The fourth of July was fun. I also found it amusing that at the festival I went to, we celebrated America by shooting up fireworks made in China (according to a friend), with musical accompaniment during the climax by the 1812 Overture (a piece celebrating Russian military victories). What are the organizers trying to say?

I now know what happens when you fill a tower of 18 drive bays with the largest hard disks money can buy. They start smoking - literally. I am rather annoyed with the customer service person who set us up with this computer.

What's more fun than getting a new laptop? Getting a new laptop and then taking it all apart to upgrade its hardware. I have now doubled both my laptop's RAM and hard disk space for cheaper than I could have bought the same features from Apple, plus I have my old hard disk for back up and can easily access it if need be using an external hard disk ( Read more... )

Yesterday I was a tour guide for a bunch of high school math teachers at work, and an awesome thing happened right at the beginning. The teachers had just arrived (I think from the airport) and Leon Lederman (nobel prize winning physicist, 1988) was supposed to be there to talk to them. But he couldn't make it, I think because of medical reasons, ( Read more... )

Sometimes the uncertainty of life can be truly fun ( Read more... )

Ahhhhh sheeat.

Looks like I gots ta have my thesis research done in time to present it at the summer conferences. I'll find out tomorrow which one it will be at, but it will probably be sometime in August. Goodbye to the 40 hour works weeks, hello again to the 60.

(please no more 80s ... please no more 80s ...)

It's been a while since I last updated. I don't really see as how the minutiae of my life are all that interesting, so I haven't really had much to say recently. I guess I can just throw up some broad themes ( Read more... )

The powers that be demand that I take a half hour online ethics training test. I've resisted for a long time, but they keep hounding me. At last I open up the webpage, and get a whole load of crap ... ere ... 12 ethics phrases dumped on me. They then decide to ask questions based on these, such as ( Read more... )

(Rant warning ( Read more... )

A while back a friend of mine was doing an MS walk, and I made a small donation for something like $30 (can't remember). On the online donation form, it asked me to answer a number of questions about myself, culminating with a question where it asks what convinced you to make the donation. The multiple choice answer options were something like: "I ( Read more... )