy road in the shadows of an overpass without being able to turn on my hazard lights.  I opened up my trunk and hood all the way so people would know my car wasn’t going anywhere, and then started scanning the traffic for someone who might help.  A dude in a pickup tried to jump start me again, which was an adventure in itself.  He had to pull in front of my car facing the same way so we wouldn’t hold up traffic, but this made quite a distance between our respective battery leads.  We clamped our jumper cables together and were almost able to connect, but there were a few extra inches, so he had to very carefully back up until he was touching my bumper, and had to stay in the driver’s seat with his foot on the brake because his truck lacked a parking brake and he was on an incline which would cause him to back further into my car if he simply let the parking gear engage.   So I very carefully connected the leads while he held the exposed center clamps (from where the cables met) apart only inches away from his gas tank (as there was no choice because the cables were stretched).   Turned the key, starter motor struggled, wasn’t going to happen.  He said my alternator was shot and it looked like jumpstarting wouldn’t work.  I thanked him and started calling around for a local towing company.  Meanwhile people were giving me dirty looks and and advising me to turn on my blinkers, some of them very agitated.  Ended up getting a tow to a garage (paid for by my insurance), leaving my car for a day and paying about $450 to have the battery and alternator replaced.  Apparently alternators always break at some point, but this can be accelerated by running a bunch of devices off the battery.  I had been running my laptop through a power adaptor fairly regularly - lesson learned.  Anyway, that was my adventure for the weekend.

This past weekend I ate at four different Japanese restaurants.

Saturday
Lunch: nabeyaki udon at Maru Ichi in downtown Mountain View. This place was fantastic - on par with the noodle houses I visited in Japan. I could tell walking in that it was the real deal because most of the customers there were Japanese.
Dinner: chirashi sushi at Momoya sushi in a random strip mall near a Safeway in Mountain View. Delicious, generous portion, will definitely come back.

Sunday
Lunch: fish bento at Sushi Ya in Palo Alto. I decided to be adventurous but the fish was a big mistake; too many small bones. The california rolls were too mayonnaisey. Decent price though.
Dinner: chirashi sushi again at Sushi Tomo in downtown Mountain View. Less quantity and variety of fish than at Momoya. Won’t be going back.

Notable items from the past two weeks:

• I’m going to graduate. About a week and a half ago I got feedback on my revised thesis, made some final changes last weekend, and am finally done! It’s waiting to be bound at Alderman Library. Definitely a weight off my shoulders, but now I have to publish a paper which may be more involved. There was a lot more I wanted to do with my thesis but was in a rush to finish, so this will be my chance to follow through since there’s no longer a deadline.
• I found a place to live. It’s on Bay St. southeast of downtown Mountain View. I’m quite pleased; two bedrooms / 1 bath, $1100/mo including utilities, off-street parking for two cars plus motorcycle, plenty of street parking for guests, great landlord, and it’s only a 4-plex so less potential for neighbors with noisy children and dogs, both of which I have to deal with at my current residence. The master bedroom is pretty large but the other one is only 10×11.5′ - a bit cramped but it’ll do. I’m not sure about the roommate yet; a friend from work wants to check it out, there’s a chance that Justine will move out here, and failing those two, I can always resort to craigslist. I’ll move in during the second week of September and see what happens.
• I went to SES (Search Engine Strategies conference) in San Jose last Tuesday and Wednesday. It’s a conference held several times a year in various locations for anyone whose business involves search engines. Most of the attendees were from companies that specialize in making your sites rank well in search results or optimizing your internet advertising campaigns. As you can imagine, these industries are largely dependent on Google, so I felt like something of a VIP since name tag had my employer printed on it. People were very interested in what I had to say, and it was a good exercise to talk to them and answer questions without giving away secrets.
• Tuesday night was the Google Dance. It’s an annual event during SES where attendees (and of course Googlers) are invited to a big party at the Googleplex. It allows us to hang out with people whose livelihood depends on Google and in some cases have an adversarial relationship with us (webspammers). Delicious food was a given, but there was also live music, video karaoke, photo booths, a dunk tank, radio controlled robots, and product demos. Good times.

I started replying to a comment from Vickie in my last post, but I wrote more than I had anticipated and decided to make it a post. What’s totally sweet about this is that since I’ve referenced the post she commented on (via the link in the last sentence), a snippet from this current post will appear as a comment on the other post via PingBack. Anyway, on to the actual post!

Thanks for the thoughts and compliments, Vickie. I can’t take credit for the design though; it came with WordPress. Some day I’ll get around to making my own template, but in the meantime, green it is! It’s impressive that you have the discipline to periodically introspect and even write things down. I know what you mean about motivation disappearing. I’ve been having weekly meetings with a “wellness coach” (for free because she’s working towards her license), and part of the value they provide is making you accountable. The very act of telling this person you’ll do something and knowing they’ll ask you about it later if you don’t is actually a decent amount of motivation. Perhaps instead of saying I’ll redesign this blog someday, I should state that I’ll do it by a certain date so people will have an expectation (in my mind at least). But then I’d have to actually do it, so forget that! I wish I could stop time and do everything on my todo list, but as a couple of the items are rather involved projects, this would take months and in doing these things I’d probably generate another todo list of equal or greater length. Speaking of todos, I have a ton of stuff to post about but it’s late again and I still have work to do. Tomorrow night I will catch up on blogging - if I don’t, someone please chastise me.

It’s late and I’m procrastinating as usual. Now that my blog has these fancy new digs, thought I’d write a bit more and respond to a post on Marcus’ blog about meditation and the brain. Btw, if our blogs implement Trackback correctly, this should show up in a comment to his original post. Anyway, Marcus asks if one’s baseline happiness and compassion can be elevated, likely inspired by the hapiness report I wrote about a few days ago. As a disclaimer, the following are late-night, half-baked, unresearched ideas. So Marcus’ question implies a more general question of whether we can consciously reprogram ourselves in profound ways. I’m thinking yes but with great effort. First, let’s be pessimistic and write off depression as a chemical imbalance, so conquering it doesn’t necessarily count as reprogramming. We do minor rewiring every time we learn something, quit bad habits, or otherwise reinforce behaviors. Mental association tricks such as mnemonics or crazy imagery are ways to intentionally manipulate our neurons, but they’re very basic and seem generally limited to pairs of concepts. Tweaking general happiness is surely orders of magnitude more complex than remembering to always put your keys in the same place when you come home. I’m not talking about short-term tricks such as counting one’s blessings; I’m referring to “baseline” happiness which is more permanent and not affected by hedonic adaptation. Of course, if we believe that fundamental reprogramming is possible, nothing is necessarily permanent. Anyway, it seems to me that to be able to change one’s very outlook on life, one would need some incredible insight into how his/her brain is currently programmed. Or maybe it’s as simple as meditating - focusing on something for long periods of time. Perhaps the monks don’t know how exactly it works. Thinking the same thoughts stimulates the same neural pathways and thereby strengthens the connections. Perhaps focusing on happiness and compassion strengthens their associated pathways so much that they become stimulated by inputs that normally wouldn’t have any effect. Perhaps some of these connections become continuously activated so that at an unconsious level, the monks’ brains are still lit up with happiness and compassion even when not meditating on them. Or perhaps I’m making things up and need to go to bed. Anyway, thanks Marcus for making me tired tomorrow. Really though, thanks for causing me to think about this. Too bad I wasn’t interested in cog sci during college. Good night.

After starting out with a blog on my domain, then switching to wordpress.com hosting, I’ve come full circle and returned to my own domain. Why? PageRank. I want my homepage (phil.harton.org) to rank highly in search engines when people search for my name, and hosting my content on the same domain helps. I’m also getting tempted (again) to write my own blogging software, and if I do, I can gracefully maintain the permalinks here generated by Wordpress.