I've set up a new email account which I'm gonna use to replace my old utk account. I was telling adrian about on Messenger and as it happens I also got to summarize my feelings about my old hotmail account.

greyhoundbus says: ngbernard@mystar.com.my
greyhoundbus says: mail me anytime
adrian says: ok ok send me a mail n i'll update it
greyhoundbus says: nah i'm not gonna use this as my main just yet
adrian says: so can i ditch ur utk mail?
greyhoundbus says: i'm just setting it up for later
adrian says: ok but i'll remove ur hotmail one then
greyhoundbus says: oh definitely. why u still have that one
adrian says: so its utk main and star secondary
greyhoundbus says: yeah
adrian says: ur hotmail is listed as ur secondary mail
greyhoundbus says: its my wankers email
greyhoundbus says: wankers send me email there
greyhoundbus says: asking me to wank with them
adrian says: ok ok so i'll change the name to wankers mail
greyhoundbus says: yeah

This week has so far been a quiet one. It's always like that after something big has happened; in this case I handed in my thesis last Thursday. Right now I still have a couple of conference papers to write, and experiments to perform. There's also the problem of finding a job looming over my head. I'll get into it while I'm running those experiments and writing the papers. There's not a whole lot of time left... those phone numbers on my resume probably aren't good for much longer, which leaves me wondering if maybe I should get a cellphone. I offered a while back to mow people's lawns for money while I'm looking for a job, so I can at least live off pocket change for a bit. Unfortunately, it's winter, and there are no lawns to mow anymore. I had a phone interview with Bridgestone yesterday, which went as badly as my interviews usually do. They ask the darndest questions. " Why do you want to work for Bridgestone?" Well I don't, in particular, I just want to work. sigh... looks like I'll need to buy one of those interview books that tell you how to lie your way through these questions.

Monday evening there was a little bit of fun to be had. Me, Brent, Marci, and David had a small cookout by the Laurel apartment poolside. Actually Bryan Wang was supposed to be there, too, in fact it was his idea, but later we found out he forgot about it. He had some extra chicken from a previous cookout he wanted to use. But he forgot he was having a cookout, so he didn't show up, which is alright, since apparently he didn't know I and David were going to show up. We didn't know he wouldn't show up and he didn't know we would. Funny how that works. It's a good thing I had some frozen orange roughy I wanted to use for the grill and David brought some burger meat, or Brent and Marci would have had nothing to eat except dilly green beans and potato salad.

We got out to the poolside and if we were reasonable people who listened to our parents and wrote their advice on our hearts and abided by them even in our adulthood, it might have dawned on us that having a cookout in 35 degree windy weather in the dark of night wasn't the smartest thing to do. But nobody said that. I think, even, that Brent thought the exact opposite. This was going to be fun. Anyway, when we got down to the poolside we found out we'd forgotten to bring the spatulas, lemon pepper, olive oil, limes, aluminium foil, Dales seasoning, oh, and Marci wanted some rice cooked. So who got to grumble all the way back up to our apartment about our collective incompetence?... yep you guessed it.

While I was up in the apartment scratching my head trying to remember exactly what I'd been sent up there to do (hey, it was a Monday. The ol' brain doesn't starting grinding til Wednesday), Marci comes in, announces that it's cold outside, so she's in here, and can she help? No? She'll just sit here and watch tv, then. Alright, I tell her... just bring the rice down with you when it's done cooking, when it's done you'll hear a 'click' and the cooker will be on 'warm' instead of 'cook'. Then I went downstairs.

I found David and Brent talking next to the fire, which was started using those neat, nut-shaped lumps of coal that our grandfathers never got to use, because God in His wisdom decided it wasn't the time yet for regularly shaped lumps of coal that fit neatly in a bag and probably burn better. No, back then things tended to look rougher and more random, such that you sometimes had to look harder to figure out there is indeed order in the universe. Anyway, I looked at those lumps of coal burning in the grill, they were struggling to burn in that cold windy weather, but they were burning. It was a good, faithful fire. I thought what a neat picture that would make, and as it happened I had my camera with me (I've started carrying it around now, mostly so I have pictures to back up my semi-fictional stories on this blog). I took a couple of pictures with the flash on and off, and with the close-up feature and on plain old auto. I think the picture I've got here turned out the best. And then it was time to grill, which Brent did, mostly, since he was the grill expert in our apartment. We put the burgers on one side of the grill and the fish on the aluminium foil on the other. There wasn't a whole lot of space the the burgers were small, like Hardee's slammers. It was very cold. My fingers were turning to icicles. David was shivering all over. Brent didn't need the spatula to flip the fish. He could use his fingers just fine, it was so cold. I watched closely to make sure he didn't pick his nose in between. Brent is a big fan of nose-picking.

After a while, Brent announced we need plates to put the food on when it's done. I couldn't feel my cheeks (both kinds) anymore at this point so I didn't mind volunteering to go back upstairs at this point. I was also wondering why the rice was taking so long. I got back to the room to find that the rice was indeed done and that Marci was just tucked in warmly on our couch watching tv. Okay Marci, I said, the rice is done, time to get out and there and freeze your touche off with the rest of us. We brought the plates down and set it all up on a card table in the rec room. The fish and burgers were done soon after, and we gathered around the card table in that brightly lit warm rec room. We dug right in, and forgot to say grace, perhaps because it was already so obvious that we were plenty grateful to be out of the cold and seated in front of a meal in a warm place. Mostly I think it was just our chronic incompetence acting up again. The food was, of course, quite excellent, all the more since we suffered unnecessarily for it.

Lots and lots of pictures. Because I can. Again.

We had a practice session for the YAMs skit at Heather Grieves' house last night. Once again, I had my camera with me.


Dee drove me there since I didn't know the way, and I plopped right away on a two-seater in the living room, where Robert was also lounging on the couch. Guys know their priorities. While Dee and Heather talked in the kitchen, I noticed that the view I had would make a nice picture. So there you have it.



Post-practice, Dee Lewis had some death-by-chocolate cake, and Heather posed for a picture with a hostess-like smile.


Thanksgiving holidays have started, no one's in the lab, Nori my friend from Japan is in town, and I'll be busy entertaining him tomorrow with the Sacks. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Sometimes, there are things that just make sense, though you don't expect them to. Right after people get prodded, they start saying "MOO".

Michaël Roy, who has been a visiting scholar at our lab for the past year and a half or so, is finally going home to France this Sunday. He had a farewell party at his apartment this past Saturday. I left somewhat early (around 11pm... French parties, I'm told, really start at midnight), but I still caught a bit of the action.

Michaël's Farewell Party

T'was the week before leaving, and all through his house
Michaël Roy partied, you should have seen him carouse
"Come everyone! There is sangria, there is wine!"
"Let us all party like it's one-nine-nine-nine!"




"Well," declared Brad "That's a stupendous idea!"
"But I can't act like a jackass with Sabrina right here."
"Oh don't worry," his wife said, "The party must thrive"
"And I'm getting sloshed anyway since you promised to drive."




"Okay then!" said Michaël, "Brad, here's your chance!"
"When you party with French of course you must dance!"
And as he did his French jig, Yohan looked on and thunk
"Yes he act stupid whenever he is drunk"




Meanwhile within their own little clique
Kevin, Lydia and Laura were discussing some serious topic
Which was apparently not a correct thing to do
Because Michaël swooped in to talk to this crew




"Hey vat is zis? You three on ze bench!"
"How dare you be boring in front of ze French?!"
"Three Americans, no-no, I know ze trick!"
"I'm replacing Laura here with Pierrick!"




And so it went on and on until late
There was laughing and drinking which was generally great
And eating and talking with friends old and new
And stuff that at parties you generally would do






The food deserves mention, there was a nice farewell cake
You could tell it took quite some loving to make
And I really need to take French lessons someday
I know "Bon voyage"... what does the rest of it say?




"Where's Brent?" Michaël asked me, "He said he would come?"
I thought so too, but later, I found him at home.
All snuggled up cozily for the rest of the night...
It's good, I guess; someone got his priorities right.



THE END

I'm going to spend some time trying to get this blog to be CSS compliant. Meanwhile, I just handed in my thesis to the graduate office yesterday. I have something to say about that, but later... for now I'm wrestling with my blog template. Yes I have a bit free time on my hands now =). In the meantime, some people are having fun getting prodded.

Update: Well I decided 100% CSS compliance is a bit of a hassle for now, simply because I'd probably need to start from the ground up, seeing as how the template I got here has so much nonsense in it already and I'm too lazy to change every single thing. Later, just not now. I did make certain improvements though. This blog is now viewable in both Mozilla and in 800x600 resolution with no problems. I'm not sure if it is viewable in both Mozilla and 800x600 resolution at the same time but that's not what I set out to do and I'm too tired to check. Now I said it's viewable, meaning you can read the posts and tag the board, but that doesn't mean there are no problems. For instance, in Mozilla I noticed I can't get the header picture to show up properly. I tried for three hours and finally said screw it. People should use IE anyway.

Oh, and here's the receipt I got from the thesis consultant yesterday:



It's not official until you get a smilie sticker, I guess.

If there's that certain something missing in your social life, and you're not too fussy about the sort of company you keep, do consider a career in law enforcement, because, according to Amy, "Really drunk people still try and do it with the officer".

Seriously, though, I would like to thank her for putting up the Franklin ten-codes on her sidebar. The link she'd provided before didn't seem to work and I wasn't sure the Knoxville codes were exactly the same. Aside from that, when she writes things like
"...so we 10-19ed to help out with the 10-24 but only after we finished with our 10-95, after which we code-3ed all the way and it was about 10:30 pm when we got there and started looking for the 10-49 that drove his 10-44 through the front door, but he wasn't there, just a buncha other cops who were 10-97 looking confused or eating donuts. '10-12? 10-12?' we asked everyone but they were all too 10-6ed to answer us..."
... when she says stuff like that, I don't feel so inadequate anymore. Thanks Amy!


"We're All Republicans Now. We've All Come Around Somehow."

Lately I've been listening to NPR, which, for those of you who aren't cool like me or who live in Malaysia (those two are not always the same thing), stands for National Public Radio. Before that, I listened to 95.3 FM. The actual name of the station eludes me right now but I think a good name would be Ultra-Conservative Christian Radio. It was fun to listen too because of how doggedly un-cool they were, as though they were trying to turn the entire youth demographic off with their sweet, soothing, wholesome Christian music, which would have bored me to tears at one point in my life, but now... now I am fascinated by how different this stuff is. You don't get this on commercial radio. You'd get crucified for putting this music on any other station that gets decent sponsorship because not only are the songs blantant and child-like in their exposition of the grace of our Lord and Saviour but sometimes they were so... bad. Not all the time, they did play some old hymns every now and then, and those are always wonderful.

But these other songs that sound like rejected Neil Diamond numbers, they were just awful. Now the message of the songs were fine, exceedingly good in fact. But the music and the way the words were put together, it was as though the performers were intent on smiting any sense of chic or taste in the listener. Hearing these songs gave me visions of hordes of Christian men dressed in tucked-in plaid shirts and pressed brown pants with suspenders, neatly combed shiny hair and thick-rimmed spectacles, sitting in the pews of their 3/4s empty churches, singing that song that I was hearing on radio, while a piano player who didn't sound proficient anywhere above 2nd grade pounded at the keys without a hint of finesse or nuance, just plain old confidence that he was hitting the right notes, at the right time, and nevermind accentuating his peformance with anything that might resemble self-expression or uniqueness because that sort of thing might lead to pride.

But I listened anyway, because I was fascinated rather than disgusted by this assault on my modern sensibilities. Part of it was I wanted some that... the confidence to express my faith without any sense of self-consciousness or fear of being herded with the rest of the flock into the 'stupid and uncool people' pasture. And who's to say a song sounds better to God when the musicians are talented or the songs are well-written... scripture says, after all that He delights in raising up the foolish, the humble, the utterly talentless. And so, that fascination with the sensibilities of the brethren with whom I have nothing in common with apart from Christ (and in whom, I'm told, we have everything in common)... that fascination was part of what made me listen to 95.3FM. I think the other part may have been Catholic guilt. Before listening to 95.3, I was listening to Wild 98.7. Hip-hop radio. Where the music was good, and the message was oh-so very bad.

And then one day, when my parents were visiting me, I said to Brent "Hey Brent I'm gonna take my parents up to Six Flags in Atlanta, wanna come?" Well at first he did, but, unsurprisingly, due to his busy life, he was forced to bail on me, but he did give me ample warning. So I told him all right, I guess I'll rent a car instead to drive up there, as opposed to just riding with him like I was planning to (my car's too crappy to make the trip). Brent says no, no take my car. Take your car? Sure take my car. Okay man if you don't mind, but you're gonna have to drive my crappy car around, so you sure? Brent shrugs the way he does and says I don't mind. Gee, thanks Brent, you're a true friend. No problem Bernard, ol' buddy, ol' pal. High five man, woo!

I take his car to Atlanta that Saturday and he gets Grover The Snivelling Tercel, which I realised halfway back from Atlanta was low on gas and I didn't give Brent the gas key. Oh well... hope he didn't get stranded somwehere. Turns out I didn't slow him down, so all was good. The next day I get into my car to go fetch my parents to wherever it was we were going that day, and turn on the radio. I realize, hey whaitaminute, this isn't 95.3 anymore. It's playing bluegrass, ewww, what the hell. Brent must have changed the channel, the bastard! Hmm actually this ain't too bad, I'll listen to it for a while. And then something called All Things Considered came on, and people started talking about... stuff. I don't quite remember what, but I remember being interested in what they were talking about, even though I knew virtually nothing about the subject. I think it was politics. All things considered indeed... they even considered schmoes like me who don't give a hoot about politics and managed to pull me in for a half hour or so. And so I kept listening, and listening, and listening. I then decided I wasn't going to bother switching to another station for a while.

So now I listen to NPR, and this is kind of where the two worlds of 95.3 and 98.7 meet. The message is a mix... mostly good I'd say, better than 98.7. The music is definitely a step up from 95.3. There's a lot of classical music, for instance... the popular secular music of centuries past, that men in wigs and frilly shirts danced to. Pretty much the hip-hop of days gone by but it sounds better because people tell you this kind of music is more difficult to play, whereas with hip-hop all you need is a dj spasming on a turntable and you've got your music. Maybe so, I wouldn't know. But at least this kind of music makes you feel smarter, and it isn't necessarily telling you to get out there and get some of that perennially hot and sweaty booty that rappers are always singing about, so you think you shouldn't just be going to Kroger, getting your groceries, and then running straight home to read for the rest of the day, rather you ought to be out on the town tracking down a couple of hos and getting jiggy with it, or something. Classical music doesn't make your life sound banal or boring. It accentuates it with a bit of class, gives it a little background mood. If you wanted to you could read to this music. You could drive to this music. You could even fantasize to this music, about hot and sweaty booty, but this music isn't insisting you do that, so you don't have to. I like that. I like not being told I'm supposed to be a horndog. I'm frequently a horndog without having to be reminded, thank you very much.

By far, though, my favorite thing to listen to on NPR, especially on Saturday afternoons when I 'm driving out to get my groceries from Kroger, is A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keiller. It's a variety show and you get all kinds live music, comedy skits, and fake advertisements for products that don't but maybe should exist, because those ads are so good it makes you want to go out and get something. The music is somewhat eclectic... a lot of it is gospel and folk but occasionally you get guys like Tommy Emmanuel whom you don't dare put in a box. They are, by and large, people who play real instruments, not the type you plug in; the electronica is kept to a minumum. So again, this is a different brand of music from what you're used to hearing on the American Top 40.

The star of the show, however, usually turns out to be the regulars and the host himself, Garrison Keiller, a man so precious I think he ought to be cloned and recycled everytime the last one keels over and dies. In a Christian manner of course, as far as that is possible. Garrison has this rich, deep, and dark voice that draws you in whenever he sings a song, tells a story, peforms a skit, or even hums. It's just so good you could just sit there and listen to it humming. Most people I know, I imagine, either don't mind that voice or can't resist it. I know only of one possible exception and that would be Gretchen Forsythe, but she hates NPR as a whole... it's a childhood thing so I won't hold it against her. On the show you get a variety of things on a regular basis... right now there are the Guy Noir skits, the Powder Milk Biscuit ads, The News from Lake Woebegone (did I spell that right?) the Republican jingle or whatever they call it, and of course there's that sweet little tune that they use to open the show every time. And it's all performed live every week in the fall and spring, barring extenuating circumstances... beautiful, funny stuff. So if you haven't tried it already, tune in to NPR wherever you are and give it a shot, or if you just want to cut to the chase you can go to www.prairiehome.org and listen to the shows on realplayer. They've got archives dating back to 1995 up to the present, so there's a lot of stuff there you get to hear for free.

That's all I have to say about that for now.


Lots and Lots of Pictures. Because I can.


Marci and Brent's happy feet.


Brent.... eats.... leftovers??? *gasp*


Mike, and Doug and Mary Terry during last Fridays dinner at the Terry's. We played Taboo afterwards and my team lost. I'll blame Doug :p.


Me and Mary deal with pent-up bitterness from our childhood, while Doug and Mike pose for the camera.

In case you don't pay attention to Dave Barry's blog, November the 16th is World Toilet Day. Be sure to visit their website.

How Brad Starts His Day Right

Brrr. It was cold in Knoxville today. People were wearing jackets and things. Not my favorite way to start the morning, freezing my touche off the moment I step out of my blanket and hit the floor... but it gets easier as the winter goes on. Brad had a much better start though, if his story was anything to go by.

He was hungry on his way to work, so he stopped at the McDonald's on Chapman Highway. He rolls into the drive through and orders a $2 sandwich. All he has is a twenty, and when the lady at the counter brings him his change, its this obscene stack of eighteen or so dirty, crumply $1s. "Here's your change!" she says chirpily.

Brad looks at the smelly bundle, then looks up and asks "Don't you have any tens or fives?"

"No, we're all out."

"Did you look in the other cash register? Maybe there's some in there."

"No, that's all there is."

Brad's a little incredulous. "What is this, Germany after the fall?! How can you not have any proper change? You guys *just opened*."

The poor lady's a little distraught now. "... I don't know. That's all there was when I got here."

The manager hears the commotion and comes over. He asks Brad what the problem is, and Brad tells him.

"Sorry sir", the manager says, "but we don't have any tens or fives right now."

"You guys are the biggest food chain in the US, and you're telling me you don't have any change?!"

The line of cars behind Brad is starting to pile up while Brad, the manager and the lady have it out. "Well what do you want us to do?" asks the manager, who obviously majored in diplomacy.

"Well, go to Wal-Mart and get me some change." So much for diplomacy.

Finally the lady asks Brad, "Are you gonna take this change or not?!"

"No", our hero replies.

"Fine!" and the lady snatches all the bills back to put in the register.

"But I still need my change."

"What!?" The lady is in fits.

"I need my change, or I'm gonna go get the cops here and have em arrest you." Brad's grinning at this point. He's just having fun.

The tortured, abused lady starts throwing a fit, telling everyone how much she hates this job, she's gonna quit, etc, etc. The manager probably wasn't enjoying himself either. There's also a long line of cars wrapped around McDonald's at this point. The manager pleads with him one last time to please just take the change.

"Oh, all right", says Brad, pockets the change, and drives off to work.


So, whose day have you ruined today?

What I Want To Be When I Grow Up

I'm in the wrong line of research. What I really want to do is feed beer to dogs.

There was a time, if you'd asked me, I'd tell you I wanted to be a rock star. It started as a joke at first, because, you know, why not. As it happens I think I've only used that answer here in the US. I wished I'd used it way back, when I was still in Malaysia. Being a late-teenager in a semi-urban setting in Malaysia, as it happens, probably isn't too different, in many respects, from being a teenager anywhere else. People would ask you want you wanted to be, and you were, like 17, maybe 18... something young. Your idea of planning for the future was what you're doing for lunch that afternoon. 'What do I want to be?' you'd think. Well, there was the good answer, the one that'd do your parents proud.

"I'm going to be an lawyer/brain surgeon like my parents always wanted me to. That's why I applied at *insert name of reputable institute of tertiary learning here*. I just got accepted last week, and I'm really looking forward to it."

Then there was the reasonable answer, the more likely one, and also the diplomatic one if the person you were talking to happened to be an aunt and uncle, because heaven knows they don't want you one-upping their kids too much, but at the same time you wouldn't sound like the kind of relative they'd want to disassociate from.

"I don't really know yet. I've been accepted into *insert name of institute of tertiary learning that any kid could get into provided his or her parents were willing to forego a vacation to Europe, or two*", and from there I'll try to figure out what interests me the most."

And that left open the possibility you'd pick something non-threatening like engineering or architecture, something your aunts and uncles wouldn't mind too much. And I guess I relied on the second, more reasonable answer for a while. Then I actually got into the American Twinning Programs at Metropolitan College in Subang Jaya, where I took a lot of classes, and learned many things, which would actually point me on the way to my future vocation. One thing I learned was I was no good at calculus. I already knew I sucked at Add-Math, back from my misguided days in secondary school, so it was no surprise. For a while though, I held out my hopes for calculus, because this looked like a new kind of math. There were all kinds of things I'd never heard of, like derivatives, and integration, and imaginary numbers. Cool things. Then as I got deeper and deeper into it I just realized these were the same things I'd learned in Secondary school, except they were easier back then and all the terms were in Malay. Then I started sucking at calculus the way I sucked at Add-Math, and it all went downhill from there.

But I did kinda like the programming classes, where you actually got to see things happen on screen after you typed out your program. It was like watching a mystery unravel... there was a sense of pride in knowing you'd made the computer do what you'd wanted it to, that you'd solved a puzzle with this tool. And that's what any interesting profession is, at least for me, a series of problems you've never seen before, and you've got tools to solve them and you get to see results. Except that's what math was too, so I don't know why I sucked at it. I hated it by no means... I was just bad at it. I guess I couldn't handle the heavy theoretical nature of math.

I needed to see results in the real world. Something needed to pop or fizzle or sit in place or run in circles, whatever. I always felt more comfortable when I could picture a result in my mind. But with math, all the answers I got are either numbers or equations made of numbers and letters signifying numbers you don't know. Oh dear. And those results may mean something someday but for now there is no context for those results. And those results became hard to remember, because I couldn't tell if they were important or not. It was like saying 'amen' at the end of prayers offered up in a Catholic church during mass, when some of the people who prayed were way across the room and I couldn't hear what they were saying. They could've been praying for their sick child or world peace which are good things to pray for, you should say 'amen' to that, but they just as likely could have been praying that Alien vs Predator doesn't suck when it opens next year or that cows fall from the sky, wearing parachutes. I didn't know. I just said 'amen' because everyone else in the room said 'amen', as opposed to giggling or gasping in shock.

And that's kinda like what math was to me. I learned the steps to getting a particular number out of a particular problem, as it says on page what-and-what of my textbook, and then I wrote down the steps and then put that number or equation down at the bottom of the page. And I was kinda happy everytime I got the right answer but if I looked the whole thing over, trying to divine some meaning from the long mess I'd made (my handwriting wasn't all too good... still isn't), a voice at the back of my head would sometimes ask, "Why'd you just do that?" I didn't always know. It was purely a matter of faith, a lot of times, that being able to solve those problems would come in handy in the future. Hey, I'm all about faith. I just had problems mixing church and academia back then.

But I loved solving problems. Which led me to believe I'd make a good engineer. So I started telling everyone "I'm gonna be an engineer." After a while, I can't quite remember when, I modified that to "I want to be an electrical engineer." I even started taking ECE courses when I got to UT, just to squelch any doubts or thoughts that perhaps I was really going to switch to orthodontics at the last minute. Still, though, whenever someone asked "So what are you studying at UT?" (and I met many of these people thanks to my association with the Navigators), and I told them "Electrical engineering", they would sometimes say "So, you want to be an electrical engineer?"

Huh?

'Why do they ask that?' I'd think to myself. 'I mean, what does he expect me to say? "No, actually I want to be a rock star"?' And so sometimes I did say that. Jokingly, of course. But the more I thought about it... the more I realized it wasn't such a stupid question.

Did I really want to be an electrical engineer? Well, I didn't not want to be an electrical engineer, but that's not the same as wanting to be one. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that a big part of me did want to be a rock star. I did want to write songs and get up in front of lots of people who would stand there, and cheer, and listen to my song, or sing it with me. Why not? So what if I was in the engineering program... if the question was what I wanted, then "I want to be a rock star" was as good and honest an answer as any, and maybe truer than others.

So I started meaning it when I said I wanted to be a rock star, and I think people started picking up the vibe that I wasn't joking, exactly. And word got around. And people started wanting to hear me sing. And they started asking. And asking. And then when I promised I would sing for them, they started reminding. And reminding. So Finally, one cold October evening last year, I gave a recital of the songs I written, at Dee's house, for a small gathering of friends (about 20 or so), and they liked it, and I appreciated them for that. I think, then, I stopped saying I wanted to be a rock star, because I already felt like one.

Nowadays nobody asks me what I want to be anymore. I think it's because most people assume that since I'm 25 with a masters in EE and all, I'm already an electrical engineer. I don't mind that one bit, because that's what I am and I'm proud to say so. I'd like to think, though, that there's one or two folks who liked my amatuerish and somewhat vainglorious performance so much that they'll always think of me as (in Matt Forsythe's words) Bernard: Poet of the People.

I'd quite like that.