extensionality

So, I've been using the same shampoo and conditioner for like five or six years now. This stuff is kinda expensive, so I buy it in the biggest bottles I can find. These huge bottles tend to be a bit unwieldy and have big openings, so when I use them directly, I'm in danger of squirting way too much. Kinda defeats the purpose to get the stuff in bulk if I'm using twice as much per use, so I fill up little travel sized shampoo bottles from the big ones. I have to re-do this every few weeks obviously.

It irks me to do a lot of random household rituals, but I find this one kinda pleasing. It's a bit tricky, though, doing this without spilling.

Even in years when I'm not particularly invested in the teams playing in the game, I still love watching the super bowl for the commercials.

Although there were some amusing ones, and few really really Did-they-really-spend-3-million-dollars-for-that-ones I can't say any really blew my mind.

Although, I am pretty happy that there was only one truck commercial throughout the entire thing. I hate truck commercials.

is yummy.

How come I never went there before?

Poor red panda :(

My icon is a red panda, in case you weren't aware.

Okay, I'm in the process of preparing for my grand European summer. As part of this, I had to figure out what to do about a phone.

My blackberry works internationally, and it turns out I could get international e-mail for a flat rate, so I did that. I can also receive messages out of my SMS plan. Basically every phone has an e-mail address that it can receive txts on. So if you are fond of txting me, please continue to do so (but it would be helpful if you let me know what your provider is, so I can figure out what the e-mail address associated with txting your phone is). Or, if you're cool and have your own Blackberry like the nolacoaster, you can just Blackberry messenger with me.

As an experiment, I'm going to see if receiving SMS + Blackberry e-mail + Skype is sufficient for my needs, but if things start to suck, I guess there's no reason for me not to break down and get a foreign pre-paid SIM card.

Stay tuned for like... adventure stories.

The bread from LaPrima that you get with the soup at the little coffee cart in Wean is really tasty. 

Hey all. A friend has asked me for a favor. She's writing an article about open source software/developers.

I am looking for people who actually contribute to development of software by coding, spending time etc. I am interested in understanding their alterior motives and I just want to talk to couple people to understand why they are doing this. I assume people in CS would be the perfect place to start looking for such people. If you have any friends that you think would be able to allocate half an hour of time for me, that would be great, thanks.

I personally don't think people in CS would be the perfect place to find such people, but it's an okay place. We could also quibble over what counts as open source. Anyway, anyone feel interested in helping this person out?

Follow the links

Today, I got to do my recitation on encodings of various types in System F, with the grand finale being the encoding of the natural numbers. For those of you who aren't type theorists, this is absolutely beautiful stuff. These sorts of sublime and sexy things are really what made me fall in love with the field, and it's a pleasure to teach them, and I can only hope I conveyed the sense of "zomgwow this is awesome" to one or two students.

This morning, I found out that Bruce Saunders, my middle school Latin and social studies teacher, died last week. I had heard from a friend whose mother is a teacher that he had been diagnosed with cancer a few months ago, but the news of his dying was still a sad surprise. Mr. Saunders was probably one of the most amazing teachers I've ever had. One subtle aspect of his teaching style was that so many of the things he emphasized were meta-lessons. Practical lessons about learning. I don't have the space to describe it all, but he made his students smarter people, which is the only thing you should really ask for in a teacher.

And certainly, no teacher was as much of a showman. And he had such a warm resounding speaking voice! I can actually still remember how it sounds. All his theatrics had some purpose and value. One of his most famous bits of classroom theatrics was "The Minute Speech" which he would deliver at the end of every class that began with a student coming in late. His delivery took exactly a minute:

"Now....a minute may not seem like a long time, but:
If you take that minute, and multiply...by one hundred and eighty (which as you may already know is the number of school days in a school year), why you'd have one hundred and eighty minutes. And if you took...those one hundred and eighty minutes and divided by sixty, which as you may already know is the number of minutes in an hour....why you'd have three. Three Hours. Three hours of YOUR life...wasted...squandered...evaporated

It's finally gotten really frigid here in Pittsburgh. Some combination of the warm protective layers made up of years worth of burritos and what have you, an undergrad stint in frigid Ithaca, or the fact that the heat is always going out in my apartment has made me pretty neutral to standard levels of cold. This is evidenced by the fact that ~30 degree weather is basically blazer weather for me, and ~50 degrees is acceptable t-shirt weather. I'm constantly hearing, "Aren't you cold?" (especially in LA).

Well, this weekend, I finally am. Cold. Feel kinda nice. Sorta. It's certainly stimulating. Being that cold reminds me of Ithaca. Yes, nostalgia. Now if only I could get a Pancho Villa with extra jalapenos from CTB. Oh man...

While we're on the subject of Ithaca, according to this map of the winners of primary elections by county, the only county in New York State that did not go to Clinton was Tompkins County, where Ithaca (and transitively Cornell) is located. I thought that was cute. Take from it what you will.

I realized I hadn't posted in forever. I'm still alive!!

Random boring me tidbits

• I'm not taking any courses this semester, but I am TAing undergrad programming languages. Should be a blast.
  
• Sprained my ankle on Christmas Eve, and it's getting tantalizingly close to 100% healed.
• I got Rock Band around New Years. It's awesome. 

Toodles.

It combines my two of my favorite past-times: 80s night and not sleeping.

Subject:

Jan. 3rd, NEON Birthday Bash!!!

Body:

Call off work on the 4th! The permit cleared and we will Rock til Spat Drops. On January 3rd. NEON (Belvedere's weekly Retro party) will be celebrating its one year birthday! And as a way of saying thanks to all those who keep evening jumping we present: A Party That Never Ends...(sort of) Jan 3rd, we will set course for adventure at 9:30, as per usual, sub cultural anthropologist DJ Hates You will present his latest archeological finds, along side the years most enjoyed retro-relics. what makes this night different? rather than ending at 2am, as the party typically does, we will be closing the front bar and keeping the back room open as an in house after party. Serving Juices, Coffee, Energy Drinks and of course water) until the dancing runs out. HatesYou has been running up and down the stairwell of the cathedral of learning, drinking raw eggs and punching slabs of beef in preparation for the challenge. who will last longer, the crowd or the DJ? Can you make it til 7am when it is legal to re-open the bar for kegs and eggs? Will it be NEON til noon? The answer is up to you! come, be part of the spectacle! be there, or don't DJ Hates You

There were a couple cute voice-mails I had left saved on my mailbox, because listening to them brought a smile to my face. I tried listening to them when I checked my voicemail right now, and I got "This message is currently not available." Sad! I hope they're not permanently gone because they're too old. :(

Dear friends,

If you are one of my frequent text message correspondents, you can do me a huge favor by sending texts as MMS to one of my e-mail addresses, instead of an SMS to my phone number. It all goes to my phone, anyway. This will help me avoid having to upgrade my text messaging plan.

If you're prone to send long messages like I am, using MMS is a good idea because you wont get hit for extra messages when you go over the 160 character limit for SMS.

Feel free to comment if this open letter makes absolutely no sense to you, but you are curious as to what it might mean.

Thanks,

D

At around 3600 words. More evidence that my real life is more interesting than my novel: chat log with my sister over 5 1/2 hours is close to 15,000 words. *sigh*

Inching closer to 3000 words. Still, I worry that my real life is more interesting than my novel so far. Beh.

Hey guys. NaNoWriMo is starting soon, and I realized I could use longer lists-of-names-to-pull-character-names-from.

So, what are your favorite mono-syllabic guys names and tri-syllabic girls names?

zomgwow

I am dying to download this. There was a link to download it earlier when I checked facebook from my Blackberry, but it 404ed when I tried to follow it, and now it's disappeared. I am extremely curious as to how it'll do things. I imagine it'll alleviate the annoyance I have with doing conversations over facebook messages. I am spoiled and used to being able to do any of my messaging/mailing directly from the blackberry, and if I want to reply to a facebook message from my phone, I have to follow some links and use the browser.

I've been extremely pleased with the Google/Blackberry co-developed GTalk client. It's really well integrated with the blackberry. Anyway, because I'm such a notorious facebook and blackberry addict, I'm pumped to see what this app will do.

And with any luck, my pants will vibrate when you poke me. ;)

I am signed up. Who else is doing it?

I still can't make her go counter-clockwise! I feel like Willem from Mallrats. Gahhhhhhhh!