Well, or flowers, or linens. Anyway, Sara's and my fourth anniversary is today ( Read more... )

In all the Harry Potter frenzied-ness, I almost forgot to mention the *other* cool part of last weekend. As I think I mentioned before, Sara is training to run in the Chicago half marathon in September (better her than me...). She decided she wanted some race practice, so we went down to Mattoon, IL on Saturday for her to run in a 10K that ( Read more... )

That was awesome.I agree with general consensus -- somehow Rowling managed to tie things off in a satisfying way. Now I'm just sad that the series is done.

I'm going to have to read through the whole set again at some point, too.

So for the last couple weeks Sara had been telling me I'd have to see Transformers alone because she didn't want to go; it sort of became a running joke. This was sort of surprising, because usually she'd be into a new scifi movie like that as much as I am (she is the more hardcore trekkie of the two of us ;-).But anyway, seemed fair enough. Then I ( Read more... )

There have been quite a few times in my life when I've been driving along a highway, going (say) 5-10 mph above the speed limit, and driven straight past a police officer, with his radar gun out, who was monitoring the highway. On any one of these occasions I could have gotten a ticket -- heck, by the letter of the law, I should have gotten a ( Read more... )

I saw this last week but didn't get around to posting it, but for anyone who (like me) hasn't gotten sick of silly captioned cat pictures yet, they now have a programming language to go with it!

My first attempt:

HAI
PLZ CAN HAS SCIPY?
AWSUM THX
VISIBLE "IM DOIN YUR WURK"
O NOES
INVISIBLE "COME ON KERN, GET MOVING ALREADY!"
KTHXBYE
I ( Read more... )

I hereby solemnly declare this xkcd to be made of 100% awesome. Seems somehow fitting that it's number 256.

I'm extremely skeptical, though, that there's actually anything significant to learn about gun policy from yesterday's violence: Extreme, unpredictable events like this one seem like precisely the kind of thing that shouldn't dictate lawmaking decisions (though of course they inevitably do). If there's a case for gun control, it's in the daily run ( Read more... )

Last night a couple people from my group were in here talking about how hard everyone had worked during the renewal proposal, and then we got on to the requirements for success along different career tracks that are open to us from where we are now. The sad part is, the consensus on academia was that aside from working insanely hard (which doesn't ( Read more... )

So we had the site visit on Thursday; I've been sort of comatose since then. But I'm getting better -- having a couple days of break since the entire lab is shut down will do that ( Read more... )