Unnaturally Long Attention Span

AvatarA blog about Grad School at Stanford, Working in a Silicon Valley Internet Company, and Statistical Machine Learning. mike AT ai.stanford.edu

San Jose Grand Prix

I woke up at 7AM this morning, stupefied at my inability to sleep. I had been awaken, not by the humming of the quad-proc rank mounted server under my bed, nor the by the persistent sounds from the street outside, but by an algorithm. I had an idea for a new algorithm in my head that just needed to get out. It had been bothering me for days.

Maybe this is why I can't sleep.

I take a short drive to the office. 3 hours later, I had written 20 pages of code. I grab some drinks and snacks from the break room and scan the daily newspaper. Apparently there's some major event this weekend in downtown San Jose, so I decide to drive down and check it out. The first ever San Jose Grand Prix is Indy 500 meets street racing. They had blocked out several streets in downtown San Jose near Almaden (by the Adobe building) to form one long makeshift racetrack. I saw several Formula 1 racecars, black dudes spinning out on motorcycles, and NASCAR dads grilling burgers. As expected there were plenty of hot dogs, beer vendors, and scantily clad women. I wish Palo Alto was this cool.

Anyways, I was just there for a short while, but here are some photos other people took.