Haha

A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in California when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud toward him.

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"

Bud looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure, why not?"

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. 

The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg , Germany. 

Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response. 

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 10-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, "You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves." 

"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says Bud. 

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on, amused, as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car. 

Then the Bud says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?" 

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?" 

"You're a Congressman for the U.S. Government," says Bud. 

"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?" 

"No guessing required." answered the cowboy. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew,to a question I never asked. You tried to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don't know a thing about cows...this is a herd of sheep. . . . 

"Now give me back my dog."

Attacking Umbrellas

This past weekend I did something which a person of my timidity with strangers is unexpected to do. I went networking.

I joined my roomates Jackie and Anna on a trip north to San Fransisco, where the firm Hart Howardton was host. They gave both an alumni get together and a student walking tour of the company's projects through the city. We left early Friday afternoon and spent the three and a half hour drive singing any songs of which we knew atleast a respectable portion of the lyrics. We got into Lafayette at about 5 and then Anna and I took Bart into the city to meet and old friend and join to party at the firm at One Union.

Much to my suprise, Anna and I were the ONLY students at the party. Apparently we were crashing the alumni party. My own department head did not recognize either of her students present, but Anna and I did get a few thumbs up and kudos from the few professors there. I met with a couple people who were from different firm types including CalTrans, who apparenlty is a very good employer, an irrigation company, and a girl who works for a firm who does solely high end resorts. I got all their cards and plan to maintain some sort of correspondence with them. After the food was eaten and the alcohol consumed, a partner in the Peter Walker (big name) firm asked us to go out to a bar down the street. We accepted the invite, but found the whole situation boring and some particular conversations innappropriate. I recieved one card from a girl who was none too sober. She didn't think that we would like where she was b/c it was away from the hubbub of the city in Napa. (sounds great!) We walked around that area of the city for a little while and then our friend Kevin drove me back to Jackie's for the night.

I woke at 7 am the next morning to the smell of bacon. Jackie's dad made a breakfast for champions of eggs, toast, bacon, potatoes and toast. Yum! Jackie quickly took me to Bart station where i made my way to the embarcadero and then walked to Union once more. The partner of the firm remembered my name from the previous evening. (exciting) There was bagels and coffee, which i had no inclination to eat and the firm gave a small presentation of their work. I was uninterested. 200 people, one office, downtown SF. Yeah....no. We started the walking tour in a light drizzle and headed to Levi Plaza, original design by Laurence Halprin. The rain picked up. We walked through downtown and stopped at the pier and ferry building where they had a wide array of foreign cheeses and oils. We continued onward and the rain and wind picked up. We finished the walking tour at Union Square in the rain.

Kevin met up with me and Anna and we went to lunch inviting one of our professors, Vangelli (Greek). The Boudin bakery is where we ate lunch and i enjoyed every bite of my turkey and havarti sandwich. We stopped and H and M, with thoughts of Europe. I bought dress pants for $20 and a hair clip just like the one I lost somewhere in France. Anna dragged us to a soap store called Lush and we tried samples of exfoliant and wierd shampoo bars. It was interesting. After washing our hands of the whole affair, we walked to Chinatown. Amazingly enough for timing, last weekend was the weekend of the Chinese New Year, so the streets were packed. Everyone was buying cherry branches and orange trees. There was a market going on down one of the streets and I bought some candy that I am fond of. The unfortunate thing about Chinatown in the rain it the people's heights. Everyone was shorter than us. Their umbrellas were too. All three of us were constantly dodging umbrella points so that we would not get poked in the eye or beheaded. From Chinatown we walked far towards Lombard street, stopping at diverse starbucks along the way for their restrooms. When we got to Lombard street we did something i will only do once in my life. We walked up it. Tired and worn out, we tried to get the best pictures we could. We headed west from the top of Lombard and walked back towards the Embarcadero so that I could catch Bart and meet up with Jackie. A long time later Jackie picked me up at the station.
That night we went out to celebrate Jackie's birthday with good italian eating. Her dad is from Boston so he is very particular about his italian. The next morning we slept in and met anna at Target. We then drive home with the spectalular view of a series of rainbows following us down the coast.

Lesson of the weekend-We were told this weekend would be a big networking opportunity, but had we not crashed the alumni party, i would not have met anyone to spark my interest and alieve some of my fears. Students of legal drinking age are not responsible enough to say no to alcohol and cannot be invited to parties. Therefore, they must crash them to get what they need out of life.