Chris Lunt's Story

Resolutions 2008

Chris Lunt — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 18:39:05 +0000

Here's my scorecard for last year:

FAILED

SUCCESS

FAILED

SUCCESS

The books I read: Ryan McIntyre: Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow Mike Frumkin: A Different Universe, Robert Laughlin David Person: QED, Richard Feynman Nick Peters: Collapse, Jared Diamond John Bykowski: Book of Knights, Yves Meynard Where I really failed was music, so that is my resolution this year: Compose 1 song per quarter. I hope to accomplish this by establishing a weekly night when I go to someone else's place and compose there.

J-pop!

Chris Lunt — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 00:28:19 +0000

When I was a bartender in a Karaoke bar in Japan, customers would sometimes ask me to sing--this was my favorite song to sing. It was still popular at the time, the words came up slow enough for me to read them, and the bar's patrons loved the fact that I was singing in Japanese. I had forgotten about it, but my fellow bartender Brian still remembered the name of the song. There was something by Chage & Aska that would sing as well.

Visiting Japan

Chris Lunt — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 19:30:09 +0000

A friend of mine visited Japan in April 2007, and asked what advice I had for things to see and do. This is what I told him: First, let me recommend the best guidebook for Japan, "Gateway to Japan". I'd lend you mine but it's about 4 years out of date. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/477002018X/sr=8-1/qid=1155522040/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-6747213-7740057?ie=UTF8 Second, you could spend a week in Kyoto alone, and I'd recommend it. Good side trips include Nara and Osaka. Nara for it's ancient temples and fantastic gardens, and Osaka for it's down-to-earth urban attitude. Tokyo = New York, Osaka = Chicago. But Kyoto is the real gem. If you feel like going further afield, Kanazawa is fun for a day, and stands in contrast to the rest of the country, as it's "yukiguni", snow country. Not in April, but the attitude is very different. Some places I'll warn you off of: Kobe, Nagoya, Hiroshima. Nagasaki has a little charm, but not enough to take you out that far. I can't really speak to the north of the country. Really, given the time you're there, I'd recommend a week in Tokyo and 5 days in Kyoto, with a 1-day visit to Nara while you're in Kyoto, and maybe one day in Osaka while you travel from Kyoto to Tokyo. Once you've got that down, we can talk some specific places to visit. I assume you're travelling with Katie, you'll want to do a lot of stuff that's fun for her. The deer park in Nara is good, other than that though, the temple/garden stuff in Kyoto might be a little hard on her--that's why I put the balance on Tokyo, which has more exciting stuff for a kid. In Tokyo, for crafts, you can do a one-stop shop that shows you stuff from all over the country--it's almost like going to a museum, but everything is for sale: Nihon Zenkoku Dentou Kougeihin Center (Traditional Craft Center). It's in Minami-Aoyama (Gaien-mae station on the ginza line, Omotesandou on the other lines). (Incidentally, Omotesando was the punchline to Lalit's favorite joke.) It's on the second floor. Rachel and I bought some puzzle boxes and an incense burner there. Also in Tokyo, there's a street where all the plastic food used in restaurant displays is made--it's a trip, and would be fun for Katy. I got a key chain that was a piece of sushi: Kappabashi market: http://www.bento.com/phgal-kappabashi.html Of course, famous in Tokyo is Tsukiji fish market--very exciting, but may be a little hard to do with Katy; it's crowded, fast paced, and a little overwhelming. Apparently on April 14-15, there's a spring festival in Takayama that's one of the best in the country. Sanno Matsuri is a big deal in rural towns--I carried a float while in Japan as a grad student. I have no idea where I was at the time, but it was cool. Ah! I finally remembered: Kiyomizu-dera, Eastern Kyoto. Fabulous views. Do a Google image search to get an idea. As far as Castles, the other famous ones worth considering are Himeji-jo, although it's out of the way, and Nijo-jo is in Kyoto, although its main tower burnt down long ago. The other best temples in Kyoto are Sanjusangendo--the hall with 1000 buddhas, and Byodo-in. In Nara, Horyu-ji has the oldest wooden buildings in the world, and the best example of Japanese-style beauty-in-asymmetry. Everything I've mentioned to date is Buddhist, but you should hit some shinto shrines as well. My memory here is every more fuzzy, but you might try fushimi inari taisha (another good google image search).

April Fools

Chris Lunt — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 13:58:08 +0000

At WisdomArk we were in the throes of choosing a name for our Beta Product. We had run focus groups and surveys, and tried dozens of names. From the portentious ("MemoryArk") to the preposterous ("MemoryCave"). It was a topic where everyone had opinions, mostly opposed-to rather than cheering-for. I sent out an email saying that Andy and I had found an even better name we hadn't thought of before, and we were going to go ahead with that one. The site was about reliving your glory days, so we would use "glory", and it was a safe place you could hold all of those memories, so we would use "hold": GloryHold.com! That day, Dean approached me a little skittishly. He was glad we found a name that we liked so much, but he'd done a little looking around, and had reason to believe that GloryHold was close to a pornographic term, and we might want to reconsider. In the 11th hour, a friend of Andy's came up with "OurStory", which we were able to buy for a reasonable price. It was a very good choice, I think.

April Fools

Chris Lunt — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 13:45:53 +0000

I sent out a mail to everyone at Friendster that told them that Kent (the CFO) and I had decided that we needed everyone to show that they were on board with the new direction the company was taking by choosing a new title for themselves. We would print new business cards with those titles. But there were a couple of rules:

the title must be two words long
both words must start with "F"

Late in the day, some people came to me frazzled: "I can't do it! I can't come up with two words that start with F that are appropriate for my job position!" It was very rewarding.

Meeting Michael Moore

Chris Lunt — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 12:23:36 +0000

While I was a student at the University of Michigan, I lived with two film majors. Michael Moore was visiting the campus for some reason, and agreed to meet with some of the current film students. My roommates knew I was a fan of the film "Roger & Me", which came out during my freshman year, and they asked if I'd like to come along and meet him. There were maybe 9 people there, and the students asked a lot of questions about how to bootstrap a small film. Michael Moore was the son of a worker from the AC Spark Plug plant--the same place my father worked when we moved to Flint in 1976. Like me, Michael had bigger ambitions than a life on the line, and he left Flint, only to return as the collapse of the manufacturing base in Michigan was accelerating. He made a brilliant, funny, sanctimonious, reckless and brazen movie, "Roger and Me", of which I was a big fan. In a time of "Reagan Youth", I found myself a Hippie born out of time, and his film reassured me that I was not alone. I again feel out-of-sorts with the current political environment, and rigorous or not, I look forward to all of Michael Moore's movies. I am happy that I was able to meet him then, and to tell him, "you've done a very important thing, and I sincerely thank you".

Self-portrait

Chris Lunt — Thu, 10 May 2007 16:51:43 +0000

My Dad just scanned this.

TheatreWorks 06-07 Season closes

Chris Lunt — Tue, 01 May 2007 11:46:39 +0000

We saw Steven Sondheim's "Merrily We Roll Along", to wrap up our first season of attending TheatreWorks, a performance company that straddles Palo Alto and Mountain View. I was impressed. After years of attending the San Francisco Opera, we'd finally wearied of the logistics of getting there, parking, eating, and getting back home. Given that a long opera can go 5 hours, I found I no longer had the stamina to make it through a performance. (Also, Operas rarely have the refined sense of pacing that modern works do--the highlight for a show is routinely in the first or second act, leaving you to wade through the third.) TheatreWorks is effectively a farm-team for Broadway--they have a commitment to new works, so they routinely give world premiers for new musicals and plays that are getting the bugs shaken out before it's off to Broadway. The performers likewise are people on their way up, on their way down, or just gearing up for their next run at the Great White Way. And for us, being a 5 minute drive away is a big bonus (and it's cheaper than the opera). This year we saw:

Vanities: a new musical based on a very long running play from Broadway. Rachel couldn't go, so Brynna and I went.
Dessa Rose: my Dad joined us for this musical, and he enjoyed it also
M. Butterfly: not the opera--a play about gender and the confused relationship between the Orient and the Occident.
Ambition Facing West: an ambitious play about the community of people who are, through their own ambition, disconnected from the place they live. The most challenging play of the year
Writing Arthur: This was a reading, rather than a formal staging, of a brand new work never before heard in public. There are backers in New York looking to get this worked up out here--but it's still got a ways to go. There were great moments, but on the whole, it was a mess. For us though, it was fun to see how a musical like this comes together
Merrily We Roll Along: a musical that flopped when it originally came out in the 80's (although the music was popular), it got reworked and successfully run in a couple of venues in the '00s. I thought it was excellent.

Kyoto noodles: Omen

Chris Lunt — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 01:05:38 +0000

A friend of mine is travelling to Japan for the first time, and asked for some recommendations. I started reminiscing about Japan. One of the places I thought about was a noodle shop in Kyoto, a place I always made a point to go to when I was there. I have no idea where it was--I always just zenned my way through the city. I resigned myself to never finding the restaurant again, were I to return to Japan. While trying to come up with the name of a temple, I pulled out the diary I kept while in Japan. Out of curiosity I looked to see what I was doing 15 years ago today. It was the day I decided I never wanted to work for a Japanese company, after hearing a ponderous speech by a corporate droid from Fujitsu. That evening my friend Brian and I dropped by the bar where I worked, and although we weren't scheduled, we jumped behind the bar, because they were swamped, and we had a great time. While flipping through the rest of the diary, I found the name of the restaurant, I looked on the web, and I found it! The internet changes everything. They serve sake out of cedar wood boxes, with a little salt. As an aside, most the diary is very tedious--I was a girl-crazy 20 year old pining for the girl he left behind.

Torturing Teachers

Chris Lunt — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 17:55:34 +0000

When I started High School, I had a new English teacher who did not have a good temperment for dealing with 14 year olds. He was fussy, and particular about his desk. He would always carefully place his stapler in the exactly same place; he would make sure that everything was nicely aligned, and he made sure we knew that we weren't to touch his desk. Along with some other students, we one day snuck into his classroom before our class, carefully noted the exact position of everything on his desk, and then turned it around backwards, replacing everything so it looked normal. He came into the classroom and started the class standing at the chalkboard. (remember chalk?) We were barely able to contain ourselves, but he seemed oblivious. He finally finished his lecture and went to sit down, and when he pulled his chair up, his knees hit the backboard of the desk. His look of confusion was priceless. He's looking at the back of his sacrosanct desk trying to figure out where his drawers and leg well had gone. When he figured out what was going on, he was not amused--he spoke not a word to the class for the rest of the period, and I felt he was a little colder after that. Someone would later glue his door shut.

Class trip to Washington D.C.

Chris Lunt — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 19:37:07 +0000

In the 6th grade I started at Utley Junior High School, one of the grim Flint Michigan schools that was indistinguishable from a small manufacturing plant. Mr. Long taught social studies in a trailer behind the school, and every year he led a trip to Washington DC. My parents ponied up the dough to send me along. I was beside myself--11 years old and flying (chaperoned) with my peers was the most adult thing I'd done.

I remember many things from the trip:

The moon rock embedded in the stained glass window at the national cathedral
The moon jellies in the bay around the National Aquarium in Baltimore
The shredded money you could buy at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing
Driving by the Potomac, the sight of the Air Florida 90 winter crash the prior year
Telling the tour guide at the Capitol building that the Michigan state capitol had a cooler dome (hey, I was 11. And it's true!)

I befriended an outsider named James on the trip. After we got back home, I visited him once; he lived in a poor neighborhood near my own. He lived in the basement in a room with fake wood panelling and a concrete floor. He was into Quiet Riot (whose hit single "Metal Health" was released in March that year), and he had a black concert t-shirt. He would become one of the "burnouts" that I managed to have cordial relationships with throughout Junior High.

The sixth grade was a very akward time for me (although 7th grade was even worse). I became somewhat of a loner. I read a lot, I started using computers. In part, the fact that I befriended this outcast was a reflection of the fact that I didn't have any other friends on the trip. But all my memories of the trip are positive.

Car Break-in

Chris Lunt — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 12:57:00 +0000

On Sunday morning, Rachel's car was broken into, and the radio badly removed. It's the third time in 3 years that we've had an incident with our cars, parked in the driveway. It's the disadvantage of living on a corner lot near a major through-way. When the police officer was taking the report, she looked up and asked, "isn't that the Saturn that was stolen two years ago?" If you can stay cheerful while picking broken glass out of your child's car seat, you can conquer anything.

Azza died

Chris Lunt — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 01:26:20 +0000

Returning home from work, I went to feed our pet guinea pigs, and was surprised that Azza wasn't dancing around the food dish as usual. I went looking for her and found her expired on the lower level of the cage. Azza was one of the "girls", the two female piggies Rachel brought home in December of 2000. We already had two older male piggies, and I remember being incredulous. The boys were already 3 years old by then and I pointed out that we'd now have pigges for another 3 years, but I was quickly charmed by the new additions to our piggie herd. People dismiss guinea pigs as being "rodents", but I found that the piggies had a suprising amount of personality. Azza was spunky and independent--she would let you hold her, but she wanted it clear that it was on her terms. I was always cautious about letting kids hold her, because she could be nippy, but she always behaved well. She loved water, and loved to rattle the water bottle as she would drink: *clack* *clack* *clack*. If the bottle ran out of water, she's get boisterous and try to flip it out of its holder. Although smaller than the boys, she was always strong, and had a beautiful skily coat, with lusturous red hair. This last year, she had a problem with her digestion, and cleaning the cage became an increasing chore, but happily a couple of months ago the problem cleared up. Even so, both she and Hala (the other girl) had grown thin and bony in their old age. It didn't slow her down though--she was still fast. "Azza" means gazelle in Arabic, and she lived up to the name; she was probably the fastest of the piggies. This sunday Stormy held both of the piggies, something that he finds very exciting. This video is a fitting tribute to Azza. He's always been interested in the pigges, and routinely goes to their cage and snatches at them as they walk by. They seem to get some pleasure out of it, because although they scamper, they keep coming back. Now only Hala is left. Hala is the sweetest of all the piggies we've owned. She's very social, and we're deeply saddened by the idea of her alone. We're going to make an effort to interact with her some more. Sven and Olie, the boys, passed away right before we moved to our current house. They were litter-mates, and we buried them next to each other in the back yard of the Menlo Park house. This weekend we'll bury Azza in the backyard.

Miracle Cure, REPEAT

Chris Lunt — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 21:49:02 +0000

Eric Haight was my freshman roommate--we'd been friends in High School. Like most freshmen, we were so excited to be on our own that we did a very poor job of managing our sleep. We'd stay up way too late, and still have to get up early for a class or a test. I have a very hard time waking up if I'm exhausted, and I can sleep through an alarm, so I would sometime ask Eric to make sure I got up. He hit on the novel idea of putting a CD into our CD player, cranking the volume, hitting play and leaving the room. Song choice was key. For both Eric and I, this was our first CD player, and we'd both bought a couple of albums--I remember my first CD was "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (SPLHCB), and I think his was "Pump" by Aerosmith. We heard these albums a lot, not having anything else to listen to. He chose Good Morning from SPLHCB, which starts with a rooster crowing. It was a good choice. And he put the song on repeat. I think I managed to stay in bed for the first pass through the song, but not for the second time. Somehow, this turned into us having an unspoken contest one night while studying in the room. One of us put the song Miracle Cure from The Who's "Tommy" on repeat. The song is 11 seconds long. Who would go insane first? I don't know how many times we heard it until I broke down and turned it off. Some of the other albums I remember from that year include "Queen's greatest hits", a Howard Johnson album, Led Zepplin 4, the best of Robert Palmer, "Workbook" by Bob Mould (a pivotal album for me), Joni Mitchell's "Hejira" (another mind blower), and Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here".

Resolutions

Chris Lunt — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 21:02:16 +0000

I remember a few of my past resolutions:

In 1998 I resolved to go camping once a season. I was very good about this resolution for years, but then I started working for Friendster in mid 2003, bought a house in early 2004, and had a son in 2005, so camping has been shot for me for some time. Now that Stormy's getting easier to manage, I'm hoping to try camping again this year.
In 2005 I resolved to go to the gym at least once a week. I've been going usually twice a week for 2 years now--I've found it's important to the health of my back, since my job involves so much sitting. It helps greatly that I have a gym buddy.
In 2006 I resolved to try fasting--it's a practice common to most religions, and I'd never participated. I followed through in early 2006, and it was an interesting, although not particularly enlightening experience.

This year, I'm feeling ambitious. I'm choosing something to improve for the holy trinity: Body, Mind and Soul.

Body: Walk to work at least once every 2 weeks
Soul: Cook at least one dish from every issue of Cook's Illustrated, play music with someone else at least once a month, have dinner with old friends at least every other month.
Mind: Read a book selected by each of my three smartest friends

Feel free to recommend me a book!