Interesting Stuff

How cool is this – my favourite author, Lois McMaster-Bujold, is mentioned in the News section of the current Penny Arcade. Few people have heard of her because her publicist is mediocre at mest, but she’s a fantastic writer (to this day, my favourite book is Cordelia’s Honor by McMaster-Bujold). She is currently tied with Robert A. Heinlein for winning the most Hugo Awards ever, and has won a bunch of other awards as well.

A couple years ago, I unknowingly got to meet her–my girlfriend at the time and I were wandering around Barnes & Noble, and since we’re both fans of McMaster-Bujold, we stopped to look at her books. A woman walked up to look at them too, and asked if we were fans of the author. We replied that yes, we both loved her work. She then pulled a book off the shelf, and told us that she had just finished it and rather liked it. We thanked her, and she left. We then turned to the back cover of the book, which contained a large picture of the woman with whom we had just spoken! It was pretty cool, though I wish I had recognized her before she left.

Anyways, I highly recommend her writings, if anyone is looking for some great science fiction to read. Her character development is unmatched, in my opinion.

In the Sunday newspaper, interspersed with the comics, is a section called KidCity which is intended for elementary schoolers, but which I read for the fun and strange facts in it. This week it was all about tiny animals (hummingbirds, etc). Although I’m not usually interested in the activities in the section, this week’s read:

How many words can you make from the letters in the word MINISCULE? We used a special computer program to discover more than 70, so anything over 20 is an excellent score!

I naturally took this as a challenge. I found a bunch on my own (over 50), and with the help of my family and the dictionary, we got a total of 77 (all of them are listed in the first comment to this post, if you’re interested). There are some pretty neat words out there!

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.

The SessionSaver plugin for Firefox only works if you re-open Firefox the normal way; if you close it and then re-open it by clicking a link in your email, it doesn’t restore anything you were working on last session. I just found this out the hard way – I have had approximately 50 tabs open for several weeks at this point, and SessionSavor has been working great. Due to Firefox’s caching silliness, I keep needing to close the program, since after a while it eats up all of my memory, but as I said, this has not been a problem at all until I just clicked a link a few minutes ago. Now, all my previous tabs are gone. Lesson learned, but I’d have preferred to learn it a different way.

I believe I’ve now been keyed into my room by Hadley more times than all other proctors combined this entire year. The worst part about this? I’ve only been keyed in by her between the hours of 3:30 AM and 7:00 AM. I’m sorry, Hads! I realize it’s a bit late in the year, but I’m gonna try not to get locked out again.

12 hours from now, I’m going to be completely done! Almost there…

Everyone should remember that this coming Friday, May 5, is No Pants Day! You are all strongly encouraged to not wear pants (and no, wearing a skirt isn’t good enough – the idea is that you’re supposed to pretend you just forgot to put on pants that morning). Unfortunately, I have a final presentation in my psych class that day, and I’m not ballsy enough to give the presentation pantsless. However, I hope to celebrate for at least part of the day.

On a tangential note, happy Fort Night! 14 days until graduation. In the meantime, Dan’s hiding in the couch cushions, the frosh are hiding under a bed they moved into the hallway, and they’re shooting nerf guns at each other. How great is that?! Pretty great, I tells ya.

I have to go back to writing my papers now. :-/

\begin{LittleShopOfHorrors}
Someone show me a way to get outa here,
‘Cause I constantly pray I’ll get outa here
Please, won’t somebody say I’ll get outa here
Someone gimme my shot or I’ll rot here.
…
I’ll do I dunno what to get outa [Mudd]
But a hell of a lot to get outa [Mudd]
People tell me there’s not a way outa [Mudd]
But believe me I gotta get outa [Mudd now!]
\end{LittleShopOfHorrors}

I’m pulling my third all-nighter of the week (well, not quite – I’ve gotten at least an hour of sleep every day), and I don’t expect to have less work until Wednesday afternoon, when I will only have a 15-minute presentation and a 20-page paper left to do. I am so ready to graduate right now!

However, the Big Algorithms presentation on Tuesday went just about perfectly (Reid and I discussed pattern matching, and in particular the Knuth-Morris-Pratt and Boyer-Moore algorithms): people seemed to understand everything we covered, we answered questions well, and they asked leading questions (this was awesome – on 3 separate occasions, we answered questions with “actually, that’s covered on the next slide…”). Our timing was perfect down to about 2 minutes of the 75-minute lecture, which blew me away because we’d never actually practiced the entire thing before. Moreover, Reid (who has a speech impediment where he stops talking when he gets flustered) went through his half perfectly, without any long pauses. On the feedback forms, one person even wrote that this was the best student lecture of the entire class. \/\/00T!

Right. Back to work…

As many of you probably know, I feel quite overwhelmed with work right about now. Today changed all of that. I was supposed to have a test in my BritLit class this morning, but I spent more time sleeping due to exhaustion last night than I had intended, and therefore less time studying. This morning rolls around and I hoped to just wing it. You know what? The test proctor never showed up, so after 20 minutes we all just wrote down the 14 lines of poetry we had to memorize, put them in a big pile, and left. How great is that!? The rest of the test has been rescheduled for Monday. Then, this afternoon in my Issues of Clinic class, the entire class was given an extension on our final papers until Monday morning. So all that’s left for this week is clinic and SciComp, which can easily fill up the rest of the week but is totally doable. O frabjous day!

Right. I’m gonna go take a nap.

It’s taken me 8 months (though I wasn’t playing for much of that), but I finally found one.

My first squeeze play →