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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

ailing

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.

>:|

sleepy

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.  :)