Linguistics, Dancing, and a Few Good Books

23 November 2002

I feel like the kid in the AP test who just discovered his essay question was on the topic he had just written his term paper on. I've been emailing back and forth with the faculty at some of the schools I'm looking at, and the contact at one of my top choices just asked me what my opinion was on Scheme vs Java in intro classes---that they had just switched from Scheme to Java, and that he was of two minds about the whole thing, but that the students found Java more "practical". I don't think he was expecting a three-page answer, but boy howdy, was it fun to write. :)

"By the way, I have an upcoming TV appearance--- as a lip-synching member of the chorus in a TV opera about Princess Diana. As the old saying goes, "You should make a point of trying everything once, except incest and folk-dancing", and that was certainly my feeling about this experience." --John Lavagnino

Posted 1:10 PM [+]

22 November 2002

I've been putting off doing this for ages, mostly to annoy Kathy, but now that I'm doing job apps I figured I'd finally update the picture on my webpage. The old one was taken during orientation my first year at Brown (1997)---I suppose I looked a little younger then. What do you think?

August 1997	November 2002

Hm, I'm also standing up noticeably straighter in the new one. Thank you, ballroom dancing!

"Nobody has a sense of history anymore. The modern fan could tell you Barry Bonds' on-base percentage with two outs and runners in scoring position during night games on the road, but he's never even heard of the old St. Louis Browns shortstop Walter "Shitty Batter" Dugan. They called him that because he was a real shitty batter." --Joe Shidle

Posted 3:57 PM [+]

Ok, "groove" was maybe the wrong word; but at least I'm done with another application. They really do get easier as I go. A lot of stuff stays the same from app to app---the description of my research, for instance. But there's always the tricky bit, i.e. finding the few things about the school that makes me a particularly good match for it. That part is going to get trickier as I go down my list into the schools where I may be a good candidate, but not a notably tight match. Conveniently, the ones that don't match very well *I'm* not that interested in, either, so I'll just punt and do a more boilerplate application. ;) But I'll get to those later, maybe next week....

"US teens invariably report that it is vastly more difficult to obtain beer than cannabis or hallucinogens. No one asks them for ID when they try to buy cocaine." --Sam Walker

Posted 4:46 AM [+]

Finished another application! Whew, thought the procrastination was going to kill me there, but I'm in the groove now.

In other news, the fink installation just completed a little while ago. Crazy.

"There seems to be this whole bizarre weed etiquette thing that goes on. It doesn't work like food or alcohol or other consumables. People hoard drugs and lie about them and are willing to hurt friendships over access to them, from what I've seen. It's just all very odd and unappealing." --Gel Thelen

Posted 2:51 AM [+]

21 November 2002

STILL GOING... (boom, boom, boom, boom)

"Going up against Wal-Mart, well, it can be very expensive to be right." --Tim Storm

Posted 6:25 PM [+]

Good heavens. At around 11 I started upgrading my fink installation to really work with System 10.2. It's still running. Compiling things, downloading things, copying them in place... I had no idea it'd take so long.

"If Apple really wanted to sell more Macs, they should just show people how it looks when you minimize shit in OS X. I thought I was going to pee my pants." --Tycho

Posted 3:54 PM [+]

Note to self: when fixing the template on someone else's blog, don't leave the window open, as it is easily mistaken for one's own blog, possibly nearly leading to embarrassing incidents like posting in the wrong blog. :P

The reason for posting: it's 4 in the morning. I did touch on the applications, but what did I spend the last hour doing? Marking and cutting fabric for the skirt I promised Amy I'd make. Fun, to be sure, but not exactly what I ought to be doing.

"It is my opinion that, under the social contract, a person is entitled to a set of political freedoms (freedoms to, if you will) and economic freedoms (freedoms from)." --Michael Kimmitt

Posted 4:37 AM [+]

20 November 2002

Mailed off my second app today. I really should work to get the rest off before Thanksgiving. It does seem to get easier with each one....

It's really funny how, no matter how much you're happy with the place you are, in your last year you start feeling ready to move on. It happened in high school and ugrad, and now it's happening here; not that I don't get along with my friends anymore (I do!), but I just feel ready for the next thing. Which, hopefully, will be a job as a professor, teaching at a smaller school. But we'll see.

Incidentally, I've been listening to a lot of country music lately, because I've been finding the pop stuff increasingly annoying and decreasingly musical. But I have to say, every stereotype about country music, well, it's true. Half the songs are about driving trucks, the rest are about the singer's mother, and they're all a lot more innocent than pop songs. And the lyrics! The one that's on right now has the main lyric "she thinks my tractor's sexy." I mean, you just can't make this stuff up. It's great.

"Coming soon for American audiences!

• Harry Potter and the Room of Secrets
• Harry Potter and the Jailbird of Alcatraz
• Harry Potter and the Cup of Fire"

--David Singleton

Posted 11:36 PM [+]

19 November 2002

Got something written up for Polly (conveniently, Malte Zimmerman's thesis totally fails to address one of the interesting cases we were looking at, thus making it "related work" and not "d'oh! no thesis for you!") and hopefully will meet with her later this week.

Now to finish up the current batch of applications. An unofficial transcript is fine, says Knox. And away we go....

"I think I'd need something that ends in -ine to play that game well." --Eva Schillace

Posted 4:11 PM [+]

18 November 2002

Despite having an irritating website that doesn't like to let me in to pay my bill online, Citibank now gets a few points for having a reasonably helpful and patient call centre staff, who killed a charge on my account that I was really just looking for an explanation for. (It was only 38¢, so it wasn't great largesse on his part, but it was still nice of him.)

Discover still wins for having an easy-to-navigate site without lots of stupid "features" that make it not work on my browser, and an easy-to-understand process for paying online, that routinely works. Too bad there are still some people out there that don't take Discover.

"Now I'm confused and have lost track of the point I was trying to make." --Casey Westerman

Posted 4:05 PM [+]

Things I need to do: write up something for my meeting with Polly, and change my meeting with her to sometime other than tomorrow; send some emails regarding my first batch of job apps; finish writing cover letters and such for the rest of my job apps; write up a list of things I did for the Brown Comp so that they can know what to do next year; and, of course, work on my CS research. The most time sensitive, and the one I least want to work on right now, is the writeup for Polly. It's when I get into situations like this that I procrastinate the worst... Argh.

"A halo has to fall only a few inches to become a noose..." --Dan McKinnon

Posted 3:15 PM [+]