Busted Ankle and Tyler Walker

Last night while playing basketball for the first time in a month, I went up for a rebound and rolled my ankle as I came down. I knew that I was done for the night as I limped off the court. This is the first time that I was in such bad shape that I couldn't go to work, but I really couldn't move around and I didn't have crutches. I've spent the past 24 hours following the mantra of RICE, resting, icing, compressing and elevating my ankle and I think I'm in good enough shape to go to work tomorrow as long as I don't have any issues when I try to sleep tonight.

I know for a fact that I could never work remotely and working from home today was a true reminder of that. I spent the whole day writing documentation, which any computer programmer will know is not the most thrilling part of the job. I also spent the whole day lying in bed with my foot propped up on a pillow wrapped in an ice bag, which might have contributed to my dissatisfaction with working at home. I also had to call into a meeting for the first time, which is another pain since you can't see what people are writing on the board, listen to people who speak softly, and hear anything when your cell phone is filled with static. Of course, I should be thankful that I have a job that lets me work from home since it saves me having to use one of my precious vacation/sick days.

I hope I can resume unaided walking by the holiday weekend.

So one very eventful thing happened since the last time I blogged. When one of the Giants more reliable relievers, Vinny Chalk went on the disabled list, the Giants called up none other than the one and only Tyler Walker, my least favorite relief pitcher ever. One might suggest that I should dislike Armando Benitez a bit more, but for now, I'll stick with Walker. I've always been committed to the fact that it is never a player's fault when a team pays you ridiculous money and then you flame out (See Benitez, Armando; Durham, Ray; Aurillia, Rich). Its the teams fault for paying you. Of course, now that I think about it, you could extend that argument to cover Walker, as it isn't his fault the Giants made him their closer a few years back so maybe you got me there.

Anyway, Tyler is back in the bigs, so I sincerely hope things go better for him this time around. Gene can probably recall me screaming at him when he came in to pitch for the Giants back in our Stanford days, but I'm willing to let bygones be bygones as long as he can keep his WHIP under 1.5 this time.

Giants choke and not back to school time

Today, the Giants managed to grab defeat from the jaws of victory. They took a 1-0 lead into the ninth inning and gave it up in a big way to lose 1-5. Its a sad way to end your day and a traumatic enough event to lead me to create a sad blog. Hopefully for everyone's sake, they will win tomorrow and Thursday when I'm at the game.

I have this very weird feeling in my gut that I should be going back to school in spite of the fact that I don't want to ever go back to school. In spite of the sadness attached to the end of a long summer vacation, there is something special about a fresh start at school and all the unknown adventures that await. I figure 18 years of education should be enough for me and I don't particularly enjoy writing research papers. I guess I could also do business school, but I don't particularly want to take that path at this time because wearing collared shirts daily is not one of my goals.

The strangest thing is that I now feel a bit left out when I hear things like "San Jose State moved in on Saturday", "De Anza starts much later" or "our research project is on hold until everyone gets back to Stanford in late September". For 18 years that mattered and now every week is the same except for the 8 weeks a year where we work less than 5 days a week. The enormity and unendingness of work I guess is a bit traumatizing. Working has lost some of its shine after doing it for a year. As my uncle says, I'm probably almost 3% of the way through my career.

Last year, I half went to school. I still knew people at Stanford, played IM football with my expired student ID, and snuck into football games with my expired student ID. I still talked to people about their research and visited the campus. Now I do old-people things, like go to work on Veteran's Day, listen to my friends talk about buying houses, and watch my 401-k crumple as the stock market dives.

In an attempt to be funny, I probably come off as a bit bitter, but life is really great right now. Things were good when I was in school, and they are still good, just a different form of good. One that has money and doesn't have to do homework on Sundays.

Its time for Stanford Football and a desprate plea for your links

So I am one of the few, the proud, the Stanford Football season ticket holders. You may ask, "Kenny, why are you a season ticket holder? Stanford was quite possibly the worst team in college football last year. I know you have a good job, but don't you have something else to spend your hard earned money on? I know a good psychiatrist."

While this decision is not totally justifiable to the logically sound reader, I will try to humor you with a few reasons.

1) I'm doing this with a very good friend, Kevin. Just like alcoholism, watching below average football teams is something that is slightly more acceptable if you do it with your friends.

2) D1 NCAA football tickets tend to be really expensive. We are getting an incredible deal on these tickets since we are young alumni. I'm Scottish and Chinese, so I can't pass up a good bargain.

3) Since nobody else wants to see these games, we got by far the best seats in the section further increasing the bargain level. Again, I think this has something to do with my ethnic heritage.

4) Since nobody else goes to these games, there are a lot of empty seats. Most of the ushers don't get too hot and bothered if you "forgot" what seat you were assigned and took an empty one, like say 20 rows up on the 50 yard line. My English major sister Amy will kill me for mixing tenses in this bullet point. Again, getting more than you paid for should be a recurring theme here.

5) I love sports because there always is the chance to see greatness and triumph. You may counter that if I'm counting on greatness and triumph, I might have to wait a while. Just like the lottery, waiting for Stanford football to win is for people who don't understand probability theory. I have no counter to that argument other than the fact that there are always small victories. For example, last year a track star that also plays cornerback for Stanford had a long INT return for a TD. That made a game where Stanford, complete with a first-day NFL QB, got 50 yards of offense (20 in the last 2:00). Remember, small victories make life bearable.

You all may wonder what is wrong with this friend of mine, Kevin. Kevin was born in Eastern Pennsylvania where football is king, played in high school, and went to Penn State. Kevin does everything possible to watch Penn State play every single football game. I feel really bad for him when both Stanford and Penn State play at the same time. When I asked him if he wanted to get season tickets, he told me that season tickets to watch the Nittany Lion cost about 500 bucks and that this was a great deal. I guess we have more in common than I thought.

All kidding aside, I really love college football and there is nothing more enjoyable than watching it live where you can see everything from the complete kickoff formations, to the marching band, to the referee who wears a bright pink sleeve to signal when the TV timeout is over. I'm looking forward to this season as the mighty Bruins, Notre Dame, and Cal will all be in town. It also doesn't hurt that Kevin is a great guy.

One more side note before I push the "Publish" button. I have season ticket holder parking pass #1170, which means there are at least 1169 other people in this world who spent money on season tickets. We could almost fill a whole section!

If you've read this blog for any length of time, you'll know just about the only thing I'm super vein about in life is my positioning in the Google results when you search for "Kenny Lau". I'm not going to be shy about admitting that I'm by far the best Kenny Lau I've ever met, so at least the army of little men working in the servers at Google should understand this and appropriately put my webpage and this blog at the top of the list.

I've been as high as 3rd, but now I've fallen to 6th and this is not cool. My Stanford page was, of course, #1. In the past I've blamed this on technical words like "page rank", but I'll translate it into English for those of you who don't speak Computer Science. Basically, the little men that serve you webpages from Google will only understand my greatness if all y'all out there edit your webpages and have them point at my site. So lobby your congressmen, religious leaders, and parents to all have their webpages point to www.makethebestofwhatsaround.com.

Page rank has got to be one of the most useless topics I write about here, but something about blogging late at night makes me want to do vanity searches in Google and then I get sad when I'm barely on the first page. Thanks for putting up with me :)

I blog because I have to and will the Apple Long Island return?

I haven't enlightened you all with nuggets of knowledge in a long time and it is getting to the point where I maybe start feeling a bit delinquent about it. One of my two known readers demanded regular updates (in spite of the fact he is too weak a man to have his own blog) and I will do my best to please my fans. Of course, calling them weak men probably isn't going to help, but it should only reduce readership by at most 50%.

Given that the only reason this post exists is to please my friend, I cannot be held responsible for the quality of the content in this post. If he has already lost interest reading every post in my blog, then these bytes will sink slowly into the lost recesses of the internet. You can't win them all, and this is life in the fast lane.

To make this post less of a downer, I'll talk about a few of the fantastic things I've done since the previous episode.

1) I have not gotten rid of any shoes or added new shoes
2) I went and saw Vienna Teng in a park in Palo Alto. She was fantastic.
3) I went to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk with the one and only Gene Pang and friends. This was also fantastic.
4) I had a beer at work.
5) I saw quite possibly the greatest company demo ever at Palantir. If you are looking for a CS job you should check them out. They are fantastic.
6) I spent a night on a friend's floor. This was not so fantastic.
7) I moved some money from stocks to bonds the day before the market crashed. This of course was fantastic timing.
8) I watched Josh Clemm get married and had Belvedere vodka at his top shelf open bar. Top shelf vodka is expensive and deliciously fantastic especially if you don't have to pay for it.
9) I watched the Giants get a fabulous beating applied to them by the Pittsburgh Pirates.
10) I am seriously considering throwing the "Apple Long Island Party" revision 2 with the one and only Gene Pang. Fantastic doesn't even begin to describe this.

The last point of course is the most important because it is the only one that forward references something in the future. The first Apple Long Island party was the first party purely devoted to the favorite drink of the great Gerran Ueyama. It is the smarter, better looking cousin of the Long Island Ice Tea and it was the focal point of an incredible party we had last year at Stanford. (Warning, inside jokes ahead) At no surprise to anyone, Tony Li couldn't even finish one Apple Long Island. The one and only Gene Pang had the Excalibur of ALI's and he was feeling so good he did a drunken handstand where he almost killed himself. What will happen this year? Watch your inboxes, I'll keep you posted.