> Recent Entries
> Archive
> Friends
> User Info
> previous 20 entries

September 9th, 2005

09:17 pm - Fire alarms Just had second fire alarm in the past 24 hours. This one was only mildly annoying, as I was just eating dinner and talking to Jacinda. Atleast I wasn't sleeping, like during the one at 3:30am last night. Which was far less enjoyable. Oh, and since i have a single, i have an alarm in my room, instead of the suite common room. which makes it far louder. Current Mood: annoyed Current Music: Maa ei kerro - Varttina

(Leave a comment)

August 31st, 2005

07:02 pm So now that i've had all my classes (and some of them twice): Syntax – supposedly difficult. Then again, some people found Phonetics difficult, which I rather didn't. Lots of people I've had class with before, which is nice. And I haven't read much of anything on Chomskian grammar, which is what the class deals with. Immortality & Eternal Life – other than being in the most miserable classroom (humid, warm, noisy from ACs that don't work...but atleast we get out early because the prof can't stand it either, and we might get a new classroom), seems like it'll be interesting. User Interface Development – not sure what to think of it. Completely zoned out today Half of it is also in Java; altho atleast Java makes sense for GUIs. But it's still Java. The rest of it could be interesting, tho. Foundations of CS II – more discrete math-ish topics. Most of it covered by all the cs classes at Blair (and some during Abstract Algebra a year ago). But there's some new material, which'll be good. Language & Gender – has 8 people. is a cool topic. is three hours long tho. Should be fun. And I have a single room! With my own bathroom! which I'm so happy about! Current Mood: bouncy Current Music: Ramble On - Led Zeppelin

(3 comments | Leave a comment)

August 14th, 2005

02:19 am - Shenandoah Spent the past 3 days in Shenandoah NP, hiking with my family. Generally had a good time. It's a pretty area; plenty of forest, and a few nice waterfalls. Places like there almost make me think twice about wanting to live in a city; but cities are so much more convenient. The views there were less-than-good tho, because of all the haze (the sun should not set ~10 degrees above the horizon; nor should the moon be reddish). Saw two black bears, which was cool even though we'd seen them before in West Virginia. Being away from the hot&humid Washington weather was nice too. Shenandoah NP has lots of non-gendered [accessible] bathrooms. Which was quite unexpected, very convenient and cool. Current Mood: tired Current Music: Morsian - Värttinä

(Leave a comment)

August 8th, 2005

11:51 pm *glares at USGS website* Webpages should not take minutes to load. Sorting a list of 7726 items by county isn't nearly that hard. Too bad I didn't notice when I started loading it; i'd like to know if it'll take longer than an hour. And yay, got postcard from Jacinda today :) 00:17 well, it finally finished...and turned out to be no use to me. *glares* Current Mood: annoyed Current Music: Iowa (Travelling III) - Dar Williams

(Leave a comment)

August 2nd, 2005

01:01 am - Legos; HBP I have over 26,000 lego pieces. Found a site that has set inventories, entered the sets I have (well, the 184 sets I could find instructions/box bits for :P), and that's apparently how many pieces I have. I knew I had a alot...but that's rather more than I expected. Finish HBP a week ago. And while it's rather not likely, I like the idea of Harry/Luna. Current Mood: lethargic Current Music: Arco Arena - Cake

(1 comment | Leave a comment)

July 4th, 2005

02:33 pm - UCC endorses same-sex marriage! Early today, the United Church of Christ General Synod passed a resolution endorsing religious and civil same-gender marriages! (link to article - the UCC news site is kinda down right now, so some random news site will have to do.) I'm not particularly suprised that the resolution passed, given the UCC's general support of LGBT people, but it's still awesome. That it got about 80% of the delegate's votes is rather more suprising, considering that there was a competing resolution to define marriage as one man and one woman. And even though the vote isn't binding on individual congregations (or any other group within the church), some of the delegates are already talking about their churches possibly leaving the denomination. As if endorsing same-sex marriage is substantially different than being Open & Affirming, allowing LGBT clergy, and endorsing religious unions for same-sex couples (which were all the case before this resolution</b>)... Now if only other denominations would follow in the same direction... (by the way, I go to a UCC church, for those that didn't know.) Current Mood: ecstatic Tags: lgbt, religion, ucc

(1 comment | Leave a comment)

June 16th, 2005

12:03 am stolen from kalligraphy of the top 110 banned books. Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you've read part of. Read more. Convince others to read some. ( list ) Current Mood: tired Current Music: Starman - Dar Williams Tags: books, meme

(2 comments | Leave a comment)

May 9th, 2005

(Leave a comment)

March 21st, 2005

12:45 pm - Spring Break I'm home for spring break now. For the next 20ish hours anyway, and then I go visit Jacinda :) Being home as been rather unexciting; I've spent most the time doing work that's due when I get back to school. I'd rather like a break from all the work though. Haven't really talked to family much even, although they've been out of the house a fair bit. It feels like there wasn't any real point to coming home... The past week was not fun; I had far too much work to do. I don't ever want to have to do anything with UML again. Or javadoc. Particularly in planning for individual projects where the design stuff doesn't help for how to actually implement it. I much prefer the programming for work that has almost no planning, but still gets done and works (and its in perl, not java :) ). We also have a new programmer for work, but it sounds like he doesn't know matlab or perl already. Why can't prof find people who have skills that we need? Hopefully the new person will be more competent than the person we have designing the webpage... Time to go back to drafting term paper for my linguistics clas... Current Mood: eager Current Music: Pretty Good Year - Tori Amos

(1 comment | Leave a comment)

March 10th, 2005

04:23 pm Why didn't I try to place out of CSE113 (Discrete)? Very little of its new stuff; I learned more about logic in AI than we covered, I certainly know more about functions, and whatever we're going to do was probably covered in assorted cs and math classes at Blair. And the people in the class...will ask the most inane questions: "but I don't think they want us to multiple these numbers, they have little dots between them" (like, dots for multiplication perhaps? didn't you wonder why there were 10 numbers when it talked about a pair of numbers?); "If we count the multiples of 2, instead of 5, wouldn't we get more 0's?" (regarding how many zeros at the end of 100!) Yes, its an introductory cs class, with only some basic math competence requirement. But can't people atleast show some reasoning ability? Or ability to learn? Oh, those questions were about homework that was just turned in. So they should have thought about it some. Its almost as bad as my roomie planning to major in EE, and yet asking me how to graph y=1/(x-1) > Current Mood: annoyed Current Music: Fionnghuala - The Bothy Band

(Leave a comment)

March 8th, 2005

01:06 am Take the quiz at dicepool.com An amusing result... Current Music: Tribute - Tenacious D

(Leave a comment)

February 22nd, 2005

12:23 am - Music For Peace Project Since I'm part of the group that's organizing this, I figure that I might as well promote it here. It'd be great if people could post it in their lj, or otherwise pass it along to people who might be interested: The Music for Peace Project a global effort to fill the world with music as a call for peace. Last February, the Music for Peace Project 2004 sponsored 70 concerts in 13 countries in 50 hours. This international, non-partisan call for peace included music from around the world and was shared with audiences as diverse as the music itself. Through the simultaneous performance of a vast number of concerts worldwide during the weekend of April 8-10, 2005, The Music for Peace Project will bring popular and media attention to international peace efforts while building a global community of socially active and civically conscious artists. The Music for Peace Project is a global celebration of peace, uniting a vibrant community that believes in peaceful solutions for the future. To help us reach our goal of sponsoring 500 concerts spanning every continent in three days, we are asking musicians worldwide to perform a concert during April 8-10 or dedicate a pre-existing concert to the project. All you have to do is fill out a simple 30-second online form - any musician can participate. Join at: http://m4p.org/index.php?page=join.txt or write: info@m4p.org Your name along with the other musicians joining the project will be promoted through newspapers, television and of course on our web site. Please consider joining this effort and help create a global community of musicians united in the active quest for peace. Please pass this along to your friends or download the Music for Peace Project 2005 letter available online at http://m4p.org/m4ppjoin.pdf.

(Leave a comment)

February 13th, 2005

02:50 pm So, I've been rather neglecting to post here. Yeah, the semester started 3 weeks ago, but i haven't posted since then. So, classes i'm taking: WRT102 - Its writing. I have to take it. I have a pretty cool prof, so it isn't too boring. A good bit of work, tho. JPN112 - Its not at 830. I'm happy CSE113 (Discrete) - Kinda boring, seems to be alot of the same material from AI and other CS classes. Prof is cool, tho. CSE219 (Computer Science 3) - Its in JAVA. writing thousand-line programs in Java is Not Fun. Java is Not Fun. Thousand-line programs aren't new for me, either, so it seems kind of annoying and pointless. LIN355 (Language in South Asia) - Somewhat interesting; don't think i did too well on exam on Thursday; too many details that i didn't learn. Work continues to be fun. Even though its rather more than the 10 hours/week I get payed for. But webserver and programming-in-perl is fun. I've been kicked out of my room for the weekend since roommate has his girlfriend over. But next weekend I can get back at him O:) Current Mood: blah Current Music: Real Men - Tori Amos

(Leave a comment)

December 25th, 2004

03:05 am Merry Christmas everyone! And a festive maths joke for your amusement: Why do mathematicians always get Christmas and Halloween mixed up? Because Oct 31 is Dec 25. Current Mood: tired

(9 comments | Leave a comment)

November 18th, 2004

07:50 pm - weird things So when I was coming back from LGBTA tonight, part of the wooded hill outside my dorm was on fire. There were a bunch of police cars on the road, and people putting out the fire. It was mostly out when I saw it, so I don't really know how big it was. Then an hour later, the fire alarm goes off in my dorm. And apparently it wasn't a drill; altho they took care of it quicker than the drill we did have a few weeks ago. Current Mood: worried Current Music: As Cool as I am - Dar Williams

(Leave a comment)

November 13th, 2004

02:09 pm It snowed last night!! Current Mood: annoyed

(2 comments | Leave a comment)

November 2nd, 2004

01:58 am - general update Time for an update... Classes are going quite well. I'm still suprised at how little work I have, since I'm only taking one 100-level course. But I'm not complaining. I'm thinking of abandoning my crazy plan to do a linguistics/physics double major, and instead do just a linguistics major and a physics or cs minor (or maybe both O:)). I'm again realizing how much fun programming is. I'm doing programming (and abit of everything else) for a research project for modelling and forecasting flooding in NYC/Long Island (and getting paid for it!), based on tides and wind/air pressure forecasts. We're just starting to do continual, automated forecasting. I'm also responsible for maintaining a webserver. 'Tis quite cool. Even tho working 8 hours starting at 2pm and after having 3 classes isn't so great. But that was just today. Perl is a cool language; while fortran is decidedly not. We're using both, for some strange reason. Roommate is still annoying. But I see less of him now that I'm working and busy with other things, which is quite good. Its been rather slow meeting people, as I'm not particularly social, and alot of people are commuters or gone on weekends. But it isn't too bad - most of the time. And while I hope no one reading this needs to be told so, but if you have voted yet, GO VOTE! And vote for someone other than Bush, please. Current Mood: pessimistic Current Music: Laulutytt - Varttina

(Leave a comment)

October 15th, 2004

(Leave a comment)

October 12th, 2004

07:19 pm THE ULTIMATE SILENCE October 12, 1998 Six years ago today, Matthew Shepard was murdered for being homosexual. What will you do to end the silence? Click here to post this on your own page or weblog

(2 comments | Leave a comment)

September 11th, 2004

(10 comments | Leave a comment)