Staying at Sammy's

Picture of me and Sam taken last year in Tokyo.

Tonight I am crashing at my good friend, Sameer's pad in UCLA grad housing. I became good friend's with Sameer last year when I stayed at Sokendai in Japan. We were living in the same dorm and working on the Sokendai project on oral history and digital archives - which Sam and I call Dejiden...but that is a long story for another day.

In any event, what I want to record in my blog tonight is how full of life my good friend Sammy is. First of all, it is actually thanks to Sam that I have a blog at all. He is the one who got me started - and he also got me started on Flickr!! - last summer after impressing me with his own marvelous sites. Sam has three blogs actually, which can be found on his blogger profile. I can't find his Flickr site right now, but I'll be sure to update this later with the link.

Another picture of Sam and me in Kamakura, also taken last summer.

The main reason Sammy deserves a little blurb in my blog tonight is that, as I suggested before, he really is an amazing guy. When I got here at 11 pm tonight, he decided to just whip me up a little something called "Dutch Baby," which involved mixing may of the ingredients for pancakes in addition to nutmeg, sugar, and butter. After throwing the ingredients in a pan, he baked the amazing pan-cake like desert in the oven for about 20 minutes as he all the while filled me in on the details of Steven Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, Wolfram's program called Mathmatica, and theory called chaos theory. In addition, as he talked, checked ingredients, and regulated the time on the oven, Sam was happily laying out a beautiful place setting for me, replete with a jazzy place mat, an orange cloth napkin, and a lively blue ceramic plate.

Sam's Dutch Baby was sooooo good. He chopped up some bananas to put on top and then put some syrup on. Believe me when I say that his cooking and lively attention really hit the spot after my long, six-hour drive down on 101 from San Jose.