Smitten State Fan

Tuesday, I had lunch with NP at the Refectory. I had delicious chicken and dumplings, sans dumplings. I guess they got away. That was perfectly ok with me, though, because I got extra rice.

That evening, I celebrated JA's birthday with him and our friends (JJ, HB, JM, DS, AP, AY, and GMc) at Tyler's, at the American Tobacco Campus. I discovered that Tyler's has excellent (extremely tart) lemonade. We shared wings, calamari, pickle chips, nachos and French fries.Tyler As expected, we had a great time.

The next day, I was back at the tobacco campus for my weekly meeting at OIT and had lunch at the Mellow Mushroom with AE and M. For some strange reason, I hadn't noticed that they sold pizza by the slice before. Spinach, tomatoes and feta was a nice combination.

Thursday, LA brought Gizmo Monkeybear Batrabbit over so all of the dog lovers within CIT could meet him. He's AT's dachsund pekingese mix puppy. He's adorable and his tongue is out of control.

Friday, AN, SM and I went to the Visualization Forum, which was an interesting program, given by David Kidd, from the National Evolutionary Synethesis Center, on Visualizing Evolution. He focused primarily on 3D phylogenetic trees, which were cool. Later in the afternoon, AN, NC and I took a field trip down to the Duke Computer Store and checked out the latest tablet PCs. They had the new Lenovo X60 with the touch screen that allows you to either use your finger or a stylus. More exciting to me were the Sony Vaio UX series tablet PCs. They are about the size of a paperback novel, have 1GB of memory, a 1.33Ghz processor, WAN, Cingular cellular access and a 40 GB harddrive. It has a slide-out keyboard, which looks somewhat easier to use than a Treo keyboard, but would have similar issues. I was certainly smitten. It's so portable and is really impressive considering that it's so small, but its computing power is almost as good as the machine I'm using now. That said, one would probably have to have an additional monitor and keyboard to make it practical for everyday use. It's possible that it might be a good Treo replacement, which would mean also carrying a real phone that actually works well as a phone (a novel idea). I don't think I'm going to get one, but on Amazon I saw a strong recommendation for a portable bluetooth keyboard, Think Outside Stowaway Bluetooth Keyboard for PDA, which would work with a tablet PC, a PDA, or with my Treo 650. I decided to order one and give it a try. I take a lot of minutes at meetings and I don't like hauling a heavy laptop around, so I'm betting it will be extremely useful.

That night I met AE at Nosh and we shared another SRB pizza with chicken.

We take basketball very seriously in this area and it's very obvious. We had cable installed in a conference room just for the ACC tournament. So, anytime you want to see what's going on, you can look through the room's windows and check it out on the projection system. Library HR had a bracket contest and I got everything wrong except for UNC's wins. That was amusingly pathetic. I, however, am temporarily a rabid State fan, because I think it's exciting that they are doing well, despite their having knocked Duke out of the tournament. I would love to see them beat UNC tomorrow.

Today I went over to CL and JL's house for an ACC tournament party. We watched the two semi-final games while eating wings, brie and crab dip. It was nice getting to meet KC and CC's baby son and the rest of their family. I experienced another example of good intentions not going so well. I brought over a four-pack of random cold sodas and on the drive over, they decided to leap out of the cartoon, out of the basket I keep on my backseat, and hide between the back seat and the side of the van. One of the bottles actually opened! It was the blueberry one, of course.