The Heusens

Last Saturday morning (1/24), I met Elle for coffee and a walk through the Rancho San Antonio Open Space Preserve in Los Altos. This place is a hidden gem and full of stroller-friendly paths and running trails. There's even an organic garden and farm along the way, with beautiful mature trees lining the paths. What a great find! I can't wait to run here.

Saturday brought a long-anticipated day: Roshan Chandra's first birthday, which corresponds exactly with Saya's six month birthday.

And what could be better than celebrating Roshan's birthday with Anita, our dear friend - and Roshan's aunt - who has been working for Clinton Foundation in Africa? Anita is in town for the next few days and we are planning to spend as much time with her as possible.


Anita met Saya for the first time (well, the first time out-of-utero):


Roshan's party was at a Gymboree in San Francisco. Let me clarify: having a job at one of these places would be my Worst Nightmare Ever. It's a place where kids have license to run amok - while on a sugar high from the juice and birthday cake they likely ingest. It's basically an indoor playground. And it's the sort of place where I wonder how many kids have slobbered/pooped/peed on the different equipment. Not because it looks dirty. But because I see how kids behave in these places. They go totally crazy.


The hilarious thing about this party was that there were only a few kids, and maybe 25 - 30 adults. So there were 3-4 kids playing on the equipment while the adults ended up singing and dancing along with the Gymboree employee...basically for Roshan's amusement. I have to say that it was pretty hilarious watching a handful of Rishi's B-school buddies dancing and shaking to a kid's song, while the children watched in confusion.

Here is the birthday boy in all his glory, lapping up the attention from all his relatives:


Also, Monica made me cry with an emotional little speech toward the end. I realized how lucky we are to have such great friends.

We got Roshan Good Night San Francisco, a board book that's a riff on the classic Goodnight Moon, but replaced with San Francisco landmarks. There's a whole series of these books on different cities. I think it's a cool gift. I want to get a San Francisco and L.A. version for Saya when we move to Indiana. Then I can point to the book and tell her where the other Asians live. (Not here, sweetheart...they're there!)

We also got Roshan a T-Shirt that says "Sorry Girls, I Only Date Models." It was a tough call because baby T-shirts are getting pretty funny these days. Here were some others I saw:

Miso Cute (with a little picture of a miso soup bowl)
Elmo is my Homeboy
I Party Naked
What Happens in Daycare Stays in Daycare
Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner (yay for Dirty Dancing references!)

Posted by Ashlyn at 12:54 AM | Permalink | Comments

I used to know a fellow PhD student in the CS department named Dan... he was a nice guy... always real gung ho about CS intramural basketball (despite its consistently pathetic record). Little did I know that he's spawned one of those crazy internet memes.

For those of you who haven't heard of the term, "meme" is kinda like the cultural equivalent of "gene". Some cultural tidbit that reproduces like crazy until it becomes part of our collective consciousness, and takes a life of its own as it evolves over time.

Like the Hokey Pokey, which I just found out to my horror is called the Hokey Cokey in the UK because the shaking imitates that of coke addicts. Or the Macarena, which became extinct in 1998. No one knows how or why they spring up, change, or die. But we sure as hell know that the internet has made memes spread faster and die faster than ever before. And good god, internet memes are weird. Ever see this gem?

Anyway, back to my original story. Apparently, there's a new meme going around because of Microsoft Songsmith, a piece of software that plays Casio keyboard-like music to accompany your vocals. First of all, it's notable because of the terrible, terrible commercial that they released onto Youtube (and has over half a million hits in less than 2 weeks). I was completely shocked when I saw him in this video.

He plays the dad. Apparently Dan's one of the developers of Songsmith.

It's cute that a couple of amateur programmers publicized their little project with a campy homemade video... Oh wait... Microsoft produced this? It's a free product right? Wait, they're selling it? Oh my...

And people are buying! But only to get in on the latest meme: mashing up the vocals from classic songs with whatever comes out of Songsmith, with hilarious results:

(skip ahead to 1:00 for my favorite part)

Not all of the mashups are bad:


But when they're bad, they're really really bad:

I sorta envy and pity Dan at the same time. How cool would it be for your research to affect millions of people's lives (even in a small way)? But how sucky if it was the butt of their jokes?

Posted by Kris at 12:50 AM | Permalink | Comments