22:23:34 Thursday January 01 2004
I am back again, hopefully for good this time. I spent new years eve with Kelsey. We played Mario Kart and LOTR Risk at his ancestral home near Delta High School. Afterwards I drove to my parents house and set up computers. I also moved all the Christmas decorations into the Attic for my grandparents. All in all not an interesting day, but a productive day.

I need to get my schedule for next semester straightened out RSN. I also need to do some more preparation for cs590m. I think I will go in to work tomorrow for a full day.

06:56:41 Sunday January 04 2004
Apparently the fine folks at ICS were doing something to expert which broke it most severely. It appears to be back online now, but I missed my journal entry last night as a result.

Last night I spent a couple hours hanging out with Joel. He recently moved up here to manage a new bar in town. I have known Joel since he was born. He went to my church as a child. His family was (and is) very musically gifted and he took to that environment readily. I don't know him as well as I should. His brother Sean is much closer to my age and we were fairly tight when we were younger. However, last night when I was in Joel's apartment looking at all the weird music and all the interesting decor I made a startling realization. Joel is quite bright. He comes from a musical family. He is tall and likes eccentric stuff. Essentially I could be Joel or he could be me. If I had channeled my energies into music my life would probably be about the same as Joel's. Would I be happier? I guess I don't know him or his life well enough to make such a judgment. None the less it is a little spooky to see your life through a mirror darkly.

Today was much less eventful. I slept too late again. It makes me wonder if I am well. Brad and I made potato soup. The recipe:

• 6 Large Potatoes • 1 Medium Sized Onion Diced • 3 Stalks Celery Diced • 2 Cups Half & Half • 2 Tablespoons Butter • 1 Tablespoon Olive Oil • 2.5 Cups H2O • Salt & Pepper • Corn Starch (optional) • Shredded Cheddar Cheese (optional) Cut the potatoes into smallish chunks. Place them in a large pot. Add the water. If 2.5 cups is not sufficient to cover the potatoes add a bit more. Throw the onions and the celery into the pot as well. Bring the mixture to a boil. Then cover the pot and reduce the heat and allow it to simmer for 20 to 25 minutes. Add the Half & Half, Butter, and Olive Oil. Heat until it is simmering again. Smash a few of the potato chunks against the side of the pot with your spoon. This creates some nice starchy potato particles to thicken your soup. If it is still too runny then add a bit of corn starch to thicken it. Serve with salt and pepper and shredded cheddar cheese. Serves about 4 people (8 bowls).

After dinner we went to John's for the traditional Saturday evening RPG. It was late and I know that he has been working a lot, but the game was lacking. He really was not into it and was much more interested in playing video games. We were supposed to be starting a Conspiracy X campaign. John has been starting a lot of campaigns lately. He can't seem to pick one, which is rare for John. He is normally a very stick to it kind of guy. I think the addition of myself as a competent and consistent GM has taken some of the pressure off of him. But I also get the feeling that there is something deeper leading to his writers block.

Matt purchased a GameBoy Player for my GameCube so old video games have become a staple around the house lately.

07:50:06 Monday January 05 2004
I had hoped to get my sleep schedule back in check by now. It looks like it didn't happen. Tonight I oversaw yet another session of Ravenloft. I wrote Nevil out of the plot so that Castor could play Jill. I also managed to significantly lessen my NPC load. John decided to write out one of his newer characters as well. I am not sure if I should read anything into that. As John was rolling up a new character mid game Paul decided to do the same. It seems like he can't resist an opportunity to roll up a new character. Thomas returned which should get Brad more involved in the game. I am also psyched to introduce the new NPC inspired by a Something Corporate song. Yeah, I know they are horrifically poppy, but they are also very lyrically sophisticated.

Of course after Ravenloft there was a huge Mario Kart war that just kept escalating. As you can tell by the hour of this entry, it went on for quite some time. Now I will sign off with the sounds of everyone else in the house preparing for sleep with headaches from laughing so much.

06:36:48 Tuesday January 06 2004
Went to work almost on time this morning even though I couldn't sleep last night. Once again this evening my house full of people has kept me awake until almost sunrise. It is slightly worrisome when one has difficulty awakening at noon.

I spent the majority of my evening fixing up this site. I know you can't tell from the look and feel, but the underlying structure has become a lot more sane in the last 12 hours or so. I also discovered several strange things that I have written which never managed to get a link on the front page. I think I will create a kind of "catch all" page for such assorted nonsense and link it from the front page. Look for weirdness in the not too distant future.

03:27:04 Wednesday January 07 2004
I finished up my web rearrangement today. I added a page for all of the random things that I have placed on the website that didn't have a link. I will redesign the extra links page soon. Hopefully I will be able to separate it into weekly links and things that really belong on the lost and found links page

This coming semester I plan to work out on a regular basis. Towards the end of last semester I just felt as if my body was some type of cart I used to move my brain from point to point.

03:10:16 Thursday January 08 2004
Ha! I got some things accomplished today. I believe that I am finally pulling out of the semester break funk that I have been in. Besides the work that I get paid for I have finally started writing up some lecture notes for the 490 course that I am teaching this semester.

You see, I really love teaching. I strongly believe that it is one of the most important jobs there is. People in the east tend to have the proper concept of teacher (or rather Sensei). If someone entrusts you with their children's education it is both a great honor and a great responsibility. Society as a whole would benefit immeasurably if we decided that teachers were a group that deserved to be respected and paid as much as doctors and lawyers. Then our best and brightest minds would go into teaching and within a few generations we would have reaped several hundred times our initial outlay.

I used to work for the Computer Science Department teaching C and C++ programming. At first I was pretty bad. Lehman sat in on my first class and was horrified. However, I have always believed teaching was important so I devoted myself to improving, and improve I did. Before long I had outstripped the other TAs and was promoted to course administrator. This is where things got hairy. Hairy like a sasquatch with hirsuitism. At this level I frequently had to go to the assistant head of the department and lobby for sufficient funds to run the course. I don't know how much you know about the way the academic system works, but a graduate student has about as much political pull in a department as he has gravitational pull on Jupiter. Needless to say I quickly expended all of my political capital.

Last semester I did not teach at all. I took a programming job with RCS. It is great. I get to work with people as geeky as myself and do something that I am good at. However, I miss teaching. So beginning next week I will be teaching a 490 experimental course for 3 to 4 students. Naturally, this work is gratis. The course will cover a variety of topics in computer music. It is not about listening to music or about how to use a particular piece of software. It is about how computers acquire, store, process, manipulate, and output sound. It is as much a course in information theory and digital signal processing as anything else. I am just happy to be teaching again and this time I am working outside of the beaurocracy so I do not expect the same difficulties as last time.

05:36:05 Friday January 09 2004
I had another productive day today. Went to work and got quite a bit accomplished before Rick (my office mate) got me involved in a discussion of weird science. First this wondrous machine was presented to me. Of course it is a free energy machine and thus very very unlikely to work. David (my boss) wants to build one. When I agreed Rick was shocked. He said "You, the ultimate skeptic, want to build one of these things?" I said "Of course. Being a skeptic means that you have to try things that you don't believe will work. If you just dismiss things because the current theory says they won't work then you aren't an empiricist. You are just accepting all that theory on blind faith."

Rick finally admitted that all this weirdness had come about because in his usual perusal of the engineering library's new books section he had discovered The Hunt for Zero Point by Nick Cook (apparently an editor for Jane's Defense Weekly). Before I knew it we were talking about Edgar Cayce (who was probably a fake) and lifters (which do work). All in all a strange afternoon.

The major accomplishment once I got home was recovering the genealogy stuff from my father's old IBM AT. It is all there, which is a small miracle in and of itself. However, all the data is stored in this bizarre format for this old program called Family Ties. The guy who wrote it wants about 50 USD for a registration key in order to use his conversion utility. It converts it to the GEDCOM format which has to be the only standard file format written by a religion. So right now I am weighing the benefits of:

1. Writing my own open source conversion utility
2. Writing down the few dozen entries by hand and inputing them into an open source genealogy program
3. Cracking the conversion program with my debugger and my hex editor

05:58:13 Saturday January 10 2004
I can't go to sleep just yet, because I am super fucking drunk. I know many people have the ability to sleep while drunk, but not I. I quickly get the bed spins and become violently ill. None the less drinking until your are nearly sick and screaming at everyone in your house that you fucking hate them is very cathartic. There is nothing better than punching Matt, Brad, and Sara in the kidneys while playing punk music and screaming at the top of your lungs. I would be surprised if I have enough voice to give directions for potato soup tomorrow. Just breathing makes my larynx feel raw right now.

Punk rock was just the beginning. The truth is that Fight Club is more than right. How much can you know about yourself until you have been in a fight? If you read your Bakunin you will know that destruction is just another form of creation.

07:30:33 Monday January 12 2004
Yesterday we made it up to Chicagoland to see Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind. There was a comedy of errors and as a result we were not able to queue up in time. Thus we were well behind when the line was cut. There had been much bickering and missing the show we drove 2.5 hours to see did not improve things one bit. Thankfully Sara jumped in at the last minute and suggested that we go take in a round of Improv Olympics. We did and it wasn't bad at all. What was quickly becoming an unmitigated failure became a worthwhile trip. This is not to say that some feelings weren't singed, but I don't regret making the trip. However, in the future all trips to Chicago will be made with not more people than can comfortably be fit in a single vehicle.

I made it a point to slack off today. It was the last day before classes begin so sleeping in and doing nothing were the order of the day. I created a livejournal account today. I don't intend to ever post anything there, but it allows me to keep track of people and post comments should I ever be so inclined.

05:36:43 Tuesday January 13 2004
I had a busy day. I spent the afternoon working on getting all the administrivia sorted out for this next semester. It mostly involved paying fees and the like. After a few solid hours at work (I am only half time) I worked all night finishing up my notes for tomorrow's cs490 music course. I am very excited and so are the students. My only concern is that it will become too much of a time sink. It is something that I want to do so I must attempt it. Frisch gewagt ist halb gewonnen as the Germans say. I am tired now so I should grab some sleep.

22:48:00 Tuesday January 13 2004
This whole getting up before noon thing is definitely not my style. My first class back behind the podium went well. I completed some more administrivia and worked on separating Professor Simonsen's tree-generator-mutation-injection thinger into a tree generator and a mutation injector thinger. Hooray for small single function utilities! It is the UNIX way.

I have been reading Microserfs by Douglas Coupland. My favorite part so far:

"People tend to assume that as we get older, years naturally start feeling shorter and shorter -- that this is nature's way. But this is crap. Maybe what's really happening is that we have increased the information density of our culture to the point where our perception of time has become all screwy" ... "You know how somebody says, 'Remember that party at the beach last year?' and you say, 'Oh God, was that last year? It feels like last month'? If I am going to live a year, I want my whole year's worth of year. I don't want it feeling like only one month. Everything I do is an attempt to make time 'feel' like time again -- to make it feel longer. I get my time in bulk."

06:10:17 Thursday January 15 2004
When you are creating something you love it does not matter that you only get four hours of sleep.

02:19:29 Friday January 16 2004
Apparently the electric company stopped by today. They scared Brad half to death by leaving this little card that says something to the effect of "Our worker was here to disconnect your electricity, but due to extreme cold temperatures we will be nice and postpone disconnection." Yeah, they will postpone disconnection. They will postpone it until at least March 15th. Do you know why? It sure as hell isn't because they are nice. It is because there is a fucking law.

There was a time in my life that I would have been upset that we had such socialist laws which discourage people from working. I was young and stupid and going through my Ayn Rand phase then. I think the Any Rand phase is natural. Everyone should seriously absorb her philosophy and then reject it on their own terms. The reason that this is good for you is because even after you snap out of it you will hold on to some of those core lessons about self confidence and living for yourself and not for other people. I hadn't intended to be up this late, so I will logout now.

07:35:28 Saturday January 17 2004
I am finally scheduled for classes. I am still not certain that I will be admitted to one of them because it is full. None the less this is an improvement in my status. If everything goes as planned all of my classes will take place on Tuesday and Thursday. As a result I have reinstated the "no alarm on Friday" rule. This rule states that if there is work to be accomplished on Friday it will take place "after I get up" which is whenever I roll out of bed. I often do get quite a bit accomplished on Fridays. It just doesn't happen until well after noon.

07:49:52 Sunday January 18 2004
The potato soup recipe is coming along nicely. I will need to post a modified version soon. Apparently Brad had a good interview in Fort Wayne yesterday. He is leaving in a couple of hours to interview with the evil empire. The interview process for MSFT has become something of a geek proving ground. Even those that hate Microsoft want to prove their geeky powers by doing well at the notoriously difficult and thought provoking questions. There are people who interview with them just to prove to themselves that they can do it. Having run this particular gambit myself a couple of times I know that it is both fun and exhausting. If you ever find yourself on an interview trip to Redmond do not count on seeing Seattle. It is a grueling 8 or 9 hour interview in which you are constantly required to recall obscure facts and think laterally. By the time it is over you will desire nothing more than sleep.

06:45:40 Monday January 19 2004
I finally added a very simple counter to the site. You can see the output here. It has only been up for a day or two, but it more or less confirms my suspicions. No one reads the log. Several people use the various link and search pages. The only surprise was the number of hits the web cam page gets.

Another Microserfs moment:

I guess supermodels are like geeks, but instead of winning the Punnett Square of brains, they won the Punnett Square of looks. It must be bizarre being fabulously good-looking. I mean, at least you can disguise brains.

03:31:00 Tuesday January 20 2004
Much was accomplished today. I succeeded in reseting my circadian rhythm to a greater or lesser extent. I did some more work on Professor Simonsen's project. I got my schedule sorted out. Hopefully for good this time. Now the only question is how I am going to pay now that I have this schedule. I learned how ispell dictionary (and hash and affix) files work.

I changed the daily links page. I created the weekly links page. And I did away with the xtra links page. The extra links that were used with any regularity were consumed by the daily or weekly links pages. The links that were just there for reference ended up on the lost+found links page. It seemed stupid to have an extra links page and a lost+found links page.

I finished Microserfs needless to say I enjoyed it a great deal. I believe that The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown is next in the queue.

05:03:18 Wednesday January 21 2004
As will be the norm on Tuesdays and Thursdays I had a great deal of class today. The lecture I designed for 490-dsp ran a little (<10mins) short today. I didn't get too much work-that-I-get-paid-for done today.

I did indulge my unhealthy obsession with foreign fonts for a bit today. Andrew has some silly script which connects iChat and iTunes on his Mac. It displays a unicode music note ♬ and then the title of the current song as a his status in iChat. Basically it allows him to impress his friends with his "super sophisticated" musical taste. Anyway his odd character was not displaying in gaim. So I broke out my unicode character map. This is always a mistake. Every time I see all of those empty slots I get the feeling that my life will never be complete until I can easily view any limbu characters that I should stumble upon. So needless to say between this unhealthy obsession and the power of apt-get I quickly found a font that can represent the silly music note and a couple hundred megs of other fonts.

Once I gathered my concentration I was able to catch up on the weeks worth of material I missed in cs 590D last week due to scheduling problems. I figured while I was in a paper reading/summary writing mood I should go ahead and finish the reading/writing for this week. This will be a good thing because it will allow me to use the entire evening tomorrow to concentrate on lecture planing for cs490-dsp.

04:03:20 Friday January 23 2004
Yeah, yeah, so I missed an entry yesterday. Let me see yesterday... I woke up early for a PSO. That is Practice Study and Observation for those of you not from purdue. There is a rule here that you must give at least one credit for a "lab". So the CS department is known for scheduling "optional" PSO sessions (see how they cleverly did not use the word "lab") once or twice a week (for which you receive no credit). Of course you will find it incredibly difficult to pass the course without attending these "optional" sessions so you essentially have to attend. At least they schedule them during the free time on your schedule. We were assigned our packet sniffer project. This should not be too hard. Just many lines of code.

From there I met with Professor Simonsen. I did not get as much done on her project as I thought I could, but she is happy. Her research seems to be moving along nicely. I know her postdoc is actually using an earlier version of my code. I learned earlier this week that I am going to get moved into a new group at work. Apparently they are going to support a group to work on advanced scientific programming. I will miss working under with Dale Talcott. He is a good guy, and a real old time hacker. I will be working under Faisal Saied now. I don't know much about him, but he seems like a nice guy. He is a mathematician with all kinds of connections within NCSA. He helped me get an account there for working on the Globus/grid stuff.

After work last night I came home, had spicy stir fry of death with Brad, and was just too tired to produce any notes for cs490-dsp. So I went to bed a little early last night and got up a lot early today. I threw together some lecture notes. Actually they were not half bad. I zipped through all my classes without lunch. For some reason I was not hungry today. Did some more work this afternoon, mostly small stuff that had been put off by all the administrivia last week. I did some plotting about what our 590d project should be. I had hoped to be in bed well before now, unfortunately I am going to need to violate the no-alarm-on-Friday rule tomorrow.

03:03:54 Saturday January 24 2004
Today I learned about empty adverbs. After a careful reading I have determined that this must be the reason my writing seems so flat nowadays. I can see how they crept in. Seven years of scientific education taught me that you cannot say anything that isn't math without qualifying it. Phrases such as: "It is currently believed that..." and "Hopefully future work will explain..." Are so common in scientific literature that they have begun to seep into my brain. I also have adopted a much more relativistic philosophy. In high school it was so damn easy to write everything without qualification because life was simple and right was right and wrong was wrong. I don't believe that anymore and because I govern my life from first philosophical principles it is difficult to avoid qualifying things. None the less I shall make a concerted effort to eliminate them. Let us see how it goes. Once again without the waffling.

Tomorrow Brad makes the long trip back to Alabama. As Sara with no 'H' said a moment ago. "It is actually kinda sad." And so it is. I have enjoyed Brad's company a great deal these last two years. He may be a son of a bitch, but he is the type of son of a bitch that is great to have around. I was very surprised at how willing he was to join my little group of super dorky friends. I am glad he did. I know all of our lives have been made much more interesting by having him about.

I am very bad at goodbyes. When I know someone is leaving my first instinct is to spend less and less time with them. I tend want to ration them out of my life. I know the feel good pop psychology camp will feed me some bullshit line about how I should be treasuring the little time we have together. I don't buy it. When I spend time with the nearly departed all I can think about is how this is probably the last time we will drink a beer together or the last time we will watch Futurama together. I am never able to treasure the time. Each minute brings another "last time" it is just too depressing. It is best just to let them fade away. I have delusions that one day not long from now when it comes time for me to move on I won't tell anyone until a few days before. I would avoid people for a few weeks, then send out the mail that I am moving to Azerbaijan next Thursday. Of course the logistics of accomplishing something like that are mind boggling, but it would be fitting if I just faded away one day.

05:38:05 Sunday January 25 2004
No major accomplishments to report today. I cleaned the house, watched Futurama with Matt and Sara, and attended the first game of Showalter's seafaring campaign. I did manage to burn a debian install CD for use in the near future as well as a knoppix CD for potential use in the more distant future. I cleaned out my inbox on mailhome as well as deleting a large number of attachments that were lying about. Tomorrow I plan to begin work on my packet sniffer, write a paper critique for 590d, and pay some bills.

04:11:18 Monday January 26 2004
I managed to do everything that I set out to do today. I didn't do much more than that, but I will call it a victory none the less. It is always difficult to work on the weekend. I added some color to the office door today. It been missing something ever since I took down the Buy Nothing Day flyer. I think it looks better now. Well better grab some sleep.

05:00:48 Tuesday January 27 2004
Today I roused myself in time to attend the Kaffeestunde. I attend fairly often. The bottom line is that I will forget my German faster than anything if I stop using it entirely. Even this little bit of exercise helps immeasurably. I know almost everyone there. However my mutant weakness is an inability to remember names. That is not just the names of people mind you. I have great difficulty with street names as well. Because I spend less than an hour with the German folks every week I must relearn names every time. Now that I have been attending for nearly 6 years it is getting a bit embarrassing.

Tomorrow we will discuss the MIDI protocol in cs490-dsp. I believe IP traceback is the order of the day in cs590d.

02:16:12 Wednesday January 28 2004
Today I roused myself in time to attend the Kaffeestunde. I attend fairly often. The bottom line is that I will forget my German faster than anything if I stop using it entirely. Even this little bit of exercise helps immeasurably. I know almost everyone there. However my mutant weakness is an inability to remember names. That is not just the names of people mind you. I have great difficulty with street names as well. Because I spend less than an hour with the German folks every week I must relearn names every time. Now that I have been attending for nearly 6 years it is getting a bit embarrassing.

Tomorrow we will discuss the MIDI protocol in cs490-dsp. I believe IP traceback is the order of the day in cs590d.

23:08:56 Wednesday January 28 2004
There comes a time when you realize that you need to start budgeting your time. A quick analysis.

Current Software Projects

• Professor Simonsen's Recomb Widget
• Professor Xie's Multiple Alignment Widget
• cs626 packet analyzer

• cs626 router
• cs590d unknown project (better figure it out by Sunday)
• Whatever Faisel assigns me on Friday (probably XML stuff for NCN)
• qblog rewrite/update
• Anything I can manage for TCR

• Read and review four technical papers a week for cs590d
• Prepare one hour of lecture notes twice a week for cs490-dsp
• Meetings with Professors Xie and Simonsen once a week each
• Meeting with Faisel once a week
• Class attendance

00:27:47 Friday January 30 2004
I feel much better than I did yesterday. Perhaps it is because the weekend is coming up. I know that I will need to work through the weekend, but at least it means that I can get a fair amount of sleep each night.

Today I did all of the usual Thursday things. I think my lack of preparation showed in 490-dsp. Teaching is not something that you can do "off the cuff" unless you are a true expert on the subject. I made progress on my packet sniffer. The weekend MUST be devoted to the packet sniffer. It is due in a little more than a week.

Chris just sent me an invite (literally seconds ago) to the new orkut thing. I am honored that he invited me. I should probably jump on the bandwagon early, but I rarely use the social networks I have in real life let alone virtual ones. Long long ago in the before times I was into the sixdegrees thing when that meme was spreading like wildfire. I still get spam as a result. On the other hand I suspect that this will be the most usable "friend of a friend" site because it is backed by google. Warren echos some of my thoughts on the subject, er... maybe I echo him.

02:58:53 Saturday January 31 2004
Today I woke up only to discover that I had a flat tire. After bumming a ride to campus with Matt I met with Professor Xie. After that I met with my group for 590d. That didn't go too well. It looks like we will be implementing the PFIR TRIPOLI scheme. I am not very fond of the scheme from a technical point of view. However, I am glad that a decision has been made and that it is something that I feel we can actually implement.

After those meetings I met with Faisel et al concerning the new performance engineering group that I will now be a part of. I think the meeting went well. I think they picked up on the fact that I was already a bit overloaded. Perhaps they will not dump a new project in my lap immediately. After this I hung out in the office with David and Rick. It is always interesting to hear them opine on the day's events. I wrote some code for a couple of hours and then headed off to the improv show. The improv show featured improv crews from Lafayette, Purdue, UIUC, and Michigan. I enjoyed it a great deal and Big Brothers/Big Sisters made out like bandits, which is excellent because that is such a good cause. We ran into Lita at the Improv show. We also saw Yost. Strangely enough he was performing. He actually did a hell of a job. I was very impressed.

After the improv Chris, Sara, Sara's new flatmate (who's name eludes me due to my mutant weakness) stopped by. We had some quite tasty vegetarian Chili and watched Being John Malkovich. I like Sara's flatmate. She is one of those people who seems to understand that judging people by the quality of their media is a time honored early/mid twenties hipster thing to do.