|
ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
Seven semesters down, one to go... plus grad school or wherever else I might end up!
Saturday, Jan. 8, 2005
5:23 p.m.
|
I'm supposed to be writing an essay for my Northwestern application right now, but I appear to be suffering from an acute form of essay-writer's block in which everything I type sounds like crap, so instead I'll summarize the events of the last two days or so. The time I spent at home (in Twinsburg) yesterday almost exclusively consisted of packing things up and putting them into my car; this was complete a little bit after 12:00. On my way back to campus, I stopped at Heinen's to pick up my paycheck, but then realized that my bûche de Noël was still sitting in the refrigerator back home. After I went back to get it and got started again, it was 12:45. I'd expected that my suite would be empty when I got back to campus, but Brian and Jeremy were both there and just having lunch when I arrived. We talked for a while, and then I unloaded my car and started to unpack. It wasn't until then, of course, that I discovered that I left most of my underwear in my dresser at home. It's over. On the plus side, I paid a visit to the registrar in the afternoon and actually was treated politely and got good service for the first time ever. The people in the registrar's office, as a rule, live only to play a never-ending game of Sorry Wrong Form with the poor and helpless students who dare enter there. Yesterday, though, I went in to get copies of my transcript, was directed to the correct form straight away, and then — when there was a problem — someone explained quite clearly what was wrong and how it could be fixed. (My transcript for this past semester was lacking the little "Dean's High Honors" designation that it should have had. They said it hadn't been posted by Undergraduate Studies yet.) I cancelled the transcript request and ran over to Undergraduate Studies in Sears to see if they could tell me when the honors would be posted. After a few clicks on her computer, the receptionist said it should have been posted already but wasn't because Tekin turned his grades for EECS 341 in late. She added the honors right then, so I went straight back to the registrar to get my transcripts, which were printed out, stamped, and sealed while I waited. With that and three other errands successfully accomplished, I came back to my room a little after 5:00 and did some more unpacking. Since there's no food here until tomorrow at 4:30 p.m., Jeremy and I went out to Chipotle around 6:30 and brought it back here. Sonnie IMed at 10:00 and asked me to meet her and some other people up at Rascal House, so I walked up there and came back just after midnight. A good day overall, I'd say. Today I forced myself to work on my Observer style guide for an hour, then ate some soup and went to the West Side Market with Sonnie. When we got back I picked up letters of recommedation that Tekin left in his box for me, helped Brian out with an essay he was writing, then tried to prolong the grad-school mood by getting started on one of my own. The result, as I mentioned at the beginning, was unfortunately not so good. Randomness: This kid lived on my street in Michigan and was one of my friends when I was little. I guess I could say that I knew him "when," even though I've only seen him once or twice in the last 10 years. |
Sunday, Jan. 9, 2005
8:47 p.m.
|
Some good times in the last 24 hours! Mark, Jessica, and Nicole appeared yesterday in that order within about 20 minutes of each other, and then the four of us went out to Aladdin's for dinner. When we got back, Mark put an old Bill Cosby comedy video on and we all watched that. It was some of the funniest comedy I've ever seen, and it only had like three swear words in an hour and a half. This is proof that you don't have to be profane or vulgar in order to be absolutely hilarious: everyday things like going to the dentist are funny enough! Most of the routine was about raising children, and since Bill Cosby had five kids and the tape was from the early '80s, it reminded me a lot of our family when I was younger. (Especially after we'd been watching the home movies I wrote about before.) Example: Father: What happened to your hair? After the video was over we all swapped episodes from our own families until I went to bed around 12:00 and Nicole turned on Saturday Night Live. Today, I let myself sleep in figuring I'd be up around 9:00 at the latest. Wrong. It was past 11 when I looked up at the clock for the first time. I ate some food in my room, made my Amtrak reservation for the Northwestern trip in February, then started looking up hotels in Chicago so I'd have somewhere to stay. Hotels are too expensive! Most of them in the city are well above the $100-a-night mark, but I'm limited to the ones that are within walking distance of public transportation and that lets out all the cheaper ones in the suburbs. The best I can find so far is a $71 Holiday Inn that seems to be in the un-downtown part of central Chicago and whose website advertises that hotel staff speak English, Polish, and Arabic, which leads me to believe that either the neighborhood's not that great or that the hotel is falling apart. A very nice-looking downtown hotel was $82 a night, but that didn't include a $17 "services fee." So the hotel question remains unresolved for the moment. Right about the time I was giving it up, my suitemates decided that it was time to go to the bookstore, so I grabbed my checkbook, a list of my classes, and an empty backpack and went along with them. Two of my classes didn't have books in stock, the networks book turned out to be the third edition of the same book that Jessica has the second edition of (some grammar there!), and we decided that we could probably borrow a few used AI books from some other CS people. The total purchase, then, was $53 for the sign language book I need for my COSI class. Since I was already in Thwing, I went down to the Observer office for a bit and cut out nice copies of some of my news articles so I can include them with grad school applications. Unfortunately, I can't decide which of my articles are actually worth including and how many I should include overall. (Help on the first point would be really appreciated; please e-mail or IM me your suggestions!) It was past 3:00 when I got back, so I spent a bit longer trying to resolve the Great Chicago Hotel Question, gave up again, and wasted time on my computer instead. Dinner was at 6:30 in Fribley — the inagural dining hall meal of the semester. Just about everyone was there: me, Jessica, Nicole, Mark, Jeremy, Susannah, Vicki, Erin, and Mary. After dinner, Jessica, Nicole, and Mark left, but the rest of us stuck around for tea and dessert and some good conversations like we used to have before we all split apart in classes. It was really great knowing that none of us had any real obligations or homework for at least one more night, so we talked and drank tea until 8:00. The original time of this entry was going to be 8:03, but just as I was starting on it Brian came into my room and talked for a while, and then I got in the mood to work on one of my Northwestern essays. The 500-word-or-less personal statement is now at least a complete rough draft, so I just have to get the news essay (like a Level II for Mrs. Milano's class) finished by Tuesday morning so I can send off the rest of my application stuff on time. This, however, doesn't seem too terrible, but will probably involve some in-depth writing and at least one trip to the library. |
Thursday, Jan. 13, 2005
9:37 p.m.
|
I've now had two meetings of every class I'm taking this semester, so I thought that this entry would be a good place to summarize them. That way, if I mention "networks" or "sign" in the next four months, you'll know what I'm talking about. In general, my schedule is arranged in neat little blocks: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 9:30 until 12:30, and Tuesday and Thursday from 1:15 to 4:00. (This got rather fractured about five minutes into French class Tuesday, but I'll get to that in a bit.) It's an hour earlier than last semester's schedules, but having Thursday mornings off after a long day at The Observer is well worth it! So, Monday morning I set my alarm for 7:15, ignored it, and eventually was awake in time to take a shower, eat some Fig Newtons in my room, and head off to COSI 220 (American Sign Language, or "ASL" or "sign," as I'll probably call it for short.) This is the one class that is not affected by the Adelbert bridge being closed: it's at the Cleveland Hearing and Speech Center over by the hospital on Euclid, so I would have gone up via Cornell even if Adelbert was open. The defining trait of ASL so far is the professor, Shirley Prok, who demanded that we call her Shirley. I have never met a more sarcastic or generally crazy person in my life. All through Monday's class I couldn't decide if she was joking about something or being serious, so I was kind of wavering back and forth between a smile and a straight face for 50 minutes. ("I don't like people. Not that much. I hate blind people. I don't think I could ever work with blind people, because they're always saying 'You owe me this and this and this....'") Yesterday I think most of us decided she was joking because the class as a whole seemed more relaxed and laughed when she said things. (Passing out the syllabus: "Rules. There's always so many rules. You're born and then there's rules.") I'm pretty sure that sign is going to be a lot of fun this semester, especially since Vicki, Erin, and Amber are all in it too — it's exactly the kind of class I wanted to sign up for! Directly after sign language is EECS 325 (Computer Networks), which is annoyingly on the seventh floor of Glennan. So far, though, I haven't been late because Shirley lets us out a bit early and we found a nice shortcut to the quad through the maze of hospital courtyards. This class, I say, will be boing. Useful perhaps, but not much fun along the way. The professor's command of English is not exactly fluent, and he uses the Dreaded PowerPoint with slides that aren't even his. Perhaps worse than this is the fact that the student population of the class is almost wholly made up of the stereotypical CS majors: calculator watches, dazed expressions, and the I'd-rather-be-watching-anime mentality. Glennan 716 is a small room, so it also gets really hot and rather disgusting really fast. From networks — which at least has Eric in it as a familiar face and stereotype-breaker — I go to MATH 408 (Cryptology) with Prof. Singer (yay!) and some other people from our number theory class last semester. Our book for the class is naturally called "Cryptology," but the subtitle is as follows: "An introduction to the Art and Science of Engineering, Encrypting, Concealing, Hiding, and Safeguarding Described Without any Arcane Skullduggery but not Without Cunning Waggery for the Delectation and Instruction of the General Public by Albrecht Beutelspacher." (I am not making this up!) So that finishes off my class three days a week — or at least it would, except for the aforementioned splintering caused by French. That's coming up next. Tuesdays and Thursdays start for me at 1:15 with EECS 391 (Artificial Intelligence, probably just "AI" from now on). It features the excellent Prof. Branicky, which means there'll be lots of work but lots of fun and good explanations of the material. It also features Jessica, Mark, Brian Szuter, and Cheryl; the five of us have been sitting at adjacent desks for the past two days. The book for AI is pretty good and a really interesting read, which is good because we've had lots of reading assignments already. And that leaves FRCH 318 (The Origins of France) at 2:45 Tuesdays and Thursdays. Only not quite. One of the kids who wants to take the class and needs it to finish his major can't make it on Tuesdays, so we spent the beginning of Tuesday's class working out an alternate time, and then the beginning of today's class revising it. End result: Tuesday 2:45 to 4:00 is being moved to Monday 6:00 to 7:15. In the evening. This means I have to probably eat an early dinner and venture out to the Mather Quad; that is, I have to do the whole Adelbert bridge-avoiding bit an extra two times each Monday. I didn't say anything about it in class, though, because Monday evenings were the only times when all of us were free and it's not like I can't make it then because of a legitmate excuse. I just don't want to, and that's not good enough. So that's what we've got for the next 15 weeks. More normal entries should resume as early as tomorrow, but this one's long enough without that sort of stuff added to it! |
Friday, Jan. 14, 2005
11:02 p.m.
|
Today was a pretty good end to a pretty good first week of class. Last night before I went to bed I wrote a C++ program to solve my cryptology homework, let it run all night, and had the final results ready this morning about two minutes after I got out of the shower and sat down at my computer. The problem: find the longest English word that can be encrypted as another English word using a Caesar cipher. A Caesar cipher means you take a word, like MESSAGE, and encrypt it by "adding" a certain offset to each letter of that word. If we pick an offset of one, we get NFTTBHF. (Z plus one is A.) My program was sickeningly inefficient and ran for something like eight hours, but it successfully found the pair NOWHERE = ABJURER. The results also included some fun ones like CHEER = JOLLY. In ASL today we had to answer questions by finger-spelling one-word answers. (i.e., "What's your dad's name? Where are you from?") I handled my name and the names of my parents pretty well, but on "T-W-I-N-S-B-U-R-G" I got crossed up a bit. I've been walking around all day today signing out words that I see on signs, but I haven't seen much improvement in my spelling yet. Most of the other people in the class are better at it than I am. Networks was a bit nicer today because the room wasn't as hot as normal. In cryptology, we got our next homework assignment, which is to decode three monoalphabetic substitution ciphers. (Those are the kinds that they always have in books, where one letter or symbol stands for exactly one real letter and you can figure them out by using the frequencies of letters in English, etc.) After class I ate Bag-It in Nord with Sonnie and some of her friends, then went to the Jennings lab to play around on the UNIX machines a bit. In networks, Prof. Wang mentioned that the traceroute command lets you see the path a packet takes from your computer to whatever other host you specify, so I was mainly trying several of those to see what I could come up with. After I did that for a while, I went over to Veale to run. When I was finished, I had about an hour in my room before heading back to the quad to help take the Tau Beta Pi bookswap apart and move all the books to the storage place in the basement. We finished that around 6:30, and I'd no sooner gotten back to my room again that I found out there was sushi and massages in Erin's suite. So down I went, and dinner and assorted other activities were enjoyed until about 15 minutes ago. Tomorrow features, in order, (1) sleeping in, (2) a trip to the West Side Market, and (3) AI and other homework. After that, anything is possible! |
Random Stuff #4
Saturday, Jan. 15, 2005, 4:07 p.m.
|
People With Fun Names We begin with an example from French literature. Voltaire's Candide makes use of a lot of European stereotypes for many of its characters, including this little crack about Spanish names: Cunégone, Captain Candide, and the old woman went to call on the governor, Don Fernando de Ibaraa y Figueora y Mascarenes y Lampoudrous y Souza. This lord has a pride befitting a man bearing so many names. Moving along to another sort of literature, we present a fine example of "cunning waggery" (see Thursday's entry). This one was the inspiration for the creation of the rest of this entry, since the quote itself is funny but somehow seemed like it needed something else to go around it. The philosophy of modern cryptanalysis is embodied in Kerckhoffs' principle, as formulated in the book La cryptographie militaire (1883) by the Dutch philologist Jean Guillaume Hubert Victor François Alexandre Auguste Kerckhoffs von Nieuwenhof (1835-1903). And finally, one of my suitemates recently pointed out this item on the Cleveland Orchestra website: Thursday, March 3, 2005 at 8:00 PM |
Sunday, Jan. 16, 2005
12:58 p.m.
|
Three cheers for finally having another "Random Stuff" entry — I was reading my cryptology book yesterday afternoon, and after I got to that quote I just had to put it here. (Watch my textbook quotes website in the next few days for some updates too; I apparently have really excellent textbooks this year!) This entire week has been quite nice, I must say. Sure, you could scan through it and find images of me frantically running through the rain with my backpack bouncing all over and my umbrella waggling out in front of me as I try to make it to the UPS store and back before my 9:30 class. Or you might find me as one of the three people actually using the library at this early point in the semester and consequently feeling very annoyed because all my friends have nothing to do. But overall there's been almost no homework, a few interesting reading assignments, and (by and large) classes that are interesting and fun. Yesterday was a perfect culmination of that week. I woke up around 9:45 (no alarm!) and had breakfast with Brian in Fribley at 10:45. We stayed there and talked for almost an hour, and then I came back up here and started the interesting part of my cryptology homework. The Great West Side Market Trip was scheduled for 1:30 — it involved me, Jessica, Mark, Nicole, Erin, Camellia, and her boyfriend Eric all catching the 1:46 train from South Side, thereby successfully joining Sonnie, Megan, someone I recognized called James, and other people I don't know who had caught the same train at East 120th at 1:44. This enormous procession of us got off at West 25th and milled around in the market for a while before coming back in smaller groups by various trains later in the afternoon. It was after 3:00 when I got back, and I went back to work on the cryptology assignment. Once our entire suite had reassembled, Jessica led a movement to Giant Eagle for more shopping. We took my car because there were only four of us and I hadn't had the car out in eight days. Dinner for me was some Kix, French bread, and Port Salut cheese. Around 8:00 I called my parents, which turned out to be more annoying than usual. I had to get through a whole bunch of platitudes and fake conversation starters like "Wow... your last semester. The end of four years of work," that I had to answer 50 million times at the store over break and that I think all of us here have gotten over already. My parents also don't ever tell me anything — they're always asking "And what else? What else do you know? Is that all?" over and over again without giving me any news from their side. Eventually I got a story out of my mom about a willow tree that splintered apart in my grandma's yard during the ice storms we had over break. At 9:00 I went down to Bethany's and Rachel's suite, and then a whole group of us went over to the Barking Spider to listen to the folk music that was playing. I'd never been there before, so I went along even though I'm not at all big on folk music. The place itself was pretty cool: it's in a sort of carriage house with low ceilings and some nice wood panelling on the inside, but it's really just a bar where you can order pop and tea and (unfortunately) where smoking is allowed. The music wasn't bad, actually. It wasn't what I'd call "folk music," though — more like random people with guitars playing little "gigs" singing songs they wrote. When I think of folk music I always imagine the kind of stuff they used to have at arts and crafts fairs when I was a kid: people with beards and overalls playing acoustic guitars and harmonicas and violins and those flat boards with rows of strings that you play with little mallets that look like meat tenderizers (dulcimers, maybe?). I left the Barking Spider last night around 10:45 and caught a greenie back to South Side. Today has so far featured a trip to Wal-Mart, a grand washing and organizing of all my dirty dishes, and some Quaker oats. The big task for the afternoon is going to be AI homework. |
Monday, Jan. 17, 2005
1:12 p.m.
|
I was happily in the middle of looking up fun programming quotes on the Internet to use for away messages, but suddenly the transfer rate across the network seems to have dropped to approximately 5 KB per month, so I'm going to do this instead. Let's see... after yesterday's post I did get to work on my AI homework; namely, I completed one of the two programming parts and ignored the five written short-answer questions. Around 2:30 I got an IM from Erin: "Did Vicki tell you about practicing sign at 3:00?" (No, she hadn't.) That turned out to be the start of a really cool afternoon, because after we worked on our homework for about an hour Erin mentioned that she was going cross-country skiing immediately afterwards. Then Vicki mentioned that she had her skis here too, and that she also had Kathi's in case someone wanted to borrow them. Natural result: all three of us went cross-country skiing with Ben. We started from Ben's house, off Coventry, and skied down the road to Superior (or maybe it was Lee). We had to take them off to cross the street there, but on the other side there was a chain of parks and open spaces that led all the way to the Cleveland Heights recreation center and then around behind it. It was definitely all kinds of fun for me, since I'd never been on any kind of skis in my life before, even though I had to fit my feet into Kathi's ski boots. We only went down one hill of note, still probably not much more than 15 or 20 feet high, and for a while I was standing warily at the top eyeing the slope and wondering what would happen if I fell down while my feet were attached to 205-cm-long sticks that belonged to someone else. Luckily, Ben and the others kept telling me to go down, so eventually I did and was (somehow!) the only one out of the four of us to not fall in the process. This experience rather typifies my behavior when faced with slight physical risk or embarrassment. I say no, make it out in my mind to be 50 times scarier than reality, someone tells me to shut up and just do it, and then we're faced with a choice: either I remain obstinate and safe (and therefore have no fun) or I give in and nothing bad happens at all. So far, examples of me giving in and having a good time include such things like cross-country skiing and riding certain roller coasters. Examples of the other case include swing dancing and jumping into cold lakes or rivers. But to get back to the story of yesterday — we ended our skiing trip back at Ben's, and then Vicki and I went to Fribley when we got back to campus. I did some math homework (another code) for an hour or so, wasted some time around my suite, and then went over to the Den at 9:30 for a party they were having. It wasn't a big affair, but it featured several rounds of Pit, so I ended up staying much later than I'd originally intended; it was 12:45 before I got back here. So we have on today's docket the ever-present AI homework, an Observer meeting, and finger-spelling practice with Vicki. I was supposed to go see "The Phantom of the Opera" with Sonnie, but it now appears that she has what is usually called "a more pressing engagement." |
Thursday, Jan. 20, 2005
5:52 p.m.
|
So... the return of classes on Tuesday has kept me from having enough time before now to sit down and write an entry, and this has caused some rather mid-level annoyance, as you'll read in a few minutes. I woke up Tuesday to the realization that I hadn't gotten any stories back from my reporters yet even though the deadline was noon on Monday. This triggered an e-mail from me to the people who were supposed to be writing to the effect that they should either send me stories right away or tell me what was going on. The results were mediocre. Story #1: nothing to report. Story #2: not much to report. Story #3: nothing to report. Story #4: came in needing a lot of work. Since I'd just lost 50 percent of my content, I decided that I would have to cover the SEC forum that was happening that night and write up something long about it in the office on Wednesday. My new schedule, though, is perfectly suited to last-minute content-writing. I'm in class until 12:30, but then the rest of the day (and night) is completely open Observer time, so I was able to edit the two other stories, finish mine, do everything else, and still finish before Marina came in around 5:00. Then the copy started coming out and things moved along pretty well until about 11:00. At that time, we noticed that we'd only seen two out of six sports pages; the new sports layout guy was doing the job for the very first time, and the process was understandably taking longer than normal. (To make it worse, we'd allotted six pages for like four pages of actual stuff, so the space-filling had to begin in earnest.) I finally made it back here at 2 a.m. This morning, I needed to finish my French and AI homework before class at 1:15. I started working on French at 10:00, and a few minutes later I got a mass e-mail from UPB saying that tickets for "The Producers" were going to be on sale in Thwing for $10 at 11:30. Now, "The Producers" is something that I've wanted to see for a long time; I missed it when it was in Cleveland a year or two ago, and when it was announced in December I said that I was going to see it this time since Fate had brought it back to Playhouse Square. So on a normal day, I would have been in Thwing at 11:00 to wait in line, gotten a ticket, and would be heading at this very instant towards Euclid Avenue to catch the downtown bus. But no. Today is not a normal day. Instead I sat in my room chained to my French book as the tickets were bought by other people. I didn't even finish before it was time to go eat lunch at 12:30. Mark listened to the beginning of this story about an hour ago, and said, "Oh, I could have gotten you a ticket; you should have told me." That's right, kids: my suitemates are going. They were second in line this morning and got tickets, and it's the three of them who are at this very instant heading towards Euclid Avenue to take the bus downtown. (I must add here that I'm not blaming them at all for this eventuality. I just take delight in pointing out how quirks of Real Life come back to haunt me. If I'd been thinking clearly — or in English — this morning, I should have done all my homework with the door open in the hopes of catching one of them on their way out. "Hey," I would have said, "if you're going to be in the neighborhood of Thwing around 11:30, could you take this $10 bill and get me a Producers ticket?" Then the life would have been made easy, as Brian and I say.) So much for that, then. I guess the upside is that I have the next six hours to take care of whatever other homework projects have been put onto my agenda for the next few days by my professors. That way if something else important comes up, I can run out of my room on 30 seconds notice and be first in line! |
|