Weeks, Months...

Shrug. I'll start keeping up with regular updates someday. Exciting things that have happened in the past month...

We got a bunch of freshmen for LSC, so people only have to work the right number of shifts this term, at least on Night. And for bellringing, so the guild won't wither and die, which is good. They seem excited about it, and hopefully they're going to stick with it. Unfortunately, they can only come once a week because the nave ceiling is collapsing at the Church of the Advent. It's not the bells fault, the engineers say, but something about all that shaking back and forth makes the water-damaged masonry fall off, and the church doesn't really want that to happen while there are people inside.

And I'm finally not in charge of practices at Old North. I get to spend my breaks sitting on the side and not thinking about anything, just like everyone else. Ironically, I've been more on time in the past month than I was all summer and I still haven't skipped a Saturday yet, because I've been bringing the freshmen over. Ah well.

Classes started. Taking 6.896 again, but this time it's Sublinear-time Algorithms. (It's a "special subject," so the same number was Parallel Hardware when I took it last term.) Basically a lot of approximate randomized algorithms--"if you squint at this graph, it would probably look not-connected," for example. But it's interesting, and will hopefully satisfy my algorithms craving enough that I won't have to take 6.856 (Randomized Algorithms) in the Spring, which is supposed to be hard. Also taking 6.866, Machine Vision, since I've done enough of it in summer jobs that I feel like I should learn something about it. Oh, and it meets my last MEng requirement besides thesis.

As far as Thesis goes, still working on jCilk. We're getting closer to an actual language specification, and I've got a prototype implementation that doesn't go that much slower than it should.

I bought a nightstand.

One Friday morning I woke up and heard a mini-bulldozer (I'm told it's called a bobcat) in the backyard. My first thought was that the back tires were going to do awful things to the grass. Then the front part scooped up a mound of grass and dirt, and I realized they weren't really worried about the tires. That evening, every scrap of dirt or green was gone, and we had a gravel pit completely surrounding the house. The following Monday, I woke up and they were paving it. I panicked and tried to call the landlords, but to no avail. The house now has an asphalt moat. (It's not very effective at keeping anybody out.)

I tripled my laptop's memory, and installed XP on it. Overall I think it still goes faster than it did before.

The career fair happened a couple weeks ago. It was a little disturbing how many people I knew on the recruiting side of things. I threw my resume at a bunch of companies... we'll see what comes of it. Interviews on campus should hopefully be happening over the next month or two.

Went to the Ig Nobels ceremony last week, for the first time. It's always on a Thursday evening, but since there's no ringing on Thursdays for a while, we took a field trip there instead. It was amusing. If you haven't seen the basketball video yet, go read the directions and then watch it. After you've tried to count, go look at its citation under Psychology.

I woke up this morning and read that my 8.022 recitation instructor from freshman year won the Nobel prize. I don't know that many professors in the fields that Nobels get given for, so this is probably the closest I'll get to knowing a winner (at least for a while).

And my Google project's still not out yet.