May 6

May 6, 1999

This is me, still not writing that paper or studying for that final. I mean, Dawson's Creek was on last night. Obviously, I can't be expected to do homework when Dawson's Creek is on! Really.

I was trying to figure out how to do forms on a web page yesterday for my internship. I know how to make the form and everything, but I don't know how to make the file that does something with the information someone types into the form. I finally found kind of a fake way to do it on the internet. Basically, someone else wrote the programming and put it up on their server, and then lets people link their forms to it, and sends the results to you in an e-mail. But I really should learn how to do it. Funny, learning Perl does not excite me. But I should do it. Maybe later this summer.

I went to a Korean restaurant for lunch today. I did a group project for one of my classes, and some of the guys in the group are Korean. So to celebrate finishing the project, they wanted to take us Americans to a real Korean restaurant. It really is the way to go, because I get kind of nervous when I don't know what something is and I'm too embarrassed to ask the waiter. But my friends asked me what I liked and told me what to order.

We started with some sushi and Korean pizza. I was nervous about the sushi because I don't like fish much cooked, much less raw. I tried the shrimp one because I figured it would be like shrimp cocktail. It was OK. Nothing great. I scraped off most of the wasabi, because one of my friends took a big bite and then her eyes were watering for 10 minutes. The Korean pizza was good - it's kind of like a potato pancake with lots of vegetables in it, and a little bit spicy. I liked it.

For my meal, I had Chicken Bogogi (I think that's how you spell it). It's kind of barbecued - it had a smoky taste. It was served in a little box with a lot of compartments (kind of like a wooden TV dinner). Each compartment had different things in it. One had the chicken. One had a green salad with some sort of ginger dressing. One had rice. One had a seaweed type salad. One had noodles that tasted kind of like ramen noodles, but sweeter. One had these radish shavings that kind of looked like noodles. And there were deep fried things - we think one was a potato, one was a yam and one was zucchini, but they were deep fried, so they tasted good.

Overall I enjoyed the meal. I didn't use the chopsticks though. I would probably try it again sometime. The atmosphere was very nice, and the wait staff was good.

Afterwards, a few of us went over to the J. Crew Warehouse Sale. They have it every year in some empty store. I couldn't find anything for myself. J. Crew doesn't carry anything bigger than a 10, I don't think! Then I thought I might be able to find shoes, but they were all size 10 and 11 and I wear an 8. I did find a nice pair of leather gloves for next winter. They had a beautiful black leather jacket, exactly what I want, but only in size small. It was $100, down from a regular price of $350.

So, I bought Jim a couple pairs of shorts and some nice linen shirts for summer. I was just noticing the other day that most of his work clothes are heavy cotton, not really appropriate for summer wear. I hope he likes them, because it's no refunds or exchanges!

From the Mergers That Make Me Nervous dept: Microsoft just bought a stake in AT&T, which previously announced a merger with MediaOne. Nothing like having all of the communications power in one gigantic, behemoth company, is there? It's hard enough to get a new phone line hooked up, but at least now there is some competition for your long distance dollars. As soon as MSAT&T rules your phone, cable and computers, expect service to get even worse and prices to go up.

So some employers are worried about massive sick-outs for people going to see Phantom Menace, a valid concern. What cracked me up was the guy from Peoplesoft who said, "The dedicated employees at Peoplesoft would never think to skip out of work" and the guy from Intel who said, "People at Intel have a lot of work to do. They don't have time to skip work to go see a move." Dream on, fellas. There will be tumbleweeds rolling between the cubicles on May 19th. Why not do what Ziff Davis is doing and have one giant company screening so that everyone sees it at once?