Monday, January 31, 2005

mental health day

for a day that started off moderately hectic, and then for having 3 of my 4 classes today (9:50-11:10, 11:30-12:50, and 2:50-4:10), (i.e. a very long day!), life turned out alright...

eric had agreed to have a "being irate at stuff" party this afternoon after our 2:50 classes, so we met up around 4:15, and after a quick trip to the post office, got back in my car and were like "dude, what do we do now?"... for as irked at people (well just one or two in particular, not really at society as a whole) and at math i was yesterday, eric was even more frustrated than me today! (him, more at the whole educational system and at professors in general), so we made the perfect grumpy conversation pair...

anyhow, we get back in my car in the post office parking lot, and have the following chat
me: so what do we do now?
eric: i dunno
me: we go to subway and ihop and starbucks and our houses... do we know how to do anything else?
eric: dude, lets go to delaware
me: be careful what you wish for -- i don't have class again til wednesday, i so totally would right now
eric: ok, NOT really, i dunno, what do we do now?
me: we go to the ocean!
eric: it's new jersey, new jersey ocean doesn't count
me: it's the ocean, it belongs to the world, not to new jersey
eric: fine, you got a map?
(dig out my atlas, and decide perth amboy is our closest bet... it's the town right on the jersey side of the bridge to staten island... it's not the ocean per se right there, but it is where the raritan river lets out into the raritan bay, which technically IS a corner of the ocean...)

as we got on the interstate to get there, things were slow -- when i asked eric if he wanted backroads, his comment was "you know, this is fine, it's like a perfect metaphor for my life right now... stuck in traffic,,.. in NEW JERSEY"... then, he finally started cracking up instead of being vocally angstful (which is a rare state to see him in, it's moderately amusing... all his default responses to things are totally different than normal and he can never keep it up, at least being really loud about it, for too long at a time :-P)

anyhow, we arrived at the end of state st. in perth amboy (right on the snow-covered beach) as the sun was setting and came face to face with *this* view



-- for a stressful day, that really cheered both of us up, to sit back, relax, jump around in snow, and watch a gorgeous sunset over water :-)... we stayed out there for like 30-40 minutes until the sun really was all the way down and we were chilly..

a few other favorite pics of the afternoon:

eric in a garbage can... (don't ask :-P)


colorful waves at dusk, and lots of birds :-P


me, caught off guard


me in profile, caught off guard... again


seriously, just *try* to tell me this isn't one of the most gorgeous sunsets ever... you can't do it, can you? :-P


(you can see the whole set of 36 sunset pictures from this evening here -- enjoy :-P)

anyhow... we then headed back to our part of jersey for ihop for dinner, then eric made a quick run to his house and met me at mine for a csilag buli (hungarian for star party) :-)

we hadn't taken the telescope out since last august (oi), but we set up, and although the lowest powered eyepiece is MIA, we managed to find and focus in on saturn for a bit and re-acquaint ourselves with the winter constellations... AND we picked up starbucks on the way to where we go stargazing, so it was a good time all around :-P

for the first half of my day being rather long and dismal, the 2nd half was a much needed break from school reality, and fun with a good friend.

oh, and just in case it hasn't been a long enough post already... when eric came in with me to help bring the telescope back up (i have like a 4 foot long reflecting scope with a separate motorized tripod, so it's definitely 2 trips for 1 person), he started playing with our wall-sized dining room mirror... then we decided it was fun to take more photos, so enjoy :-P







oh! finally, in case you don't pay close enough attention to the sidebar, march is gonna be a freakin awesome month.

(1) alliswan plans to come to visit on her spring break (the week before mine)... she came to see me last year around the same time, and i visited her last may, but we haven't seen each other again in nearly oi... 8 months now... this should be a party... current thoughts include going to see "stomp" in NYC while she's in town :-)

(2) after alliswan's back at school, i have my own break... i should be on altar guild at church for march, so i can really only be out of town monday through friday... as such no peru or canada (current potential trips in the works with some of my friends) for me... however, i got something even better... roommate (who's been to visit me several times this fall,... most recently in december right before christmas) is back at school in columbia, south carolina and i haven't been down there to see her yet... so (a) i'm going to columbia to see her part of the world and have some fun... (b) my friend sheima (we were best of friends the first semester of freshman year of HIGH SCHOOL before she moved to virgina, although we kept very well in touch after that to the point that i stayed a couple days with her family during spring break of my senior year of HS 3 years later... we haven't been in touch as frequently, especially after she got married a few years back, but she too, is in columbia, and the plan includes me spending a night at her place and seeing her for the first time in (dude) 6 years... this should be great :-)... there's a couple other friends down that way i'm hoping to see, but roommate and sheima are the main ones to catch up with and i'm excited

(3) finally, the week after my spring break is arlene's spring break... she's a mutual friend of mine and eric's from our semester in budapest... she goes to school in washington state, and has never been out to jersey... i last saw her in august in vegas one night when she and her boyfriend were on their roadtrip and made plans to cross paths with me and eric as we started out on our own cross country trip... it'll be super cool to have her around too :-)

so yeah, march is looking to be a fabulously exciting month on all THREE counts :-) yay for spiffy friends to see and have come see me :-)

ok, seriously, enough typing for the night... time to read :-P

night y'all! :-)

mondays, mondays...

your day might not be off to a good start if

* you were doing homework til 2ish and got up at 8ish... 6 hours of sleep is doable, but not my favorite

* one of your roommates, (who doesn't have to be out of the house for HOURS yet) hops in the shower about 30 seconds before you were about to grab it, causing you to leave the house 10 minutes later than planned after running through the getting ready process

* you end up behind a garbage truck on the way to campus, with various pieces of paper trash flying out at your windshield along the way

2 classes down, 1 to go.... then no class til wednesday afternoon... *that* much is good.

later dudes.

Sunday, January 30, 2005

oi

why do people have to make life more complicated than it should be?

i've been frustrated with (person who shall remain nameless) for several weeks now, but didn't know how to formulate it until recently (and had been too busy to think about things super-hard til recently)... but today, i sat down, typed 8K worth of "this is how i feel and why, please actually think seriously about the impact you have on others for once", set it aside for a couple hours, read it again, and sent it in email form.

no response as of yet, but for as to the core of some major issues as it was, if i get a response, i don't expect it to be for at least a couple days yet.

comment from a close friend who's been tuned in all along and read what i wrote after i sent it, "I can't imagine what it must have taken to write, but you are right on every account. It was well written and to the point. It was highly critical without being mean. Honestly, I impressed that you were able to write it so clearly. I think it was the best thing you could have said to him. I'm glad you sent it, but more than sending it to him, I'm glad you were able to clearly figure it out."

when did i get so good at expressing anger clearly?

oi.

i just wish there weren't situations that required sorting out anger and sending critical comments to resolve.

(yes, i'm vague tonight, sorry)

tomorrow's a horribly long day... time to crash.

night y'all.

ode to vodka

i bought this today (skyy vanilla vodka)... the big glass (750ml) of it... because it looked good, and yesterday was payday, and i haven't bought alcohol in awhile...

scott and eric were over tonight to watch "fiddler on the roof" with me and colleen... eric's not really into vodka and colleen doesn't really drink so scott was my only hope of getting someone to try it with me... he tried just a fraction of a shot and decided it was decent but asked what i'd mix it with... when i told him i planned to drink it straight, he gawked and was surprised, but agreed to pour...

he poured us each about 1 shot worth and i laughed at him and said i wanted more... this repeated itself until he finally gave me 3-4 shots worth, and we stopped then, not because i didn't want more, but because scott really didn't think i knew what i was doing... at any rate, i was done with that glass in less than 5 minutes... scott had given himself half as much and took half an hour to finish... he got up partway through the movie and got himself some wine... and refilled me another 3-4 shots worth, which i again finished in under 5 minutes (you can't sip vodka :-P)

anyhow, neither eric nor scott believed i knew what i was doing and both commented when i started on my first glass that i was gonna be passed out on the floor before the movie was half done, but really, i felt nothing... no sight impairment, no behaving obnoxiously, no loss of balance... and i had 6-8 shots of 70 proof vodka in a very short period of time... the boys were impressed :-P

i've been saying for awhile now that coffee has way more of an effect on me than alcohol, and people have laughed (because they've seen my caffeine highs and caffeine blackouts), but not thought that was possible... but tonight, scott's comment was "dude, i don't think i'd ever want to go up against you in a drinking contest... i'd be sunk"

yes, lara can drink a LOT, and not be affected a BIT... go vodka :-P

Saturday, January 29, 2005

ode to shopping

i've been productive today! not at all at math, but you know...

got brithday cards for 3 really cool people who have birthdays this week...

went to riteaid to get some various things, including some vanilla vodka to celebrate clearing off my MBNA credit card :-)

then i went to the grocery store... for starters i was by myself and got a cart... usually i'm paranoid about pushing a cart and get a handbasket and if it doesn't fit in there i don't get it... which results in lots of grocery trips and not getting a lot each time... oi

today, i got a cart, i was all proud of myself that i did... and got to the checkout... things were fine... i put all my groceries up on the moving belt and then pushed my cart up and helped the bagger put the grocery bags in it... however, not paying attention, i stuck my grocery discount card on the belt behind all my groceries (since the checker was in the middle of ringing up all my stuff by the time i got it out)... then, neither of us paid attention to it until the card went zip... right into the inside of the belt.... the manager, the checker, and the bagger all took apart part of the checkout machine/belt to get it back out... needless to say, i felt just a bit dumb

if all's well that ends well, life is good... i got my groceries... i had the victory of pushing my own shopping cart through the store without a problem :-P... my discount card was retrieved, and i got all my stuff home... but dude... how many times in a week do you think they get customers who accidentally throw their shopping discount card into the moving belt at the checkout and cause employees to dismantle the machine... i have to be pretty unique on that one.

oops.

Friday, January 28, 2005

remembering auschwitz

yesterday marks 60 years since the liberation of auschwitz (see here)

it's one thing to know what it was about... it's another to actually read the stories of survivors and/or actually see it for yourself (i was there for thanksgiving 2002... it was one of the saddest days of my life)... as absolutely sick to my stomach as it makes me feel to actually sit still and process the horror that it was all about, i can't imagine being one of those who are still around today to tell their 1st hand stories of being there.

my challenge to you -- actually read some of the survivor stories you'll find online linked to places like the cnn link above... and elsewhere... process what it really was about rather than just "a horrible place"... allow yourself to really feel (again?) what a horrible thing this was.

just like the inscription on the peace monument at auschwitz-birkenau "for ever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity..."

may we never get so far distanced from it that we fail to recognize auschwitz for the heinous wrong it was or lessen the grief and saddness we feel for it.... and in so remembering, may our resolve be strengthened that such destruction of human life and human dignity never happen again.

may we never forget.

apprentice, week 2

just finished watching last night's must see TV (which i missed while at the playhouse)... dude... know how i said i like this cast better than last seasons? i think i lied.

sure, there are individuals i respect... but as a whole, i couldn't believe how much in-fighting there already is on the networth team, and it's only week 2!... brian and kristin were absolutely ridiculous and kristin got completely off the hook for it in the boardroom... regardless of how justified her motivation, her attitude was loud, abrasive, and obnoxious... and brian... kudos to him for walking into the boardroom and saying "it was my fault, fire me"... but then turning around and trying to defend himself again... how much did he mean it and how much was him thinking he was saying what he should to throw the rest of the team off guard in the boardroom? his scene in the taxi after he was fired was the strangest one i've seen... he was too pompous, and i was glad to see him go, but there are a few others on his team that are a little out there too...

on the magna team, i could understand that verna was tired and stressed when she quit the task and walked off... it makes me wonder how she survived college without pulling any allnighters or anything... she claims she learned a lesson from it all, and i hope that's true, but i was amazed that she just kinda went into overload mode like that... going even to the beginning of the task, *before* she freaked out, she was kinda pushy with talking to the PM about details that she could have just figured out without irritating him, like she didn't get the idea that more was going on than just what she needed to think about... like i already commented though, she did claim to have learned a big lesson, so hopefully it'll be better for her next go around... the hotel-wide party though was a brilliant idea... for working with what they were, that had to be a big selling point, so go team... also, kudos to danny to still being an individual, but coming across as more of a professional than a crazy hippie running around with a guitar this week... i was impressed at the change

characters i still respect -- john, last week's winniing PM did a good job of working hard, and responding honestly to brian... although he may need to be conscientious in the future that his confidence (which so far has been grounded) doesn't block him from recognizing his own faults (so far i don't know what they are, but everybody has some, right?)... i thought craig's boardroom comment was quite astute... and i liked the morale of the magna team throughout this task, even after one of their members quit and came back.

next week's previews say a member will quit in the first 5 minutes... verna still seemed upset during the reward... i wonder if it's her? or if it's someone who's still disgruntled from networth... brian was a major issue, but there was a lot more going on than just him this episode that didn't get discussed in the boardroom.

dude... what a show.

to the playhouse and back!

yesterday was a crazy busy day... class with my advisor, lunch, reading class with my advisor, break, seminar that my advisor coordinates... by then it was already 5:30 going on 6pm... eric and i went to his house so he could change clothes and then to subway for dinner... then to my house for me to change clothes and for us to meet scott and colleen... we all had tickets to the marriage of figaro at the local playhouse last night... it was pretty fun.

some of colleen's catholic center friends met us there... colleen had bought us tickets in the gallery though (as far away from the state as you get in the top balcony), and it wasn't sold out so eric voted for moving further down in the balcony (if you're not taking sold seats, no one gets mad)... so he, scott, and i moved down, but colleen and her friends stayed put higher up.

if you're not familiar with it, the marriage of figaro (opera by mozart) is insane... figaro and susanna are getting married, but the count (their employer) is in love with susanna and tries to do all kinds of crazy things to screw things up... there's a pageboy (really a woman playing the part) who ends up dressed as a woman for half the play (a woman playing a man dressed as a woman... oi)... and there's a devious plot with the countess and susanna to get back at the count on the day of the wedding... there's another devious plot by the count to try to force figaro to marry another character instead last minute, who turns out to be his mother... things just about absolutely go crazy.

quotes:

(at intermission)
me: (to eric) dude, are they all on drugs?
eric: did you just ask if they're on bobs?
me: sure, bobs... how do you spell that
eric: b-a-u-b-s... baubs.
me: um ok, sure... are they on baubs?
eric: definitely, yes

(partway through act 3)
me: (to scott) dude, what on earth is going on?
scott: don't tell me you're confused already
me: no, i just want a reaction of "this is all insane"!
scott: ok, well they're all insane... and they just found his mother... and she wasnt't a snort OR a pronk!

(a snort is the name for a bulldozer in the kids' book "are you my mother", and a pronk is the name for a snort in the spanish version of the book ;-) )

next thursday, i'm crazy excited... there's a performance of the soweto gospel choir (award winning choir from south africa) at the same theater... ben, leigh, and i have 5th row orchestra section tickets, and i'm pretty excited about it :-)

anywho... early class today... gotta get a move on... tgif?

Thursday, January 27, 2005

remember casettes?

have i mentioned that after christmas, i brought back my casette tape rack from my room in memphis? my tapes had been in jersey since august 2003 when i first moved up here, but they'd been boxed up and i hadn't listened to a single one... now that they're all out and within 2 feet of my boombox, i've been in to listening to some old stuff i hadn't listened to since junior high/HS... dude... good stuff... if only i didn't have to flip the casette every 30 minutes :-P i guess that's why we have digital technology now, eh?

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

movies... and lots of work

oi... for having a nice calm morning, my day got busy

self observation: i way overuse "oi" a lot lately... mostly in speech, but it's starting to carry over into typing too :-P

back to the plot... i read until my roommates were gone this morning, took my time getting ready, then started in on homework.

as you may or may not recall, i have an advisor since november... this semester i'm in his regular course with like a dozen other students, and i'm taking a reading course with him.

now with this reading course... we met before christmas break to discuss my first project for it... my prof realized i had the qual to worry about and that i wouldn't be starting anything until after that... however we didn't meet last week so i didn't really start anything then either... today, knowing that our first meeting is tomorrow and i've had a bit of time to get started, i feel like i should have a lot to show for it... but i just started this afternoon... major oops. i've generated a lot of data and have some ideas of what would be most profitable to attack first as far as generating proofs, but yeah... lots of data, no theory/proofs to show tomorrow... oh well... it's just the first week, right?

apparently trevor (eric's roommate last year who decided instead of taking the qual and going to grad school two years in a row to move to india and teach math there for a year) had a reading class with my advisor last year... he'd come in with half done stuff and the prof would praise him for what he had done rather than chewing him out for what he hadn't... i was discussing this with ben, and he commented how for him personally, he needs an advisor who will chew him out and give him crap if he's not working hard enough... we came to the conclusion that i'm hard enough on myself to make up for that so it's probably good that my potential advisor is always so positive! :-P

in the meantime, lots of time to be spent playing with maple and with the online encyclopedia of integer sequences... aren't you jealous?

tonight, since ben had last minute other things going on last weekend, and skipped our usual friday night go to see a movie at the theater ritual, we went and saw one tonight instead... coach carter... it was really good. samuel l. jackson played a tough high school basketball coach who took over as head coach at his old high school, where the team had (1) a horrible record, and (2) were failing lots of their classes... it was one of those "real life story, teaching kids respect" kind of stories, of which there are many, but it was worth watching. it was well put together and the characters were real... i enjoyed it.

the theater was playing the movie in several theaters at staggered times (i.e. we saw the 7:35 show that got out at 10ish, but there was also like an 8:20 showing in a theater across the hall)... anywho, this couple of kids come in around 8:30 (a little late for the one across the hall... nearly halfway through ours), sit down, apparently know they're running late, but somehow didn't realize they came in halfway through(?!?!?) and stayed in our movie until it was done... how can people not realize things like that?!?!... ben and i were amused :-P

tomorrow will be a busy day... not bad busy, just several more places to be than a usual day... class at 11:30, reading class at 2:15, and since i now technically have an advisor, i figure i should be going to the seminar he organizes, which is at 4:30 tomorrow... after that, eric, colleen, me, and some of colleen's catholic center friends see "the marriage of figaro", so at least it ends fun :-P

i'm done rambling, really, i am... just killing time while my sequences run in maple... oh boy :-P

night y'all... and happy thursday?

why i like wednesdays

don't get me wrong, i love my roommates, but there's something remarkably nice about having the house to yourself from the time you wake up on til you actually have something to do at 3pm... there's something remarkably nice about being able to blast your music as loudly as you want and not worry about bothering anyone... there's something remarkably nice about being able to sit in you PJs in a recliner with an oversized coffee cup full of soup and watch snow without the slightest chance of being interrupted by someone to discuss math or household business

i like my roommates, but i also love wednesday mornings :-)

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

the power of one

the story of how one person trying to stay warm can cost lots of people lots of money and lots of time for years:

Fire causes long-term disruption on New York subway lines

2 Subway Lines Crippled by Fire; Long Repair Seen

summary... sunday, a homeless man near the chambers street station (on the A and C lines (blue lines, further south in manhattan, just north of the WTC site, etc.)) lit a shopping cart full of garbage on fire to keep warm... the fire spread to a control room in the station which contained some 600 relays, switches, etc.... cripping the C line (which will not be fixed in the near future) and reducing the A line to 1/3 the number of trains... it could take 3-5 years to fix, and there are only two companies in the world who make the right parts to replace what all was damaged... besides two of NYC's busiest subway lines be crippled, costing lots of people lots of time (A and C combined have about 580,000 riders on an average weekday), repairs were estimated to cost several million dollars.

dude.

more fun news

solar flares make really cool pictures... especially when they're the biggest in 15 years!

published last week, just days before carson died... did you know he was a secret joke contributor to letterman's show? interesting...

finally... happy birthday to the mars rovers!

Monday, January 24, 2005

oi

i started eating dinner 3 hours ago... and i just finished it... not that dinner took that long, i just got a 2.5 hour distraction in the middle of it.

one month ago i got an IM from a screen name my ex-foster cousin had IMed me from before. we quickly discovered i was talking to one of her friends, and her friend didn't know who i was... apparently my ex-foster cousin had stolen the password to a screen name that wasn't hers and added me to the buddy list.

my ex-foster cousin got a new foster family in november, and we've not been in touch with her since... however, these kids (apparently 2 or 3 trade off with the screen name) have IMed me periodically for the past month, either chatting away and then cussing at me for no apparent reason, or forgetting previous conversations think i'm some guy they all like and start flirting, and then get mad when they find out i'm not... last night when my "i don't even know you and i have homework to do... bye" got an "a**hole" in response, i blocked her... she got another friend to IM me and call me names instead, so i dropped a line to my aunt telling her what i knew of who it was and that if she wanted to mention it to the parents, that would be great

as i was eating, i got a phonecall from my brother that got me back to my computer... after denying that she knew anything about talking to strangers on IM all day, one of the girls broke down and told her mom, yeah she had been being mean to me, but i called her a "b*tch" first, so it was justified... um... is that even normally in my vocabulary? especially when talking to a 13 year old??? i don't think so.

anyhow, 2 hours were spent scouring my computer and seeing if there was a way to retrieve old IM convos that i hadn't thought to save at the time to satisfy this girl's mother.... oi.

so two 13 year old girls in trouble with their parents for inappropriate use of IM, and the boy they got involved in it last night felt bad and IMed me to apologize tonight, to which i told him it was fine, and i just wanted him and his friends to recognize that what they were doing (IMing strangers and calling them names) was inappropriate.

blah... *hopefully* now though, i won't get any more of these retarded IMs of "hi... oh wait, you know (insert my ex-foster cousin's name), well then i hate you, and you're a %^&*" when i'm trying to work... dude

on a less ranting note, i made like the best dinner ever tonight...

i had an acorn squash that i forgot i bought a week ago... baked it in the oven (cut squash in half, cut out seeds, put each half face down in a quarter inch of water in the oven for half an hour)... when it was nice and soft, i put the two halves face up in a dry baking dish, but put a spoonful of butter and a decent amount of honey in the middle of each (honey was my new idea, mom's been cooking squash like this with butter for ages), and baked them 5-10 more minutes in the oven to let the butter and honey soak in a little...

while all that was in the oven, i cooked some egg noodles, and when the squash was good, i filled the middle with noodles on both (to also soak up the little bit of extra butter and honey)

sweet, but really really good... if you like squash, it was absolutely fantastic.

ugh... 9:30 already and i haven't had *time* to do any homework since i've been home tonight... ergh

later dudes

some fun?

i liked this post from laura's blog... read it yourself...

other fun?

jersey may have gotten a bit of snow, but i'm kinda glad we didn't get this much!

...and of course you can never go wrong with nasa's astronomy picture of the day... i especially liked yesterday's

later dudes

oh good... :-P

oh good, my current career aspiration was affirmed by blogthings.com (insert sigh of relief)... because i sooo depend on them to define my life :-P (not really)





Your Dominant Intelligence is Logical-Mathematical Intelligence





You are great at finding patterns and relationships between things.
Always curious about how things work, you love to set up experiments.
You need for the world to make sense - and are good at making sense of it.
You have a head for numbers and math ... and you can solve almost any logic puzzle.

You would make a great scientist, engineer, computer programmer, researcher, accountant, or mathematician.



Sunday, January 23, 2005

oi

if you've checked my blog in the past 36 hours, you know i *was* posting a ton of pictures every hour or so.... i decided since i had so many and not everyone has dsl, maybe i should make it an option view... so the pictures are down... you can see all 149 files here and see this weekend's blizzard in action.

since church was cancelled i slept in today (very rare for me on a sunday)... worked on homework most of the afternoon... midafternoon while i was finishing some stuff up yet, colleen and leigh decided to unbury their cars... i joined after colleen's car was already in the street (my car was parked between colleen's and leigh's for the storm) and came out to this:



looks like fun, eh? since my car was inbetween the two others, it wasn't quite as bad to get stuff out from behind my tires... so sweeping off the roof simplified things lots for me :-P... i took over shoveling from colleen, who was tired of it... i actually rather enjoyed it (maybe residual from growing up on a quasi-farm?) and shoveled for the better part of an hour and a half

here's me and a big pile of snow... woo hoo?



eventually, leigh wanted to help but we only had one shovel... i suggested that she take some more pictures with my digital before it got dark, but she and my camera decided to not so much be friends, so she insisted i go take some pics and she'd shovel for a bit... so i took a walk all the way around our block... i was pretty pleased with these shots:

sun setting over ice-covered houses :-P



me, being a goof :-P



looking down the street to the moon



after freezing our noses off for quite some time, but eventually freeing all three cars (leigh's took the most work since the snow all blew in to the side of her car that wasn't facing my car... i had to climb into a 3 foot snow drift and scoop snow out from under her car until she could get it out), we headed in for the pittsburgh/new england game...

in case you haven't gathered, pittsburgh is my absolute favorite team, and as you may or may not know, i absolutely hate the patriots... they have a habit of screwing things up for the teams i like (and tonight was no exception)... i was excited when pitt seemed to come back in the 2nd half with a little more fight to them, but then it quickly degenerated into a game that made me mad... i always hate to see my teams (pitt and tennessee) go down... but especially losing to the patriots really gets my goat... i'll be rooting for philly in the super bowl just because they're going up against new england... oi.

so it goes...

snow, yay... getting work done for a lot of the afternoon, yay... football... :-(

crashing soon... i've got a feeling it's gonna take a bit more work to get to campus tomorrow than usual :-P

night y'all

johnny carson dies...

opened up an internet browser to look up some math and instead was hit with this:

Late-Night King Johnny Carson Dies at 79

released just 13 minutes ago....

wow.

the morning after

we're still under a blizzard warning for another hour and a half, but man did it storm while i was asleep!

last night, i could open our balcony door and take pictures with flash (without having it flash back off the glass door), now... well, you'll see shortly

according to weather underground online, we (1 mile from new brunswick, NJ) currently have 14 inches of snow (that was reported at 8am, and from the view out of my house, i believe it!)

according to the weather channel, today's even more fun as we get to deal with 25-40mph winds, with gusts of up to 50mph, to help us rearrange our buckets full of snow, whether we like it or not.

i know one person who's not trying to leave the house today! ;-)

here's a local news story...

click here for the source

WE'RE COVERED
Nature lets it snow (2 inches an hour) and blow (40 mph)
Sunday, January 23, 2005
BY MARK MUELLER
Star-Ledger Staff

A season of meager snowfall became a season of plenty yesterday with the arrival of a howling two- day tempest that slowed highways to a crawl, grounded hundreds of planes and plunged wind chills into negative territory.

With snow-clearing operations hampered by winds and the storm's intensity -- snow fell at a rate of 2 inches per hour at times -- acting Gov. Richard Codey declared a state of emergency until 8 a.m. today. The declaration gave police the authority to close roads.

The storm was different depending on your ZIP code. By 11 p.m., more than a foot of snow had piled up in West Milford in Passaic County, while 10 inches had blanketed Sayreville in Middlesex County, and 8.4 fell in Newark.

The conditions eased for a few hours in the evening, but forecasters were expecting the tail of the storm to pack a more potent punch overnight.

"The first part of storm, there was not a whole lot of wind -- well, that's over," National Weather Service meteorologist Scott Reynolds said late last night. "It's going to get nasty."

A blizzard warning remained in effect until 10 a.m. today across hard-hit northeastern New Jersey, where 45 mph wind gusts were expected along with snow accumulations that forecasters said could reach 24 inches.

A winter storm warning covered the rest of the Garden State.

"All available manpower and vehicles are deployed, but if it's still coming down at noon (today), the road conditions in all likelihood are not going to be very good," said Mark Lavorgna, a spokesman for the state Department of Transportation.

The storm, a convergence of two weather systems from Canada and the Pacific Northwest, hammered the upper Midwest and the Ohio Valley before roaring into the Northeast before noon yesterday, spawning blizzard warnings from northern New Jersey to Vermont.

Temperatures fell to record lows in Maine, reaching 29 below zero in Bangor. In Ohio, the storm was blamed for three deaths.

"It's a major storm. Hopefully not a crippling storm like the Blizzard of'96, but there's no getting around the fact that it's a big one," said Al Cope, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Mount Holly.

The bitter blast made up for what had been a tame New Jersey winter, one that had delivered above-average temperatures and just a few inches of snow across most of the state. Since Dec. 1, only 6.5 inches had fallen in Newark. Yesterday Newark and many other towns surpassed that amount in hours.

In the Burlington County community of Lumberton, 11 inches of snow fell before sunset. By 11 p.m., other towns were catching up: 11.3 inches in Carlstadt, Bergen County; 10 in Manalapan, Monmouth County; 9 in Union, Hunterdon County.

Forecasters said between 18 and 24 inches could fall in Passaic and Bergen counties by the time the storm ended today. Essex, Hudson and Union counties were likely to be close behind.

Central New Jersey was expected to get between 10 and 14 inches, with 9 inches in Monmouth and Ocean counties.

Given ample warning, transportation officials deployed more than 2,000 plows, salters and sanders, but the force struggled to keep up. By 9:30 p.m., police reported dozens of accidents across the state, though none was serious -- a possible sign that people had heeded warnings to stay indoors.

"Either that, or that they are traveling so slowly," said Sgt. Michael Nordstrom, a State Police spokesman.

To help snow-clearing efforts, Transportation Commissioner Jack Lettiere ordered abandoned and disabled vehicles towed from all state and interstate highways.

While road traffic moved slowly, airports fared worse. Thousands of flights were canceled from Chicago to Boston, with 120 cancellations at Newark Liberty International Airport by yesterday evening.

NJ Transit cut service to one train per hour on its busy Northeast Corridor, a condition that would continue today, spokesman Dan Stessel said. To accommodate travelers, NJ Transit tickets would be cross-honored on any train, bus or light-rail system statewide, Stessel said.

The storm also derailed dozens of events. Meadowlands Racetrack canceled its harness racing program, and several college basketball games were postponed. The Paper Mill Playhouse called off this afternoon's performance of "Harold and Maude." William Paterson University moved tonight's graduation to tomorrow.

But not all was put on hold. Thousands of students took the SAT exam. Thousands more crowded the Meadowlands Exposition Center for Auto Expo 2005.

Getting home was another matter. Gusts above 40 mph turned snow into an airborne froth that cut visibility to less than a quarter- mile in many spots. The wind was expected to persist today, making temperatures in the teens feel like 8 below.

As usual, predictions of the impending storm sent people scurrying to supermarkets, hardware stores and big-box home improvement outlets.

"People generally like to wait till the last minute," said Richard Aloi, an assistant manager at a Home Depot in Raritan Township. "They see a snowflake and they run out."

Not that Aloi was complaining. By 10:30 a.m., the pre-storm swarm had snapped up the store's last 50 snowblowers and some 600 bags of sand, half of the load that had arrived hours earlier.

Some people joined the migration because, well, that's just how they were raised.

"My mother always said it's good to get more than you need when possible," said Lue Haskell, a 61-year-old Irvington resident, as she left a Home Depot in Union Township with a new shovel yesterday morning.

At an A&P supermarket in Jersey City, where checkout lines stretched 30 carts deep, Vinny Wycko worked as quickly as he could to replenish stocks of ground beef, the only meat left on the shelves. Within minutes, those packages disappeared, too.

"Every snow scare, people are frantic," he said, smiling. "It's a 24-hour period, and they're afraid they won't survive."

If the storm was a trauma for many, it was a joy for some.

In past years, a heavy snow was a siren call to kids who lived near Walters Park in Phillipsburg. But after a young sledder struck a pole last year, the town halted sledding and tubing there, even planting a sign atop the slope saying so.

But as the inches piled up yesterday afternoon, cousins Brett Johnson, 14, and David Pastic, 11, couldn't resist. They hauled out their snowboards for the first time this season, and had the hill nearly to themselves.

"Last year, when both of us were snowboarding, we had to watch out for people because there was so many of them," Brett said between runs. "They're probably scared to come because of what happened."

This time, the cousins had to share the slope only with Chris Grube and his 9-year-old son, Chris Jr. The Grubes live in Brigantine, but the elder Grube grew up in Phillipsburg and spent many a winter enjoying Walters Park. When he heard about the incoming storm, he decided to relive some memories and start some new ones with his son.

Grube knew about the ban but came anyway.

"What are they (the police) going to do, give you a ticket?" he asked as he watched Chris Jr. fly down the hill in an snow tube. "They've got better things to do."

The storm also was a welcome blast for the operators of Mountain Creek ski resort in Vernon, which until yesterday depended largely on machines for snow this winter. Yesterday, skiers and snowboarders crowded into the resort's parking lot by 8 a.m.

"It's some of the best times to ski when it's snowing," said Debbi Robibero, who works in the resort's guest services department.

"It's absolutely wonderful."

Staff writers Mike Frassinelli, Katie Wang, Kasi Addison, Paul Nel son, Raviya H. Ismail and John P. Martin contributed to this report.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

i woke up and already took 32 pictures of the view from our house in highland park, NJ... i'll be posting them shortly

later dudes! (and stay warm!)

Saturday, January 22, 2005

etc.

one more pic, but not mine -- from yahoo news



have you ever seen times square so deserted? i mean even last year in the big december blizzard then, i was up in NY to see 42nd street with like a dozen friends and things looked busier then!

got a call from the mother, besides giving me an update and asking lots about snow, we agreed that we'll transfer the balance from my now highest rate credit card to one that she just paid off and then i'll pay her each month... knocking down from 16% interest to 1.5% interest should make a big difference

phone call on the house phone while i was on the cell with mom -- church is cancelled tomorrow... and our deacons are calling every member individually to tell them so... can't say we're not organized :-P

i call paul (who has been riding with me to church for the better part of a year now and wants to join good shepherd),... he goes on a rant about how NJ people are wimps (even though we're supposed to have a foot of snow by morning and then crazy windchill and fierce winds making whiteout conditions tomorrow all day) to cancel such things... wants me to go with him to closer churches if they're open tomorrow, and i said ok... we'll see if he actually finds any that are open!... he thought my objection originally was to driving in snow, boasting that he, a native of chesterton indiana, can drive in ANY winter weather... pretty sure by now i consider myself pretty competant in winter driving too... i'm just not stupid about it :-P lol...

anywho, that's the current rundown...

i've been reading lots of math today... almost 50 pages of learning the basices of affine varieties (algebraic geometry stuff) so i can read 50 more pages that tell me what a grobner base is and how to compute one.

oh joy, oh joy

later dudes

winter storm 2005

just about everyone in the eastern half of the country has been hit by the big storm coming through... here's what weather.com has to say for us today: (i'm in middlesex county, NJ)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Severe Weather Alert from the National Weather Service
...BERKS PA-BUCKS PA-CARBON PA-CHESTER PA-HUNTERDON NJ-LEHIGH PA- MERCER NJ-MIDDLESEX NJ-MONROE PA-MONTGOMERY PA-MORRIS NJ- NORTHAMPTON PA-SOMERSET NJ-SUSSEX NJ-WARREN NJ- INCLUDING THE CITIES OF... ALLENTOWN... BETHLEHEM... NEW BRUNSWICK... PERTH AMBOY... READING AND TRENTON 1141 AM EST SAT JAN 22 2005

... WINTER STORM WARNING IN EFFECT UNTIL NOON EST SUNDAY...

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN MOUNT HOLLY NJ MAINTAINS A WINTER STORM WARNING FOR THIS REGION. TOTAL SNOW ACCUMULATIONS OF 12 TO 18 INCHES ARE EXPECTED BY THE TIME THE STORM ENDS.

A DANGEROUS WINTER STORM WILL AFFECT THE ENTIRE AREA TODAY INTO SUNDAY MORNING. SNOW HAS ARRIVED OVER EASTERN PENNSYLVANIA, AND ALL OF NEW JERSEY AND IT WILL CONTINUE INTO SUNDAY MORNING.

TRAVEL CONDITIONS WILL BECOME EXTREMELY HAZARDOUS AND ALL UNNECESSARY TRAVEL IS NOT RECOMMENDED ONCE THE HEAVY SNOW BEGINS. FOLLOW THE DIRECTION OF EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AND POLICE IN YOUR AREA. DRIVING CONDITIONS SHOULD START IMPROVING LATER SUNDAY.

THE UPCOMING WINTER STORM WILL HAVE TWO PHASES. THE FIRST PHASE WILL FEATURE VERY HEAVY SNOW THIS AFTERNOON INTO THIS EVENING WHERE MOST OF THE ACCUMULATING SNOW IS EXPECTED TO OCCUR. THE SNOW IS EXPECTED TO FALL SO HEAVILY THAT NEAR WHITE-OUT CONDITIONS ARE LIKELY WITH RATES REACHING ONE TO TWO INCHES PER HOUR. THE SECOND PHASE OCCURRING OVERNIGHT INTO SUNDAY MORNING WILL FEATURE LIGHTER SNOW, BUT CONSIDERABLY STRONGER WINDS. THIS WILL CAUSE BLOWING AND DRIFTING OF WHAT IS EXPECTED TO BE A VERY LIGHT AND FLUFFY SNOW. THIS MAY CAUSE BLIZZARD CONDITIONS AT TIMES.

ANOTHER FACTOR WILL BE THE VERY LOW WIND CHILLS. AS WINDS INCREASE TONIGHT INTO SUNDAY, WIND CHILL VALUES WILL BE NEAR 5 BELOW ZERO.

PEOPLE WHO FIND IT NECESSARY TO VENTURE OUTSIDE SHOULD WEAR MULTIPLE LAYERS OF CLOTHING, GLOVES AND A HAT. LIMIT THAT OUTDOOR TIME TO A MINIMUM. PETS WHO ARE KEPT OUTDOORS WILL REQUIRE, AT A MINIMUM, A STRONG AND WELL INSULATED SHELTER TO PROTECT THEM FROM THE COLD, WIND AND SNOW AND ACCESS TO PLENTY OF UNFROZEN WATER. THE MOST HUMANE THING TO DO IS TO BRING YOUR PETS INDOORS....


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

in light of that, and in light of the fact that i have a digital camera and i LOVE snow... and we're supposed to get a foot of it in the next several hours, consider me your NJ winter storm picture place :-) lol...

every hour or so i'll put a few more pics up of what it looks like from being snowed into my house... noon pictures posted shortly... enjoy! :-P

fun(?) with water

last month, our washing machine broke... given, it's ancient and came with the apartment... but the fact that it's been sold from one tenant to the next for years and not part of the landlord's part of the house means it's hard to fix... there's no warranty or contract on it... it's not the landlord's responsibility... and it costs $65 just to have someone *look* at it, not to mention parts and labor... joy

needless to say, since it broke just before we were all going home for christmas, we didn't care then...

then, when we were studying for quals and just eric and mike were home in the guys house, it wasn't a problem to say "hey, can we come over and play pool with you and use your laundry room for the afternoon"

now, that all 6 guys are back in the house, and 2 have girlfriends more or less living there at least more than half of the time, it's not quite as easy to say "dude, we're coming over to do laundry"

on that note, this morning i went down to the basement and cleaned out the big sink we have down there next to the washing machine... and HAND-WASHED a load of clothes (especially when it's cold and you're running out of clean socks, you can't just let these things slide)

meanwhile, in case you've never experienced the joy of hand-washing your own clothes... to do a decent job you have to scrub them pretty well and wring them out, and all the stuff your washing machine has cycles to do... if you have a working washing machine, consider yourself lucky

as if that wasn't enough fun... my house was built in like the 1920s... we have an oil powered hot water furnace, that provides hot water to the house and provides the hot water that runs through the radiators in each room (we're talking old school and/or hungarian-esque ;-) here)... unlike in hungary where all we had to do was keep the gas-powered furnace lit, here, with oil-powered heat, every so often (once a week or so), we have to go down to the basement, and drain all the water from the machine... then run some water through to rinse out rust, and then refill... i decided to do that while scrubbing my clothes (yay multitasking)?

to drain the furnace, there's this huge long hose attached to the bottom of the furnace that goes across the basement and has its other end over a sewage hole in the corner of the basement... when you drain, the water goes through the hose and down the sewage hole... joy...

only, that's not so much what happened this morning... here i am in one corner of the basement scrubbing my clothes when i hear weird noises from clear across the other end... apparently the furnace isn't happy in the cold or something, and instead of draining a smooth stream of water through the hose, it was throwing it out in spurts... as a consequence, the hose was bouncing all over the place and spraying down half the basement with hot brown furnace water... i captured it and then jammed the free end *down* the sewage hole, but not until after quite a bit of stuff got an unexpected shower...

now my clothes are drying in our perfectly good clothes dryer, and the furnace has been drained and put back online... but all this is to say... if you have modern and/or working appliances, you really don't know how good you've got it.

end of rant (which probably wasn't that exciting anyhow! :-P)

Friday, January 21, 2005

tgif!

my day

8am: awake

9:30am: tried to leave for school, car was mad about it being cold... took a little longer to get going than i counted on

9:50am: i'm about 30 seconds late for class, but am only the 2nd one in the room... 10 minutes in there's still just two of us (only 4 showed up on tuesday and 7 are registered)... this is with a prof i'm mildly scared (word choice) of, so there's me in the back corner, ian at the front of my row, and the prof, waiting on more people to show up and chatting with us... 3 more came within 5 minutes, but not until i decided to sit up front with ian instead of being in the back corner when i was one of only 2 people in the audience... oh well

11:10am: done with class and back to the office... check email, get a bunch of stuff out of the math library, set up for pizza seminar, run around in the cold outside with eric, come back in and warm up, get people to go with me across campus to pick up pizza

1:10pm: introduced the pizza seminar speaker (this week jared), and sat back for an hour of pizza and listening to a talk about special relativity (it was pretty cool)

2:30pm: clean up from pizza seminar and other such fun, go to my office to kill 45 minutes before a 3:30 meeting i had with the dimacs people (the people hiring me for the summer)

3:15pm: get an email that says that one of the people i need to meet with unexpectedly had to step out, can i meet at 4 instead... proceed to kill 45 more minutes playing minesweeper in my office

4pm: go to meet people i'll be working with this summer... get a tour of the building and a list of important dates in the next couple weeks, along with things i should do in the next week or two as far as planning goes

4:45pm: meeting done, pack up all my stuff, and go home

5pm: finally get home (this is a really long day for my schedule!), and immediately start working on updating the pizza seminar website

5:30pm: eric and scott come over with the intent of watching star wars episode 2 (we've watched 4,5,6, and 1 in the last week and a half on different nights)... we set it up and eric's copy of the DVD didn't like leigh or colleen's dvd player, so around 6, we send scott and leigh out to rent a better copy... eric turns on an episode of deep space nine (leigh has the entire season on dvd) and we finish it about the time scott and leigh return

background: once, when i was frustrated with scott about 2 months ago, leigh was on the phone with him and i was in our TV room... as she walked through and he asked her how mad i was, she jokingly commented that "scott, i think you'll have to get her flowers to get yourself out of this one"... the poor boy took it seriously and said he promised, rather he virtual pinky-swore, that he would... all the guys were like "scott buys flowers for no one... that's never gonna happen", and i didn't so much believe it myself, but....

7pm: just as eric and i finish star trek, and his in depth explanation of all the different series of it, scott comes in with a dozen roses for me!

sure, it was on a dare/keeping a 2 month old promise, but no one has EVER bought me flowers before for ANY reason, and by this point i was figuring it was all a joke form last semester... nonetheless... a few pictures







let it never be said that lara doesn't have good friends :-)

7:15pm: touched by the flowers, and (temporarily) done oohing and aahing over them (let's face it roses are beautiful and they smell really nice too :-P), we all got back to the movie

9:45pm, due to *some* distraction by lara making the movie get paused so she could ask ridiculous questions every 10-15 minutes (since i really do get confused by the plot quite a bit, as this was only my 2nd time ever to see each of the movies), we finished the movie in 2.5 hours instead of like 2.25... whatever, it was fun... and i finally *did* get to see "the one with kick-ass yoda and the light saber", which i had been asking about since episode 6 i think

10:15pm: that brings me to now... a bowl of soup later, i'm pretty content, and ready to go mind my own business and read for a bit (ah, time to read non-math... a fantastic leisure opportunity i haven't really had in *months*,... it's gonna take time to get used to again!)

tomorrow?

meeting on campus with sam at noon to work a little more on our final project from experimental math last semester (which we turned in, but are curious if we can fix our code (it's a program in C) any better before we drop it completely)... otherwise homework... we're supposed to get 10-15 inches of snow between tomorrow afternoon and sunday morning... we'll see how this goes... i've got plenty to keep me busy for the being stuck in the house bit of the weekend :-P

and that's a wrap...

night y'all

what do ya think?

i answered the survey honestly... do you agree?





You Have A Type B+ Personality



B+





You're a pro at going with the flow
You love to kick back and take in everything life has to offer
A total joy to be around, people crave your stability.

While you're totally laid back, you can have bouts of hyperactivity.
Get into a project you love, and you won't stop until it's done
You're passionate - just selective about your passions



Thursday, January 20, 2005

this and that

i've been organizing my computer... finally took the couple minutes to download and install firefox, which i've been using on campus (and like better than IE, and i know it IS better than IE) for awhile... only drawback is that my subconscious knows better where to click for things in IE without looking, and i'm not to that point with firefox... all things in time i suppose...

besides, that, is it scary that i now put in a quick-launch link to minesweeper on my computer? (look just to the right of the start menu in the photo below)... i'm not addicted at all ;-)



it makes me happy, but probably is a sign that i play the game just a hair too much... :-P

all new season of apprentice tonight... as a whole, i like this group already better after day 1 than i liked last seasons's characters (this isn't to say there weren't individuals i liked last time).... this season will be interesting since instead of dividiing by gender to start, it's booksmarts versus streetsmarts,... while on the surface is another arbitrary way to divide things, i think it will make things interesting... not that 18 people on a TV show prove anything conclusive either, but both groups are pretty proud of who they are and it'll be interesting to see how it all works out.

another plus this season? one of the characters is from memphis! the short guy with a drawl and an askew bowtie (bren) is a lawyer from my city :-) see here

you can't tell that much from an hour and a half of them, but some already have some pretty strong personalities... danny, for instance... if tonight was even moderately realistic of how he is, then he's pretty self-confident, but also can screw things up by mentally being who knows where out there... if your dream of having a brilliant idea doesn't show up in time to meet a deadline, you still gotta try with what you have, no continue to sit there and play guitar... it seemed like he was saying to the camera at the end "i'm such a great morale boosting cheerleader, and then they gang up on me... not fair!", when he didn't really do a stellar job of anything and wouldn't own up to it... erin, if she was being completely herself tonight, surprised me when she burst into tears to her project manager after they lost... she couldn't handle the stress of having to ditch one of her team members... if she's that tense after week 1, how on earth is she going to make it through 16 weeks?... unless that was a fluke and she really can bite the bullet better than we saw on screen tonight... another one who will be interesting to watch for is kendra... she wasn't too much on camera *during* the task, but was working... but her comments in the boardroom... non-agressive, non-following-the-crowd... but to the point and astute... i was impressed with the 30 seconds of her on camera they did have and am curious if first impressions really are accurate... carolyn commented to the donald during the boardroom something to the same effect, that she respected kendra's comments.

so yeah, we'll see... todd really did not the best job though... you can't manage a fast food task without actually working in the middle of things (as opposed to his sitting in a booth with a clipboard when his team was trained to work)... so oh well...

it'll be an interesting season.

eric and me had lunch at subway today after dr. z.'s class... we're all good again. and we tell funny stories when at subway... while eric was telling me how he, scott, and mike were making fun of jared for being a klutz earlier in the week and jared managed to make a gesture with knock a spoonful of oatmeal all over the wall and all over mike in response... as eric was demonstrating, jared's motion that spilled the oatmeal, he hit his tray and knocked his drink cup in the air (luckily it was empty and had a lid on the ice!)... just ironically funny... and the blowup of 2 nights ago was discussed in detail and things cleared... it's good to be on good terms with your friends :-P

all that rambled off... class in 11 hours... reading myself to sleep and then getting up in 9 :-P

night y'all!

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

the rundown

in general
~~~~~~~~~~~

it's been a crazy few days... after quals, i've spent most of the past week remembering how to have a normal non-studying-24/7 routine again... i bought groceries for the first time in a month... i caught up on bills, mail, email, buying school supplies, cleaning (i actually put all my furniture in a pile and got into every corner of this room)... it's been busy.

along with high stress lately (and despite good news/excellent payoff for hard work), comes snappiness... just because the qual is done and i got lots of good news last week doesn't mean stress instantly dissipates... i'll be the first to recognize that i have been periodically unreasonable with people this week, but i don't think it's *all* me... then again when of all the people i know around here, i can only name one who i haven't been irritated with for at least 5 minutes in the past 5 days, at least part of it has to be lara issues, and probably a significant chunk... so i seclude myself and mind my own business a lot in hopes of my attitude going away before i deal with people more... so it goes....

school stuff
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

obviously the qual is no longer a worry... classes around here started yesterday... i'm currently taking 4 and have been to two...

i'm taking the second semester of combinatorics... same prof, same students, same time... same everything, just new impossible homework :-P

i'm taking combinatorial commutative algebra... it's really exciting that i finally have a female prof since rutgers only has like 5 female math profs out of like 110 faculty... we had our first class today and i liked the prof a lot... my background is definitely not in algebra, but i think she plans to present things on a straightforward enough level that it won't be a problem... looking forward to it

otherwise, i have a reading class and a real class with dr. z., my advisor... his real class is tomorrow, and i suppose we'll talk then about our reading class (i already have known since before break what i'll start of working on... i just haven't started anything since quals have been done)

besides that, i'm still in charge of pizza seminar

besides that, friday i have a meeting with the dimacs people to meet people i'll be working with this summer... i'll start helping them with some preliminary stuff before january is up even if the bulk of my job will be in the summer

besides all *that*, since eric and i weaseled our way out of the teaching training course last spring, we have to take it with all the 1st years this semester... ai yai yai

so busyness all around

speaking of eric, i think he's not talking to me right now... see 1st section... oops

church stuff
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

as recorded multiple times, pastor j., the pastor at my church here in jersey, retired 2 months ago now... so my church is in the process of finding a new pastor... in the meantime, we have an interim pastor.

he's nice enough, but has only been around for 3 weeks and is still working on ironing out the kinks... e.g. a week and a half ago, he turned 2 pages in the bulletin instead of 1, so immediately after the prayers he did the benediction, then realized he had skipped over a large chunk of the service and needed to go back... this past sunday he got confused reading the congregation's version of the hymnal in a place where the pastor's part is printed in part with an ellipse to save space i guess (the proper preface to communion)... whether you're familiar with lutheran liturgy or not, the point is, the vacancy pastor stopped church for 10 minutes and had all the deacons come up to the altar and help him look for a passage of his part of the service that he couldn't find... in the end they didn't find it for him either so we just skipped it...

i know he's new and things will smooth out in time, and that's fine... i also just miss having a pastor who knows me by name

reading
~~~~~~~~~

i haven't had time to read fiction since last summer, what with studying for the august qual, then a crazy semester during which i was studying for the january qual, and then studying like nuts ever since, that this week i've made a point of starting in on some non-math before things get crazy again... you can keep tabs on what's actually off my bookshelf on the sidebar of my blog, but some comments.

mental floss magazine is *hilarious*... i've mentioned them before... i discovered them in a bookstore in ohio on a trip last may, and bought the then current issue... later in the summer i saw the next issue and bought *it*, and then got myself a subscription when i moved into this house last fall... so enamored with their writing and humor am i, that i ordered every single back issue that exists (the magazine puts out 6 issues a year and started in 2002)... silly lara though... i got the subscription, and just keep putting the new issues on the bottom of the stack, which i'm reading in chronological order... i've got 3 more 2003 back issues to read, then the 3 from fall 2004 to catch up with... lots of laughs though... it's a quality mag.

tonight, i started reading lee strobel's the case for christ... i purchased it nearly 4 years ago now, after a conversation with a friend who was really into it... i recognize that there are some strong criticisms of the way strobel goes about things and the information he presents, but it's been on my shelf for so long, that i kinda wanted to know for myself what was in there rather than listening to all the critics... i actually read 1/6 of it in the last hour and a half, so it's not too difficult of a read, and nice for me to see what all the fuss is about.

is it weird that i now read non-fiction for my leisure reading? it makes me feel old :-P

other people stuff
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

i got an email tonight that really frustrated me (word choice) in a way that's hard to put into words... i've posted before how my friend nicole (who died in a car wreck in september 2003) was supposed to be intered in a columbarium on the valpo campus... when steps were being made earlier this fall to finalize that though, her family met resistence from the board of directors... instead of intering nicole's ashes a couple weeks ago as expected, her parents ended up bringing the urn containing her ashes back home to florida (it had been in the campus chapel for the past 16 months)... instead of having the green light on the columbarium, there is now a committee being formed to determine whether it's a good thing or not... also the prayer garden/labyrinth they had been planning to go with it is now estimated to cost 8 times what original estimates said... all in all, things that had been in the works for the last 16 months are suddenly hitting a frustrating brick wall, so to speak... if you're a valpo person and have any interest in contacting the committee (with concrete, non-"i think the runaround you all are causing on this is unnecessary, stupid, and hurtful" type comments) once it's formed, let me know and i'll keep you posted on what i hear from nicole's folks on how to contact them and submit your input... but that's the scoop on that for now...

otherwise, lots of changes going on for plenty of other friends too... whether moving back to school that they've been absent from for a bit,... or worrying about applications/steps for next year after graduation... or returning to foreign countries for mission and/or peacecorp type work, or for school... i guess it's a general rule that everyone's always got something going on, and we all need each other's patience and support and prayers to make it through...

in conclusion
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

if i've managed to offend or irritate you this week, i'm sorry

if i've been mad at your this week, unless i've specifically approached you about it, consider things as all good between us...

i just want space right now, and i think (hope) that's all there is to it.

hope you all have a fabulous week

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

people... blah

Monday, January 17, 2005

funny news

both of these i found on yahoo news



Thu Jan 6,10:05 AM ET: Owen, a one year-old baby Hippotamus gets close to his adopted 'mother', a giant male Aldabran tortoise at Kenya's Haller Park, January 6, 2004. The 120-year old giant tortoise living in the Kenyan sanctuary has become inseparable from the baby hippo rescued by game wardens, sanctuary officials said on Thursday. (Peter Greste/Reuters)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~




Fri Jan 14, 4:11 PM ET: As seen in this photo released in New York by Hasbro, Inc., Friday, Jan. 14, 2005, Hasbro, Inc.'s Playskool division is launching a new Mr. Potato Head figure, Darth Tater. Available at stores nationwide in February, kids will be able to have all kinds of mix 'n match,Mr. Potato Head fun with this wacky spud dressed as the infamous Star Wars saga villain, Darth Vader. (AP Photo/ Hasbro, Inc., HO)

fun with quizzes


I am nerdier than 76% of all people. Are you nerdier? Click here to find out!


re: above -- such is the cost of being a math grad student and also having been a CS major :-P...

re: below -- raise your hand if you're amazed that it didn't tell me i was FIVE :-P





You Are 25 Years Old



25





Under 12: You are a kid at heart. You still have an optimistic life view - and you look at the world with awe.

13-19: You are a teenager at heart. You question authority and are still trying to find your place in this world.

20-29: You are a twentysomething at heart. You feel excited about what's to come... love, work, and new experiences.

30-39: You are a thirtysomething at heart. You've had a taste of success and true love, but you want more!

40+: You are a mature adult. You've been through most of the ups and downs of life already. Now you get to sit back and relax.



Sunday, January 16, 2005

answers

while i'm at the computer, (and as several people decided they'd rather IM me or ask me in person than be patient), i might as well tell you what's the scoop on the 10 statements/3 lies game... not a single person got all 3 lies, but some of you were on the right tracks... enjoy the read, and most likely learn things about lara you didn't know before :-P

3 lies
~~~~
3) i have never been picked up by the police -- false, when i spun out in a blizzard in 2000, i was picked up by a state trooper and told i wasn't allowed to stay with my car… so defining picked up by the police as told to stop what I was doing and get in the car NOW, yes I’ve been picked up by the police
6) i have never held a gun -- false, my dad owns a rifle, which he keeps (unloaded) in the house, and i've had to move it when looking for things and/or cleaning
9) i once was given an actual lump of coal for christmas because i didn't believe that santa could find us at my grandparents' house and i complained incessantly about it for a week. -- false, i was given a pencil eraser painted black and told to pretend it was coal, but for the same reason

7 weird truths
~~~~~~~~~~~
1) i once brought a bag of bird crap to school on a dare -- it was 6th grade... people do strange things in 6th grade
2) i once had my shoes thrown in to one of the great lakes and had to have a friend go wading/swimming to get them back. -- true, it was in undergrad... strange things happen in undergrad
4) i was convinced for a week that a man dressed in a cape and pirate hat was stalking me -- true, for a couple weeks in budapest my roommates and i had some strange encounters with a very strange expat in a cape and pirate hat, and just when they were starting to happen too frequently for comfort, it stopped and we never saw him again
5) i have assisted a pig giving birth. -- true, in 4th grade one of our family's vietnamese pot-bellied pigs had piglets, and the family formed an assembly line to help the mother pig and clean off the babies (growing up on a quasi farm can be quite educational ;-P)
7) i have had "caffeine blackouts" before, somewhat akin to how alcohol can affect people who are drunk -- yes, twice that i can remember i had so much caffeine in one day and was so hyper by the end of it that the next morning i shuddered at stories of my silliness, but couldn't clearly remember what i had actually done
8) i once attended a tango party in my pajamas -- strange, but yes... the short version: my roommate at my REU in san antonio 4 years ago was very into dancing, especially tango-ing... when she and several of our friends were in my room and decided to dance for awhile after i was already ready for bed, the above is the end result
10) i have not lived for more than 12 consecutive months without a chipped tooth -- true, when i was 1ish, i tripped and chipped my front tooth on a table... my mom was so excited when i lost the tooth and it was replaced with the adult one, without a chip... within a year, i proceeded to try to jump a large tree root with my bicycle, when the bicycle stopped and i didn't, and i flipped over the handlebars chipping the same tooth... and thus, my left front tooth has been chipped for all my life except before age 1 and most of age 7

decorating

new semester = motivation to start things off with a clean room... today was mostly spent cleaning the dust bunnies out of corners in here... however i've had a foot of empty space near the ceiling above my bookcases and more like 2 feet of empty space near the ceiling on the wall my computer's on in here ever since i moved in... so i took the opportunity (while all furniture was in the middle of the room for cleaning), to decorate some more :-)

here's the end results...

above the bookcase:


and above my computer:


amazing what you can do with a printer and clip art and/or stencils, and construction paper :-P

yay for filling up blank space (i hate blank space, so this makes me quite happy :-) )

the end.

Saturday, January 15, 2005

a fun game?

i saw this idea on a friend's blog... when enough of you leave comments guessing which 3 are lies, i'll post the real answers/explanations... good luck!

Make a list of 10 statements about yourself:
* 3 of the 10 statements must be lies.
* Post your list and have people guess which three are lies!

1) i once brought a bag of bird crap to school on a dare
2) i once had my shoes thrown in to one of the great lakes and had to have a friend go wading/swimming to get them back.
3) i have never been picked up by the police
4) i was convinced for a week that a man dressed in a cape and pirate hat was stalking me
5) i have assisted a pig giving birth
6) i have never held a gun
7) i have had "caffeine blackouts" before, somewhat akin to how alcohol can affect people who are drunk
8) i once attended a tango party in my pajamas
9) i once was given an actual lump of coal for christmas because i didn't believe that santa could find us at my grandparents' house and i complained incessantly about it for a week.
10) i have not lived for more than 12 consecutive months without a chipped tooth

Friday, January 14, 2005

laughs

funny things people have sent me while i've been too stressed to think about posting them:




(read the caption on the above one -- you can click on it to see it bigger)

... and a poem:

They throw imaginary ropes around imaginary cattle,
No one was amused.
They get themselves all trapped inside invisible
boxes,
and yet they seem confused.
But you've got to respect them,
sure they were weird
They were the true pioneers

No one had it harder,
These boys passed the test.
No one got beat-up more often,
than the mimes of the Old West

People these days they feel so sorry for themselves,
they think they've got it hard.
Try walking through Dodge city in the eighteen
hundreds,
dressed in a unitard.
And though the odds were against them,
they would prevail.
They knew they just couldn't fail!

No one had it harder,
Rightfully so, I guess.
No one got beat-up more often,
than the mimes of the Old West!


finding my desktop and floor again (after hurricane qual-studying took over for a bit in here)

later dudes

more?

so after eric, colleen, leigh, and i watched "the empire strikes back" at my place tonight, sam and scott suddenly showed up so sam could congratulate us all (he just flew in from the west coast tonight)... if you've met sam, he's entertaining, but not necessarily a very huggy person...

nonetheless, i, lara, got sam to do a group hug with colleen, scott, and me... it was pretty great :-)

ok, so to recap... i've been awake for 21 hours now... in that time, slowly but surely got ready, 3 hours of crazy math test, 3 hours of waiting, passed the test, found out all my friends passed the test, movie at the theater (the life aquatic w/ steve zissou), found out i got a really cool summer job and get to go see my friends in europe again within the next 8 months, saw another movie, and got *sam* to do a group hug...

it's been quite the day.

i could actually read fiction tonight isntead of math for the first time in about 6 months... you really have *no* idea how that makes me feel :-)

night y'all.

oh, p.s., pictures here -- enjoy!

Thursday, January 13, 2005

woo hoo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 17:34:32 -0500
Subject: DIMACS job as REU coordinator

Hi Lara,

I am pleased to tell you that we have selected you for the job of REU
coordinator. Please let me know by January 21, or earlier, if you will be
accepting the position. I certainly hope you will and look forward to
working with you.

Regards,
Brenda

Brenda J. Latka
Associate Director
DIMACS
Center for Discrete Mathematics
& Theoretical Computer Science
Rutgers University

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

this was the job i was all hoping to get back in like SEPTEMBER... the one with a free trip to prague at the end (and hence a chance to go back to budapest after :-) ) ... days don't get much better than this!

results

i passed, eric passed, colleen passed, leigh passed... a nail-biting afternoon and we all worked our butts off for it... sooooooooooo glad it's done

the end.

p.s.

oh, so the cost of studying for over a month in jersey while your friends are all over the country adds up... usual cellphone bill? $40-$50/month....cellphone bill for the past month? 346 freakin dollars

i have no idea where that money's gonna come from, but if i pass it was totally worth it to get the studying help i did... if i fail, that's another MAJOR worry to be paranoid about... we shall see.

eh.

day 2

questions posted later probably, but here's the scoop

today's test was harder than yesterday's... recall questions 1,2,3 are required, and you pick 3 to do from questions 4-9... i for sure aced questions 1 and 3, and 9... never came up with an answer for question 2, but wrote down theorems i thought should be applicable

also wrote up what i think was a really good answer for number 6 and a reasonable first stab at an answer for number 5, although 5 was definitely partial credit, not full...

we'll see how this goes.

the graduate director told the 4 of us (colleen, leigh, eric, and me) that he'd look for us around our offices hopefully around 3ish (hoping that grading would be done and he could tell us each our fates)

in the meantime, at noon scott met us at the math building and took us all out to lunch (at perkins) for surviving, and now, we're all just hanging around and waiting...

i'll reveal the verdict when i know it.....

we shall see.

later dudes

ack

night before last i slept very well -- last night i had nightmares about insolvable math problems and tossed and turned about them all night... i decided i would have written a different last line to #3 yesterday if i had it to do over again, but i still should get most credit for it.

in 5 hours this mess will all be done... i'm hoping to pass, i'm hoping all my friends pass (although from reactions from yesterday, for one of them it's highly questionable, which worries me because, i want all four of us to make it)... but really after noon today, there's nothing i can do.

if you're not a math person, you probably haven't really talked to me in a week to a week and a half.... i'm sorry if it's frustrating but you still probably won't hear directly from me until after the test, and if it's not good news, it'll probably be briefly and then silence again for another bit... i've been 'in the zone' so to speak of hanging out with math people and talking math with them all the time, and no matter how much i like you, if you're not talking math to me this week i haven't wanted to break the rhythm of math stuff all the time... hopefully tonight (in the event of good news), that'll all be over with.... in the meantime, i really super appreciate your prayers and good wishes and your patience with me.

game plan today: test from 9 til noon, lunch, seeing "the life aquatic" at 2:50 with eric, and hopefully when that gets out we'll be able to find out if we passed.

either way, no more studying until classes start next week -- woo freakin hoo! :-P

lara versus the rutgers qual, act 2, commences in 2 hours, i better get my act together so i can beat it up :-P

later dudes

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

lara versus the rutgers math qual, day 1

here's what i was up against and how i think i did... remember each problem's out of 10 points and 80 points over 2 days guarantees a pass, and lower scores *could* pass, but there's a freakin lot of smart 1st year students taking the test early to screw up our curve, so 80's a good goal... check it: (click on either page for a larger view)

part 1 -- 3 required questions



question 1: this one majorly bugged me for over an hour while i worked on other problems instead... then it dawned on me... if not full credit, pretty darn close

question 2: this one i started immediately, got sidetracked and came back to... colleen and i got the same answer (2 * pi / sqrt(a^2-1)), which makes me think i'll get all if not most credit on this one too

question 3: positive i did a darn good job on it immediately after starting the test... all if not most credit on it

part 2 -- choose 3 questions out of 6 possible



questions 4 and 6 i didn't even try to look at
question 7 i started to work with figuring one of them must be true and one false, but failing to come up with a counterexample to either i left it alone

question 5: clearly eisenstein's criterion on f(x+1)... however, i left
"claim: p divides sum from j = i to p-1 of (j choose i) for all 0 <= i <= p-1" with "i don't have time to finish the proof but it should follow from....."... maybe half credit on that... at least non-zero credit because i didn't tell lies, i just didn't fill in all the details

question 9: as soon as i remembered what it meant for a group to act transitively, this problem is a 5 minute easy problem... the answer is 4

question 8: i started this within 15 minutes of opening the test but it wasn't until the last 5 minutes of the 3 hour test that i realized how to fill in the missing chink in my proof... thinking 9 or 10 points :-)

saying that they're mean and only give me 8 points on each of the ones i think i aced, that's still MINIMUM mid 40s,... probably somewhere in the 50s today... which means i can do worse tomorrow, just get a couple right and *probably* still pass... good news indeed

no congratulations, because if tomorrow is a really sucky group of problems i'll be super annoyed and not want to hear any of it...

however: in conclusion, i think i did well today, so that much is good... don't talk to me until tomorrow.

i'm off to the guys' house to play pool with colleen :-)

later dudes

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

current away message

me: (on the phone to ben just now) so, i'm gonna die before 9am, then i'm gonna fail the qual, and then i'm going to impale myself on a pencil when it's done at noon

ben: ok, we really need to work on your ridiculous story telling ability... you can't just permute the ridiculous events and expect me to pretend to believe it... how are you going to fail *after* you die, and why bother impaling yourself if you've already been dead at least 3 hours... i have faith in you, and i think you just need some sleep

heh... we shall see... night y'all

game time

the qual begins in 13 hours

there's nothing i can study and retain that i don't already know... and there's a lot i don't know, but there's a heck of a lot more i know now than 6 months ago, than a month ago, heck even more than a week ago... we'll see how this works...

eric and me have been egging each other on and driving each other nuts... it seems to be a personal hobby of each of us to see how much we can "annoy" the other without really getting into trouble, but when we're both stressed and snappy, we both easily cross lines and piss each other off... e.g. earlier today we were getting along just fine, and then he told me that a complex analysis book i have and find quite useful was illegal study aid because he didn't have a copy and then ran off down the stairs with mine while i was trying to use it... when he came back, i grabbed it from him and wacked him in the head with it... yes, we're like 5 year olds, but we're both highly stressed, so it happens...

i've paged through old exams... i've called up friends who have passed the test already (scott and ben) and told them "name a theorem, any theorem" and had the quiz me on what i should know.

now it's up to whether the qual committee picked (1) problems having to do with theorems i know, (2) phrased the problems in ways that i see what theorems i need, and (3) i'm able to think in 3 hours tomorrow and 3 hours thursday of what each problem is getting at and write it well.

we'll see how this goes.

oh, and just so you know...

(1) if i pass "i knew you could do it!" is NOT an appropriate response and will probably make me mad at you... "congrats" or "yay lara" is appropriate

(2) if i fail "i'm so sorry" or whatever can be left alone... if this is the case, i'll probably hide even more undercover than i've been the past couple weeks and you all can handle it... you can trust ben and scott to make sure i don't disappear altogether :-P

the end.

ai yai yai

signs that we're all too stressed

last night: leigh and i are happily playing pool at eric's house and quizzing each other on math theorems for the qual (e.g. "what does arzela-ascoli say?... 12 ball in the corner pocket"..."if a sequence of functions is pointwise bounded and equicontinuous then it contains a subsequence that converges uniformly on compact sets... 7 in the side pocket", etc.)

(the previous night, eric, in an effort to make me a little better kept putting balls right on the edge of a corner pocket and setting me up with the cue ball clear across the table... for about 2 dozen shots in a row, i got the balls in without scratching and eric was amazed that i did so since i'm realy not that good)

eric comes down the stairs to join our review/watch our game, and i scratch on a shot identical to what he was setting up the previous night

eric, "see, you can't just hit the balls so hard... hitting a pool ball on the edge of a pocket is like holding a baby chicken, you gotta do it gently"

me "you hold a baby chicken gently too long and it craps on you"

eric "oh man, so then you manhandle them so that they pee on you?"

me "birds just have one kind of crap that come out of them, not two"

eric, "only you would know that"

me "me, biologists, and people who have grown up on farm type places worldwide"

eric, "ok, so here's something i've *always* wondered... how the heck do birds have sex... i just don't understand"

me, "are you serious?"

eric, "yes, i really wonder this and i don't know how it works"

me, "i can't believe you've *never* seen birds have sex... one gets on top of the other and it's pretty straightforward from there... not too weird of a concept... why are we talking about this?"

eric, "i've only owned two birds and not concurently, so i've never seen such a thing"

me, "all the more reason to visit my family in memphis... you can watch birds have sex... aren't you excited now?"

.................

as if that wasn't weird enough... somehow, *that* conversation degenerated into a debate about why eric thinks bird shows (which i've grown up going to with my dad since before i can remember) are completely ridiculous while i tried to defend the idea... eric thinks its ridiculous that there are standards for how different chicken breeds, cow breeds, dogs, cats, etc. should look and that the world would be just as great if we let everything procreate at will and form one convergent mutt chicken, mutt cow, mutt dog, mutt cat, etc., while i defended my dad's case... we snapped back and forth for over an hour about this before colleen, leigh, and i went home

(and on the way home i called dad to ask if he had a good justification besides aesthetics for breed standards... his answer? productivity... the predominant traits preserved by the breed standards are there to help optimize meat and dairy production, because if it wasn't for farmers we wouldn't be able to feed the world)

one more day til the qual... i don't think any of our nerves could handle much more of the snappiness we're all at right now

hopefully i'm still a grad student in 2.5 days....