Dallas Yet Again

I think Texas might soon be (if not already) the place I've been in the third longest (after California and Singapore, of course) with all of the visits this year. After being sent off by scrumptuous Curry House-style meal courtesy of Gina, I spent the weekend like most in Dallas: hanging out with Ruth, sleeping a lot, and eating a lot.

One place we went to for the first time was the Nasher Sculpture Center. We spent about an hour there, which is about my limit for most artsy type places, so it was just right. I particularly like sculptures since it gives the viewer much more opportunity to interact with the artwork:





When we weren't causing a stir and trying to take pictures with statues without drawing the ire of security, we also spent some time exercising. Ruth has a nice little pool at her place, so I tried swimming some laps, although I didn't really get that far since I'm so out of shape. I guess I won't be venturing to the infinite pool at work anytime soon...

Besides that, we went to the usual restaurants and were finally able to give Blue Mesa Grill a try. It's supposedly the best brunch in Dallas and it didn't disappoint, providing a variety of tasty eats. It was a buffet, so we were super stuffed, but I managed to have enough room for two helpings of dessert :) I was going to take a picture of the dessert, but got too excited about eating it, so I only have one in a half-eaten state:



After all of the scrumptuous eating, we instead spent the last dinner cooking at home. Since my cooking skills are quite limited, we opted for cooking spaghetti. With the help of some tips I remember from Gerald, it turned out pretty well!

Four letter F word

The power of Free and Craiglist is just too much. I knew it was significant, but the full extent of which I was finally witness to this past weekend.

So my former housemates were moving out of our old place in Mountain View; I had already moved out a few months ago, but came back to help them move out / clean up. It was a major pain: the extent of dust that was buried into our carpet was quite impressive and there was so much stuff to toss out, but I occasionally found random things that I had been looking for or didn't know that I had lost.

After making a few runs to dump stuff, we tossed a mixture of interesting and worthless things outside our place with a big FREE sign on top of it. We got a decent response: the RC car got snatched by a kid in the neighborhood and a couple of good items went. We were still left with random, ugly chem class stools, left-handed hockey sticks, a pair of crutches, random extension cords, etc.

In the mid-afternoon, Gerald posted on craigslist that we had free stuff; I thought it might've been too late already and was resigned to another trip to the dumpster with more stuff. Random people started showing up again taking some of the better items like a couple bikes. And then the champs showed up... an odd couple that put on the roller blades, skated down the street with their dog's leash in one hand and Andrew's crutches in the other. They took just about all the worthless things we had, from a dog/cat shampoo to clothes hangers to a random shower caddy I had just brought out. They were so happy, too. By 6pm, the entire stash of items was completely gone!

That saying about one person's trash being another person's treasure is so true. Given how desperate people get to unload stuff, there's definitely good deals to be had; you'd have to be pretty silly to overpay or offer to pay for something that was offered for free.

Analyze this!

I don't really write much about Google products, but I finally got to check out Google Analytics for the first time and it is super sweet. Unfortunately, there's a backlog for signups right now, but watch out for it if you have a website and want to check out how it's doing.

I just added it to this blog yesterday; the coolest thing I've found so far is a geo map overlay that shows you where visitors are from. I can take guesses at who some of those isolated random data points are :)



Already reaching four continents after two days of analytics!!

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Edit: Wow, Dallas is huge, too!