Erwaman's Personal Journal - June 2009

Central Park is really impressive. You really appreciate the size of it when you ride a bike from one end to the other and it just seems to go on and on. As Ismail pointed out a few times, when you're in it, you forget you're still in New York City. There is a huge pond in the park, more tennis courts in one place than I have ever seen (probably about 25), and so many people lying on the grass.

At a path intersection, we saw a juggler standing on a crate with three clubs. In front of him was an open backpack with a sign that said "Feed me to see me juggle." The juggler literally stood very still on the crate, holding the clubs in his hands, looking straight ahead through his sunglasses, waiting for someone to put money in his backpack. So Ismail went up and put a dollar in the backpack and the juggler came to life. After juggling for a minute, he went back to his frozen pose, waiting for the next donation to bring him back to life.

We rode to the north end of Central Park and then we kept riding to Columbia University. Their central yard, with a library at each end, is quite magnificent.

Riding uptown and then coming back, I realized that uptown is at a significantly higher elevation. Never realized NYC sloped upward as you went north.

So I decided to visit Erik and Ismail yesterday and I barely did any planning. I just Google Map'd public transit directions and left. I didn't even bother to look up train times. Again, today, as I rode public transportation, I marveled at this masterpiece of organization and management. 24/7 transportation, above ground, underground, over the water. Light rail, PATH, NJ Transit, NYC Subway, Amtrak, LIRR, Metro North Railroad, Greyhound, Ferries, so many different services so easily accessible. When you exit the train, all you need is a general idea of where you want to go and you just follow the signs. They snake you upstairs, downstairs, down long hallways, onto another platform. You look at the signs again to pick the right train and you're off. You look at the subway maps on the platforms and the railcars and you see the extensive underground network throughout the city and you easily locate transfer stations and your final destination.

Public transportation is so easy to use and so affordable. Electronic, touch-screen self-service ticket machines. Maps with detailed time schedules, trains arriving every ten to twenty minutes. I love it. I think the extensive public transportation networks across the country and the globe are truly some engineering and transportation marvels.

Night of June 11: I was playing StarCraft, as I do many nights. It was a 3v3 on the map Zero Clutter. I was my favorite race, Terran, and the game was proceeding as usual. Then, after I had built two comsat stations, I tried to hotkey them and that's when weird stuff happened. I hotkeyed my two comsats 'Ctrl + 9' and 'Ctrl + 0' without any problem. But then, as I continued performing tasks, I realized none of my keypresses seemed to work! After about 15 seconds, I realized that somehow, I had changed my keyboard setup to Dvorak!

Frantically, I tried all sorts of 'Ctrl +', 'Alt +', and 'Ctrl + Alt +' key combinations, but nothing I tried changed my keyboard layout back to Qwerty. I did accidentally press "Ctrl + Space," switching my language from English to Chinese, and then zhu4yin1fu2hao4 started appearing on the bottom right of my screen. Holy crap.

Next thing I tried was minimizing the game and opening the language bar. But it was already set to Qwerty! Dang it. Only in the maximized game screen was my keyboard layout Dvorak.

I started up 'Text Services and Input Languages' and removed Dvorak from my list of enabled languages, hoping this would fix the problem. It didn't.

I went back to the game and started playing with mouse only because my standard shortcut keypresses didn't work. After 30 seconds, I realized I could not go on with mouse only. So once again I tried some more Ctrl and Alt key combinations. I did not figure out how to toggle back to Qwerty, but I did figure out how to change my screen's resolution: Ctrl + Alt + F11. When SC was open, pressing Ctrl + Alt + F11 changed my resolution to 800x600 (normally it's 1280x800), turned my display into 256 colors, and cycled through these three views:

StarCraft	Desktop

Finally, I gave up figuring out how to switch back to Qwerty and decided to start figuring out where all the letters on the Dvorak keyboard are. Here's what I learned and how I used it:

• A is in the same location on Dvorak and Qwerty. That was convenient. So I could still select a group of units with my mouse and hotkeys and attack move (A + click).
• M is in the same location on both keyboard layouts. So I built a lot of marines by clicking my barracks and spamming M. Fortunately, one of my two allies was also Terran, and he massed tanks and science vessels, so my marines complimented him well.
• N (Qwerty) = B (Dvorak). So I started spamming N + N with my SCVs to "Build + Barracks," so that I could build more marines (spam M).
• I (Qwerty) = C (Dvorak). Now I could build medics (shortcut key C) to heal my marines.
• K (Qwerty) = T (Dvorak). Now that I knew what 'T' was, I could start pumping tanks and stimming my marines (both use shortcut key T).
• ; (Qwerty) = S (Dvorak). I could now build more SCVs and Supply Depots.
• U (Qwerty) = G (Dvorak). I wanted to type 'GG' (good game) to my opponents at the end, so I figured this out. And amazingly, my team still won the game.

Very hilarious game from my perspective. If you're interested, here's the replay. Analyzing the replay in BroodWar Chart, you can definitely notice how low and erratic my APM (actions per minute) got mid-game when I accidentally toggled Dvorak:

Amusingly, I probably learned more about Dvorak from this experience than in all my readings about it.

Gustavo also cooked a whole box of Goya seafood paella (over a pound of yellow rice and seafood). After that finished cooking, he asked me to get a big bowl for it, and I found a large baking tray (about 14"x10"), and then Gustavo got another idea. He told me to cover the bottom of the tray with a layer of rice. Then, we added a layer of Kraft singles and mozzarella cheese, cut from a rectangular hunk. On top of that we added another layer of paella. We threw the whole thing in the oven and made paella lasagna! It was SOOOOOO good.

While letting the paella lasagna bake, Gustavo had purposely burned three whole green peppers in a frying pan to make the skin easier to peel. They were still hard to peel and I don't think the singing really helped. Gustavo also cooked up a pot of chopped string beans, carrots, onions, and ham - the stuffing for our green peppers. When the green peppers were peeled and hollowed and the stuffing was cooked, we filled the peppers up and I was ready to take a bite.

And then Gustavo said, "Hold on, hold on, they're not done yet." He asked me to beat three eggs, which he used to coat the peppers, but this didn't work too well. The eggs were still too runny and just slid down the sides of the peppers. I think we should have added more flour to the eggs and made a thicker paste. But we did manage to seal up the openings on the peppers with the eggs.

After the messy egg-coating, the stuffed peppers still weren't done. Gustavo had prepared another pot of tomato sauce, into which he dunked the egg-coated peppers and let them simmer for a while. Finally, the stuffed peppers were done and we enjoyed them with some paella lasagna. Lots of leftovers, too.