And 13 hours, 40 minutes later, I have finished my final. It was annoying, and definitely non-trivial, but it wasn't actually all that hard. It just required a few somewhat clever ideas -- nothing nearly as hard as, for example, my approximation algorithms final. Now it's time to go home, get some sleep, then come back in tomorrow morning for ( Read more... )

Time to start my type systems 24-hour take home exam. Hopefully it won't be too bad, although the TA made some pretty ominous comments. I didn't have any problems with the homeworks, though, and I just finished working my way through the final optional problem set on intuitionistic and classical logic. I have to say, while at first it seemed ( Read more... )

Via Pandagon I found two old videos from the 80's of Frank Zappa defending the right of rock musicians to say whatever they want. Whenever someone proposes censoring music or something similar the obvious retort is "well if you don't like it or want your children to hear it then just don't buy it." In one of the clips the right-winger defending ( Read more... )

I spent pretty much all of yesterday and today downtown watching fencing -- a USFA North American Cup event was in Pittsburgh. It was a lot of fun. Ben, Tommi, and two freshmen who I didn't know (Max and Noah) fenced in the Division 1 men's epee, and Kira and another freshman (Jasjit) fenced in the div 1 women's epee. Ben finished second, which ( Read more... )

Apparently it's actually pretty easy to mess with Texas. Wimps. I've been biking to school with the temperature in the teens, and it hasn't been a big deal.

Apparently water main broke on the third floor of Wean and flooded a machine room, taking down the entire SCS network for the day. Since grad students' home directories are on /afs/cs.cmu.edu, we couldn't even login to our office computers, much less use them for anything. At this point I have e-mail access again, but not much else. Even www.cs. ( Read more... )

This is kind of sad. I was reading a blog post over at Think Progress that abbreviates "paragraphs" as "graphs". It honestly took me about 30 seconds to realize that this was an abbreviation, and they weren't actually talking about graphs. That's kind of sad, but I suppose it's to be expected since I spend the majority of my time thinking about ( Read more... )

I'm not really impressed -- we probably had close to 1000 bottles of champagne at Quad for pickups every year I was there. Of course, that was Andre, but it's still champagne :-).

Yes, it's Saturday night, and no, I didn't go out or do anything social. Clearly I am lame. I even came home early today and actually made dinner in my apartment, but everyone else was busy or didn't feel like going out, so I just decided to make it a relaxing night and watch some tv. I feel like I've earned it -- I've done all but half a ( Read more... )

Thanksgiving was fun -- I met up with my family in New York, like we always do. We did the usual stuff, although we didn't go to the Macy's parade like usual because it was raining that morning, although it cleared up by the time the parade started. We went to the very end, though, and did our usual following behind the parade thing. There was ( Read more... )