In the last few weeks I rewatched the last two seasons of Lost. This is the sort of thing I do from time to time, and it was the first time I'd watched all of season 6 since the show ended. Right after the finale aired in 2010, I was quite upset with it. With the entire show now in the increasingly distant past, I wanted to write a more carefully ( Read more... )

I'm making a livejournal post for the first time in over 3 years. Please remain calm. I'm making this post because I'm about to make a longer post, which I would post to facebook, except that it's way too long for facebook. (I know, facebook sucks, I hate facebook. Every hates facebook. Let's all post on facebook about how we hate facebook.) Don't ( Read more... )

Finally getting around to writing something about the Mystery Hunt:

This was a tough year writing the hunt for me. I ended up putting a LOT of time into it, which I hadn’t expected at all at the outset. In the comments on my hunt wrap-up post last year, I wrote:

I'm going to be much [busier] this year (graduating + probable post-doc + applying ( Read more... )

Things are not always the way I want them. I try to accept that not everyone is perfect, that people try their best to do things well, and if they fail it's not because they wanted to. Maybe they had good reasons for doing what they did. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt enough to look for their reasoning, even if I disagree with it ( Read more... )

I just submitted a complete draft of my thesis to my committee. Some statistics:

• Pages of actual content: 227
  
• Pages of references: 9
  
• Pages of pre-content: 14
  
• Total pages: 250
  
• PDF file size: 1,398,047 bytes
  
• Latex file size: 428,488 bytes
  
• Word count: 68,299 [this was calculated somewhat sketchily. Sorry, it's hard to know what a word is when there ( Read more... )

( Well... )

From this week's New Yorker:


( Read more... )

A long long long time ago, when I was but a first year graduate student, still uncertain about what the hell I was doing in Ithaca and whether I'd made a huge mistake, my 7th LiveJournal post ever was called The Cost of Television. It was about my journey to get television on my computer, and how the product I bought was pretty wretched. Oh, how ( Read more... )

I was just reading a draft of a paper my adviser sent to me. This is a paper that we're in the process of writing. It has four authors, but the vast majority is actually written by him and me. A week or two ago I wrote up a quick version with what I thought were the most important parts, sent that to him, then he filled in a bit more, and sent it ( Read more... )

It's time to cut my hair ( Read more... )