Erin and Joe seal the deal. from Andrew Stein on Vimeo.

Joe breaks the glass!

Congratulations to cousin Erin and Joe!!

No complaints this labor day weekend as I continue this day of wine tasting, eating, and napping while reading Harry Potter and watching the sun go down. And I almost forgot to mention the delicious cheese that we have too.

Happy Lab Day Weekend everyone!

Although I’m stationed in the Bay Area these days, I woke up this morning and soon learned that my hometown of La Canada Flintridge, a small city northeast of Downtown LA was on fire.  Conveniently, with my parents out of town, I needed to learn what was going on and needed to spread the word to concerned friends and family (and my parents).

A great source for reading about updates on the fire is this website produced by the city: http://www.lacanadaflintridge.com/news/welcome.cfm?action=details&ID=323

In case you missed it, I have embedded a video of that amazing race from yesterday when the USA 4×100-meter freestyle relay team barely beat that of the French.  It may be taken off of YouTube because of copyright laws, but for now, here it is:

Also, one of Stanford’s own, Benjamin Wildman-Tobriner (2007), participated in the preliminary heats of this 4×100-meter freestyle relay, and the team completed in a record breaking time of 3:12.23.  This time was then beaten yesterday in the finals, but it was still an incredible performance.  As a result, Ben will bring home a gold medal from these Beijing Olympics Games.  And although, Ben did not compete in the finals of this event, he definitely was an integral part to the USA getting there.

One could write a whole commentary about China today based on the picture below.  I love the olympics, and I love the competition, the sportmanship, the intense desires to succeed, the teams, the energy etc.  But I think it’s important not to ignore some of the things that the Olympics can overshadow and hide.  Look at this wall which separates what we see as “the olympics” with what much of China has to experience.  I just wanted to step back–even if only occasionaly–and try to see some of the bigger picture.

I thought that his world clock was sort of interesting… take a look:

Poodwaddle.com

Hi. I’m excited to announce that I have started my own weblog. Just last week, I began interning with Mozilla Corporation and was introduced to the utility of blogging. I look forward to updating this blog more and more in the future.  You can always email me at adstein (at) stanford (dot) edu.