germany!

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*

ready?

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!

denoument

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. :)

seattle

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...