This last week was spring break here. Stanford is on the quarter system, meaning that spring break came between quarters, so there was nothing that I really needed to do. The weather was beautiful, so I did a lot of biking. I also went out a bought a bunch of books and did some reading. And besides that I did some programming and sitting in coffee shops too.
On Wednesday I biked up to Foothills Park on Page Mill Rd. I went up there a few weeks ago with Joel and decided it was worth another trip. It's a pretty hard trip though, since it's a climb the whole way. (The trip down is fun.) When I got up there I wished I'd brought my camera, and so the next day I went back and took some pictures.
I bought a bunch of books at a used book store:
I've already finished reading the MacLean and I'm well into the Plutarch and the MacDonald.
I've been working on revamping my webpage, building some software tools to help out. I wrote a first draft of part of it in Python, but it turned out to be way too slow, even after profiling and optimizing. So for a while I was searching for a language that was fast but safe. After playing with different languages for a while I decided on Java, believe it or not: the GNU Compiler for Java produces decent native code and it's only going to get better over time. I've now reimplemented the bits that were written in Python as Java, and indeed it's about 10x faster.
I've also been working on, but mostly thinking about, software for Java-based iButton smart cards. I have three of the iButtons themselves, and two readers, that I borrowed from a prof. Any ideas?
And of course I've been, as usual, hanging out in coffee shops, drinking decaf or hot chocolate and having the occasional chocolate cookie, hoping to meet women. It doesn't work, of course; I suspect I am socially defective. Over spring break the coffee shop on campus was closed, so I had to switch to an off-campus Starbucks.