the surrounding area is pretty desolate: a steak house, a lumber surplus store, a 24 hour dunkin donuts, and a chinese buffeteria. there used to be a compusa nearby but that company went out of business last year. the actual interview felt like it went by pretty fast even though we talked for almost an hour and a half. not sure about the rest of the staff, but the two people i talked with had a good sense of humor so right away i felt pretty comfortable. hopefully in a week or two i'll hear back from them. i grabbed the 86 bus back to harvard square. walking home in the dark with my laptop in my hand, i felt like a working man again, a return to normalcy. as much as i love the freedom freelancing offers me, it's can be difficult chasing after projects, and even harder when the work dries up and i'm forced to live off of my savings. i like the independence; i hate the unpredictability. i think it's time to get off this roller coaster.
soon after i got back home i went with my family to wuchon in union square. we were hoping for some korean barbecue action to celebrate my father's 60th birthday but they didn't have that. 
instead we went with a kalbi soup, some bibimbap, a spicy beef dish, and some 
fried oyster and kimchee pancakes. afterwards we came back to my place. my sister and i presented our shared gift, a national geographic genographic project kit to test genetic lineage. for dessert we had the flan i made last night. although it's hard to taste the cinnamon (which all pretty much floated to the top), i think it adds an extra dimension to the flan.
with my father's assistance, i raised the fluorescent lamps inside my grow closet. the light on the top shelf can go even higher, but the one on the bottom shelf is already at its maximum height.
the rest of my friday evening was lost in hellgate: london. even now, after banging away at it for 4 hours, i'm still itching to play again. it was jarring switch back into OS X; these cross-platform computers really seem like owning two machines.