I finished Angels and Demons by Dan Brown a couple nights ago– not a bad suspense / mystery novel, I’ll say that much. While there were a number of little things that nagged me, the most annoying aspect was the breadth-without-depth phenomenon which often befalls authors attempting to write about areas of study well outside their reach. As an example, anyone who has taken any college level bioethics course would gag when reading the purportedly moving and awe-inspiring orations on science vs. morality delivered by the camerlengo or, even worse, the third-person narrative voice. Certain plot elements were basically a rehash of The Da Vinci Code (or rather, vice versa), and the romance element again stuck out like a sore second nose. Nonetheless, the book was able to keep my interest till the end.

When I thought I had seen all the CSS bugs in IE and had workarounds figured out for all of them, another IE CSS bug rears its ugly head. If you have div A with width=50% inside parent div B, div A’s width is, as you expect, 50% of div B’s width. In IE, however, if you float div A, div A’s width suddenly becomes 50% of the entire window’s width! This is not supposed to happen, as any standards compliant browser will demonstrate. Looks like it’s back to using tables for layouts, and that just sucks.

Last weekend was crazy. I flew into LA around midnight Friday for a wedding on Saturday morning. The wedding was great fun. Since the reception ended in the afternoon, we had time to go to the beach before having dinner with everyone. I got a chance to see friends I haven’t seen since they graduated from Princeton in 2000, like Anthony So, Pat, Bob Ohgami, and Harris. Other people at dinner included Conrad, Jen Sung, Jen Shen, Sirena, Joyce, Helen, David K., David L., Risa, Jane and Ted. Joyce ‘02, DK, Andrew and Donald couldn’t make it to dinner, unfortunately. I’m still kind of in shock from seeing so may old friends all at once after having not seen them for several years.

Anyway, I flew back the next morning to catch a concert at Carnegie Hall that night. I got off the plane at 5, hopped on the train into the city, ran into Jeff Lee, had dinner, and did some reading in Central Park for an hour before the concert at 8 PM. Guess who was playing? Yevgeny Kissin and James Levine! They were amazing! I had to get these tickets 1 full year in advance, but it was worth it. They played an all Schubert concert. Which reminds me, I was thinking– when a soloist performs, it’s called a recital. When an orchestra performs, it’s called a concert. But what do you call a 4-hands 2-piano performance? I’d think it’d be more of a recital than a concert, but everyone around me was referring to it as a concert.

When I got into work yesterday I was exhausted, and not just because of the weekend. The entire week leading up to it was crazy. On Tuesday I had pulled an allnighter at work. Same thing on Thursday. On Friday, after flying into LA, I stayed up all night again working on the slideshow video for the wedding, literally up to the last minute. It felt like Princeton undergrad all over again. But now it’s over, and I can get back to the normal 9 to 5, er, I mean 9 to 8.