Allen Lew's Thoughts

is a car review: 2005 Audi A6.

No I didn’t write it; I just made the page for it. I’ll be doing that every week.

Finding a place in DC is difficult just due to the shear expense of many of the places.

I found a place that was relatively less-expensive on Craigslist, but take a look at what they wrote back:

-The current tenants are hard of hearing or deaf- the house’s just across from Gallaudet University. We’re pretty much like you except that we can’t speak lol…

-The house is triangle shaped.

-It may be noisy due to the house’s proximity to the intersection. We wouldn’t know lol.

-We have 1 dog, 2 cats and an iguana.

Not to be so narrow-minded, but come on it is weird. As my brother put it, “if you moved there, it sounds a bad sitcom plot.”

So apparently if you run a Google search with the name Allen Lew, you’ll find my Wikibooks user page second. A Yahoo! search for Allen Lew yields my Facebook profile third.

Just surprising how you just the internet can find so much.

So apparently I’ve been locked here at for about an hour US News, due to a “suspicious package.” Just great.

Update: I did get out, and apparently someone sent a fake anthrax letter.

So as I blogged about a little while ago, I was going to the east coast for a short family vacation. I flew out from Oakland to meet with my brother and mom in Dulles, VA (another Washington, DC airport) and went to stay with relatives. We got like no sleep, but had to board a 6 AM bus to New York to see my sister and her high school Economics Challenge team compete. They lost, partly due to the fact that one of their team members was an hour late and got disqualified (how and why I still have no idea, but apparently it was a frequent pattern). Well, it wasn’t a total defeat, as they got the all expenses paid trip to the city and $1,000 dollar savings bonds (quite the consolation prize). After she left, the rest of us went around the City and saw some sites like Chinatown (which my brother thought was a lot like the real thing with the people disobeying traffic lights, crowds of people, in audible taxi drivers, and garbage on the street), Rockfeller Center, and the former site of the World Trade Center. Yes, New York is filled with all sorts of sights, sounds, and smells (try stepping into that subway station that reeked of urine after smelling the horses near Central Park).

New York Skyline

So I got my internship at the web division of US News. I’ll be working in Washington, DC all summer in the Georgetown area.

So on Saturday, I’ll be flying to Dulles, VA near Washington, DC to visit some relatives. Sometime during the week, I’ll also be heading down to New York City to see my sister and the rest of her high school friends compete in the Economics Challenge competition.

Then back to DC to interview for a U.S. News and World Report Internship (they called today, I thought I applied too late). If I get it, I’ll be in DC for the summer. If not back, to Los Angeles for week then Berkeley again.

Some one left a comment saying I was her favorite Calstuff blogger. So my friend sent me an IM the other day with this message:

yo allen – i have someone who wants to meet the “famous allen lew from calstuff”

He then goes on to tell me that his friend saw me on campus the other day, but was too shy to say Hi. What the hell? I’m not famous and I’m certainly not unapproachable.

From http://museumofconceptualart.com/accomplished/index.html:

At age 20:

Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard and cofounded Microsoft.

Canadian hockey player Scott Olsen founded Rollerblade, Inc.

English novelist Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, which was immediately successful.

Ragtime composer Scott Joplin became an itinerant pianist and traveled throughout the Midwest.

Despite a lack of experience, James Cagney fast-talked his way into a vaudeville dancing job.

Egyptian hermit Saint Anthony gave away his inheritance and joined a group of ascetics, eventually becoming the father of Christian Monasticism.

D. H. Lawrence began writing his first novel, The White Peacock.

Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice, her second and most famous novel.

English author Elizabeth Barrett Browning published her first volume of poetry.

Polish-born Joseph Conrad, one of the great English language novelists, began learning English, his third language.

Charles Lindbergh learned to fly.

John Stuart Mill pulled himself out of depression and found that the ordinary events of life could again give him some moderate amounts of pleasure. He decided that happiness is attained not by making it the direct goal of life, but by fixing one’s mind on some other pursuit.

Leon Battista Alberti wrote a Latin comedy that was hailed as the “discovered” work of a Roman playwright.

The Greek philosopher Plato became a disciple of Socrates.

Alexander Graham Bell taught a stray Skye Terrier to talk. By training the dog to growl on cue and then manipulating his mouth and throat, Bell could make him produce the phonemes “ow, ah, ooh, ga, ma, ma,” to say “How are you, Grandmama?”

Enter your age and find out what people did at your age. (via Yahoo Picks!)

Oh the wonders of Photoshop never cease to amaze me:

(via Worth1000)