A Day in JFK

Stuck in NYC's JFK airport for 24 hours.

Met a friendly African man from Casablanca here to study computer information technology.

He said he thought things were very complicated here.

He was stuck for two days, and this was his first time in America.

I lent him my phone to call family in Omaha, they called friends in NY.

He had to wait for them to call back.

I wanted to scavenge the terminals for a good source of food and wifi.

He had a lot of baggage but followed.

I taught him how to ride a moving walkway and then how to use chopsticks to eat Chinese food.

They finally arranged a ride and place for him to stay, he offered to let me come.

I declined to spend more time exploring the terminals.

He told me his name was Kelvin, I told him mine.

It was widely rumored among baggage claim employees that the international terminal, 4, had the best food before security.

Over the intercom, 'Welcome to Terminal 4 at John F Kennedy International Airport. Please keep your luggage with you at all times. Unattended baggage will be removed for inspection and may be destroyed.'

Time to sleep on this bench in front of Peet's Coffee & Tea

some questions, once asked, cannot be answered

Typical Night in Berkeley

Walking back from the gym I noticed a crowd around an SUV, some peering under it. It looked like a cat was hiding under so the family with the car didn't want to drive away and risk running it over. I asked what it was- it was a loose, possibly feral, Guinea Pig. Since the family was dressed up and I was coming back from the gym and dirty, I volunteered to crawl under and chase it to safety. So I did.

After that I went to an Indian restaurant because I had a $50 gift certificate for the place from a friend. After some fuss, they gave me food and marked the gift certificate down to $42 to account for the meal. Ten minutes into eating, an old Indian man, possibly the manager, came by my table and asked to see the certificate, then confiscated it because they thought it was forged or somehow not authorized.

Job Title: "Distressed Trader"

http://www.thirdave.com/ta/people-investment-team.asp

On the way home

On the BART
The tough-looking gangster-dressed guy in front of me was reading "A Guide for the Ghetto"

Chapter: "How to Hustle and Win"
A crucial, bolded point from the book: "You ain't worth sh*t if your word ain't worth sh*t"

At the bus stop
Two couples making out, both extremely passionately. Big lady dancing nearby starts meandering over and then whispers "they should go get a room"; Me: "no it's ok"

Man nearby the stop, who I found was named Edward Brown, told me a Greek myth, among other things, about a man (don't remember the name) who carried a lamp around during the day looking for just one other real person, and didn't find one. Said Berkeley felt the same way except for me, for listening

The effective dimensionality of human personalities must be high, since odd encounters are so frequent

At Borders Bookstore

Interesting time at the Union Square Borders:

Good juxtaposition of books in the reference section: "Amazing Things to do as a Family", "Pessimists Guide to History"

Finding philosophy in the screenplay writing section (am I becoming Californian after all?). Rollo May definition of existentialism: dissonance between belief that universe has a purpose and the lack of purpose in one's own life.
"How to write an unlikable protagonist" - interesting chapter.

Travel section is very crowded, one chubby guy in cheap half-suit stands in front of the US travel section; Idaho

Guy sitting in coffee shop area with a big stack of webprogramming books. Moved on from them, skimming through magazine: "Practical guide to handguns"

At Starbucks

Friday night I'm at Starbucks, writing, around 10pm at night.
Attractive girl approaches, friend waiting hesitantly around the corner.
Offers to give me a free haircut.

Explains that she works at an upscale salon down the street and needs models for practice.
I ask "Are you serious?" "Yes"

Monday I walk past Prada into Vidal Sassoon for a supposedly 100$ haircut.
Not bad.

Quant Trading Male/Female Ratio 5:1

Today I talked to Ralph Goldsticker, a managing director of research at Mellon Capital Management and he told me that there are about 5 men to 1 woman in the quant industry. So it's a little better than software development but worse than going the pure business route.

Lose 11 Pounds in 18 Hours Now!

I keep an excel sheet tracking my weight, water percentage, and fat percentage.

Today I didn't eat breakfast or lunch and then went to sleep and eventually got dinner around 7pm. When I finally left to go eat my weight had dropped all the way to 139.6lbs, the lowest I've seen it since I started tracking.

Just last night when I stayed up till 4am creating diagrams for my future entries on maxdama.com, I weighed myself at 151lbs. The scale is very precise so mechanical error could not be above .2lbs.

The Max Dama diet: lose over 10lbs in 18hrs. I hadn't realized weight was so crazily variable.