cjsmith | That interests thingy

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dangerpudding asked me about this handful of my LJ-interests, and I finally got around to writing about them.

(Should I be working? ABSOLUTELY. Well, I'm eating lunch now; let's say this is my lunch break. Should I be doing NaNo instead, then? ABSOLUTELY. Oh well.)

Amr Diab: Egyptian singer. I first heard of him while sitting in an airport by Abu Simbel. My travel companion and I both enjoyed the music that was playing in one guy's little stall by the waiting area, and I shelled out for the CD. After our return home, I was bemused to find I could buy this thing on Amazon -- I had no idea at the time how popular this dude was -- so I bought my friend a copy of the album, as a memento of the trip.

Financial independence: As defined by the book Your Money Or Your Life, this is the point where (I'm going to paraphrase) one's passive income, from investments for example, meets or exceeds one's expenditures. The concepts in this book really changed how I think about money. What do you really make per hour? Is this album, that latte, this cute skirt, or that spa trip worth that many hours of my life? I would love to reach financial independence some day. That's not likely without radical changes. I plan to make radical changes.

Mary Chung's: One of my favorite restaurants of all time, a Chinese restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts. To this day it is run by Mary Chung herself. When I was at MIT, "Mary's" was on Massachusetts Avenue just a bit north of campus. Student groups would pile into the small dining room, stumbling blindly because everybody's glasses had just fogged up, and order vast quantities of "ravs" (Peking pan-fried dumplings for you West Coasters), "suan" (Suan La Chow Show, the spiciest soup I've ever had), and entrees such as "mouth peel beef" (orange peel beef). We had a whole protocol for holding up fingers (or partial fingers) to order ravs. Good food. Good memories.

mywaves: A small but growing startup feeding video to cellphones. I work here. I write what goes on the phones -- well, only half of it now, since we hired someone to work with me!

N47490: The first (and so far only) plane I ever owned. Shortly after my first solo flight, a group of three of us signed the papers for purchase of this 1978 Piper Warrior (PA-28-161) located in Minnesota. Rick, the licensed pilot of the bunch, bought a one-way ticket out there to get it. It was a sweet little trainer that flew well for its type. The rest of my primary flight training occurred in this plane, including my checkride, and I took it to Colorado for a family reunion once. It was only when both of the guys wanted to move up to more expensive stuff that we sold this one. It lives in Oregon now.

Pitts: One of the most fun and still accessible aerobatic aircraft types flying today. I have about fifty hours logged in Pitts S2Bs, and back at the top of the stock market bubble of the turn of the millenium I actually test-flew an S2C with an eye to purchasing one. (Then the bubble burst and I got a Pitts embroidered polo shirt instead.)

SIPB: An MIT student group where I was very active for nearly four years. We answered questions about anything from Apple desktops to Cray supercomputers. I tend to describe it as "where people who are too geeky for the rest of MIT can hang out", and when I was there, that probably wasn't far from the truth. I met

rfrench there, as well as several of the people currently on my LJ-friendslist. Guess what the group's favorite restaurant was.