Chinese food and volleyball

Another busy weekend. Saturday I went down to San Antonio to help my aunt, who was working a the booth at Folklife Festival selling Chinese food. Some of my cousins were also in town for this, and it’s always nice to see them. I’m not entirely sold on the whole Folklife Festival concept if our booth was any representation, since the food we offered was either very Americanized food (fried stuff, like egg rolls or fried wonton) or had names which I had a hard time keeping a straight face while saying (such as long life noodles)… either way I doubt there were huge insights made into Chinese culture due to the booth. But maybe I’m just missing the spirit of things. In any case, the eight-course “real” Chinese dinner we had afterwards more than made up for it, and it was fun wandering around the fair with my cousins. That, and working the booth did bring back a little nostalgia from my high school days seven years ago when I volunteered to work concessions at football games with Key Club. Ah, the memories.

Also, today was the first game of the three-game summer intramural volleyball season. I’m on the team my department put together (Road Warriors), and since I haven’t played volleyball regularly since… um, never, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Luckily nobody on our team or the opposing team seemed to either, so it wasn’t too embarassing, and we ended up winning. Yay. The team warming up after us seemed much better though, so hopefully we don’t play them. I think this is actually the first organized team sporting event I’ve ever participated in, and… I don’t know where I’m going with that. It was fun, but I still think I like the individual stuff better; but who knows, maybe the next game will convince me otherwise.

And yes, I am sad that Destiny’s Child is splitting up.

Randomness and Ranting

Much has happened in the last six weeks or so. Here’s a quick summary:

• Church mission trip. Deserves its own travelogue, and will get one once I get pictures from the others.
  
• Good friend Dan Björkegren from UW came to visit en route to the Rio Grande Valley with Teach for America. It was a fun couple of days, including the creation of Spotbus Austin, which isn’t quite done yet.
  
• Long drive to McAllen to drop Dan off. Round trip, it was about 800 miles, which makes for a tiring day. Part of that is my fault for doing nerdy things like driving to the southernmost point in Texas (not that exciting, a dirt road by some farms with a bunch of little kids running around), and driving to the Gulf at Boca Chica Beach.
  
• Research is going well, and in the fall I’ll be presenting on robust network routing at the INFORMS conference.
  
• Next weekend I’ll be driving to North Carolina to see Sean who will be there for the US Open.
  
• TransCAD is the worst computer program ever. If you have any say in the matter, stay as far away from it as you can.
  
• School is done. I guess this actually happened in May.
  
• Um… that is all that comes to mind right now.
  

Also, the fact that I haven’t updated in a while also means that you haven’t heard me rant in a while, so I guess I should do that too. The victim for today is the Black-Eyed Peas, quite possibly the worst music group around right now. For a while I’ve said that they needed to come up with their own style, since all their early singles were pretty derivative — “Hey Mama” sounds like Sean Paul, “Shut Up” sounds like Destiny’s Child, and “Where is the Love” sounded like an attempt to copy “City High” and “What Would You Do” (which didn’t need to be copied anytime soon anyway). This was annoying, especially the unbearably trite “Where is the Love,” but at least I figured they were a harmless flash in the pan that would be gone before too long.

I figured wrong. Now everybody is raving about their new single “Don’t Phunk With My Heart” (which some radio stations edit to “Don’t Mess With My Heart,” apparently “Phunk” is now a dirty word), which is quite possibly the most annoying, pointless, and stupid song I’ve heard in a long time. Even the video is crappy. I always said they should try to find their own style and stop copying others, but I couldn’t have imagined a stronger rebuttal to my argument than “Don’t Phunk With My Heart.” So, I say to the Black-Eyed Peas: give it up. You’re bad when you copy other groups, and horrible when you try to do something original. Move on, and free up the hip-hop charts for better quality acts like 50 Cent or Missy Elliot, since apparently people don’t realize how sucky your music is and buy it en masse.

OK, enough complaining for one night. Off to bed now so I can help my aunt at San Antonio’s Folklife Festival tomorrow.