Day 1: Saturday 4/10/2010

When I arrived in Norfolk, there was a mix up at the ticket counter – the web check-in boarding pass I printed the day before was invalid and it took some work for the ticket agent to print a new one.  When we arrived in Chicago that afternoon, it was a very long trip from the B concourse island to the international terminal.  We had to go under the ramp, into the main terminal, and take a train to the international terminal, a good 15 or 20 minutes.  Fortunately, the terminal was not busy and we were able to check in at the SAS counter without any issues.

The TSA agent checking my boarding pass at the O’Hare International Terminal commented about me being from Virginia; she said she had never been there.  When I travel to other parts of the country, I always get interesting comments from the locals about me being from Virginia.  In Palo Alto, a waitress commented that it was cold in Virginia, when at the time I remember it was really much warmer at home than in Silicon Valley.  When in Gloucester visiting an old roommate, I got a comment from his neighbor that I was from “Virginny.”  I’ve also heard another Massachusetts resident (who attends school at William and Mary) refer to “Virginny,” as well.  Hollywood always portrays Virginians with thick backcountry accents when the reality is nothing of the sort.  Some have the Tidewater accent, but it’s unnoticeable to the untrained ear.

Also, there were no restaurants in the O’Hare International terminal: 8 bucks for a pre-made sandwich.  Fortunately, we didn’t have to wait long until the Stockholm flight departed.  I noticed that nearly everyone waiting was Swedish, for there were no blue American passports that I could see.  Once on the plane, I realized we lucked out on the seat assignments and got extra legroom since we were just behind the premium economy section.

On the flights, my adviser and I talked about the direction of my career in school and afterwards.  Placement at a faculty job would probably require more time in school, perhaps up to another year, while a research lab may require less.  It’s all about gaining enough experience to do what you want to do.  It was interesting to talk to him about the possibilities since he has experience in both industry and academia.  Both have benefits and drawbacks and there is no way I want to close the door on any particular track just yet.  Just this week I talked with some other students in our department about the time required to complete a Ph.D., and those Master’s students involved in the discussion were wary of spending years in school to graduate.  I would not be opposed to spending another two years in school as long as I worked hard enough to get some good papers published in the hope that I could get a good faculty position at a research university.  From the looks of it, I have plenty of time to think about it and decide.

Day 2: Sunday 4/11/2010

As usual, I didn’t sleep much on the plane, only short bouts of 10 or 20 minutes.  The sun came up quickly and the clouds parted, giving us a view of jagged mountains and snow and little sign of life.  Before landing, the ground was covered up again by thick fog, which we soon descended into.

Though it was 7:30 in the morning, the airport was almost completely deserted.  Immigration and customs was a breeze considering we were the only flight arriving at the time.  A high speed train took us from the airport to the Stockholm Central terminal; a speedometer read well over 200kph as trees and buildings flew by.  I doubt any train at home travels anywhere near that fast.  From the train terminal, we took a subway two stops until we were near the hotel.   One thing I found odd was that the subway tickets had to be purchased from one of several convenience stores surrounding the subway entrance.  In the subway terminal, there were no ticket machines or windows and no signs indicating where tickets could be bought.  Instead, we had to ask someone at the entrance looking for freeriders where we could purchase tickets.

The city was mostly deserted, though it was a Sunday.  Stores were closed and nearly nobody was on the subway or walking around on the streets.  Even the school where the conference was to be held was nearly empty of students with the library closed.  Weatherwise, the day started out cloudy but later the sun came out, with temperatures in the lower 40s – pretty much a December or January day at home.  It’s a good thing I brought my heavy coat.

The hotel had a room available as soon as we arrived, which was surprising since it was only 9 in the morning.  My adviser and I slept for a few hours and then headed out in the afternoon, exploring Gamla stan and the area around the conference.  We walked by the parliament building and the Stockholm Palace, taking a ton of pictures.

To me, it seemed as if everyone was pretending that the weather was nice.  People at coffee shops sat outside at tables, wearing winter coats while being punished by the wind.  Others stood in lines at ice cream stands, despite the 40 degree weather.  Plenty more were out running and biking.  I suppose weather can be much worse in Stockholm.

The crowds picked up some in the afternoon, but there were few restaurants around our hotel so we settled on a Mongolian BBQ place.  I’ve been to similar places at home, but in the brief time I’ve been here there wasn’t anything interesting that caught my eye.  Just the usual McDonald’s and a few other places labeled “American Grill,” or “Steakhouse.”  I travel thousands of miles to get away from American food, among other things, but it seems I can’t escape it.

Day 3: Monday 4/12/2010

Though sleep was better than the previous night, I still had trouble.  I almost never sleep well on trips since it’s always hard for me to adjust to new environments.  I got up before 7AM and went out for a run beyond the university where the conference was, noticing there was a large park I could check out, so I headed that way and was surprised.  City blocks now packed with commuter traffic and sidewalks packed with people suddenly gave way to a vast forest with tons of dirt trails.  Plenty of other people were out running and biking.

I tooled around on the trails for awhile and headed back.  I was surprised that traffic would stop even if it looked like I was about to cross the street.   In addition to the trails, there were large paved paths with marked lanes for bikes and pedestrians.  Sweden seems to have solved the bike path problem so prevalent in the United States.  By making the paths wider and by separating pedestrians and cyclists, cyclists can cruise the bike paths without having to dodge pedestrians.  In the city, sections of curb separated bike lanes from vehicle traffic, also decreasing the chance of a bicycle accident.

On Monday, there were a handful of workshops; I attended one on “Cooperating Objects,” which appears to be a new buzzword in the embedded/sensor networks community.  A few people spoke about event detection and machine learning, with ideas similar to my research.  There were easily several hundred people, much more than at previous conferences I attended, people from all over the world.

At the reception Monday evening, I met Alexandra from Romania, who attended school in Slovenia.  It was interesting talking to her, considering that we are from very different and faraway places, yet we work in the same field.  We hung out quite a bit between breaks throughout much of the conference and through her I was introduced to a few others from Eastern Europe.  At school, it can feel very insular with few people to share your work and ideas with, but at a place like this, everybody is doing the same thing, and they come from everywhere.

Day 4: Tuesday 4/13/2010

Tuesday was a long one.  I was up at 6:30 to run, with plenty of daylight.  I explored a different part of the park than before, but ended up by a factory.  I’m still surprised at the number of trails in the city.

The plenary speaker seemed to be more of a biologist, speaking about human and animal brains as a control system.  There were quite a few talks in IPSN about machine learning and/or event detection so it was interesting to see others’ approaches to similar problems.  Later on, there was a poster and demo session which lasted until nearly 7:30 at night.

During the poster/demo session, I met a guy from the University of Utah which had concocted a sort of “x-ray” vision with 802.15.4 radios – I remember reading about this on the internet a few months ago.  Link quality between radios would change due to people moving about in the room, and with enough links, the moving people could be localized.  Apparently, his paper based on this was rejected mostly because nobody believed it.

Day 4: Wednesday 4/14/2010

On Wednesday, I hit the motherlode for trails when out on my run.  On previous runs I seemed to hit dead ends – running into roads, office buildings, or even factories, but today I found a trail that took me out to the rest of the park.  There were plenty more trails and open space by the time I had to turn around.  It was also sunny right from the start instead of morning fog.

The IPSN tracks were pretty interesting, again with a few on event detection and machine learning.   One group took a twist with a technique I used in my paper that I hadn’t thought of.  I also went to the CPS conference sensor network track, but didn’t really see too much differences compared with the typical sensor network research.

Day 5: Thursday 4/15/2010

I ran again in the morning, out to all the new trails I found the day before.  Unfortunately, the clouds returned.  At the conference, my adviser’s adviser, Jack Stankovic, was the plenary speaker.  During his talk, he used the example of a storm in Chicago as a reference to real time job scheduling.  The next day, I was supposed to return home via Chicago – hearing about any airline problem in Chicago was the last thing I wanted to think about.   This example eerily foreshadowed the problems to come for my return flights (through Chicago).

There were a few other sessions in the IPSN track that were interesting – at least one other event detection paper that was related to my work.  Then, in the afternoon, it was time for my presentation.  Since I was in the sensor networks track of RTAS, most people were in the concurrent IPSN track, so I didn’t get a huge audience.

Just before the presentation, I found out about the ash cloud coming from Iceland.  One of the other people in the room mentioned about flying back through Chicago the next day, as were my adviser and I.  He then mentioned something about maybe not getting back, and that’s when I found out about the ash cloud causing a huge mess in the UK and northern Europe.  It was headed to Sweden next.

With this on my mind, it was my turn to present.  I thought I did reasonably well and finished on time, except that I rearranged my slides just before the presentation and wound up having a backup slide placed ahead of my last slide, causing me to skip through it.

Following my presentation, my adviser and I locked ourselves in a discussion room in the university library and proceeded to call the airline reservation number to get a new booking.  The earliest we could get was the following Tuesday, over four days away.  Weather reports stated that the cloud might stay for days or weeks.  I walked back to the hotel and extended the hotel reservation until Tuesday while in the lobby other conference attendees scrambled to adjust their plans.

At the very least, I’ll get to see more of Stockholm and Sweden, though the weather isn’t supposed to hold up.  Fortunately for this week it has been fairly warm and sunny.  We’ll have to take it day by day to see if the ash cloud will dissipate enough to allow us to go home.  If Tuesday comes and goes and there’s no sign of the cloud letting up, it might be worth a try to head south via train or bus through Denmark to somewhere where I can fly out.

Then, I got to college and faced the experience of eating in the dining halls.  Our entire cross country team would pile into the Caf every night after practice and sit in the same cluster of tables.  Most of the time, we were exhausted from whatever workout or long run we had done that day and were dying for food.  Of course, the stingy workers would only hand out a few pellets of nasty roast beef or a few noodles of pasta after standing in line for ten minutes.  We were starving — give us more!

“Get back in line,” the workers retorted.

Thus, after whatever inhaling whatever meager rations the Caf workers gave us, everyone on the team finished their dinner with a nightly ritual: cereal.  Cereal wasn’t portion controlled by the miserly Caf workers, so we ate a lot of it.  When I first arrived as a freshman, I couldn’t believe everyone else ate cereal for dinner.  It seemed so out of place, but soon enough, I found myself doing it every night along with the rest of my teammates.

The Caf always had Kellog’s granola, which in some way or another became my cereal of choice for breakfast and dinner.  A bowl of it in the morning gave me most of the energy I needed to get through a day of class and practice.  It was also great after plenty of grueling workouts.  So, I not only ate cereal with almost every meal, but I became addicted to granola.

At first, I stuck to the Kellog’s brand, which I ate at the Caf.  It wasn’t until my sophomore year that I discovered bulk granolas in the grocery stores, while a few years later I found Trader Joe’s, which sold the same bulk granolas as well as other granola-based cereals for cheap.  All the while I continued to eat cereal for dinner while at school: my parents would have a fit if I did that at home.  Then, after screwing around on the Internet, I found that it was easy to make your own granola with a minimum of ingredients.  I found a great recipe here and also here, but my version is as follows:

Preheat oven to 275 and combine the following in a large mixing bowl:

• 4 cups rolled oats
• 1 cup pecans
• 1/3 cup, heaping, packed brown sugar
• pinch of salt
• 4 tsp canola oil
• 1 cup pure maple syrup (I use Grade B, but Grade A Dark Amber is also good)

Place on a cookie sheet with cooking spray.  Bake for about 40 minutes, stirring every 10-15 minutes to allow the edges and center to dry evenly.  When the oats turn golden brown and the syrup has been absorbed, it’s done.

Since I don’t eat in the dining halls anymore, I wonder if my old teammates still finish off every dinner in the Caf with a bowl of cereal.

HEY GENIUS, WE WANT YOU!

Microsoft:
Meet the Company!
9/18
4:30-5:30pm
Andrews Hall room 101

People here love their work because they get to think big and dream big.
Right now we’re looking for the next generation of Microsoft innovators.
If you have talent and a passion for technology, this could be your big moment.
Come find out more about our fulltime and internship opportunities and the area of Seattle!

Bring your résumé for a chance
to win great prizes!

FREE FOOD will be provided!

OMG Free Food? It’s as if the author thinks that the food will change my decision whether or not to go. The sentence structure seems very pedantic and more like that of something a non-native English speaker (Nigerian scammer) would write. It just doesn’t seem to flow very well — usually in these emails it’s more along the lines of “Company X is currently seeking a customer service oriented and highly creative individual to provide services and support as a Junior Software Test/Documentation Specialist.”

The department later sent out a more formal email verifying that this was indeed real, which I found hard to believe. Regardless, I’m not looking for a job at the moment. I will say that the latest round of recruitment emails from our department and the school’s career services has been much better than the typical “Redneck Technical Services is looking for an entry level web designer in Rustic, VA with a starting salary of $20K.”

I started a weight routine for my legs and upper body which is the best I can do since I can’t run or bike. It should help some when I eventually am allowed more range of motion in the brace. The brace has done wonders for my hamstring flexibility though. I have been putting some weight on the left leg since the doctor and PA said I am allowed to, but I stick to the crutches when I move around. I’m real paranoid about screwing up the healing process and knocking out that clot in the knee that’s supposed to form new cartilage. There’s still a few times each day where I’ll move and I can feel the knee pop right in the area where I had the microfracture. I really hope that’s not the kneecap destroying part of the clot that’s in there. I’ll have to ask about that on Thursday.

There really isn’t much else I can do except work on the school project during the day and watch the Olympics at night. The stuff I’m working on still has problems and the conference submission deadline is at the end of the week. Each test case in the experiment takes about 5 hours of CPU time so each time I change something it takes quite awhile until I see results. And there are a lot of test cases, so I need as many as 20 or 30 processors running simultaneously to get results as fast as possible. I used to wonder why there was a need for systems with so many processors, but now I know. Each group of tests also spits out about a gig in raw data which also illustrates the need for a large amount of storage space.

I really hadn’t watched that much of the Olympics before whenever they had it, but I don’t really have that much else to do this time around. I always watched some of the track stuff, but that was about it. Personally, I didn’t think the coverage was all that great since there seemed to be an insane amount of commercials. Also, since there were so many sports, they couldn’t show everything, so the time was broken into small chunks of each. I didn’t get to see some of the stuff that sounded interesting, like the sailing or whitewater rafting stuff, shooting, or the modern pentathlon (which has cross country). There were a lot of things that I didn’t find as interesting, like diving and gymnastics, which seemed to last forever and require a palate akin to a professional wine taster in order to distinguish between a good and bad performance.

With the entire world watching, you would think that all the athletes would be on their best behavior as a representative of their country and as the best in their sport. Despite this, there seemed to be a bit of showboating and poor sportsmanship. One guy in taekwondo kicked a referee in the face after being disqualified. A wrestler threw his medal down on the mat after being angry over a judge’s call. In the qualifying heats of the 4 x 400, Great Britain’s anchor taunted the Jamaican runner behind him as they finished. And of course, there was all the showing off for the camera by Jamaica’s Bolt in the 100 and 200 — this was so bad there is even a YouTube video mocking it. There were many cases in the qualifying heats of the sprints where those in the front would pretty much slow down and walk across the finish line. Before the championship season every year in track, our head coach always said if we did that we’d never be wearing a uniform again. Of course, these instances were probably the exceptions rather than the rule, but it only takes a few bad apples.

Now that the Olympics are over it’s now on to the hype of the conventions and the fall election. I’m getting sick of a lot of it especially since Virginia is considered a “swing” state. There are tons of ads on TV, most of which are really annoying. There are too many attacks on the other guy and not enough emphasis on the good qualities of either candidate.

Maybe by the time all that is over I’ll be back on my feet again and things will be more or less back to normal. Maybe I’ll be crippled for life, but I’m trying to do everything I can to avoid that.

It turns out that one of my teammates did have microfracture surgery before and at the end of his 6+ month recovery, he was running and working out again with everyone else. It took a lot of work to get back into shape, but he did it and is still running without problems today. Tomorrow I am supposed to meet with the orthopedic surgeon to sign some paperwork and try to figure out what will happen in the days/weeks/months following the surgery.

My cell phone was slowly breaking down over the last few months and finally seemed to give up the ghost yesterday. Aside from the 10-15 minute battery life, it had gradually been unable to connect with the cell network. For awhile, it would randomly lose and reconnect with the network, but yesterday it was “No Service” everywhere I went while everyone else I saw was yakking it up. Normally I don’t talk on the phone very much, but when I’m out on the bike or driving somewhere and something breaks down, it’s good to have. I’ll have to figure out what to do about this and I am not sure I want to plunk down more money for something that’s intentionally designed to wear out after a few years. I really just want something that can make calls and has a long battery life; all that other crap like pictures, video, unwieldy web browsing, and text messaging I have no need for.

Yesterday my mom dropped by and we took the ferry to Surry and tried going to a barbecue place for dinner. Naturally, it was closed on Tuesdays. An hour of driving and the ferry trip and there wasn’t much else out there, except for the Virginia Diner, so we went there instead. It wasn’t bad, but not all that great either. I’ve seen that place while driving by on 460 several times, but never ate anything there. We’ve stopped a few times to buy some of the peanuts and peanut brittle they have, but never the food.

As we drove through Surry county, I saw lots of signs and bumper stickers reading “No OLF” in giant red letters, protesting one of the potential sites for the Navy outlying landing field for all the planes at Oceana and Cherry Point to practice landings. A much bigger protest has been going on in Northeastern NC for a lot longer since that was the Navy’s first choice. My mom said she couldn’t blame them for protesting it since a lot of people live out in the middle of nowhere to avoid stuff like that, but the funny thing is that is the same reason why the Navy wants to build there in the first place: there’s nothing around. For over 20 years I’ve lived within 5 miles of Oceana and the jets flying around at all hours never really bothered me. In fact, I sleep way better at home than I ever do in Williamsburg, where it’s usually quiet. Sometimes the quiet seems kind of unnerving because I almost expect there to be some kind of background noise of planes flying and cars driving down the nearby highways. It’s probably why Williamsburg seems so tired to me. That said, I can’t really fault the people in Surry for protesting either since they were there first and live there so they don’t have to deal with the noise and irritations of living in the close quarters of a city. If I were one of them, I would feel the same way.

I have only a few more days to enjoy my freedom of movement, and then I’ll be confined to crutches. I’m still biking as much as I can and walking everywhere I can too. Not being able to do much else will allow me to spend more time with school, but it’s good to have a break. Following a few weeks of downtime, then the real challenge of recovery begins. It’s always way harder to recover from an injury than it is to manifest one or take the initial time off after getting one. In the meantime, I’ll try to enjoy what I’ve got.

At this point I’m not entirely sure how I’ll get around at school to get food and get to the office. I’ll have to find out during the pre-surgery doctor visit if I’ll be able to bend my knee to sit down or get into a car. I won’t even be able to drive my car since it’s a stick and the left knee is the problem. In fact, other than running, I feel the knee the most when I put in the clutch. I may be able to trade with my parents for awhile, but I still might not even be able to drive right off the bat.

As much as I really don’t want to do this, there isn’t really a choice. If I don’t get this done, I’ll never be able to run again. From the sounds of it, even if I don’t try to run again and don’t have the surgery, the wear on the bone will get worse and I’ll have to get a complete knee replacement. I don’t want that. So for the past few weeks and probably for the next couple, I’ll be biking. Biking doesn’t seem to hurt it much, and when it does, it only happens for a few seconds at the beginning of the ride. My bike isn’t in that great of shape, and really I could use a whole new bike, helmet, and shoes, but in a few weeks I won’t be able to use any of them, at least not for a long while. I could try saving up for some new stuff and wait until the late fall/winter when I’ll be able to use it again (hopefully).

I really don’t get that much pain right now, my knee is more of an annoyance if anything, so it seems that the cure is worse than the disease. At least for the moment. Reading other people’s experience with microfracture surgery tells of really long recoveries, with some people having more pain than before they were operated on. It seems that a lot of people went in thinking they were having a meniscus tear removal which has a very quick recovery time — some people are allowed to walk out of the hospital from that one. Instead, some people wake up and find that they had microfracture and then won’t be able to walk for 4-8 weeks. At least I can go in knowing that already.

It seems quite a few people are able to return to running with their knee better than before. One guy has a website that chronicles his whole experience. He has run several marathons since and says he never felt better. Hopefully I can use that as motivation. From the sounds of it, I won’t be able to do much of anything until the crutches come off, and then I can do some stuff in the pool along with whatever the PT people tell me to do. After about 3 months or so it looks like I’ll be able to use the road bike again, and then a month or two after that maybe running. It just depends on how everything turns out. The doctor/surgeon seemed very optimistic and seemed to think that I would be able to run again with no problem. I hope so. It’s just going to be extremely frustrating between now and then, especially since I will get completely out of shape. Even the guy who has ran six marathons since his surgery said he lost a ton of muscle mass in his legs and never got it back.

With all that’s going on (or not going on), I feel so disconnected from the world I live in. Everyone I really was good friends with has moved on, yet I am still here in Williamsburg. The bad thing is that it’s so dead here in the summer, especially on the weekends. I’ve gone home nearly every weekend just to escape this place. A lot of the excitement in my life has ended with my time on the xc/track team. There were always races and workouts that loomed in the near future, but were great when you had a good one. There’s just been a huge void ever since that has ended, and I’ll never be able to go back to it. Even if I am able to run again, running workouts with the team (if I could) wouldn’t be the same since everyone is different and much younger.

That said, I still enjoy the work I do. It isn’t too hard, but not too easy, either. It will give me good opportunities for the future. In the past, I made a few big decisions based on stuff that was happening in the present instead of thinking ahead. For the most part they turned out okay, but sometimes I wonder What If. There isn’t any going back in time so I have to do the best with what I’ve got, and sometimes it wouldn’t have mattered anyways. Like my knee, for example. I don’t think I could have changed anything even if I went back in time to early January and told my past self that within a few weeks it would blow up and it would lead to this whole mess. If I had not run that day or gone later or something, it still probably would have given out sooner or later. The previous two years of twisting my ankle and other punishment just gradually took its toll and caught up with me. I guess it would have been possible to go back even further and tell myself to take it easy on the trails, but even that I’m not sure about. What’s done is done and now it’s time to face the future. Here’s to hoping it will turn out well.

This really seems to illustrate two points: 1) Locally grown fresh food can be cheaper to obtain, and 2) No wonder so many people in western countries have so many diet-related health problems — look at all that packaged stuff!

Of course there are upsets to this order of things, the main thing being government intervention. The farm subsidies set up here in the US heavily favor grain and cattle farmers with a series of price floors and economic incentives. There are basically no subsidies for fruits and vegetables. This is what turns us into a fatty beef-eating corn-syrup chugging society with heart disease being the biggest cause of deaths every year.

The cost of food has definitely skyrocketed for me. Since I eat most of my meals in the dining halls, I get cereal, milk, orange juice, and a few other snacks and beverages about every two weeks. I used to spend around $25 for every two week period, but now it’s gone up past $40. The media blames it on increased energy costs, demand due to population increases throughout the world, and diversion of corn to ethanol production.

If the farm bill were reorganized to promote all food to be locally grown and sold, this would eliminate a lot of the energy-based cost increases. If we shifted our diets away from all the prepackaged stuff and ate more fresh food, this would get rid of a lot of the production costs and would be a lot healthier to boot. Also, I know that there is the argument that so much of grain production goes to cattle feed and that if we cut back meat consumption this would really help things in terms of lower costs and better diet. Unfortunately, I like meat, and lots of it, so I can’t really support that change. I also don’t mind drinking soda and processed/manufactured cereals. At the same time, I walk into the caf and most of the stuff they have is deep-fried and straight out of some factory and it disgusts me. I can’t stand the country-fried steaks, french fries, heavily-oiled pastas, and canned sugary sauces and gravies.

I did join a locally-grown food co-op and their offerings are definitely expensive — again, since all this stuff is mostly fruits and vegetables, it’s not subsidized and will be more expensive. It’s also in part to the co-op being small and the cost to truck in a small number of potatoes or lettuce from Suffolk being pretty high. The stuff they do have is pretty good, though. Williamsburg also runs a Farmer’s Market that I’ve bought some good stuff from — bread, seafood, and peanuts, among other things.

I can get going on some implementation of the system I am working on with my advisor (finally) so that we can move on to putting out a paper. If I don’t finish this, then I won’t ever get my M.S. The Theory of Computation class has some difficult NP-Complete reduction problems so while that will be difficult to get through, I don’t have to finish it right away. Looking at those problems a little bit every day is much better than staring at them for hours and getting nowhere.

Since I do have some free time, I got Call of Duty 4 through Steam. Though a lot of people complain about it, I really like the concept of Steam. There isn’t any rummaging through various B+M stores looking to see if they have what you want. There isn’t any annoying packaging and CD to insert everytime you want to play. There isn’t any CD to lose, either — you just redownload.

I’ve played through a portion of the game already in the past day since I downloaded it and so far, it’s been great. It’s very cinematic and the battles seem so out of control. A lot of the time I feel so helpless with stuff blowing up all over the place and bullets screaming by. At the same time, though, the game depends on you to get stuff done. The other soldiers you’re with won’t advance until you do, so you do have to make some kind of progress. If you don’t, they’ll just hang back and the enemies will continuously respawn in the same places. The linear aspect of the game is the only drawback (along with a pretty weak AI), but the action definitely makes it fun. I haven’t played the multiplayer yet, but I heard it’s great, which is one of the reasons I bought the game. With many games, the multiplayer is pretty bland, so I’ll finish the singleplayer and then leave the game to collect dust — four hours of gameplay isn’t really worth $50. But, a good multiplayer that allows hours of fun in addition to good singleplayer allows me to recoup my investment.

I also saw Into the Wild, which prompted me to buy the book. The movie reminded me of a few guys on the team that had a similar attitude as the main character. It would be great just to cut loose and forget about all the nuances of every day life, except this guy really did it. Christopher McCandless graduated college and decided to hitchhike, hop trains, kayak to Mexico, and live in a bus in the Alaskan wilderness. Unfortunately, he took it a little too far and starved to death. It seemed that he didn’t have much knowhow in terms of wilderness survival, or that maybe he wanted it to go that way. The movie (and maybe the book) got me thinking about what it would be like if I just up and left without telling anyone. To disappear into the great beyond with no real destination in mind. Forget sleeping in the same bed every day, going through the same old routine, going to class, eating the same bland food, and seeing the same things. Every day would bring something new and exciting. Of course, it wouldn’t be any walk in the park — things that I normally take for granted would suddenly become a huge problem, mainly food, shelter, and just general health kind of stuff.

The Colonial Relays were this weekend and I caught a little bit of the meet. A few of the guys who recently graduated came back and it was nice to see them. Most, like myself, are still in school, just somewhere else. It’s funny how removed I feel from practicing and competing despite still running every day from the locker room and seeing everybody that’s still here. At this point it’s difficult to imagine racing. Just running is an accomplishment at this point.

The semester is coming to a quick end — only 3 weeks and two labs left to TA. Hopefully I’ll finish everything successfully.

Then it dawned on me that there was more than just apple butter. Looking on the internet, I was able to find pumpkin butter, pear butter, peach butter, and even cherry butter. I bought some apple butter and pumpkin butter from Kroger without any HFCS, and found it to be much better than the stuff at the UC. Some of the stuff at the grocery store is cheaper and made in some factory with corn syrup and other added crap, but the stuff I got came from a farm in West Virginia. The pumpkin butter was like pumpkin pie, but not as sweet.

I wondered what the other butters tasted like. I searched everywhere and couldn’t find anything but apple butter and occasionally pumpkin butter. What’s more, the stuff seems to be “seasonal”. I could find apple butter easily in the fall, but it’s a rare item now. I never could figure out the seasonal food scam — it’s usually the best stuff but stores/people only make it during one sliver of the year (girl scout cookies, Reese’s PB eggs, pecan/pumpkin pies, pumpkin-flavored ice cream, sweet potato dishes, some beers). I finally broke down and ordered a trio of jars (cherry, pumpkin, and peach) from a national park website that offered the stuff.

It finally came in yesterday and I tried out the cherry — good stuff. It was like jam, but thicker. It’s also really different than the apple and pumpkin butters I’ve had.

The other thing that gets me is fruit juice. I signed up for a campus food co-op where local stuff is offered every week and you tell them what you want. Then you go and pick it up when it comes in. I ordered some “cherry” cider, which turned out to be apple juice with cherry concentrate and tasted in kind. I went to the grocery store and bought fruit juice labeled as “cherry”, but found cherries to be down the list after apples and grapes. It didn’t taste anything like cherries. I finally found pure cherry juice and blueberry juice at Trader Joe’s, but I’ve got to finish off the “cherry” cider first.

Then, I’ve got extra stuff for my adviser for the M.S. project/research which is really an extension of my wireless class project. There are weekly things he wants me to do which can make things tough. Since he keeps changing his mind on the details of the project, I have to continually refine the paper I’m working on to reflect these changes. I really want to just pick something and go with it so I can do some actual implementation, get some experimental or simulated results, and put the stuff in a paper. Then I can get my M.S. degree. The deadline for my M.S. paper and project is basically next week and my adviser didn’t want to push it, so I (hopefully) will get my degree in the summer.

The end of the semester won’t be the end, but I’m hoping that I’ll be done with my M.S. stuff by then. I then have to apply for candidacy into the PhD program (actually I don’t even have to be done with my M.S. project for that), but I have to be done with the classes I am taking this semester. Hopefully I can choose a committee without any problems and they will look at my classes and grades and say: OK. Hopefully. This all seems like a dream and it’s hard to believe that this is where I am in my life.

There are only four labs left for my intro Java class, so there won’t be too much left for that. Some of the labs are getting more complicated and some of the students are having trouble with some of the concepts (arrays, interfaces). I do my best to help, but I can tell that some of the students don’t like me. This is mainly because I get as frustrated as they do when I can’t explain something to them very well. As I’ve said before, learning to program is an individual task — spoon feeding the answers to problems doesn’t help you learn. Teaching the concepts helps, but you really have to work on stuff on your own to truly understand everything. I have to try to get the students to think independently. I try to make them ask the right questions about what went wrong when they have problems.

The housing selection stuff for the gradplex is this week so my roommate and I have to pick out a place. We have to find another building since we are going to be here in the summer. The one we are in now is going to be renovated. Unfortunately, the building also has the laundry machines for the whole complex. I have a feeling they will just close off the whole place and I’ll have to go somewhere else to do laundry. The computer science building is really close to one of the undergrad dorms which has laundry machines. I could drag my stuff over there and do it while I’m working in the office.

The other day I was thinking about taking home a lot of my winter clothes since I wouldn’t need them anymore. Then I realized: What’s the point if I’m going to be in Williamsburg year-round? I can just keep everything there and not have to take it home. That seems weird. It’s like I’m gradually starting to move out of home. At the same time, though, I’ve gone home a lot more than I used to.

I have gone home a ton and I’m at home again now. It’s nice to get good food and to sleep like a rock when I’m here. My dad is here for the first time in what seems like forever since he is always working. It seems a lot more peaceful at home than at school when there’s always someone that’s crashing around in the building or yelling outside. Despite that, the undergrad dorms, and especially my freshman dorm, were like pure mayhem compared to the gradplex. I’ll probably wind up at home again next weekend since it’s Sarah’s birthday. Also, she probably won’t be able to come up to Williamsburg because of her job. Funny that this time around, she just ordered what she wanted online (a coat) and I’ll just pay her back for it. It doesn’t seem like much of a present since I don’t wrap it or even get to give it to her, but it’s probably for the best since it’s something that she wants and will enjoy. At least I got a card.

The going isn’t necessarily ideal, but I am making some kind of progress.