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Changes abound in my life these days. Like, uhh ...
hmm. Well, maybe it's exactly like it has been for
months. The classes are different this semester, the
workload is a little more reasonable, but the general
picture is about the same. I sit at my desk and do
work, or if I'm lucky I go to a coffee shop and do
work. We have an awesome little coffee shop within
walking distance called Cafe Vienna.
I've secured
an apartment for next semester. My
neighbor Jeff, Marina, and I are staying in a
3-bedroom 3-bath apartment off the north(ish) end of
campus. They're new aparments, and very
nice. Our unit even has a little baby wiring
closet. :-)
I'm in the process of becoming an IN state resident,
for various reasons. It's kind of a pain, because of
all the paperwork involved. Finding time to make it
to the offices around classes is a chore. I'm hoping
to get finished up on Monday.
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Matt
squeezed in a massive update the other day, so it's up
to me to even the odds. bhumphre
is no competition with his recent update schedule (come
on, three times a year? Even I beat that ...), so I'm
still on schedule for world domination through dribbling
stories of my life onto the Interweb, in the process
turning myself into an Everyman hero and winning the
hearts of the vast hordes of mentally underpowered
Interweb users. Is there another kind?
Today marks the last day of classes before Thanksgiving
break. If the weather holds out on me, I'm hoping to
leave for home sometime midafternoon. This will be my
longest break since I got back from Japan, at a whopping
five days. Of course, I'll be doing algorithms for some
not insignificant part of it... Yesterday was the due
date for a relatively large project in OS (demand
paging), so algorithms has been on the back burner for
a while. It's unfortunate that it's worked its way to
the front just in time for me to ostensibly have some
time off.
I'm part of the elite 3g cell phone group now. The last
phone I bought was supposed to have been 3g capable once Sprint rolled out
their service ... but service was rolling out all over
the place and the promises of my phone doing 3g data
transfer didn't seem to be being fulfilled. I called
Sprint to see what was up with that, and it turns out
that my phone wasn't 3g capable. Being as I
bought it specifically for 3g and had enquired about
said service at the time, I was outraged. After much
indignant protest to the Sprint rep, I wound up with
a phone that is *actually* capable of 3g data transfer.
The USB
cable that should let me use it with my laptop is
on its way as we speak. Who cares about their lame
"screen savers" (which we call wallpaper) and "ringers"
(which we call annoying)? It's about using the Interweb
from remote. I'm hoping the latency is good enough that
I can comfortably use ssh.
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Usually I know I'm slacking, this time it took me
completely by surprise! I was just thinking "hmm, if
I update now, I can be on a regular update schedule."
Apparently by "regular" I was thinking "semi-monthly".
The upside of that is that they tell me I'll be here
about 5.5 years ... if they go as fast as the past
few weeks I'll be ready for graduation by next November
or so. ;-)
I guess these past few weeks have gone by so quickly
because i've been working hard. The algorithms class
I'm taking is consuming huge amounts of my time, largely
because I appear to not have the math background that
would really be desirable. My neighbor, Jeff (that's
right, another Jeff!) pointed out yesterday that almost
all of the sections we've been doing an problems we've
been assigned are marked with a star in the book, which
is explained in the introduction to denote topics that
are more appropriate for graduate students because they
"may require more advanced math". By that they
apparently mean "if you only do the starred sections it
will me more like a statistics class than an algorithms
class".
Anyway, I should really be working. :-)
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It looks like both bhumphre and Matt
have updated their respective news sites, so I suppose
I should, too. bhumphre went for an amazing eleven
months with no news, and it has been quite some time
since Matt has tossed us more than one sentence. After
I update, the combined updating power between our sites
will rival updating power like the world has never seen
before!
So on a note other than the subjugation of the world by
our news sites, it seems to me I must be settled in at
Purdue. I don't feel like I know anything about what
goes on here, or that I know anything about the program
or my classes yet, but it's not new any more...
I guess from here on out I'm just another student. ;-)
The OS class I'm taking seems to be pretty sweet. We
haven't done any real meat work yet, but the intro lab
is cooler than I'm used to seeing from an intro
assignment, so I have high hopes. I'm already halfway
lost in Algorithms, which is pretty much as I expected.
Hopefully I can get caught up and stay caught up for one
semester.
I get a four day weekend! Well, three now, since Friday
is largely gone. I have no Friday classes this
semester, so with Labor Day I get a total of four days
off. I got kind of excited about going someplace cool
for a day or two earlier this week, and then I realized
that I have no money so I'll go to my dorm room instead.
I'll call this another part of the summer vacation I
didn't have. :-)
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This is the first week of classes here at Purdue, so
I've officially started my graduate career. I've only
had one actual day of classes so far, so I can't make
any predictions as far as that goes... But let's say
it seems promising. I'm pleased to find that there
are quite a few classes here with a depth I didn't
have as an undergraduate. The professors I've met so
far have all seemed competent, so hopefully that depth
will be realized in some sort of reasonable fashion.
I'm taking an Operating Systems and an Algorithms course
this semester. Operating systems may be quite a bit of
work, but it doesn't really worry me. Algorithms, on
the other hand, does. We'll see how that goes. Sixteen
weeks of algorithms ... yikes.
I'm also TAing for an undergraduate operating systems
course. Only time will tell how that goes, too, but
it also looks to be fun. I teach a "PSO", which is
sort of a cross between a lab section and a group
office hour, once a week. I've also got an office
way on the other side of campus where supposedly
students can come to me for help. I dunno if they
will or not. ;-)
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Technically summer break isn't over, but for my intents
and purposes it really is. My summer break was July 4
through July 7 this year, and today is the 6th. That
was fast.
I went to
Brett's wedding today. He and Abby looked
so happy, and it was a very nice wedding.
Brett's a good guy, and while I don't know Abby so well
she seems like a really good girl. I wish them the
best. :-) Good luck, guys.
The wedding reception was at Edison Community College in
Piqua... That nagged at my brain for a little while
before I figured out that I think that's where Little
Jeff did his post secondary work. Small world...
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Wow, I'd thought I was slow on the update before, but
this is ridiculous. I guess it's time for another bulk
summary to get mostly up-to-date.
After returning from Japan in mid-March, I finished up
at Ohio University with one last quarter. I was grading
for the ITL, working with INBOUNDS, and completing the
Japanese sequence. Life was busy (hence the lack of
updates), but I have to say it was a good final
quarter. I'm definitely going to miss OU.
I guess the next logical order of business is an
introduction to the next n years of my life...
I'm enrolled at Purdue for a Masters degree starting
this Fall. I haven't decided for sure on a real
long-term goal, but there's a definite likelihood I'll
be there through a Ph.D. as well.
As far as this summer, I'm interning at NASA again.
This summer I'm working on analyzing some traffic dumps
from a web server at GRC to see if a handful of TCP
"enhancements" (limited transmit, larger initial window,
appropriate byte counting) really help anything in
reality. It's a fun project, and coming along all right
as far as I can see.
Josh is also up here this summer, and it's nice to have
a roommate again this year. Not that I don't spend a
significant portion of my time sitting right here at
this keyboard anyway... ;-)
Marina is at home in Russia right now, and she's been
mostly out of touch since she got there. After myself
being in Japan and her being in Russia, it really brings
how lucky we are to have the ubiquitous connectivity we
have here in the States to light. Or maybe how unlucky
the rest of the world is that their connectivity
sucks... :-) At any rate, I'll be glad when she gets
back to the U.S. and I can keep in better touch.
That's it for this update... With any luck the next one
will be less than four months away!
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Of course, it's the 15th here, but it's V-day in the
Free World. Valentine's day is actually a little
weird here, only girls give stuff to
guys. There's another day in about a month
called "White Day" where guys are supposed to give
back to any girls that gave them stuff, much of which
is "girichoco", or "obligatory chocolates" that
people are socially obliged to give to friends and
coworkers. So there's your culture class for this
update.
Finals started this past Tuesday, and the last day
is next Tuesday. Afterwards we have a graduation
ceremony for myself and the other 6 month students,
followed by me and the gang leaving for Okinawa
for 11 or 12 days. That should be a blast... We're
taking a three day cruise down, staying on Naha (the
main island) for four days, a smaller island farther
south for two, and then returning for three days by
cruise again. Okinawa is semi-tropical and supposed
to be generally cool, so I'm getting pumped up for
it.
I'm only here for about another once, and then it's
back to Athens and OU. I'll be there on the first
day of spring quarter, so it will be classes as
usual for me. I'll be glad to be in Athens again,
but I'm definitely going to miss Japan. But I'm
sure we'll hear more about that later. ;-)
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It seems it's been a while again. I should just quit
apologizing for that since it's becoming the norm.
I've been back in the States for this previous week
for the holidays. It's been a fantastic trip home,
and I'm very glad to have made it. Thank you to
everyone who helped me in various ways to make it
possible! I saw a lot of people this week while I
was home, but if I didn't catch up to you I'm sorry
and hopefully I'll see you early in the spring.
As I said, it's been a good week... But tomorrow
morning I get on a plane for the Far East again.
Some ridiculous number of hours later I will land
in Nagoya, beginning the second three months of my
study abroad. It seems like I should be able to
come up with something significant from that, but
I really can't. I guess I'll see y'all in another
month. Or maybe sooner if I'm on the ball. ;-)
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It's only spurious because I never update any more.
Sigh, I seem to be slow on the ol' uptake
these days. Computer access in Japan is maybe a little
bit harder than it needs to be, and when I get to a
computer I seem to have more important things to do.
Speaking of things being harder than they need to be,
everything in Japan is a little harder than
necessary as far as I can tell. I'm not sure why that
is, but everything seems to take twice as long as it
should and then turns out wrong to boot. I used to
think it was a language barrier, but now I think it's
par for the course. Everything seems to get done
eventually, the road is just sometimes long
and painful.
I've hit a lot of cultural snags since I've been here,
but there was a huge one the other day that I found
both interesting and sad... I was in the international
students' office asking about purchasing a katana, and
they kept telling me I needed to get a license first.
From the U.S. I repeatedly informed them that, in the
U.S., we don't need licenses to own swords...
They couldn't comprehend it. They literally could not
comprehend a place where one could own a sword without
a license. I told them that in America we didn't need
a license for a firearm, either, and that was
way too much for their noggins.
Well, seeing as this lounge isn't heated and my fingers
are rapidly turning into frozen finger sticks, I will
sign off for now.
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