next to 666

the end... for realz

2009-05-11T08:58:00.004-04:00

Tough, silly, and chill,
Strike a balance to recall,
Another year passed.

Yeah, it's gone, alright. Hard to believe that a year ago today I'd already started my job at Google and moved to California, but a lot has changed since then. I'm pretty sure that I spent time last summer (and over the past school year) growing up... but not so much that I won't be excited to get water guns in the mail (thanks, Mom and Dad).

This last semester was dandy. I got cut a break from homework, but that left time to explore other interesting things; I'm getting really excited about logic programming and miniKanren, which was, incidentally, the PhD thesis project of one of my AIs this semester. He's trying to get me to convince the NLP people in Deutschland that they want to use it for their research. :)

I guess this is the part that I think about what I'll miss when I'm overseas this summer, but I don't really know what to say. I'm actually pretty terrified of the move. It's one thing to move across the country to California and meet up with someone I know there. It's an entirely different thing to move 7 timezones across an ocean to a country where I don't even speak the language and have never met in person anyone within 3 hours of where I'm living. It's scary!

But I suspect I would be denied the opportunity to expand myself if I didn't do things that terrified me once in a while. Skydiving was a blast! :P

So this is the last entry in this blog... I don't live next to 666 anymore, and I guess I'll miss it a little bit, at least. The painting we did was a lot of fun, but I learned some stuff about what kinds of people I can live with and what kinds I'm not so good at living with. Let's hope that Mathieu and Titilayo are the former. :)

(next posting will be on awesomehaus.blogspot.com)

mail, the end

2009-05-06T10:49:00.003-04:00

Now that I post this,
I expect letters. Is there
Greater joy than mail?

Well, probably. But there's nothing quite like opening a mailbox to see a real piece of paper with one's name on it. Evan and I started a game of chess by mail this semester (I don't remember if I mentioned this before?), and it's sort of tedious, but also lots of fun. :D

Anyway, my address for the summer:

Valkyrie Savage
Max-Planck-Straße 4 Building 20
64281 Dieburg
Germany

I think that's how it's written, anyway. Google maps can find it with that. :) And, yes, I am living on Max Planck Street.

I'm going to miss this blog a little bit, but I'm going to have a new one for the summer, which, hopefully, my roommate will write on, too. I'm expecting it to be at awesomehaus.blogspot.com (hat tip to Carlo). But I'll post a link for sure when I get it going.

I took my only final this morning: Calculus. There was one question that I messed up, but the rest of it felt okay, I think. We'll find out later this week. Eep!

What now? Paper, painting, packing. That's all. Then Germany!

real life

2009-05-04T14:39:00.003-04:00

We can't all live in
A real world. School is far from
It, but we come back.

Today brought my first visit to ye olde dentistry shoppe in nearly two years. Being in school makes it hard to actually do things like that, but it turned out alright. The only thing I was chided for was flossing too hard; I had some indentations in my gums that were caused by it.

I did get a prize, though, for being good. And some weird looks for getting a prize. (see photo)

I wonder what constitutes real life. I mean, I haven't really felt the recession due to being in school, but some real life responsibilities are there. I pay bills, I cook, I have to keep my house clean (and my roommates happy). But if college is supposed to prepare us for real life, then where is my 9 to 5? Where are the scads of money that I should be getting? Where is any sense of stability?

But soon will be a return to an even more real life: work! Hard to believe that my flight is a week from tomorrow! Harder, I'm sure, for my parents to believe. :) Especially since I have yet to get an address for where exactly I'm going...

Oof.

narcissism and the greater good

2009-05-02T17:18:00.006-04:00

Earthworms in puddles
Hapless victims of giants
But why were they there?

Almost every day this week it rained. It made for a fairly miserable time getting to class with a laptop, but it did give nice spans of time to ponder the great mysteries of life, like why the hell earthworms crawl across cement? I brought this up in conversation with a friend of mine. "You know, if you're an earthworm, and you were to find something that you couldn't dig through, why on earth (!) would you continue across it? It seems ridiculous!"

He commented, in a sarcasm-about-wisdom-hiding-actual-wisdom tone, that if no earthworms had done it, then they would only be in one spot. They are fighting for the greater good! Or perhaps they are emo earthworms. But the first sounds much more noble.

	Christopher Columbus worm
	Amelia Earhart worm

On the other hand, stories in Time and Newsweek recently began insisting that humans aren't really tending towards that sort of commitment to the species at large; we're becoming more and more enthralled with ourselves. Well, not humans in general, but the US, at least, is suffering from a "narcissism epidemic." Interesting. I wonder if all that teaching that little kids get about being a beautiful and unique snowflake is best summed up by Chuck Palahniuk: You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.

Well, maybe putting it so bluntly isn't the right thing, either, but I can certainly see where psychologists might get inklings that people, especially my age, might be getting a bit big-headed. I have borne witness to many a student spending hours grooming his or her Facebook profile page to make it attractive to, you know, anyone who might visit. Such effort! And the fact that some employers and graduate schools now use Facebook to help make decisions on candidates sort of encourages that, too. I dunno... I'm not sure that I can subscribe to that. I know that I spend too much time on Facebook after my lenten resolution ended, but I think I'm doing a better job than a lot of people. Anyway, it's time for adventure. I have to put off thinking about this atomic theory paper for as long as possible.

brief

2009-04-27T20:28:00.006-04:00

So quickly pass days
Of sunshine and freedom, but
We can retain their joys.

I had the pleasure to spend this weekend with Evan, and what a weekend it was! I picked him up from the airport around midnight on Thursday, which was sort of an adventure in itself. I almost missed his landing due to the plane's being 20+ minutes earlier than originally expected. He had shared with me his plans to navigate the high seas of the AmeriCanadian arrspace in his pirate garb from last weekend, so I wore the closest approximation I had to such ridiculosity (which, sadly, is quite diminished from what it was when I had that trunk of costume stuff before the flood). I heard thudding footsteps racing down the hallway from the terminals. Who else could it be? I raced towards the passenger exit and leapt into the arms of the man in the black trenchcoat--thankfully Evan--, and we collided with a thud, much to the amusement/chagrin of lookers-on.

Let's see... our adventures... we spent Friday wandering campus/Bloomington climbing and eating many things. Moroccan food (Casa Blanca!) is obnoxiously tasty. My semi-experience in parkour helped me keep up, though the blood donation earlier this week slowed me down a little. Anyway, I'd spent some time on Wednesday and Thursday writing notes in places I thought Evan might climb, and I managed a pretty good success rate with the guessings.

Friday was also the day that we went to Columbus, which was pretty great. We borrowed a pair of bikes from my lovely roommate, Georgia, and took a quick tour de downtown. We hit the library, the Chihuly at the visitors' centre, the jail, city hall, the courthouse, the tower and tunnel in Mill Race, Eos, and the Ameritech Building, among other places. My dad made his derricious fish pizza, my mom made kringla, we watched a terrible movie (Don't Mess with the Zohan), and all was right with the world.

Saturday was the race! But drama first; Georgia, Evan, and I packed out of Columbus to hit up the farmers' market in Bloomington before parkour at noon. I managed to lock the keys in the car, so we had to find a random person whose cell phone we could borrow, then wait for my parents to come rescue us. :-/

Parkour was good times; the guys were excited to meet someone new, of course. We found some more of my notes, too, so good. ^__^ The weather for the race was gorgeous: sunny and warm. It was a little ridiculous that it was $20, payable only in cash, to get in, though. We managed to find a dollar from a nice man outside, since we were short.

Bunny Gamma came in 12th! Excellent! I was really proud of them. :D We ran into Georgia and Jeff at the race, too, and they provided us with one of, again, only two pictures that exist from our weekend together. I thought it came out cute. :P

After the race was tasty dinner of seared tuna (including V-shaped brands, thanks to a smart purchase by yours truly over spring break) with sesame seeds, rice with soy/sesame/vinegar sauce, and a salad with garbanzo beans, lime, chili powder, sunflower seeds, onions, tomatoes, and general delition, followed immediately by Flight of the Conchords! It was a good show, but too brief.

Then some nighttime parkour, which ended when I tried to scale a wall in my Converses (which, for those of you who may be unaware, are sadly lacking in traction) and fell 8 feet onto my wrist. It's not broken, but it hurt like a bitch. Anyway, I have a brace on that now. We followed that adventure with a bonfire party, including delicious s'mores.

Sunday was full of pancakes, fried plantains, X-rays, and a drive to the airport. The weekend wasn't as long as I might've liked, but we had teh funz. And now it's time to get serious about schoolwork, since this is the last week of classes! Woot!

i like these

2009-04-23T00:06:00.004-04:00

Shoots of green push up,
Split the ground, bring the spring, and
Make life look alive!

Happy Earth Day! I hope you all celebrated. I got a tree yesterday, a White Oak. It should grow up to be pretty spectacular; I'm giving it to my dad to plant out at the property that he and my mom recently bought. I hope they think of me when it grows up. ;)

One thing that I learned today that's neat: Bloomington makes people pay to have garbage collected. Recycling collection is free, but putting trash out necessitates the purchasing of $2 "trash stickers" at the supermarket, one per bag. I learned this in the course of signing my lease for next year, which I have to say I'm super excited about. Clawfoot tub, here I come!

Another thing today that I learned about and liked was Texas' recent threats of secession. C'mon, guys. I guess it brought an extra grin to my day, so I can't ask for much more, but...

some oddities

2009-04-21T23:45:00.003-04:00

College brings myst'ries,
The fog of knowledge obscures
The plain and simple.

We finally got our sink fixed. We've spent a couple weeks trying to fiddle with it ourselves, to no avail. Drano did nothing. Digging with spoons did nothing. Nothing did anything. So we filed a maintenance report and were treated to the message on our door (upon our return):

Replaced garbage disposal. Old one was clogged with penny.

Well, that's odd. We can't be throwing pennies down the drain in a recession! (Thanks to Georgia for that one :P) It seems like, despite education, we all still do dumb things sometimes. -___-

Other oddities... well, my arms look rather odd at the moment. Parkour over the weekend was pretty intense, and now it appears that I've taken a cheese grater to the inside surfaces of my limbs. That's what one gets for climbing things, I suppose.

Yesterday was 4/20, which, in a hippie town like Bloomington, has more connotations than "the day between 4/19 and 4/21." I guess this is a reasonable opportunity to make some comments about marijuana. Venus was writing a paper about legalizing it recently, and in talking to her about it I had some thoughts.

I know that California is considering legalizing marijuana; it's their state's most lucrative crop. If it were legalized, it could be taxed, and thereby their government could bail itself out of the massive hole it seems to be in. Not to mention that the United States has something like 25% of the world's prisoners. In fact, more than 1% of American adults are currently incarcerated. A large portion of those are due to drug misdemeanors. Legalizing marijuana would also cut down on that sort of nonsense; as a nation we gripe about having to spend so much for prisoners, blah, blah, blah, but maybe we're just interpreting illegality in the wrong way. And what is so harmful about marijuana? It's not an addictive substance. It doesn't impair any more drastically than alcohol or other already-legal substances (i.e. salvia). It's not doing any more harm to the air than tobacco smoke. There's a lot of stigma associated to it, though.

I was reading Time today when I came across an article about Amish romance novels. That's just odd in itself, and I don't really feel obligated to elaborate.

It's weird to think that the end of the term is so close. I can taste it! :D

...i'm a math major

2009-04-18T10:55:00.002-04:00

There's more of interest
Than what one learns in school. It
Is best to explore.

Well, I thought I was going to do my math homework, but it's about wedge products and differential forms, blah blah blah, so I determined that tea would make me do it. After making tea, I spent more time contemplating the vortices in the tea steam than doing the other stuff... *sigh*

water/boarding

2009-04-16T23:23:00.003-04:00

A sunny day brings
Hearty fun, college brings
A crazy mess. Heh.

One of the service fraternities on campus ran a fundraiser today: IU's biggest water balloon fight! It raised money for the March of Dimes, and, judging by the number of people I saw there, it was a lot. There were probably close to 300 people in Dunn meadow, it was $3 to get in, and there were 13,000 water balloons up for grabs. I think we took care of them all in about 5 minutes. Hehe. Too bad I didn't really have the foresight to, er, bring a change of clothes.

As alluded to in the post title, I've been thinking about boarding recently. I like to do math homework on boards, because it's easily erased, doesn't waste paper, etc., etc. People are of differing opinions on whether whiteboards or blackboards are superior. I guess, to be politically correct, I will call them "dry erase boards" and "chalkboards." But, anyway, I can't decide myself.

Dry erase boards are nice; you can project things onto them. If I need to work off of something that's on a computer screen, I just throw it up on a dry erase board and draw away. Erasing off of a dry erase board is nice, too. There's no chalky mess. Unfortunately, a casual swipe with the hand across a dry erase board will result in both awkward stains on the skin and damage to the board's surface, which leads to real difficulties in erasing later.

There is, however, a certain gravitas associated with anything written on a chalkboard. Think of all the great minds of the past that have derived mathematics and the sciences as we know them today using these great tools! Chalk in my hand feels somehow weightier and more serious than a dry erase marker ever could. It's nice to just brush a hand across a chalked error and correct it with none of the nonsense associated with dry erase markers.

I know that IUCS has gone and replaced almost all of its chalkboards with dry erase boards, but I also know that Dan Friedman rescued a chalkboard from a dumpster and had it hung in his office. It may contribute to great ideas, but it also probably has had a hand in lung ailments for several generations of grad students. :P

chaos

2009-04-15T08:43:00.004-04:00

A box of chaos,
Sits, unopened, mysterious,
The centre of town.

Back home in Columbus, there really is a box of Chaos just chillin' in downtown. Chaos used to be one of my favourite things about going to the Commons mall, but now it's being torn down and replaced by, what, a hotel, I think? Ridiculous. But I'm more interested in the draw of the Chaos box than whatever thing they're replacing it with.

jokes

2009-04-14T12:17:00.003-04:00

Why keep jokes to fields
Where only crass comments live?
Let's extend to more!

I don't know why, but I've never heard a CS-related "yo mamma" joke. I can't think why this would be. We all have decent senses of humour, right? So if you've ever heard one, please share. I figured I would make a couple contributions to start off:

Yo mamma so big, she wouldn't fit on your 1.5TB RAID5 harddrive.

Yo mamma so dumb, she don't know the difference between a heat sink and a float.

days go by

2009-04-13T12:26:00.003-04:00

I'm too lazy to
Write a real post, so I'll just
Write a few haikus.

Friend requests, messages,
Too many to leave me sane.
Why do I do this?

College students march,
A rainbow of umbrellas,
Hunched against the rain.

Winding down, slide with
The flow. Grades will come, just sit
Back, relax, enjoy.

Easter food heavy
In my belly, but it gives
Energy for fun!

Sustainabili-
ty is too long to fit in
Just five syllables.

Green tech, green campus,
Lectures about them abound,
Sustain IU week!

Pink petals poke up
Colouring campus coyly
Suggesting a sniff.

food and films

2009-04-10T12:58:00.002-04:00

Redolent of youth,
Concocting with Dad, now I
Strike forth with my friends.

In the grand tradition of Thursday cooking night, Georgia and I whipped up a heart-shaped pizza last night. She has pictures of it, and I hope she posts them. *nudge, nudge* But it was delicious and super-easy. I still don't have my dad's dough techniques quite down, but it would be hard to really get them exactly since he doesn't measure and I don't measure and it, er, wouldn't really work.

The flick of choice was Porco Rosso, one of the Ghibli movies I hadn't seen yet. It chronicles the adventures of Porco (formerly Marco): an Italian seaplane pilot who has been turned into a pig and now lives as a bounty hunter. It was cute! I think my favourite part was a scene between a quietly beautiful Italian woman and an obnoxious American man, during which she laughed gleefully at his claim that he was the best pilot in the Adriatic, defending her giggling with, "I find your humility to be quite charming."

In other news... well, there isn't much other news. I am signing up for classes. I kind of hate the permissions systems for signups, as I discovered and elaborated on during a discussion with Evan. I mean, it's cool that IU wants people in the classes who are capable of doing the work, but I'm pretty sure that it's a fairly good self-correcting system, no? I can't think of many people who would stay in a class that they were failing or that they had no idea what was going on in. And it's a massive hassle for people like me who learned stuff outside of school and who need to go through ridiculous administrivia just to end up in the proper place. >:| Oh well. At least this is the last time I'll have to jump through those hoops (hopefully)!

sports

2009-04-08T21:27:00.004-04:00

No longer teasing,
Spring is here to (probably)
Stay. Feel the season!

With warm weather comes time for physical activity! Thus far I've done some Frisbee, soccer, and Parkour, but I think that I've discovered a new sport: trying to get from one end of campus to another without getting accosted by all those folks who are scheming for my money. Observe my ugly art:

Anyway, I think it might catch on. I'm becoming quite proficient at it myself.

something interesting

2009-04-07T19:37:00.002-04:00

Our wants, needs, and times,
They are a'changin, but can
We really skimp those??

So what is it that sells well in a recession? I was reading an article in this week's Time that addressed specifically that question. It gives answers that you might expect: canned goods and fresh produce, for instance. It also gives answers that you might not expect: family planning (mainly condoms) and "seasonal general merchandise," whatever that is (they say that it includes things like road salt, decorations, Valentine's gifts, etc., but I just think it's a silly term).

What doesn't sell well? A lot of people have stopped buying junk food as much, according to this article, including cookies and ice cream. They've also cut back on purchasing... feminine hygiene products?? In the physical magazine, though apparently not on the site, there is a chart of the top 20 best-performing items and the bottom 20 worst-performing items. The unit sales of feminine hygiene products has dropped 12.6% since last year. Now, how the hell do you cut out 12.6% of your use of that stuff? I wonder if more of the population is turning to transgender surgery? Perhaps there is more job security if you are a man? I don't understand. A friend speculated that perhaps it also is related to the fact that the Baby Boomers are now going through menopause, but I don't feel like that could account for more than 12 percentage points of noise. That's plain crazy.

a few things i've learned

2009-04-06T13:00:00.004-04:00

Ninjas (or ninjae?)
Come from wise masters, failure,
And dedication.

And, you know, some other things. Time's pretty important. Anyway, I have been experimenting with my sharp new Ubuntu install, and it's way fun. I haven't really used Linux as a desktop environment except during my time at Google, and being at work sort of precluded playing around with all the nifty things that it can do. I took the GRE on Saturday morning, and I think that the few weeks that I've had this thing to play with actually improved my score by a couple points, haha.

It's intriguing to me to learn the things that people think are cool about computers. On Friday I was on a panel for undergrad women who are interested in Computer Science, for example. Sarah Loos, who lived/worked/blogged with me last summer, and I tried to get the girls excited about, you know, interesting algorithms and stuff we worked on at Google, deep ideas about computational complexity, blah blah blah, but their interest was only really sparked when I offhandedly mentioned that I had a) given up Facebook for Lent and b) written a script to block me from it and allow me to access it again once Easter arrived.

"Can you really do that? Wow! What class do you learn that in?"

"Um.. well, to be honest I sort of taught that to myself. But It was the foundations that I got in my CS classes that let me do it, really."

Yeah, so it was sort of bullshit. It's really trivial, actually, to add a line to your hosts file and write a cron job to remove that line on 4/12. But they just thought it was the coolest thing. :)

Oh, I guess that's only one thing I've learned, and this is entitled "a few things i've learned." What else, then... I wrote a script that will verify that an ISO burned properly to a CD (thanks, once more, to the internets!), I've discovered the joys of aliasing commands:

$ alias ls='echo muahahahah'
$ ls
muahahahah

(super fun to do if people forget to lock their screens in the lab, but I have useful aliases, too ;) ), I've set up nifty passwordless logins to the computers at school, and a few other things, probably. Those are the ones that come to mind, anyway.

good and evil

2009-04-05T17:04:00.004-04:00

Who knows what evil

Lurks in the hearts of men? You,

If you keep awatch.

As I was standing at the bus stop today in the freezing cold and rain (I had just finished a soccer game, too, so I was totally inappropriately attired in shorts and a t-shirt), a man with an umbrella walked up to me and offered to share. "Save your hair," he said, "and you must be freezing. This umbrella is big enough for two."

It turned out that he was a professor in the Geology department, and we actually knew a few of the same people via my (albeit spotty) participations in caving club. I had lost some of my faith in humanity after watching Slumdog Millionaire last night, but it was restored by a little Indian man with an umbrella.

meetings

2009-04-05T10:19:00.004-04:00

"Hi, I'm Valkyrie,"
"Valkyrie Savage? I've heard
Of you!" "Um.. what? How?"

The thing is, this happens to me a lot. I was talking to Sarah about it the other day, and she commented that it's probably a consequence of the fact that I know a lot of people in a lot of places, and the, er, fact that my name is "Valkyrie Savage", such that in any given group of people among whom one or two know me, probably all but one or two actually know me and the remaining ones are almost certain to remember my name. I've been meeting a lot of people this weekend. I haven't done that for a while, I guess. I'm a bit worn out of the usual banter:

"Your name's 'Valkyrie Savage'? a) I don't believe you! b) That's awesome!" (P(a) = .25)
"c) Well, I mean, I can grab my ID or something. Honest to God, that's my name. d) Haha, thanks. I hear that a lot." (a -> c ∧ b -> d)

In addition to meeting slews of new people (including 3 Johns and 2 Marks) in a couple days, I've definitely been keeping busy. I took the GRE yesterday morning! It wasn't as tough as I expected. I mean, it was tough (I didn't answer all the questions, but you're not really expected to be able to... I think that a 40/70 gets you about at the 80th percentile, and I answered 56... so I should have a decent shot at something respectable.), but I think I did alright. Considering the fact that I haven't had a class on networks or compilers, nor have I had a serious class on computer architectures or operating systems. :-/ Maybe I'll retake it in the fall after I glean some knowledge from the Networks and OS classes I'm taking then? I dunno.

Speaking of classes in the fall! I am pretty sure of what I'm taking, but I still am conflicted on what fun course I should fill it out with. What I know is this:

Computer Networks
Operating Systems
Topology
Analysis

It's going to be intense. Networks and Topology are grad courses, Analysis is an honors 400-level course, and Operating Systems and Networks are both P courses, which basically means that I will be programming at all times I am not sleeping. Or proving.

Anyway, the fun courses that I'm thinking about:

Scuba Certification
Piano
Middle Eastern Dance
Hapkido
Jeet Kun Do

It's a tough choice, I know. ;)

I went, also, to a talk by Doug Hofstadter yesterday. He's actually the professor for one of my classes, but he's super cool to listen to. He talked about how AI is advancing... but not really viable yet. I guess one of his colleagues said that computers would be conversant by 2010. So... umm.. watch for that? Haha. Maybe.

I saw Slumdog Millionaire finally, too. It wasn't as good as everyone said, I guess? I mean, I liked it, for sure, but I don't think I'd've given it Best Picture. I liked WALL-E better. Oh well. That's why I'm not in Hollywood.

Anyway, I have a soccer game to get geared up for. Go Grass Kickers!

style pains

2009-04-01T10:53:00.002-04:00

Ow ow ow ow ow
Owie owie owie ow
Ouchie owie ow.

So maybe this wasn't as worth it as I thought. I guess the pain didn't last long, and it didn't cost much, but I've been getting some weird looks. I suppose no one will ever not think I'm a nerd now. :P *item getting music plays*

I actually think it's kind of cool. After Georgia and Jeff got their tattoos, I started thinking about why I didn't have one. I couldn't come up with a good reason, but I just couldn't find anything sufficiently nerdy that "normal" people could still relate to. I thought about Pikachu for a while, but that stage in my life has passed, I think. I had to go more old school.

Yeah, it will be annoying to keep it clean for the next few days, but at least I don't have to keep the bandages on. The redness went away surprisingly quickly.

I think my mom might freak out, though. At least it won't be as bad as when I tell her that I am pregnant with twins from a guy I met at the club in Miami. Or when I tell her that I got cast as the motorcycle stunt double in the movie I auditioned for. It probably won't even be as bad as when she finds out that I have been hanging out with my friends in the Chemistry lab and accidentally melted my cell phone.

p.s. Happy April Fools Day.

link as promised

2009-03-30T09:36:00.003-04:00

Haha, good jokes. I
Like to hear them, but I am still
Learning to make them.

Carlo's routine, if you think you can take it.

Veganism!

2009-03-29T14:43:00.002-04:00

It's exciting stuff. I made the transformation from vegetarian to vegan only about two weeks ago, but it's been pretty exciting stuff.

Even when I was vegetarian, people who were vegan seemed somewhat like wacko extremists. No yogurt, cheese, milk, eggs, butter? Really? How in the world would someone have that kind of self discipline and drive. I mean, restaurants everywhere use things like butter in their cooking. I just didn't have the drive to make such a change. Sure, sometimes, during the year or so before I became vegan, the thought of drinking milk some days would gross me out. I'd think of calves being fed a combination of milk, hormones, antibiotics, and the blood of other cows and we too grossed out to touch the stuff for the next few days. But I love cheese, I love mint chocolate chip ice cream, and I especially love goldfish crackers. The idea of giving these things up long term was something I couldn't even think about.

Then I read a book called Skinny Bitch, which you've probably seen or heard of even if you don't remember it. It's full of quite a few flaws in reasoning and other errors, but it did compile everything bad I've ever learned about the meat/dairy/egg industry in one nice little place where I was forced to read it all. Even though the sources they quote throughout the book are often less than reputable (PETA, for example), BUT everything int hat book about animal factory farms I had heard somewhere before, I just really hadn't compiled the information together and been confronted with it directly. The quotes in the book from people who had worked or were currently working in these facilities were horrifying. Shoving tasers up pigs' butts? Gross. Pulling horses out of transport vehicles they they become frozen to, ripping off their skin? Gross. I'll stop writing about the bad stuff for now because to be honest I don't like thinking about it, and who would?

On a happier note, which I meant this entire post to be on, I feel so alive and full of energy. I eat way better than I did before. Vegetables take just as long to steam as a frozen dinner takes to heat up. I don't worry about calories or anything, just making things taste good in a vegan way, and boy does food taste great when you put some time into it! I'm also blessed by the fact that I'm in college and the surrounding grocery stores cater to local, organic, vegetarian, and vegan preferences. I realize that most grocery stores don't carry "Rice Dream" ice cream, which has a delish mint chocolate swirl flavor, soy yogurt, or even vegan butter. Whatever will I do when I move? But for now I'm content in the fact that I haven't had to give up any of my favorite foods, just find substitutes for them.

-Georgia

cred and a quick summary

2009-03-29T10:46:00.005-04:00

More and more, I
Am becoming a CS
Major you'd expect.

Haha, and by that I mean that I played StarCraft for the first time last night. Pathetic, I know, that I haven't played it before... it was pretty amusing, I have to say, when I opened the box with the installation disks and found a flier:

COMING IN 1999: DIABLO II FOR BATTLE.NET

:P Amusement ensued. Anyway, I did like StarCraft a fair amount. I haven't played a game similar to it since I was obsessed with Age of Mythology about 5 summers ago, but it's ok. I don't think it'd take long for me to get better at it, and I'm probably going back to play more later today. Teehee.

Also contributing to this CS major-ness is the Math Talent Show yesterday. I'll post a link to my friend's standup routine when he actually puts it on the interwebs. It was a good time for all, I think. A group perfomed Finite Simple Group of Order Two . I love that song. <3! Additionally, a guy did violin beatboxing? I had seen fluteboxing, but this was something completely different (and completely awesome).

I realized that I never actually mentioned what I did on spring break! The Arkansas trip was nixed due to infighting, so Robbie Woerner and I decided to head to Florida with my family. This gave us a few days at home first (Venus had a doctor's appointment or something on Tuesday, so we planned to leave following that), which meant that there was some adventure to be had right away!

On Saturday, Venus asked me to lead her friends on a caving trip. I, um, didn't have any particular confidence in these particular friends, and I was very hesitant to take them. She insisted, though, so we went. (Hahaha, I think that I will avoid mentioning their names so that this ridiculous story won't ever show up in a Google search for them, funny though that would be.) I found the most obnoxiously pansy cave that I could to take them through, because they had never been underground before, and I didn't want them to be responsible for getting hurt.

Five minutes into the cave, we are walking in a less-than-ankle-deep stream. I am in front. We come to a fork. "We're going left," I say. Seconds later, one of Venus's friends does not, for some reason, turn right at the fork. She also didn't turn left. She simply walked her face straight into the wall. This, as you might imagine, led to bleeding. So we rushed her out of the cave.

The cut was tiny (about 1.5cm), so we cleaned it up and decided to do something else with the day in Bloomington: Chris (a friend visiting from Johns Hopkins) took us to a railroad trestle west of town. We wandered around by it, and on the way back to the car I heard a yell behind me. "We got a bleeder!" Chris.

"What the hell does that mean?" I asked.

"Get a towel!" my sister ran down the hill looking frantic.

"Oh, not again..." We grabbed towels and bandaids and all that good stuff and tried to fix the bleeding friend up again, this time while en route to the Emergency Room. Was her blood not clotting? What was the matter? I had no experience with this sort of stuff. When we were 95% of the way to the hospital, the other friend offered a meek comment, "I'm sorry... it was a knee-jerk reaction."

I looked skeptically at her in the rearview mirror. "What was a knee-jerk reaction?" It was explained to us that bleeding friend had been walking behind other friend and tapped her on the shoulder, and other friend's immediate reaction was to clock bleeding friend in the face and set off another spurt of hemoglobin. Wonderful. She didn't even merit stitches at the ER; just some glue. UGH.

Then there was a nice day of hiking on Sunday with Robbie and Venus, which actually led to a chance meeting with a high school teacher whom we all had for US Government who is now retired. That was a nice surprise. Monday was full of errands (I got my computer sent off to be fixed, got the oil changed on the car, and managed to get in a bit of shopping, during which I found a killer white vest), but there have to be days like that sometimes. Tuesday I spent essentially the entire day in the car between dropping Venus at the doctor's, picking up Robbie, realizing Robbie forgot his wallet and driving back to his house and then back to my house, and heading out for our trip. We made a stop at the Lodge Cast Iron store in Tennessee. I am now the proud owner of a cast iron brand in the shape of a V.

Florida was fun, but I think we did way too much driving. From Tuesday to Saturday we visited St. Augustine (the oldest city in the US, and we went on a ghost tour to learn some of the history), Boynton Beach (Mom has a friend there), Miami (Robbie and I got to go clubbing for a little while), Venice (fossilized sharks' teeth lie scattered along the beach for observant travelers to collect, plus the beach sand was perfect for running and playing Frisbee on), and St. Pete Beach (aka "St. Pete, Bitch" as per the signs: ST PETE BCH). There was more time in the car than fun in the sun, but it wasn't a bad trip overall. :)

I guess that was a longer summary than I had intended, but... well, you know.

re: last post

2009-03-26T19:49:00.002-04:00

Dag, yo. That's crazy
Stuff happenin' there. Am I
That bad a person?

Well, I mean, I'm not *bad*, but my curiosity got the better of me as I thought about that last post and I decided to calculate my carbon footprint since January 1, 2008. 7.96 tonnes of CO2??? Ouch! I think that it probably has mostly to do with all the flying that I do; just the trip to Tokyo was 1.96 tonnes... :-/ Maybe I'll stay home more... oh, wait, I'm going to Germany. Scratch that.

So I'm sorta bummed about that, but I did get extra points from the calculator for being a vegetarian, not owning a car, and doing mostly walking and biking. Although I think I remember reading somewhere that walking is actually worse for the environment than driving, assuming that all your food energy comes from meat. Meat comes from a long way away...

So I guess I'm going to work on improving that. I'm about 2x what the world goal is, but I'm (both happily and sadly, I guess) only about 1/3 of what the US average is. Hmmmmmmmmm. Rugged individualism!

some thoughts

2009-03-26T09:20:00.003-04:00

Now that I'm back in
School, I can ponder stuff like
This. And share it, too!

I went to a talk earlier this week by one of the profs in the CS department (man, the honors seminar at IU is pretty awesome): Eli Blevis. He talked to us about all the tech junk that computers and stuff are generating; even washing machines have brains now, and when a consumer doesn't know how to fix it (and sometimes even techs don't know!), washing machines will get replaced. The whole machine. When all one really needs is probably one part that's maybe 8" long.

Eli also talked about other areas of sustainability. He and his wife live in town, but they grow almost all of their own food in a garden, and they have creative ways of recycling things that they can't produce on their own. Bloomington actually has several interesting sites for this; along 446 there is a toilet, well-known to the denizens of this area, with flowers peeking out of its bowl.

Eli started his work before everyone was green fatigued. He wrote the first paper on sustainability in computer hardware. Ironic that he flew all over the world to present it.

It's shocking to me how little people think about all this stuff. I mean, I guess it's a little more to the forefront of people's minds in a community like Bloomington that is basically the closest Indiana may get to a hippie commune, but so many people in so many places don't give it a second thought at all. People replace their cell phones on average every 17 months? That's ridiculous. One guy who attended the seminar on Monday has had twelve cell phones in three years. That is *obscene*, mmkay? I get my cell phone replaced every two years like a good kid. I've had my laptop for almost 3 years. Do I really want that new gaming rig? Well, yes. But I probably don't need it. Our society of keeping up with the Joneses is rife with rapidly diminishing satisfaction with technology. I wish people didn't have this crazy desire to be above-and-beyond better than other people. :-/

vacation with ponce de leon and gandhi

2009-03-23T09:16:00.003-04:00

I roll with them, those
Crazy famous dead folk, all
The way in Flor'da.

home sweet home

2009-03-15T22:29:00.003-04:00

I can't stay away

From ERs, it seems, even

When I am at home.

Evidently, I should listen to my gut. A while ago, Venus asked me to arrange a caving trip for her and a couple of her friends, girls I had known from when I was still in high school. Based on who they were, I was a little hesitant to take them on a trip; they had been rather girly when I had known them before. I was assured that things would be fine, and I decided that I could take them through the wimpiest cave I knew. Little did I know that it wasn't wimpy enough. On walking through a stream, one of her friends ran her face into a wall and started bleeding. We went to the ER. The cut was only 1.5cm long, so it didn't even require stitches, but she got it glued (?) shut.

In other news, I am home for Spring Break! The Arkansas plans got nixed, but Robbie and I are going to go with my parents and sister to the Carolinas/Virginias/Washington. It should be a fun time. :) I've been enjoying relaxing, though. I watched a couple pretty sweet movies: Idiocracy and I'm a Cyborg, But That's Okay. The first was sort of depressing in its humour, but it was definitely hilarious. The second was an interesting imported movie from Korea that was on our On-Demand channel. The bunny guy was so sweet. I think I need a Rice-Megatron, though: I may be a cyborg.

What else.... oh, Robbie, Venus, and I went hiking today and ran into Mr. Nay. That was pretty random. Amusingly, it was at Hesitation Point (in Brown County State Park).

And happy Pi Day! Well, it was yesterday, and I missed out on the pie, but I still feel that the well-wishings are valid. ;)

germany!

2009-03-11T16:13:00.004-04:00

I can't adventure
Enough during school, but in
The summer? For sure!

Just this morning I received an email from the DAAD-RISE program that I applied to many moons ago, and they told me that I've been accepted as an intern for the summer! That means that I'll be heading to Germany in mid-May and coming back stateside in mid-August. The work will be at a university in Darmstadt, a town (or city?) just outside Frankfurt. I have lots of research to do before I get there, though; I don't know the first thing about work visas or apartment-hunting in other countries or train passes or driving internationally or... well, the list goes on.

Anyway, I'm sure that I'll be posting more about that as summer approaches. Right now I've got some PL homework to do. *sigh*

winnings!

2009-03-08T17:47:00.004-04:00

Losing an hour,

Doesn't take away THAT much

Excitement from me.

It's important to take things as they come, and when a beautiful day comes along, it is important to take it! So yesterday I pretty much wrote off the entire day to enjoyment. I had stayed up late Friday night (Sean and I went to see Watchmen, which was a lot better than I expected, and then I got sucked into a game of Settlers of Catan with Evan over the internets, in which I totally pwned him ;), so I woke up around 11, ate breakfast, and went to parkour! Although I haven't been to it in some time, I noticed that I was a lot better at wall climbs. Presumably that is due to the fact that Roy and I have been training pullups. Woot!

In addition, I went hiking in the Dean Wilderness yesterday with Jaimie and a few of his friends (I knew two of them, Ronak and Jess, but the third, Sara(h?) was new to me). It was gorgeous, and we climbed the fire tower there. We also wandered down to the lake to search for fossils and watch the sunset. On the way down there, there was a burned-down house that was still partially standing; the fireplace/chimney and lower floor walls remained. So we climbed the chimney and poked around in the ruins a little.

After hiking, I went with Roy to the Union to see Milk, a film about the first openly gay man to serve in a high public office. It was really good! It's super sad how people treat(ed) homosexuals during that time. Hard to believe that just 30 years ago people were being denied housing and jobs just because of sexual orientation. Even harder to believe that they still get treated that way sometimes today.

Then, on to Max's place to watch Iuri (my capoeira instructor)'s band play. They had a really awesome hiphop/reggae/rock(?) thing going on. It was hard music to dance to, though, at least for me. I don't really rock out to that stuff very often.

Later, Atomic Age Cinema! I had heard of this previously, but I had also been told that it was for the 21 and up crowd, which, though disheartening, didn't surprise me. Anyway, I didn't ever look into it until last night. Basically, at a theatre here called the Cinemat there is something like "Mystery Science Theater 3000" live. A horrible movie is screened, and four guys dress up in ridiculous costumes (Dr. Calamari, for instance) and mock it, and anyone is welcome to join in. The movie last night was "Death Bed: The Bed that Eats." It was a rather enjoyable film about a bed that dissolved people in yellow digestive acid that quite resembled beer.

Today I've done real work... well, mostly. I finally hooked up with Chris Beckley for the first time in months, and we went to Gum Boot dancing lessons. I guess his logic teacher runs them. Anyway, Gum Boot dancing is based off of communications developed between miners in Africa. It's a whole lot of boot slapping and -stomping. I enjoyed myself, despite the fact that I was, in a word, terrible.

Now I think I'll go explore some of the weird stores around here that I've never been to. The big Sahara Mart is something that I'm pretty anxious to explore. I also noticed that I pretty desperately need new shoes for parkour, so maybe I'll check out things to that end, as well.

losings

2009-03-06T20:00:00.004-05:00

DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME???

Willy-nilly change the clocks...

What the hell's the point?

I don't understand why Indiana switched to having daylight savings time. It has to be a hassle for businesses, right? Paying people for an hour they don't work in the spring, paying people overtime for an hour they work twice in the fall? Plus it's just weird, and I don't see why anyone cares what clock hour the sun comes up at.

On that note, what's up with timezones? I can understand that it's nice to have a semi-standard time that the sun comes up, but the way that they're currently laid out, that isn't really the case. Indiana, again, for example, when it locked onto the Eastern time zone stretched it out to some kind of impossible proportion. It's probably more than an hour between the time Augusta sees first light and the time that we here in Bloomington do. Some places have solved this problem (?) by introducing time zones that aren't an hour long. In India (noticing a pattern with place names here, haha) there are 30- and 45-minute time zones. The way I see it, this is even more inconvenient. Changing a digital watch by 45 minutes is a hassle.

I guess it makes sense that Indiana be slave to the same system as the rest of the states with respect to daylight savings, but why do we observe this any more in the States, anyway? AFAIK, it's some kind of leftover from Ben Franklin's efforts to spark demand for candles or some such. I've never heard of a modern-day purpose that it serves, and all I ever hear about it is people complaining. Maybe that's because I'm in Indiana and we've been spoiled until recently, but does it make sense to you?

All I can say is I'm not buying any candles.

owwww

2009-03-04T22:29:00.004-05:00

Muscles ache, brain, too,

Learning, growing, expanding!

I'll redeem myself.

So I still feel like this term is pretty slow compared to other ones as far as classwork goes, but I'm finding other ways to entertain myself. Roy and I have been doing some serious working out this week; each of us is striving to be the first to do a pullup. :P The daily gymination is coming as quite a shock to my as-late-untrained body, but we're pulling through. I just can't laugh without squeezing back little tears of pain.

I'm enjoying exploring other academic pursuits, as well. The work on Polyworld with Larry Yaeger should be pretty interesting, and now that I've got my laptop running Ubuntu alongside Windows it'll actually be feasible to work on it, haha. And I've plowed through a couple books on graph theory this week; that was pretty interesting. I guess a lot of it just seems intuitive, but the introduction of, y'know, proper terms is sort of nice to have.

Did I mention that I bought a beginner book on piano over the weekend! In the absence of friends who are always around to regale me with their playings, I am reduced to attempting to pick out tunes for myself. I guess it's on my list, so maybe it's not so useless a pursuit, after all. Oh, I was sitting in the fireplace room in the Union (one of my favourite places on campus, especially during the winter), and for the first time I had the distinct pleasure of listening to a really talented player pour out some songs through the gorgeous white grand piano there. It was a fantastic feeling: soaking up the fire, absorbing the music, and pondering my maths.

I went over to the place I may be living in the fall this evening to chill and play WiiFit. That game is pretty sweet. But I guess the apartment is the interesting thing. ;) It's about the same size as this place, but the kitchen is bigger, and it has a sweet loft (which would probably be my bedroom). It also has a fireplace, and it just feels homier than this apartment. Plus the floors don't creak. The downside? It's pretty far from campus. There is a bus, but... I dunno. I sorta wanted to be closer to where things happen. We'll see how it goes.

blondes have more fun

2009-03-02T12:24:00.002-05:00

I'm back to brunette,

And it may just be that blondes

Have more fun than me.

Yes, I know that "me" should be an "I," but that sort of throws off the rhyming thing that I was attempting to do there.

Anyway, now I'm a brunette again. I think the colour that I chose is a little ashier than my natural one, so it may look silly when it grows out, anyway. But whatever. It's actually been kinda funny to see what people think of this new/old hairdo. A lot of people never saw me with short brown hair since I dyed it practically the day after I got it cut. Now a lot of people are barely noticing a change; I guess the blonde combined with the short was a shock, and this is just business as usual? Who knows.

But on the topic of blondes having more fun... it might be true. At least, it was for me. ;) I mean, c'mon, I spent two weeks in Tokyo, flew to Canada over a weekend, saved a girl from a falling rock in a cave, took my roommate to the emergency room for a broken patella, started capoeira classes... since I've gone back to brunette, what have I done? Well, not a lot. Hrm.

fire alarms and math nerds

2009-02-28T11:48:00.005-05:00

Math nerds, unite! By

The power of numbers,

We play... Settlers? Hm.

Last night I had the distinct pleasure of attending a party of math nerds. Those people can be lots of fun in large groups, especially when there are party games around that encourage it. For instance, during the course of the evening, we played Apples to Apples, and one green card that came up was "edgy." The winning card? "Stop signs." Maybe not math nerdy so much as... well... regularly, generally neardy, but fun nonetheless. We also played a round of Settlers of Catan, which I whupped up in, thanks to the still-burning shame of losing last time I played with Evan. :P

The board that we used for it was super-nice, though. I borrowed it from a friend's roommate, and he had built a wooden briefcase to tote it around in and everything. I'm pretty sure he had every expansion, but we elected to forgo the expansions in light of the fact that half the people who wanted to play had never played before. Might have been too confusing. But I'm thinking that I probably want to get a board of my own sometime; it's a good game to have around.

Also yesterday was Capoeira. It's such fun! We extended our respective repertoires of badassery by cartwheeling over barriers. Have you ever tried it? It's terrifying! But you feel frickin awesome when you do it. :D

Oh! And I finally got my W-2 from Google and filed my taxes. Thanks, Uncle Sam.

This morning I was awakened by an odd odor shortly followed by a piercing beeping noise. Evidently Georgia had left a pot on the stove for a wee bit too long, and the stuff in it had turned the charcoal. Our fire alarm was not happy. Unfortunately, it was really unpleasant to throw open all the windows and doors downstairs, as it's approximately 28 degrees here (that's -2 for you metric folk ;).

Undaunted by previous kitchen incidents, I started making bread this morning. It should be super tasty: cranberry cinnamon sugar. Mmmmmm.

Anyway, I'm hoping to find some excitement for this weekend. I'm thinking that I'll probably dye my hair back to brown so that it's mo' betta' for my Silk Spectre costume. Watchmen releases on Friday! I'm excited! :D!

no facebook: day 2

2009-02-26T12:49:00.003-05:00

Productivity

No longer punctuated

With random people.

Well, it's been about 37 hours since I swore off Facebook, and it's been beautiful. :) I guess I never spent that much time on there, but I did take microbreaks from whatever I was theoretically supposed to be doing in order to see if I had any messages/invites/pokes/whatever. It's amazing what removing those 15 second diversions can do for focus.

I'm a little sad about the fact that I essentially lost a second email address. I know a lot of people won't be contacting me at all for 38 more days. :(

In other news, I'm starting to lean more and more towards Cognitive Science for graduate school. I've had meetings with a couple of people in the department over the last day or so, and the idea of combining all these seemingly-random things that I've been studying up until now into a coherent sort of discipline is really appealing. I signed up to take the GRE for Computer Science in early April. I have to say I'm at least a little apprehensive; I can only assume that there are things I won't know on it that I'll learn in the next year, but from my score on the practice exam I think I'll do okay. I'm hoping to get a book from a prof about graph theory, which is an entire topic that is entirely missing from IU's CS program. Meh.

lent

2009-02-24T09:34:00.003-05:00

I like to observe
Other folks' holidays. It's
Good for the soul.

Well, I'm not Catholic, but Lent starts tomorrow, and I've decided to give something up. I observed Ramadan a couple years ago, and that was a really rewarding experience. Why not, right? I decided to forgo Facebook for the next 40 days and 40 nights. We'll see how that works out, haha. :) Hopefully it will end in my being more productive.

Anyway, I will still be existing until Easter. If you need to contact me (and you can't use Facebook to do it!), my email address and phone number are still listed on my Facebook page. ;) Teehee.

Wish me luck!

exclamation points!!!

2009-02-18T15:39:00.002-05:00

Did you ever notice

The sheer number of them? My

Left pinky itches.

I didn't realize until I glanced at this blog's archive just now that I use exclamation points entirely too much. Maybe it isn't a bad thing. I think it's probably just a consequence of the person I am: living fully in EVERY SINGLE SECOND. Maybe I just get bored reading dully-punctuated textbooks all day. Maybe I like factorials, or I am trying to "not" everything. Whatever it is, it is.

I guess the real point of this post is to express some more excitement, though. I got an email from my host this week that my features should be launching sometime in the next month! Who knows what that really means, but they've definitely been picked up by other engineers, and they should be ready and raring to go. Soon!

pictures!

2009-02-16T21:47:00.000-05:00

Everywhere I go,

Random people appear, and

They send me pictures!

Picture from the Canal de Rideau in Ottawa, taken by Ed, a random guy Evan and I ran into during our skating. His are actually the only pictures that exist from the trip... haha, oops.

<3!!!

2009-02-16T18:13:00.003-05:00

(-∞, 2601218943565795100204903227081043611191521875016945785727541837850835631156947382240678577958130457082619920575892247259536641565162052015873791984587740832529105244690388811884123764341191951045505346658616243271940197113909845536727278537099345629855586719369774070003700430783758997420676784016967207846280629229032107161669867260548988445514257193985499448939594496064045132362140265986193073249369770477606067680670176491669403034819961881455625195592566918830825514942947596537274845624628824234526597789737740896466553992435928786212515967483220976029505696699927284670563747137533019248313587076125412683415860129447566011455420749589952563543068288634631084965650682771552996256790845235702552186222358130016700834523443236821935793184701956510729781804354173890560727428048583995919729021726612291298420516067579036232337699453964191475175567557695392233803056825308599977441675784352815913461340394604901269542028838347101363733824484506660093348484440711931292537694657354337375724772230181534032647177531984537341478674327048457983786618703257405938924215709695994630557521063203263493209220738320923356309923267504401701760572026010829288042335606643089888710297380797578013056049576342838683057190662205291174822510536697756603029574043387983471518552602805333866357139101046336419769097397432285994219837046979109956303389604675889865795711176566670039156748153115943980043625399399731203066490601325311304719028898491856203766669164468791125249193754425845895000311561682974304641142538074897281723375955380661719801404677935614793635266265683339509760000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000)

who says math isn't romantic?

canadia parte deux

2009-02-15T12:03:00.004-05:00

White lands of the North,
But full of warm things! And, of
Course, of injuries.

I get to see Evan this weekend! Super exciting! It was a pretty long flight to get here, though. Mostly because of a couple hours spent in O'Hare waiting for my other plane to board. I was bored, so I decided to explore. Did you know that O'Hare has a children's museum in it?? It was pretty crazy. I also spent upwards of an hour walking around, and I made it from end to end in that time, but I skipped, like, 4 terminals. They go from A to L or something, and each one is huge.

Irrespective of that, I'm here! Evan's little apartment is pretty nice, although it seems his roommate has made himself scarce for the weekend. :P When I got here, Evan took me out to try poutine, which is some crazy dish that is, both basically and exactly, French fries + gravy + cheese curds. Hmm.

This place is interesting; Ottawa is right on the border of two provinces, Quebec and Ontario. The drinking age is different in these two provinces, so students from the other side like to come over here to drink a year younger. There are a lot of signs at bars detailing that Ontario residents aren't permitted entry unless they are 19.

Let's see, what've we done so far, other than eat poutine... well, this weekend in Ottawa is Winterlude, an ice/snow/winter festival thing. The city sets up ice sculpting contests, ice slides (super fun), fire and ice shows... plus the Rideau canal is frozen over and skateable, so we did that. It's odd to see, like, vendors and stuff just parked out on a frozen canal. We got a beaver tail, too, which is more or less an elephant ear, but tastier and in more flavours! We got garlic and cheese. Mmmmmm. Oh, and I, of course, injured myself ice skating. The canal ice was weird. Its surface was really irregular, I guess due to the fact that there was an unseasonable warm spell this week. So my figure skates' little teeth thingies caught on one of the flaws, and down I went. Onto my knee. I'm reasonably certain that it fared better than Georgia's knee, haha, but it still kinda hurts and is a bit swollen. :( But, you know what? It was totally worth it. Oh, and some random guy visiting from Toronto took our picture. I gave him my email address, so maybe he'll have sent it to me by later today and I can put it up.

For dinner yesterday, we whipped up a dericious feast. I had brought some drunken goat cheese with me, so we had that, and we had also some fresh homemade bread, artichoke hearts, FECKING TASTY bean sprout salad, tuna salad, currants, and local brews. Yum! Every adventure with Evan seems to turn into a food adventure, inexplicably.

But that wasn't all, of course! Evan of all people would be the one to find a Valentine's Day rave for us to attend. The tickets for it were pretty sweet: Invader Zim-themed! Hahaha. So we got all dolled up and went out to the club. It was pretty sweet. :3

Well, maybe that's all. Probably not. There's still today, and we're still planning some adventuring for later. It's going to be sad to go back to Bloomington, especially since I have a midterm, like, 23 hours from now. Uck.

But it's a good weekend. :D

Oi What a week!

2009-02-12T08:35:00.002-05:00

So this past week has been so jam packed with stuff but I've been on so many pain meds I don't really remember a lot of it. I had surgery on Monday- they put some screw, bone graft, and wire in my kneecap. The day got off to a really good start though, Jeff woke up early and suprised me with a longstem pink and white rose and a little stuffed animal tree frog that had "surgery frog" written on its stomach. My knee hurts a lot more now than when I broke it, and these pain meds are doing a number on me. I'm finally able to think somewhat coherently and so, I'm able to write this entry! I'm sad I had to miss class this morning though (I was throwing up), we were going to be learning different frog calls! I was really looking forward to it!

I'm excited because tomorrow Jeff and I are going to see Circ de Soleil, which his mom kindly got us tickets for. Saturday night we are going to a dance at Collins: the Vieneese Ball. Hopefully dancing with my knee won't be too bad, but I know that Jeff will make sure I have a good time no matter what. Sunday I have to do a 4 hour lab, ugh, BUT Kyle is also moving to Bloomington that day, which is very exciting! I need to start sending valentine's to people actually! Yay! Danielle is coming up this weekend to visit Dennis, so hopefully I'll be able to do something with them as well.

Val- I hope you have fun in Canada this weekend! Find a penpal for me! And I just got your Valentine's day card you left for me! THANK YOU!

happy birthday, Georgia!

2009-02-10T14:42:00.002-05:00

You made it, at last!

Too bad the drugs make you odd,

But we like you still.

spring???

2009-02-09T17:31:00.002-05:00

Wait, what? Spring has sprung?

How come no one told me this news?

I CAN WEAR SHORTS NOW???

So apparently nobody bothered to inform our lady Gaia that it's the middle of February. Today was a balmy 60 degrees in the middle of the day. Seriously. It's awful. All my beautiful snow, gone! But whatever. I guess that's how it goes sometimes.

Georgia's surgery was today. I haven't seen her yet... but I'm sure it went fine. :)

This semester is making me horrifically lazy. I haven't got a lot of work to do, so I always put it off. But the thing is that the work is pretty complicated, so.... it's just generally a bad idea. Merp.

cookies!

2009-02-05T21:21:00.003-05:00

Baking, delicious!

And ingredients can be

Faked, if need be. *grin*

So Georgia and I met our neighbors, finally. We noticed their wireless network a few days ago; ours is "Next to 666," and theirs is "Yes_it's_666." :) Anyway, we whipped up a batch of orange chocolate chunk cookies for them.

Ingredients:

1 cup shortening

1/4 cup light brown sugar

1/4 cup dark brown sugar

1/2 cup white sugar

zest of one orange

juice of same orange

2 eggs

2 1/2 cups AP flour

1/2 cup of crushed chocolate anything (we used M&Ms and Hershey bars)

some salt

some vanilla

some baking soda

These cookies go through the standard cookie-mixing steps: creaming the shortening and sugars, adding flour in stages, blah blah blah. They bake for a really long time, though. The recipe calls for the oven to be at 300, and it took a good 25 minutes for them to come out. Maybe we just make bigger cookies than most folks, though. ;)

Anyway, we took these to our neighbour. He is evidently from Russia. He opened the door, beer in hand.

"We're your neighbors! We made cookies for you!"

"Is this for real?"

It was pretty funny. I hope his daughter is around sometime, or that she at least likes the cookies.

Thursday Cooking Night: Georgia and Val make Potato Blintzes

2009-02-05T20:48:00.006-05:00

So tonight Val and I had our weekly cooking night as usual, but this night we decided to do a blog about it! So we made Potato Blintzes, which is basically a potato/ spinach/ onion mixture wrapped in crepes. I had the difficult task of making the crepes, but they turned out only half way retarded! Yay! So here's the recipe, they tasted great! We put soy sauce on ours, or you can add in cheese.

Ingredients:

crepe filling:
about 2 medium potatoes
2 onions
1 lb spinach
salt (some) and pepper (lots)

crepes:
1 cup flour
1/4 cup water
1 1/2 milk or soy milk

Directions:
Mix all the crepe ingredients together and let sit in the fridge for several hours, or if you're a hurried improvising college student, stick it in the freezer for a while and then in the fridge!

Mash up the potatoes, heat up the spinach (if frozen) or mix it in with the potatoes or something. Saute the onions and add salt and pepper to taste, and voila! You have your crepe filling.

Make your crepes, stack them up on a plate, put some filling in each one and wrap it up. Cook them in a frying pan for a bit. Guess what?! You're done!

IMPORTANT NOTE: In writing this I assumed that you would use your common sense when making these. For example, spray the crepe pan with cooking oil before you start making them.

Also pictured is the batter for the cookies we made afterward, Orange chocolate chunk! Delish! But I believe Val is posting about those...

In other news, I have surgery Monday on my knee. Hmmm. Time to get all my homework for next week done before the painkillers make my brain all foggy.

-Georgia

age

2009-02-04T08:37:00.002-05:00

Damnit, I'm so old,

You may say I'm in the prime of

Life, but I know. Eff.

I was watching "Memento" at Carlo and Jaimie's last night, and two of its stars are Carrie-Ann Moss and Joe Pantoliano, better known as Trinity and Cypher from "The Matrix" trilogy. We had a depressing realization: the first Matrix movie came out 10 years ago this year. That's half my life.

;_______;

First Georgia Post!

2009-02-03T20:34:00.002-05:00

Well, Valkyrie has been mentioning it off and on for a while about it now, and the time has finally come for my first blog post! Val has wonderfully described the adventure of breaking my knee, but the aftermath is far less amusing slash annoying. We'll leave it at that for now.

Today one of my classes was canceled (YAY!) and Kyle came to visit (double YAY!). We went to Mother Bear's, and we're about to start watching a movie projected onto my living room wall. And that, is the end to a short and sweet blog post.

event

2009-02-02T12:58:00.004-05:00

Can it be? Really?

People in my office now?

How did that happen?

Haha, it's an event! I was just sitting in my office hours today, unsuspecting, and, suddenly, 3 PEOPLE CAME IN. Crazy, I know.

And I am a fan of Punxutawney Phil's predilection for predicting 6 more weeks of winter weather. <3!!

Additionally, Georgia is now an author on this blog, so hopefully there will be some differently-opined content on here shortly. :D

la vie boheme

2009-01-31T13:51:00.005-05:00

Tramping through the snow,

You can't hear a sound. It's easy

To lose yourself here.

I maintain that snow is magical. I won't go into the whole spiel about "oh, it's so beautiful and quiet and peaceful," mainly because I don't feel linguistically equipped to deal with it in a more convincing way than I've seen it done before, but also because there are adventures to relate!

So Georgia went in to see an orthopedist about her kneecap, and she managed to break it pretty much totally. A normal kneecap seen from the top looks like a semicircle, mmkay? Well, she broke it vertically on the right and on the left and horizontally between those lines (so it formed, like, an "H"). In the centre of the bottom of the H is... powder. She shattered it totally. :/ It's been interesting/amusing to watch her crutch around in the snow. Yeah, so I'm totally insensitive. :P

It's sort of funny, too: I guess it's not really the type of break that a cast can be made for, so she's been set up with a compression sock and a soft-ish brace-y thing. I mean, when you break a bone, though, you of course want your sympathetic friends to sign it, right? So later today we're going to bust out permanent markers and sign that sock.

There has been more sledding since then! Last night I went out with some more friends to the same hill. Over the course of the past few days, a lot of people have had this idea. Whereas the snow was fluffy and soft on Wednesday, last night it was hard and slick and fast. Pretty much any flat-ish object was suitable for sledding. I felt like a proper college student as I whooshed over a ramp riding a trash can lid, and, later, a cardboard box. Awesome.

It's amazing the amount of ingenuity that college students have for things like that. I mean, friends and I have faked some pretty tasty meals this semester. If we're missing an ingredient for something, we choose the sort-of-closest thing that we have to it and sub it in. No fresh-cut tomatoes? Well, we do have pasta sauce...

Oh, and, as a side note: spicy hot chocolate is delicious.

epic

2009-01-28T21:56:00.008-05:00

I can't get enough

Adventure just for me, or

So it would appear.

Before I forget, here is one of the pictures from the ice cave: YAY ICE CAVE.

School was canceled today! It was amazing. IU hardly ever does this. I got a text message at around 7am informing me that school was closed until noon, and one later saying that it would be closed the rest of the day (I signed up for this alert system thingy that they do.). Of course the best choice on a snow day is to go sledding! So I called Sean. We met DOWNTOWN. We settled on snow tubes at a place called Tri North, which is a middle school in Bloomington that happens to be on the city's largest hill. Awesome!

Georgia came, too! I was excited to spend time with her. Jeff was busy with homework, and she was free, so it was good! Also along for the ride were Alex (Sean's friend) and Kurt (Alex's neighbor). Driving was pretty treacherous, but not for Kurt's Subaru with All-Wheel Drive. :P

We get to the hill, and it's awesome! About a dozen people have beaten us there. We lug our tubes up to the top and start sliding down. Then, as college students, we decide we need a ramp! Of course! So Alex and Kurt build a NICE LITTLE 2FT RAMP. And it was good. The only way to send two people down on a tube was crossways on top of each other, which Georgia and I were the only ones brave enough to try.

But there were better things to be found on the hill! One kid had created a SNOW BIKE. He had pulled the wheels off and REPLACED THEM WITH SKIS, which then made it easy to ride down the hill. It cut through even unpacked snow like a dream.

Then we noticed that some kids had built a bigger ramp. We were like, hey! We have snow tubes! Let's go! So we WENT. I know that I saw a guy catch more than 6ft of air off the end of it, and I had quite a lot of fun on it myself. Then came Georgia's turn...

She managed to get turned around on the way down, and the moral of the story is that she landed on her knee and face somehow. So we spent the second half of the day with Jeff in the ER getting 11 stitches in her chin and a bunch of XRAYS that revealed a broken kneecap. Fortunately, she didn't also have a broken chin. So that was good. Bummer about some of the stuff she won't be able to do now, though.

But we did get a few good things out of the day. I like the videos and pics from Sean a lot, for instance. And Georgia's mom bought us all Panera! And... Georgia, Jeff, and I watched the caves episode of Planet Earth. Win!

basically awesome

2009-01-24T18:00:00.004-05:00

Cooking at last! And

I get to see Georgia! What

A term it will be!

It's so much more awesome already. I actually get to see the girl I'm living with! Mary's still pretty nonpresent, but Georgia and I have been spending a lot of time together cooking, computering, homeworking, and generally hanging out. Tonight we're off to a formal, hooray!

Not to mention the other awesomenesses: the fact that I actually get to see my own house during daylight hours is crazy. And it isn't just because the days are getting longer! Sean's going to have ridiculous amounts of cave trips and other adventures this term, I think, since it's his last before he jets off to grad school who-knows-where. Last night we took a trip to a cave just west of town that didn't really have nice rock formations (people had been through and destroyed them), but in the entrance where it was below freezing there were some amazing ice formations. I think he'll be putting up those pictures later; I'll post a link if I remember to. And Carlo seems excited to find some adventures, too. A trip to the Creationist museum may be in store. I can't wait to see a mural of people riding on velociraptors.

These classes are pretty sweet, too. I wish I had learned Scheme the right way the first time; I resented it until this semester, really. But now that I see how just nice it is, I can't help but be in love. Damnit, Dylan, you were right. :s

Anyway, I'm off to prepare! My first real dressing-up with short hair! :D

POCAR

2009-01-18T15:43:00.003-05:00

Every part of me,

Exhausted! Immobile! Why

Did I go for that?

Well, POCAR was a little less of a success than I'd hoped for. My team, the Flying Hellfish, managed to finish about 2/3 of the race, and then we realized that we were defeated. One of the checkpoints we visited was a decoy, and it would have taken more than we had in us to go correct our mistake, come back to the camp, and do the last leg. So we called it quits around 4 am after hiking something more than 12 miles over ridiculous hills.

But something about POCAR: people don't finish it. There were some pro teams who were in it to win it, but from what I understand only 15% or so of the teams who start each year actually make it all the way through. Good lord, was it tough! After the first loop, we were all in a sort of false sense of security; it wasn't over particularly vicious terrain, and it was only 6 miles or something. The second leg, though, was over crazy changes in altitude and was about 6 miles (longer, maybe; I'm not sure I mapped it out correctly), and we would have had to backtrack at least 5 to get the right checkpoint. ARGH. But I kept up with the boys despite the fact that I haven't really done hardcore exercise in 6 weeks or so because of that mono garbage.

Anyway, sleeping in a bed last night felt awesome. I wish I hadn't had to get up today. But I did, and here I am. I'm hopefully going to get some application essays written for a research program I want to do in Germany this summer. ^____^

semester

2009-01-15T20:26:00.003-05:00

Fun's begun, hurrah!

With so much time, maybe I'll

Keep up with writing.

So the semester has started out nicely, and it appears that it will be a fairly relaxing one (at least compared to the last one). I've enjoyed all my classes thus far, at least, and I can only imagine that they'll get more interesting.

But it's cold. My nostrils froze on the way to class this morning. That isn't right. Although it's sort of amusing to watch people go by here, and it's easy to tell who's from California (several layers of poufy coats, still shivering) and Indiana (smiling, wearing a sweatshirt)). And seeing clouds of breath is pretty neat, too. I'm hoping that the pond in the arboretum freezes thick enough to walk on soon. :D

home

2009-01-13T12:51:00.002-05:00

Again, that feeling,

What's done is done, can't go back,

Memories remain.

Happy new year!

So I don't know how I could begin to talk about how fabulous the trip to Tokyo was. I'll perhaps make a longer post about it later when I have my journal at hand and can properly recall all the crazinesses. But I don't know if it can be done. There are the pictures on picasa, and I've got a head and journal full of swirling thoughts, but trying to write it in a coherent way might not happen.

Anyway, the semester has started off pretty well. I've now been to almost all of my classes at least once, and they seem like they'll be ok. :) I'm a lot more excited about S312 than I was about S311, Hofstadter's course is going to be, predictably, awesome, algebra should be good, robotics sounds ridiculously cool, and I find myself dreading the Scheme class less than I expected. I can't wait to go to capoeira on Friday. :3

ready?

2008-12-23T21:00:00.003-05:00

Buy, trim, wrap, pack, chat,

Drive, snow, cook, eat, check, recheck,

You ready for this?

Well, Christmas is now two days away. Titan is here for the holidays, and the tree finally got put up at home yesterday. We had our family Christmas this morning. I feel like my Christmas has been a little overshadowed by my efforts to prepare for Japan (speaking of which, my hair's purpleish now--http://picasaweb.google.com/VASavage/PurplePains#--I guess that bleach blonde + purple + purple + purple = brown with purple streaks?), so I'm trying to make up for it by being really spirited. Cookies! Elves! Reindeer antlers!

It's been good. The roads are in awful condition, though. It's a white Christmas! The drive from Indianapolis to Joliet, which is normally ~3 hours, took 6-7 hours. I think I topped out at 50, and that wasn't for very long. Titan, Venus, and I saw 15 wrecks between Indy and mile marker 201 (normally about an hour away). People got a little too crazy, and it was wicked slick. We made it alright, though. Just waiting for Mom and Dad to get in later tonight. They left a few hours after us, and it seems like their going is even slower.

Japan plans are almost here! I'm nervous that I've forgotten something in Columbus or Bloomington, but I've repacked my bag so many times I don't know how I could have. I guess we'll find out for sure in THREE DAYS. <3!

holidays

2008-12-22T00:52:00.002-05:00

There's no place like home

For the holidays! But I

Won't be here for long.

It's good to be home. Finals done, hair cut, stress removed, bags packed, family visited, snow fallen, dogs walked. It was worth the hard term to have this epic break. I'm ridiculously excited about leaving on Friday. But the time home is nice to have, too. We visited family up in Chicago for a big pizza party ("oh, gosh! I didn't recognize you with your short hair!"), I went to a party for Ryan's birthday, ("oh, gosh! you look so good with short hair!"), and Titan came home ("oh, gosh! you have short hair??").

:) Can't wait!

hair

2008-12-19T22:20:00.003-05:00

It's gone for the cause,

And I don't miss it as much

As I thought I would.

My hair! It's gone! Lopped off! Sent to Locks of Love! I guess it's okay, though. I don't mind as much as I figured I would... 11". Hum.

http://picasaweb.google.com/VASavage/HolyHaircut#

finals

2008-12-16T09:09:00.001-05:00

A big test for all

The marbles? Wait, who thought this

Was a good idea?

Yeah, I can't say I'm a huge fan of the idea of finals. I haven't had any yet; mine are all today and tomorrow. It's less than thrilling to think about sitting in a room for two hours and agonizing over the fact that those two hours contribute 40% of my grade. Seriously, it's an awful idea.

On the plus side, finals week means that there's lots of free time (no homework or classes!) to make sure I see everyone before I shove off. ^_____^

And Christmas shopping. Ohhhh... that.

winding down

2008-12-11T08:34:00.003-05:00

No homework, more fun!

'Cept there's neither snow nor sun.

Oh, Indiana.

What the hell is this winter thing here, anyway? I've been living here for... what... wow, like, 12 years or something ridiculous, but anyway I still don't know what exactly the harbingers of winter are here. Sometimes it's snow. It snowed over the weekend (while I was fantastically ill), but it's all melted now. This week it's been sort of... grey and rainy. Ick. Thanks, December.

I'm happy to be much better now, though. I can do things like... breathe. And... eat. I was super excited yesterday night, actually; I was famished for the first time since I got sick. Apparently mono kills your appetite? But mine is back WITH A VENGEANCE.

I'm also happy to be done with all my homework for the term. All that's left now is a couple exams and a little presentation. WOOT. ^_____^

And then.... Japan!

ailing

2008-12-07T14:32:00.002-05:00

Just in time for my

Finals to start, just as it

Snows for once, I'm sick.

It *would* happen this way, wouldn't it? Of course. As Sean just told me today, everything I do is epic.

So on Tuesday, I went to the IU Health Center because my throat and neck were starting to feel... off. Once my body starts to feel off, it usually gets very bad. So I figured I should get it checked as soon as possible. I guess I went too soon; they did a strep test and it came back negative.

As the week wore on, I started counting the number of lymph nodes I could see and feel in my neck. It was pretty ridiculous. They're still grotesquely swollen. -___- I felt worse and worse, my appetite went away, and I couldn't swallow without wincing.

Today I woke up after 12 hours of sleep and was still exhausted. I could barely make myself drink a glass of milk for breakfast after not eating dinner yesterday, so I decided that I couldn't wait another day to go back to the health center, and I went instead to a place called PromptCare or something. The glorious news that they had for me was not that I have strep, but that I have both strep and mono. Awesome. Just in time for finals, just as Japan is looming, and just as we get our first real snowfall that I'd want to go out and play in. Ridiculous.

>:|

that time of year

2008-12-04T17:50:00.002-05:00

It's that time of year,
When Christmas spirit pours from
Everywhere. And how!

It's been pretty amusing to watch the transformation in stores. Some started Christmas in October, and it seems like prices are getting slashed in anticipation of the holiday season even more rapidly this year, probably due to the fact that consumer spending is expected to drop dramatically. I just read an article in the New York Times about Saks Fifth Avenue and how they're cutting some of their prices up to 80% already. Amazing.

I haven't actually done any Christmas shopping yet, myself, but it's looking like a pretty easy season. The internet now offers more gifts than ever, and I have some extra time to spend making creative gifts (i.e. spending less money). :)

I was pretty excited today; I busted out my Jack Skellington earmuffs for the first time this season and got lots of compliments on them. :D Winter is a fun season to dress for, haha. I'm also excited because I was talking to one of the guys from Dresden who was on the CC team, and he has promised to send me a Christmas care package with more chocolate. What he wants in exchange is... barbecue sauce?

Classes are winding down, which is nice. One of my profs has canceled all his lectures for next week, and I had two classes with him, so that frees up my schedule a lot. I also won't be (I don't think) teaching the lab that I generally teach, since there won't be any new work to do. The only nagging thing for me now is calculus. It seems like that work never ends. I can't say that I'm terribly excited about Calc IV next semester, but we'll see how it goes. Hopefully we'll be learning a lot more; I feel like this term I didn't pick up a lot of new material from 311. Meh.

Oh, did you hear that "meh" was added to the dictionary? It's a very recent thing. I was pretty excited. :3

Anyway, that's about all for the moment. I have calculus to do!

denoument

2008-11-30T21:25:00.011-05:00

Home again, am I?

Time to rest before finals,

But "resting" means "bored".

After crazy adventuring, there is always the glorious homecoming. Or something like it. I dunno, coming home to an empty apartment after two weeks of essentially nonstop excitement is a pretty massive letdown. But let's not dwell on the pres

ent.

We shall delve into the past!

Austin:

So we won the Cluster Challenge! It was a fun competition. A lot of the other teams looked pretty good, but we knew what was what, and so we emerged victorious. :D This entitled each school to a plaque with a spiffy engraving, and we all got some kewl vests, etc., etc. The party that night was a lot of fun, too; the conference rented out an old west town (Star Hill Ranch, I think?), where there were square dancing lessons, a mechanical bull, campfire

s, a mariachi band...!

I think that we're going to ultimately write a paper about our experiences in the CC this year, which I imagine will, er, happen, as compared to the paper last year. That should be i

nteresting.

Planes, trains, and automobiles:

The Austin airport is pretty nice. There are nice leather chairs to sit in in some parts. It was there that I took my calculus e

xam. :o Then off to Indy's new airport (which is MUCH nicer than the old airport, except for the fact that none of the TSA people seem to know which doors set off alarms or how to shut off said alarms yet) for a delicious--and nutritious

--dinner of German chocolate bars. :P

The flight to Toronto was really awesome. I accidentally took the wrong seat and confused the hell out of the guy whose seat I took, but since I was already seated and

blocked in he said that it was ok for me to just stay there and he'd take my seat. "Too many planes, too little sleep," I explained lamely. But he didn't mind. My seatmate was a Mr. Steve Allen from the Toronto area. We had a really excellent chat about all things Canada, and he helped me practice saying things like "zed" and "washroom." Hahahaha.

The approach to the airport was amazing. The night was pristinely clear, and Toronto was laid out like an ADHD kid's Lite Brite board. There are random smatterings of hi

gh population density punctuating large swaths of near-emptiness. The CN tower looked awesome, though.

When I got to YYZ (why-w

hy-zed), I took my first trip through customs! It was sort of a joke, I have to say. "Wh

at are you here for?" "Visiting friends." "How long are you here?" "6 days." "Do you have anything that I should know about?" "No." "Welcome to Canada." I exchanged for Canadian money, which is super pretty. :) Not like our dull, green dollars, but a rainbow crying to be spent!

I navigated the st

range maze that followed customs, and I found Pat waiting for me. I guess Evan was in the bath-... er... washroom. Figures. :) But it was great to be greeted! Since I had had approximately 700 calories in the previous two days, I asked them to take me to dinner. So we took a quick tour of Waterloo in the dark, and I got an awesome falafel pita during the eati

ng of which I spent time choking on a piece of cucumber. But it was still delicious.

Waterloo I :

That night, I was totally exhausted, but who really needs sleep, anyway? Evan took me to the club right near his hotel where he knows some bouncers, Starlight (or -lite, maybe). We went with his friend A-Mac and his ex-girlfriend/now friend Juli, but we didn't really see them much. That night, he also took me for a somewhat longer tour of parts of Waterloo, mainly the Uptown Loop which goes through a park. It was snow covered! ^____^ It actually snowed

about half the days I was there, too, which was fantastic.

The next morning I got to see the "famed" farmers' market in St. Lawrence (I think). It was sweet! Way bigger than our farmers' market here in Bloomington, haha. We had

delicious maple syrup and bagels and samosas and fresh juice and... mmmmmmm.

Toronto :

Saturday afternoon found Evan and me combing the city for adventures. We made a stop at his parents' house (

which is totally awesome; his dad is an architect and h

is mother an interior designer, so it's an exquisitely planned industrial sort of complex that felt surprisingly really ho

mey) for clothes, first. Then we had a massive amount of food in a markety part of Toronto and swung on some swings. A stop through the AGO -- Art Gallery of Ontario -- was interesting; it was closing essentially 30 minutes after we showed

up, so it was a bit of a whirlwind visi

t. But totally worth it. Especially for the disco camper thing they had set up. :D

After that, dinner at Sushi on Bloor. FECKING DELICIOUS. We were so stuffed from all the previous food, though, that neither of us could even make it through our respective chirashi. Oof. Still, tasty. Then... oh! A thing put on by NewMindSpace wherein they intended to raise a strand of balloons and leds higher than the CN tower. It was effing cold, so we didn't stay the whole time, but w

e did end up on the webpage for it, which is

sweet. And we saw it go pretty high. Oh, and Evan's brother and his girlfriend joined us sometime before all those sh

enanigans.

THEN. The four of us took a drive down to the lakeshore to a club called Guvernment, where

we saw INFECTED MUSHROOM. It was totally tight! The laser light shows were ridiculously sweet (and expensiv

e, I'm sure), and the performance from the group was also AWESOME. So, it was really hot in the club, right? So how do they

solve that problem? Oh, they H

AVE LIQUID NITROGEN JETS THAT B

LOW OVER THE C

ROWD. It seems so obvious. Being lost in a chilly, refreshing cloud of recently-non-liquid nitrogen is exhilarating. :P

Oakville :

We all stayed in Evan and Neil's parents' house, and in the morning we at scrumptious pancakes with real Canadian maple syrup. Dericious! Evan gave me a tour of Oakville, including several sweeping views of Lake Ontario, and then it was back to Waterloo to do work.

Waterloo II :

We spent a lot of time, unfortunately, working while I was visiting. Last week was the last week of classes for my Canadian friends, so they of course had massive amounts of proje

cts and assignments to finish up and hand in. I had a crapton of stuff to do, too, that I had been shirking while not at school for the previous week. Anyway, I won't dwell on the working times. I did go to class with Evan a few times, and that was pretty fun. Their classes aren't much different from ours, I guess, except that they're bigger. And the people lecture with funnier accents. :P

Since there was snow, we had to engage in the trifecta of great Canadian sports: traybogganing, snowball fighting, and pushing other people onto their faces in snowbanks. It was good times. ^___^

What else? Oh, there was lots of good food to be had. In addition to all the interesting restaurants that I tried the

re (including one called, simply, Vegetarian Fast Food Restaurant), there were also a couple of epic cookings. Pat and Jeff and I created a Thanksgiving feast, which was

unspeakably delicious (and nutritious). Evan and I made some trout with eggplant and beans and lemon and soy sauce.... YUM.

Comments on Canada :

Bags of milk - they don't have jugs or cartons of milk, they have bags. These bags are inserte

d into pitchers when one desires to use them. I thought this was pretty much one of the funniest things ever, but they didn't see that it was.

Washrooms - not a restroom. Not a bathroom. A washroom.

Walk signs - their little man looks way more excited to cross the street than ours.

Oreos - American Oreos are superior to Canadian Oreos. There is little dispute on this fact.

The Metric System - I was terrified the first time I looked at Evan's speedometer when I was driving his car. 130?? HOLY SHIT!! But that's actually just ~80, so we weren't about to die. The picture at the top of this post is me filling up his car... in LITRES. ^___^

And I guess that wraps up my epically long blog posting. Maybe I'll be less lazy in the future and have several shorter comments, but maybe not. I keep seeming to say that. :)

sleepy

2008-11-20T11:41:00.003-05:00

Who would have thought that

One can survive on just ten

Hours of sleep a week?

Well, I wouldn't've. But it turns out that, not only is it possible, it's a helluva lot of fun! The Cluster Challenge this year has been a really different experience from last year, but these German fellows are a (metric) shitton of fun. :) We've spent a lot of time with the cluster, but it's also been a good time to, like, learn about other cultures, yadda, yadda. But, seriously, it's been interesting. They've not missed a chance to make fun of me for the US university system; I'm missing a test and a couple homeworks this week, and my professors requested that I do them and fax them, which is apparently completely a completely unreasonable idea in their system. I guess I thought it was sort of unreasonable, too. Grr. Anyway, we have been having a great time. The organizers set us up with a trip to the Main Event, which is a place near Austin with laser tag, rock wall climbing, bowling, an arcade, pool tables, ...

The challenge itself went well. We ran more (I think?) data sets than any other team, and we didn't run into any issues. The MIT team didn't show up, and the StonyBrook team from last year essentially bailed them out, with help from Dell. The MIT rack didn't show up; they thought that they were going to run a rack with GPUs in it, but there was no chance that they'd finish in time to present it here. So the SB kids who were supposed to just be volunteers asked Dell for a rack and some nodes since they got here. They scored an impressive... 16 GFLOPs on Linpack. Ouch. Arizona is running a Windows cluster, which is an interesting crippling in itself. The Colorado team was running some hardware that was scheduled to be announced, but it didn't wind up happening, so they had to rebuild their cluster the morning the competition started lest they violate their NDAs. Awful. But the other teams (Purdue, Alberta, and Taiwan) seemed to do alright.

There's about a thousand other things that I could say, but I have to go and not sleep some more. :)

more adventure!

2008-11-15T07:19:00.002-05:00

We're off to Austin!

Computer adventure!

LOL. We're nerds.

So Austin should be fun, no? I'm pretty excited that I'll get to see Ben, Nick, (Ilya?,) and Aaron again--the StonyBrook guys--, and I'm ALSO super excited because some of the German guys from our team happened to find out that I... love dark chocolate. And we all know what that means.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.

update

2008-11-11T12:52:00.002-05:00

Should I do it? Go
To Seattle? Or am I
Destined for elsewhere?

I just got a response from MS, and it turns out that both teams that I interviewed with have extended internship offers to me for next summer So..I could definitely go out to Seattle and make monies like I need to, if I want. But I desperately want to intern abroad! I need an opportunity, like, now...

seattle

2008-11-11T07:53:00.003-05:00

A city of grey,

And cities of hot and cold,

Too many plane trips.

Seattle was fun. It was good to go back there; I remember when I was 12 or so I decided that that was where I wanted to live the rest of my life. So when Microsoft offered me a chance to interview, I jumped at it. There are pictures to be seen in my picasa album. The interview? Well, it was not quite as easy as the phone interview, but I wasn't impressed with its difficulty, either. A couple sample questions:

What's the best way to do a level-order traversal of a tree in which each node has arbitrary numbers of children, and there is an 80% chance that there will only be two levels?

What's the best way to find the previous node in an in-order traversal of a binary tree?

What's the fastest way to find the nearest common ancestor of two nodes in a binary tree?

Design Expedia. (This question was unfortunate; I'm an Orbitz girl.)

If you have two sorted linked lists, what's the fastest way to merge them into one sorted list? How much extra space do you need to maintain pointers for this algorithm?

It was sort of like I was back in C343. I even got asked runtimes for all the algorithms I designed. Woot. Anyway, the moral of the story is that I felt like I totally nailed the interview. I'll know for sure later this week. I really hope that things happen such that I get the position in the Dublin dev office... but we'll see. ;)

I guess I still have to comment on the election, too! I'm really excited that Indiana went blue. AFAIK, it's the first time since LBJ that we've voted Democrat. I'm proud of you, Indiana! I'm also proud and not proud of California; they passed one bill that requires the humane treatment of all animals raised on farms within that state (i.e. Valkyrie could eat any meat that comes from California!), but they also voted yes to Prop 8? That's disappointing. I don't understand why homophobia is so rampant.

I got my new glasses yesterday, which is exciting. They're exactly the same as my old glasses... but not lost. Haha. And now they come with the added amusement that they're vaguely like Sarah Palin glasses. :)

I can't wait to leave on Saturday. My two-week adventure promises to be epic. I wound up buying a plane ticket to Toronto; since Mom offered to pay half of it (she's terrified that I would crash into a snowbank and die and then my corpse would be raped by wolves, then be stolen by Canadian lumberjacks and boiled down into syrup) it's actually cheaper than driving. Which is awesome because it saves ridiculous amounts of time (2 hours in a plane is way better than 20 hours in a car, imho).

Oh! The guys for the Cluster Challenge team from Germany--well, two of them--, are in town now. I met them yesterday finally. I think that this year is going to be lots of fun at SC! How could it not be? I mean, c'mon. It's frickin Austin.

Anyway, I think that's about all I have for the moment. Maybe I'll get better about blogging regularly sometime...

MSNBC

2008-11-05T01:41:00.002-05:00

OMG, I'm on
TV! Why write a haiku, when
I can just show you?

chess

2008-10-25T03:32:00.001-04:00

I finally won!

Perhaps I have strategy,

Despite what I do.

Hah! Chess! I won a game. That means I get to cross it off my list. ;) Super awesome!

delay

2008-10-24T11:31:00.003-04:00

Too much to do, and

So little time for blogging.

I'll have to make due.

Well, it's been a really long time since I wrote anything on here, but that's okay, haha. I've been adventuring! The Canadians came, and we went quarry jumping, crazy caving (thanks to Mr. Sean Lewis for setting up a ridiculous trip :D), wandering around Bloomington... we also cooked a massive (I mean massive enough that I couldn't finish all the leftovers before they went bad) Thanksgiving dinner for Canadian Thanksgiving and watched War Games. So now I've finally seen it!

I've taken midterms, and I realized that different departments function differently. Up til now I've been doing all CS stuff, mainly, and not a lot of math, but I guess the Math department likes to kill souls. I know that I got a 73 on my Modern Algebra midterm, but that was actually pretty good compared to what other people got. This leads me to think that there is going to be some kind of grand, happiness-inducing curve at the end of the semester. :3 It's definitely stressful to try to think about that grade, though. But it's my favorite class! Augh!

Also, I've been doing CC stuff way too much. It's hard to manage my time when I spend 6 hours at the fricking data center in one night. Ridiculous. But it's sort of cool to learn how to install and optimize operating systems. I'd actually never installed Linux before... *ashamed face* But now I have!

The times that I see my roommates are becoming even fewer and farther between; it's sad. But it looks like my course schedule next semester should permit many more shenanigans. Woot! I actually am allowed to register for classes starting today, so I think I'm going to get on that.

One of the projects I'm working on for this semester is called Fluency, and it can be tested out at this webpage. It's a pretty neat idea; a GUI builder for people who don't know how to program. The code that underlies it is a pretty massive mess. I started out by improving the text areas (I just did that last night), and I'm terrified to death to try to mess with all the Null Pointer Exceptions that pop up in it. But the project should be fun, for sure!

Also... umm... hmm... oh! I changed my mind on what I want to be for Halloween. I'm going to be the Silk Spectre from Watchmen. I'm pretty excited about it. I think I made this decision mainly because I got invited to a Heroes and Villains birthday party, and Daphne just doesn't really cut it as a superhero, haha. :) So that's going to be my project this afternoon.

This weekend is Homecoming, and I think it's going to be another football game that I don't go to. Oh well. I'll get to one eventually. I'm pretty excited about going rappelling tomorrow, though, in stead of going to the game. Wewt!

Oh! And elections! I'm TEH PSYCHED about the elections. I had my mom buy me a sweet shirt recently: Bigfoot-Nessie 08--Change you can believe in! ^____^

I'll try to be more diligent about writing this in the future, but no promises! It's sort of fun to try to remember everything I've been up to, anyway. Sort of. :P

anticipating

2008-10-06T16:54:00.004-04:00

Action! Adventure!

And no time to do it all!

Frickin triage time.

I can't believe how quickly next weekend is coming up! I spent way too much money on groceries this weekend preparing for it, and some cleaning, lots of homework... but there isn't time to get ready! There's a crapload of things to do now.

This past weekend: the Lotus Festival! It was pretty frickin sweet. Musical groups from all over the world came to perform. My favorite performances? Funkadesi (some kind of crazy punjab rock/rave band), Little Cow (rock band from Hungary), and the March Fourth Marching Band (from Portland, OR, a group of men on stilts and women dressed like slutty marching band performers doing silly dances to awesome jazz music). I also saw a group from Mongolia that did throat singing, which is teh awesome. Let's see... oh, there was a group that performed Celtic music that was pretty neat, and some Spanish a capella music that I liked. I didn't have a chance to see everything (the festival was sort of set up to make that impossible), but I'm really glad I dropped the $30 to check it out this year.

Also over the weekend was ridiculous amounts of working on the programming project due yesterday. Instead of building a game, we were instructed to build a game builder, which was... er... complicated. During our presentation, my team didn't choke as badly as I expected, haha.

Oh, man! The VP debates! I haven't had a chance to comment on them yet. I was fairly impressed with Palin. Not impressed in such a way that I'd want her to be the VP of my country, but from what I'd seen of her previously she was totally incapable of forming coherent sentences. She did a pretty fair job of that in the debate. Her issue was, instead, that she only had a few answers, and there were more than a few questions. So she continually fell back on things that she new that were laughably unrelated to the queries at hand. There were a few things that I learned about Biden, too. I have to admit that I was woefully undereducated on their positions at the start of the debate. But I didn't realize that he was opposed to gay marriage. I'm actually not sure that he is, even though he said that; his phrasing seemed to imply that he actually understands that there should be a separation of church and state. Wow! It's like our founding fathers designed it that way!

I spent a nonnnegligible amount of time working to get ready for my visitors next weekend, too. Shopping! Woot! And I found a place to get free-range turkey for the thanksgiving dinner I'm setting up. I'm so excited! And I just got wind of an interesting opportunity for Saturday night shenanigans when they arrive. Wouldn't want them to think that BTown is boring. ;) I've actually managed to convince myself of that this semester; it's kinda nice.

Oh, and what up with this bizarre heat wave? 80 degrees is way too hot for October.

walls

2008-09-28T15:44:00.002-04:00

Why stay in the bounds,

Conform to the space-closers,

When I can paint them?

b words

2008-09-27T00:55:00.002-04:00

Boys, boats, badminton,

Bread, breath, breadth, bacchanalia,

Breezy, bold, BAM!

Bad, I know. But I feel like I've been exposed to bushels of b words lately. Let's explain some!

Boys - Why can't I make girlfriends? I guess it's probably because I'd much rather get filthy in a cave than get dolled up and go out for yogurt (cue Teen Girl Squad voice: Let's go get yogurt!). Anyway, I've been meeting lots of guys and being presented with interesting opportunities--caving, stargazing, dance parties, live music shows, bike rides, and boat-building. Which brings me to

Boats - Today was the Cardboard Boat Regatta, which I'd never heard of previously. I guess it's to raise money for Leadership Scholarships or something, but I was excited to help the physics club build a boat out of cardboard and duct tape. Then they raced it through a swimming pool. lulz.

Badminton - How do you say this? I say "bad.mitt.en". I guess some people really pronounce it "bad.min.ton". Hm. News to me.

Bread - I baked! It was pie, actually, that I baked (asian pear and pawpaw), but the crust was bready? I think that counts.

Breath - I waited with bated breath to see if we would actually find another member for the Cluster Challenge team (we were having some difficulties because of technicalities associated with Andrew's graduating and annoyances due to Greg's nonpresence), but today we finally cemented Chris Beckley as the final member. Woot! It's like a (much) more complicated Goofy Giggles, haha.

Breadth - I'm glad that my education has spanned a lot of different areas. I'm made more glad of this as I branch out and befriend people with majors vastly different from my own. If I couldn't hold my own in a conversation about astronomy, what good would I be?

Bacchanalia - HAHA. So at the career fair, Microsoft gave out ping pong balls with their logo on them. So what do the CS students immediately do? Play beer pong. Oh, you sorry people.

Breezy - Have you noticed it's getting chillier? I'm really thrilled about the advent of fall. This humid summer garbage just ain't right. It was nicer in California. :o

Bold - It's unfortunate that not many people are bold any longer. We seem to hide behind our little keyboards instead of owning up and interacting face-to-face like real people ought to. I was reminded of this fact today at the regatta when a real, live guy actually came up and hit on me. Crazy, I know. And he even said he doesn't have Facebook! Le gasp!

BAM! - I pretty much just like this word. There's no sense leaving it out of a set of b words. ;)

kiyaaaaaa!

2008-09-21T17:19:00.001-04:00

A huge jump, scary!

Looking down, far scarier,

But frickin awesome!

underground

2008-09-20T19:04:00.003-04:00

Buried in the earth,

Endless water carvings lie,

Waiting to be found.

Southern Indiana may not have world-class dining, clubs, or musical venues. It may be that hardly anyone here has ever heard an opera, spoken to a politician, or been outside the Midwest (as I meet more and more people who haven't, I'm continually astonished), but there is something to be said about caving here. It's world-class. A lot of people you wouldn't expect have experienced it. I learned today that some 300,000 people have been through Buckner's. That's probably why it's in such terrible shape today, but oh well.

Anyway, today I went on a caving trip through a system I've never been through before. It was a rush! We (the IU Caving Club) went through Donaldson and Bronson caves in Spring Mill Park, which isn't far from here. I've never been through such a wet cave before; there were a couple parts that required out-and-out swimming, which is really hard in cave gear. Sean lent me one of his wetsuits for the trip, which I was REALLY grateful for. He and I actually explored a little side passage that involved crawling through an 18" high passageway that was half-full of water for about 50 yards. Frigid water. The other end, though, was a pretty neat, big, open room. He said that we were among about 20 people to have been in there; it had only been discovered recently. w00t! Exploration!

He also led me up to a little rock ledge that didn't really go anywhere, but it had a couple of neat formations at the top. The climb up there, as well as climbs in other parts of the cave, tested my parkour skillz. ;) I skipped their practice to go caving today, so that was good, haha.

I learned a few things on the caving trip:

don't forget a wetsuit if you're going to get wet

wearing crappy jeans is good, but wearing jeans without knees can get you beat up

test rocks before you try to use them to hold your weight

all water has to go somewhere and come from somewhere

What else recently.. umm.. oh, for my current B490 project my partner and I are writing Number Munchers. Super awesome, haha! Homework hasn't kept me as busy as I figured it would, but... there's still a lot of it. I have some Modern Algebra to finish up, actually, so I'm going to have to shove off. Oh, but I should mention that this week was the career fair, and I got an offer to interview with Microsoft. Whee! And tomorrow should bring some further adventures!

time

2008-09-17T23:16:00.004-04:00

Where is my city?

The Midwest has so little.

I can't wait to fly.

And school is started. So much work! I was sad, but I didn't try out for the Spanish play. It would just be too much, I think. :( This grad class is keeping me on my toes, for sure.

But there's still time to kill on weekends. And it's a total bummer that there isn't much to do around here. I miss all the crazy stuff that happened in and around San Francisco all the time. There isn't really an audience for it here, though. I talked to Kam about a thing Evan had mentioned to me: a rave in the forest called "Dance of the Primes." His comment? "You know, Val, if we had a 'Dance of the Primes,' nine people would show up and six of them would be wearing capes."

It's true.

I want to get something like that started for Btown, though. Just, you know, anything really cool. The dance party last year ("People are Still Having Sex") was a lot of fun; I hope that it happens again in the not-too-distant future. I think our first comedy club is opening sometime soon.

The career fair was yesterday. It's amazing the looks you can get from people if you dress sharp. I walked around with my friend Stuart (or maybe Stewart, I don't actually know), who was in a nice suit with a tie and all, and I was wearing my suit, and we got pulled over by the NSA and some other people. It was exciting. I actually got an email today from Microsoft offering an interview. I wonder if I'll do it? I mean, it can't hurt to practice technical interviews, eh? Plus that's kind of cool.

celestial

2008-09-14T09:56:00.002-04:00

Moon and sun, spinning,

Pulling, alighting the sky,

Decorate my wall.

learning

2008-09-13T16:10:00.002-04:00

As I keep going

I pick up new things to ease

All things I'm doing.

There's a zone. It exists for everything. As this week progressed, I found myself getting more and more stressed about the mounds of math homework and programming homework and social commitments piling up. But then I found it. And suddenly, my work was done! I had time to kill! It was amazing! :)

So last night I went over and chilled with Nick and Chris, and we had a dinner party. I got to wear my Rodeo Drive dress, which was pretty awesome. We made a really delicious recipe out of a book Chris had:

Mahi-mahi and Fennel

1 1/2 lbs. Mahi-mahi

2 fennel bulbs

4 julienned carrots

1/2 cup flour

1/2 cup milk

2 tbsp. bread crumbs

1 tsp. butter (I think)

1/2 cup grated manchego cheese (or any hard cheese)

Prep the fennel bulbs by cutting off the stalks and peeling the outer layer off. Wash them. Cut out the core, and chop it into quarters. Julienne these. Boil the fennel and carrots in a pot for 8-10 minutes.

Wash the mahi-mahi and cut it into 6 pieces. Put a little olive oil in the bottom of a pan and saute them until nicely cooked. Pour the cooked carrots and fennel into the bottom of a baking dish, and lay the fish on top. In a sauce pan, combine milk, flour, and 1/4 cup of chopped fennel leaves (the frilly part) and reduce it to a nice sauce. Pour this over the fish. Combine the bread crumbs, cheese, and butter in another bowl and put a little pat on each fillet. Bake it at 375 for 10 minutes.

Yum!

Anyway, that was great. I hadn't tried to make anything elaborate since the sushi experiment last weekend (it's hard to find time during the week...), so it was nice to do something to keep my skillz fresh. :P We also had fruit salad (featuring delicious asian pears from home!) and bruschetta con fungi (one of Nick's friends brought this; it was toasted Italian bread with some creamy mushroom stuff on top). And German chocolate cake.

Today was good, too. I got a new bike! It was only $80 at the IU parking enforcement bike auction. It's a pretty nice bike, too. It needs a new seat and a new chain, but those aren't hard to come by. I may even just take the ones from my bike that I moved to Venus's bike. :o

Also today was parkour! Only 4 people showed up for this one, but it was still fun. I'm developing my sense of balance (important!), and I managed to pull myself up a wall for the first time!!! It was only, like, 7 feet high or something, but that's a start, eh? I guess the jumping technique eluded me last week, but this week I did okay with it. It's important to jump from a little way away from the wall, and it's also important to first focus on connecting with your foot and THEN focus on grabbing the top and pulling. I was trying to do it in the wrong order before.

I also practiced, and was miserably bad at, QMing (haha, I used a parkour term! QM=quadripedal motion) along a railing near Sycamore. But that's the balance development I was talking about. It was good times. And I'm really excited that the guys are all being so patient with me... heh...

Anyhoo, this afternoon is going to be crammed with homework working. I hope that I don't totally dumb out on any of my problems for calc (I was working on one for Modern Algebra last week, and it looked damn near impossible because I failed to realize that I + A = I - (-A)), but we'll see. This assignment looks like a lot of busy work. Blech.

7 years later

2008-09-11T18:08:00.002-04:00

Seven years later,
What is it? Political
Squalor. And unresolved.

Today marks the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. And what? We still have a useless administration? Oh, terrific. At least November is on its way.

Anyway, I'm keeping busy. Homework is piling up like crazy, as are funsies (parkour, Math Club, etc.). Oh, social calendars!

I'm really enjoying the math courses I'm taking. Evan totally made me a nerd. But I'd be lying if I said I'm not having fun proving things about matrices. :)

painting

2008-09-07T18:41:00.007-04:00

When I get too bored,

Things get interestingly

Colored. Pikachu!

My room.

adventure

2008-09-07T09:34:00.003-04:00

Now sore and happy,

After such adventuring,

How can I slow down?

It's been a heckuva weekend. Friday Ben and I worked on our SuperPong game for Rawlins, which was a lot of fun. Had some pizza and brownies (care of his wife... and they were delicious!), chunked out some Swing stuff... It's coming along great. And it looks like that's going to be my only hard class. Granted, it will be hella hard, but that's okay, eh?

A couple things I learned about Java during the course of this exercise:

threads are easy. Just make sure you don't run them til after you paint your console for the first time.

dimensions are dumb. For whatever reason, swing makes an applet that doesn't actually conform to the dimensions you give it. We had to put in corrections of about 5 pixels for the sides and bottom (more for the top) to ensure that the paddles and ball in our game wouldn't run off into invisible parts of the screen.

arraylists are mega-useful. Except when you compare a sprite with itself. We turned on clipping in our game (so that the ball could, you know, hit the paddles), and instead of flying anywhere, the ball just vibrated in the middle of the screen. We were like, "wow, what the hell is it doing?" for a couple minutes before we realized that it was just hitting itself every clock cycle. D'oh.

defaults are good. We're storing all our correction and size and initial position and whatever variables in a Defaults file in the package, which makes it easy to change them. But, of course, you already knew that.

Anyway, then I hung out with Nick and Chris, and they fixed my bike! W00t! Well, by "fixed my bike" what I mean is that they put my bike's good parts onto Venus's bike. Hers was still in terrible shape from the flood, so we replaced the chain and wheels and cleaned it up a bit. I got a bike chain bracelet out of the whole thing, which makes me feel pretty cool. Then we played some Wii and tried to watch Casablanca, but all fell asleep (most likely because it was about 1:00am when we started it).

Saturday I made sushi for lunch. It was delicious! And so easy to make, too. I screwed up a little, though, and my sushi didn't hold together as well as it could've because I kept thinking that my hands were sufficiently wet that the rice wouldn't stick to them when they... weren't. Yeah. Hands wet = good. And I need to figure out the optimal way of cutting the fish so that the slices are a little prettier.

After sushi, Jeff, Georgia, and I went to a parkour event at IU. That was pretty sweet. I was able to do more things than I thought I'd be able to, which was a pleasant surprise. I gotta work on my triceps, though, so's I can do pullups and stuff. Uii. But, um, I also learned the difference betweek parkour and free running (somehow I never learned this over the summer with Evan?): I guess that parkour is all about efficiency in getting from point A to point B and free running is more about "self-expression". It's sort of like parkour for showoffs. :P

Then was some marathon training with Georgia, which was tiring, to say the least. I got in an unbelievable amount of exercise yesterday. After running 3 miles with her, I lifted some weights, then walked home, found Evan online (yay!), finally saw his pink hair pictures, then packed up again and biked over to Kam's for his housewarming party. It was pretty sweet. All my AIs from CS were there. They were funny drunks. :P

Today should finally bring a watching of War Games, which I'm excited about. Unfortunately, it will also bring some reading and some code cleanup. I can hardly motivate myself to do that kind of mundane stuff after all my excitements this weekend. :\

gah!

2008-09-04T23:32:00.002-04:00

It's never too soon

To get knocked flat on your ass,

And that's what happened.

As concerned as I was on Wednesday about not having enough work to do this semester, I am now equally as concerned in the other direction. Well, I was yesterday. I've chilled out a little since then. But B490 (the grad design patterns class) is going to be FIERCE. I'm really excited about it, and the prof is convinced that I'll do well... but it's going to be epic. Our first assignment is to write a game for Monday. Keep in mind that that was an assignment that spanned an entire semester for me in the Spring. :s

My other classes seem okay. Tae Kwon Do is going to be odd... I mean, we have to write a paper? What? So I'm going to sign up for taking that pass/fail. It's a frickin HPER class. Not worth the effort of writing a paper. The Putnam course will be challenging, though not nearly so time-consuming as design patterns. My algorithms class will be interesting, but easy. My prof for modern algebra was in Canada during our first classtime, so I haven't actually experienced that yet.

Other things this semester! I signed up for a couple of caving trips with the IU Caving Club. Super! And this Saturday Jeff and I are going to try our hands (and arms, and legs, and feet, and ankles, and skillz) at a parkour meet. Hmm! I can't wait!

starting

2008-09-02T21:50:00.002-04:00

Quick though I may be

To pass this judgement, I fear

This semester's load.

I haven't had a hard semester yet in college. I feel like it's an integral part of the experience, but I haven't done it yet. I scheduled this one to totally kick my butt, but if my first class (S311) is any indication, it'll be just like all the other semesters. The real sad part is that I have so many evening classes. I'd like to enjoy my ridiculous freedom.

But yeah, this S311 course. It's Honors Calculus III, which I think I recall expressing concern over in a previous posting. I haven't done calculus in a long time. But I feel like the professor is pretty much going to do a lot of hand-holding for this course. And we're only going through, like, 3.5 chapters in the book. Behhh. Not to mention that she's... well... plain. She seems nice enough, but I'm having a hard time imagining myself getting fired up about things in her class.

I think this will be a good semester for math-y things, though. I'm super excited about the Putnam, especially after solving two problems off an old test on my own. Well, not entirely on my own, I guess. Daniel was there, but I did... er... most of the solving. Anyhow, I also finally finished reading that book that Evan gave me (A Mathematical Mosaic), and I feel like I took a fair amount away from it. So that's good. And I just felt like I was in the zone as I read out of the calc book for next week's assignment.

In other news, now that my MARATHON TRAINING has started, I'm getting pumped about running. Georgia and I are going through a program she found together, which I'm thrilled about. I ran 5 miles yesterday, and close to 4 the day before.... woot!

the midwest

2008-09-01T00:38:00.006-04:00

Ted: The cuter the
Animal, the tastier
It is grilled. Me: Oh.

Talk about culture shock. I went to RibAmerica with my folks today (well, technically yesterday, now), and it was a trip. The sheer... midwestern-ness of it astonished me. There were some things I was okay with: the, like, twelve different booths harping their award-winning barbecue were pretty cool (I tried the BBQ sauce at several, and I have to say that it was delicious). The booth devoted to grilled, butter-dipped sweet corn, which had one of the longest lines at the event, was pretty quaint. And their corn was awesome.

No, it was Ted that did it. And he's from Detroit! I guess that counts as the Midwest. Anyway, I had multiple crazy laughing fits during his concert. A few things that set them off:

Ted: *raises two machine guns from nowhere into the air high above his head* ...and we should give machine guns to every child! And to skinny girls, too! Fat bitches can reload 'em. Gotta keep them busy! And I know you're wondering, "does Ted have a permit for giving machine guns to kids?" Well, I got your permit right *drops the machine guns and flips the bird* HERE!!! That's for you, Obama!
Crowd: *screams*

Drunk guy next to me: *shakes my shoulder* This part is AWESOME!! Watch!
Ted: *wearing a ridiculous Native American headdress, pulls a hunting bow from behind a speaker, loads it, sets the arrow on fire, poises his white guitar across the stage, and proceeds to shoot it* I sacrificed my Great White Buffalo!
Drunk guy next to me: RIGHT IN THE X!! YEAH!!!
Crowd: *screams*

Ted: And I love huntin' season! The cuter the animal is, the tastier it is when you grill it! That's why I love vegetarians; vegetables are fuckin' ugly and that's all those sonuvabitches eat! *continues talking about killing animals*
Crowd: *screams*

Ted: Now they don't know it yet, but all my boys (he was talking about the players, sound guys, etc. for his band) have 12-gauge, riot shotguns waitin for 'em at the end of the night! Because I think that with more guns and ammunition, they'll do an even more kickass job!
Crowd: *screams*

In addition to those times, it was pretty excellent to hear him adlibbing his own songs to include lines about BBQ. Bahahahahaha!

Oh, the Midwest.

a week

2008-08-31T11:29:00.002-04:00

In a week I see
How Bloomington sits, awaits
School with bated breath.

Now that I've been in here for a week, I've finally grown accustomed to the rhythm of this town. As the last freshmen are moved in and the moving trucks are driven away, it's settling back into what it really is: the #5 party school in the nation (according to Playboy). It's interesting. Watching all these silly kids walking around, trashed, in the middle of the afternoon, I've had some ample time to wonder about things like our drinking age and why it's so high (I feel like that leads to more people binge drinking during their early years of college because they simply haven't been taught how to drink responsibly), as well as what it is that makes some parents try to control their kids' lives to such an extent that college is a time when they simply go crazy. I'm glad that my maw and paw saw fit to let me gradually take control of my own time. It's helped me immensely since starting college.

Things in this apartment are slowly working themselves out, too. I feel like we're not all around very much, but I guess that's okay. Post-its and whiteboards have become useful means of communication. Maybe we'll settle in together a little more once school starts for real.

Anyway, my adventure for today is that Ted Nugent concert. \m/ Rawk!

change

2008-08-29T13:04:00.004-04:00

Change marks all of us,
Some far more notably so,
Others seem inert.

I went to a breakfast this morning with WIC (Women in Computing), and was then whisked away to a little seminary thingy held for the direct admit kids to CS and Informatics. It was pretty interesting. I guess I have a little bit of a different perspective on things after spending the summer in Cali, but once I got back into talking with Suzanne and Laura it felt like I hadn't left. I'm super excited about a few things now:

1) Being a UI for the Goofy Giggles class! I talked to Prof. Brown today about it briefly, and he seems excited to have me. Working for him last summer was great, so I'm assuming that this experience will be as good.

2) The Cluster Challenge in Austin! Laura informed me that it is, indeed, going to happen, and that I'm welcome to participate. Should be a lot of fun. Except it's getting restructured this year, I guess. I liked the format last year (learning all the random interesting things about supercomputing was great), but I guess this year we're in it to win it. Hmm.

3) Tae Kwon Do! I just changed my schedule so that I'm in Tae Kwon Do instead of Yoga. I feel like it will better suit my tastes, perhaps.

4) The Putnam! It's been a long time since I've done real, interesting math. I noticed this when I was going through the book Evan got me for my birthday (A Mathematical Mosaic, Ravi Vakil). I hope that I do better than average, but average on this exam is a 0, and I'm pretty sure I can get at least a point someplace. We shall see!

5) Parkour/getting back into shape! Jeff said that he'd be interested in trying out parkour-y things with me. Plus I need to lose all this fat that I got from the friggin amazing food at Google. Which shouldn't be hard since I'm living on a student budget now!

6) Cooking! I realize that this is in direct conflict with my last item, but I don't care! I just got a new set of pots and pans from Gram & Gramps, and I can't wait to use them for the first time. Hopefully this weekend!

Anyway, back to productivity (or some rendition thereof). I have to finish some stuff up before I go laking this afternoon. ;)

internet

2008-08-28T11:16:00.006-04:00

At last, internet!

But I can live without it,

Er…umm… well, kind of.

The Comcast guy finally appeared today to connect 664 to the Interwebs. It was pretty damned inconvenient to not have internet in our apartment this past half week. I’ve been journeying to the library (a couple miles, maybe? not bad on a bike) to get my fix every day. And it’s a good thing, too. I’ve gotten a couple emails that required responses within 24 hours. It’s interesting to me that people are always, now, expected to be so unremittingly connected and “on the grid.” Even as a CS major, I find it’s nice to drop off once in a while, but, here I am, blogging about it. Ironic.

Anyway, those emails. One of them was an offer for the UI job I wanted for this semester! I’m super excited about the class; it’s CSCI-C335: Computer Structures, which is better known as the Goofy Giggles class. I had tons of fun taking it last semester. I think I’ll probably be better suited to being a UI for this class, anyway, considering I’ve actually taken it (I felt a little useless trying to explain the details of the Ants project that I’d never done to the kids in C212 last semester). Plus it’ll help me keep my hardware skillz fresh, which should serve well for hacking that DEFCON badge. :D The other email was a reminder about a lunch with Albert Chen, sponsor of the Telamon Informatics Scholarship, which I’m currently getting. He was a super nice guy, actually. We had a nice lunchtime chat about his company, traveling, the Olympics, Google, and CS in general. The food at the place we went (Mandarin House in Carmel, IN) was terrific. I guess Albert knew the owner/is a regular there, and he organized a table of special dishes that weren’t on the menu for us. And they were all friendly to my happy meat requirements. :)

The apartment is all painted, now, so huzzah for that. Roy came over (lured by cookies and the Wii that I now have) and helped me finish off the kitchen, which is now a cheery yellow. I was dumb when we bought the paint and didn’t think about how much we’d actually need for such a small space, so we have a lot of leftover now. I think the doors stand a good chance of being the next surfaces to be afflicted with acrylic jaundice.

The Wii has been a lot of fun the past couple days. Also a lot of fun is Nick and his lake house. I hadn’t been tubing in ages, so that was a fun thing to get back to. And one of his neighbors has a rope swing, which made me feel totally oldskool. I’m a little bummed that my tummy didn’t get tanner over my summer in Cali, but maybe I’ve got a chance to tan it yet here in Indiana. :P

I’m trying to decide if I can do anything epic for Labor Day weekend. The past two long weekends I’ve taken trips (Los Angeles for Memorial Day and Lake Tahoe for 4^th of July), but it looks like I’m just gonna be chillin here in Btown for this one. Maybe I’ll find some friends and go camping for Friday or Saturday night. Ribamerica is a concert that’s going to be happening up in Indianapolis this weekend, and Mr. Ted “Cat Scratch Fever” Nugent is going to be playing there. The tickets are only 5 bucks, which is pretty wicked. My dad called me up two nights ago and asked if I’d like to go see Ted with him and my mom. This is definitely the first rock concert they’ve ever invited me to. :D Should be fun!

in

2008-08-24T23:02:00.003-04:00

Back to Bloomington,
But I miss California.
At least I'm not bored.

So now all my stuff's in the apartment, which is pretty cool, I suppose. My room is massive (yay!), and Mom and Dad managed to help me get a box spring and a desk in just our little Matrix. I was pretty impressed.

We're all here now, too, which is nice. I don't know how Georgia survived the last week here by herself. I guess she had her newts? Anyway, we haven't had much time to catch up about our summers yet. I was woefully out of contact with them, and everyone else back here. Mary didn't get in until this evening, and then she went over to Colin's, so it was short-lived. Georgia's already abed.

We did get to have dinner together, though. The first meal I cooked in the apartment! It was just pasta and sweet corn, but that's the stuff that college is made of, right? I think Georgia and I are going to make spring rolls together tomorrow, which is pretty exciting. I'm curious how my social life will be different now that I'm living off-campus.

Tomorrow we're going to get paint for the living room (green) and the kitchen (yellow). I want to paint my room, but I wasn't sure exactly how I wanted it done. I'm pretty sure--enough that I already bought spray paint--that I want to reserve the back wall of my room for graffiti. I've never actually graffitied (sp?) anything before, so that should be interesting. After making the stencil for and spray painting my DEFCON laptop this summer, I wanted to try the real deal. I'm toying with the idea of letting visitors graffiti, too. I think that would be fun. I mean, you can write on a Facebook wall, why not write on a real wall? Hmm. I'm concerned about ventilation in my room, though.

Man, I feel so silly and girly saying this, but I really miss the friends I made in California. :( It's going to be excruciating waiting until October to see them. I need to find new people to adventure with, I guess. But every time someone says, "Delicious!" and I think, "and nutritious!", it's a pretty sad reminder. Ditto hearing the word "goat," seeing Segway lawn mowers, thinking about math, using my DEFCON laptop, holding Kung Fu Panda, riding my bike, wearing my Google apparel, ... Maybe I'll forget some of it as the year wears on and I find other entertainments for myself. I don't know whether I hope for that or not.

Ummm... yeah. I got a Wii this morning, which was pretty exciting. With Mario Party 8! ^___^ Now we just need a TV to play it on, haha. We're not getting internet until Wednesday morning, so it's going to be a few more days of biking back and forth to campus to get my fix. I've been keeping busy with unpacking and decorating and reading, though, so I guess it's not all bad.

Anyhow, it's been a pretty long day. I sleep with my shades up, so the sun woke me up pretty early. And I've still got 10 minutes or so of bike ride to get back home.

before

2008-08-22T16:26:00.002-04:00

Before I even
Move in, my nerves are singing,
Anticipating.

I'm fairly (or unfairly) convinced that this year is going to rock. After a long summer of R&R in sunny California, I'm ready to get back and hit the books like a madwoman. My schedule this semester could potentially kick my ass, but that would be okay. The college experience, right? Anyway, the classes I'm taking this semester:

S403 - Honors Modern Algebra
S311 - Honors Calculus III
M490 - Putnam Seminar
B403 - Some kind of algorithms class I don't remember the name of
B490 - Graduate Design Patterns
E190 - Yoga

I'm thinking of adding in another class (that's only 15 hours there, so I'm really, really tempted): Graduate Operating Systems. And I'm also considering the possibility of changing yoga for something more adventurous... like... umm... I dunno, actually. Maybe rock climbing. That would be pretty sweet.

Some of my stuff is moved in to the apartment, and I'm going to do the rest of the move tomorrow. Things have been complicated by the fact that our minivan drowned in the flood, but c'est la vie. From what I've seen of the apartment so far, it's going to be pretty nice. Hopefully a step up from what comes to mind when one thinks of "college apartment." But I guess that remains to be seen.

But I'm hoping for a healthy amount of diversion from classes this semester. This summer taught me a lot about kicking back and enjoying life, and those are lessons that I intend to continue following. I'm planning an Election Day party that I'm pretty excited about, as well as a visit from some of the Canadians (Evan, Jeff, Pat) and a visit to them sometime later on.

:D Bring on the year!