Făt Frumos

This past Friday, while bicycling across Long Island, I discovered a new sport -- wind surfing on a bicycle. Every time a big-ass truck zooms past you on a highway, it creates a wave of wind that pushes you forward! I used to get nervous about the trucks on a narrow road, but now I enjoy them.

Here's the whole route: http://www.bikely.com/maps/bike-path/36510

And here are some pictures: http://public.fotki.com/vokinhsalak/boston-nyc-bike-2/

-mk

P.S. I beat my own distance record on Friday: 103 miles in one day (Route 25, from Orient Point to Brooklyn, 13 hours). Yey!

I just realized that the date when I launched our bike expedition's website — April 19th — is the "Bicycle Day" holiday (search for it on Google and you'll see what I mean). It is also the date on which I made my decision to apply to b-schools.
-mk

My career coach's name is Stever Robbins (http://steverrobbins.com/). I asked him about his name today. It turns out that his name used to be Steve, just Steve. His e-mail, for a long time, used to be "stever@somethingorrather..." Also, he happened to be a big computer geek (wrote one of the first DOS TCP/IP stacks and so on), so everyone knew him as "stever". At some point, he says, the name got so stuck that he decided to officially rename himself from Steve to Stever!
-mk

Last night I kept turning and shuffling in my sleep from being cold. Then, I finally awoke — it was still dark — to realize that my blanket was missing. (FYI, I live in a small dorm room, about 100 sq. ft.) I rose on my elbow, lit the reading light, looked at the floor — still no blanket. My eyes slowly scanned the room and what do I see? The blanket is crumpled up inside the trash can! I'm not joking :-) I still think someone must have come in and done that to taint me in the night...
-mk (a.k.a. Muzungu Kichaa)

Our website is finally live:

http://bikecoasttocoast.org/

Please go to the website and get involved!

Ciao, friends
-mk (a.k.a. Muzungu Kichaa)

Guys, check this out! I got a fax number from eFax.com and the number just happened — coincidentally! — to match my cell phone number in 6 out of 7 digits, even the sequence is the same:

cell: 532-6572
fax : 539-6572

The probability of this happening -- namely "getting exactly 6 out of 7 digits of a phone number correctly" -- is ...let me get the zeros right: 0.0000069, i.e. 69 out of 10,000,000.

How cool is that!
-mk

Last summer I did my MBA internship at Google. The Mountain View campus is a sprawling complex of buildings, and people are always shuttling (riding cool electric scooters) from building to building for various meetings. One day, I went to an unfamiliar building to discuss something with an interaction designer. As we sat in her cubicle talking, her little annoying dog kept biting my calves, licking my hands, and distracting me from the important meeting in whatever way he could (Google allows and encourages dogs in the office). But he was cute and I kept petting him throughout the meeting.

After the meeting, as I walk toward the exit, I realize that my hands reek of dog. Still immersed in thought, I turn into the nearest men's room to wash my hands. As I stand by the sink lathering my hands, I hear a stall door opening behind me. Someone comes out, approaches the sink next to mine, and starts washing his hands. Still deep in thought, I absentmindedly raise my eyes to the mirror and see that the person next to me is a woman! And it hits me that I must have accidentally gone into the women's room.

She seemed as absent-minded as I, though, and didn't seem to have noticed anything weird. Therefore, I could have slipped out and nobody would have known about my error. But, stupidly, I turned to her, blushed, mumbled something like 'Oops, it was an accident!', and ran out :-)

I'm not sure yet why people use LJ, but have been curious to get a glimpse of this pervasive tusovka. Decided to get an account and check it out for myself. But what kind of stuff am I going to post? To start, I think I'll use this as a place to write down weird stories that I witness or in which I happen to participate directly -- with me, both happen relatively often ;-)

Ciao!
Făt Frumós

This past Saturday, 8pm-ish, I was checking my e-mail in a cafe on Houston and Wooster, when I heard the sound of an explosion. Explosion? I looked around at the people in the cafe; everyone was acting as if nothing had happened. Ok, then, maybe it was just thunder or something (though the sky was clear...). In a few minutes: boom! another one. What the hell, thought I? This time around, lots of fire trucks started descending on the intersection a block or two away. This was getting interesting, so I packed up my computer and went to check things out.

As I approached Houston and Mercer, I saw that cops and firemen had cordoned off a several-block perimeter around Houston and Broadway. A small crowd of bystanders was gathering, and I asked them what was going on. A man told me, "It depends on what you like to see. Over there," he pointed toward the commotion ahead, "two manhole covers just shot up 50 feet into the air" (indeed, smoke was billowing from the pavement). "And over there," he continued, pointing to the sky, "is a lunar eclipse." New Yorkers were being well entertained that night!

But the night's weirdness didn't stop there for me. I phoned my mom to invite her for a movie. She told me she wanted to see "Elizabeth", and asked me to call 777-FILM to find out where it was playing. So I dialed, navigated the menu to where one enters the first three letters of the title, and accidentally pressed a wrong key (I wasn't sure what I pressed, but it wasn't the letter "E" that I had intended). Surprisingly, though, the voice on the other end proceeded to prompt me to press one if I wanted to see "The Queen"! ...and I remembered that the title was "The Queen", not "Elizabeth".