Interesting Stuff

The schoolyear is now over, and although I didn’t finish everything I wanted to, enough got done. I graduated, and the ceremony was alright, all in all. The most amazing part, in my opinion, was at the very beginning. We were all dressed in our caps and gowns and medals, and started to walk down to the tent near the library where the real ceremony was, and all of the profs lined up on either side of the street and applauded for us as we walked past. Cheezy as it sounds, it practically brought tears to my eyes. The rest of the ceremony was uneventful; the usual fare but with an exceptionally boring speaker (that is to say, Prof. Platt gave a boring history of the college without anything related to graduation, advice for the future, or anything any of my classmates and I could actually use or learn from. Libby’s speech, on the other hand, was fantastic). We had dinner at Buca’s with the Panishes, the Harrises, the Couplands, and Kevin.

By the way, if you didn’t know, my brother is going to go to Mudd next year. This is going to make my visits as a sketchy alum a little bit weirder. We’ll see how that turns out.

I’m now back in the Twin Cities, and I already really miss Mudd. Although it’s certainly nice to see some of my friends from the area, all the really interesting ones seem to still be off in Texas/Iowa/Illinois/elsewhere. The company here is enjoyable but not at all intellectually stimulating, and I’m beginning to find myself bored in their company. Have I really changed that much in the past year? We’ll see how the summer progresses; perhaps this feeling will pass.

As for my overall plans this summer, they’re already starting to fall apart. I am definitely going to DEFCON, but I’m almost positive I will not get to AAAI this year – it’s a bit expensive without getting a college/company/etc to pay for you. Including travel, lodging, and admission, AAAI adds up to ~$1000, while DEFCON, in contrast, shouldn’t be much more than $200.

I had also hoped to learn a bunch of TeX and do some crazy TeX programming this summer. Although this is still doable, my computer (which I thought I was bringing home) is now in storage out in California, so I’m stuck on a Windows box with none of my previous code for a few months. I had the foresight to put all of the TeX, LaTeX, and AMSTex manuals on my CS account so I can still get to them, but I need to first learn about TeXnicCenter. I’ll get to it eventually, but the going right now is a lot slower than I expected.