GregSchwartz.net

I’m working at Venrock over the summer. As Wikipedia explains:

Venrock, a compound of “Venture” and “Rockefeller”, is a pioneering venture capital firm formed in 1969 to build upon the successful investing activities of the Rockefeller family [...] Venrock focuses its investments on early-stage and start-up companies in information technology and emerging technologies.

So why is an HCI guy working at a VC firm? Well, I’m an intern here, and I can’t say much more than that!

One downer is that the office I’m working at is in Redwood City. I had planned to ride to work everyday, because I thought I’d be at an office close to campus. I might have found a decent solution, though! A combination of CalTrain and riding my bike look like a reasonable alternative to driving (and about the same cost per trip). I’ll give that a try in the next week or so.

While we were editing our final paper for CS376, Steve mentioned Zeugmas to me, but had a hard time explaining it. We looked it up on Wikipedia, and here’s what we found.

Zeugma (from the Greek word “ζεύγμα”, meaning “yoke”) is a figure of speech describing the joining of two or more parts of a sentence with a single common verb or noun. A zeugma employs both ellipsis, the omission of words which are easily understood, and parallelism, the balance of several words or phrases. The result is a series of similar phrases joined or yoked together by a common and implied noun or verb.

There are a number of geeky examples:

• Star Trek: The Next Generation: “You are free to execute your laws, and your citizens, as you see fit.”
  (I have no idea what episode that’s from, and I’m quite curious.)
• Numerical Recipes: “Come the (computer) revolution, all persons found guilty of such criminal behavior will be summarily executed, and their programs won’t be!”

And a number of funny examples:

• Charles Dickens: “[She] went straight home in a flood of tears, and a sedan chair.”
• Groucho Marx: “You can leave in a taxi. If you can’t get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that’s too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff.”
• Flanders and Swann, “Madeira M’Dear”:
  • “He said, as he hastened to put out the cat, the wine, his cigar and the lamps…”
  • “She lowered her standards by raising her glass, her courage, her eyes and his hopes”
• Bob Kanefsky: “Did she turn down the wrong hallway, his advances, or the sheet?”

Photos, shot on day 59, have been posted.

And since it’s Finals Week, I have yet to make it to the gym. Might make it today, definitely make it tomorrow.