mokudekiru

Yeah, I pretty much live here. This afternoon I stopped in, there were no empty tables on floor (which means I have to sit with a stranger or find somewhere else to study), but in fact Sergei was there so I sat at his table. Tonight I'm at a big table with two other macbook wielding strangers and Nathan. There is always a quest involved in getting a good seat in this library.

Thursday night, Noam came back into town. She came over to my dorm and she did math, while I did chemistry. Just like old times (except that we both would have been doing math). That was the kickoff to my fantastic weekend.

Friday night was Andrew Bird — he is absolutely amazing. He played a couple years ago when I was in high school — at this point a bunch of my friends went to see him and kept bragging that they could see Andrew Bird because *they* were 18 (the age required to get into the particular venue where he was playing). I didn’t know who he was at that point and immediately realized my mistake. Luckily this time I didn’t miss out. My guess is that this concert involved more musically interesting things because he had a very large concert stage to set up on. It looked a little like this. He’s strumming on his violin at this point:

His original training is in violin (Suzuki method!) and he makes good use of it — most of his songs began with him playing a line on the violin, recording himself in realtime, and layering himself over this recorded track. He did use the guitar a bit too (often standing with the guitar on his back and holding his violin in front of him). He also whistles and hums a lot.

Because he’s essentially a one-man-band, he sounded pretty different live than recorded. When he played Fiery Crash, I didn’t really recognize it until he said that line (though it sounded familiar somehow). A really 抜群 concert, I must say.

Unfortunately, around the time Andrew Bird was singing about a Fiery Crash, Nathan was actually having an epic bike crash with a sidewalk…

The rest of the weekend involved… going home and coming back and forth to campus the entire weekend for the purpose of studying and going out — finally saw Ariana’s apartment, etc. I stayed at home until Monday morning, and apparently people came hunting for me Sunday night, mysteriously right before the CS homework was due…

So I’m off to CS.

Today I had just taken my chem quiz and was sort of out of it, when I noticed that I had a missed call on my cell phone. The number wasn’t in my phone book, but I decided to call it back anyway. The quad was sort of loud and I couldn’t quite hear what this person was saying, except that it had something to do with CS class, answering a question, and Noam. After about three minutes of going “huh?” repeatedly, I finally learned that it was Boyce telling me that Ford said to tell me from Noam congratulations on answering a question in CS lecture today… Wow. At least I know his phone number now…

And I wasn’t even really sleep deprived while this happened.

Because I am working on re-reading this play for a project that is happening on friday, etc., and right now I am so involved in 花ざかりの君たちへ that if I had a moment I would use it to watch… but here is a picture to show you that I’m actually still alive. We can make this into a game:

Who can tell me what this alien spacecraft actually is?

Tonight I went to my first [and last?] party. Luckily I invited my friend Nick (my mathbuddy) so that when we both wanted to leave after half an hour, I had someone to walk back with. I think we both feel like we’ve fulfilled party quota now. However, it wasn’t without its highlights. Best moment: girl is trying to get through the crowd, walks between me and Nick, points at both of us and says, “you’re both in my math class.” And we are.

This week is going by really too fast. I felt particularly rushed today, when I had activities from 10-3 (office hours I went to, then 4 classes), studying at Grainger for 2 hours, math study session, dinner, meeting, back to my dorm for hours of CS fun… while I walk I memorize chemical compounds.

I would have not survived today’s marathon of classes were it not for hanging out with Ford and Boyce a lot last night (facebook albums to prove it) and exploring the food options readily available near our dorm. Since, as previously mentioned, the cafeteria is really never open when I need it to be, and/or closed whenever there’s even something resembling a holiday… sometimes you need food. So we went to Late-Night across the street (since all campus residential halls has it) and basically you put money on your campus ID and then can buy food there, and it’s sort of like a grocery store. The number of people there was surprising — the nighttime activity, the food! So I bought a sandwich that I took with me today to eat between Theatre and Chem. That worked out well… yeah right.

I couldn’t even finish my sandwich on the way to chem (this must have meant I was walking fast, as I have several times eaten Jimmy Johns sandwiches before I make it from one side of the quad to the other) but luckily Ankit had saved me a seat as he promised, and I finished my sandwich with a minute or two to spare.

What I have been working on for the past few hours is CS. Nathan and I want to work on it tomorrow because that might mean we don’t have to spend all weekend doing it (or so we hope). I’ve gotten it mostly typed up, and mostly worked out (comparing answers still REALLY necessary) but I’m still pretty slow and clumsy with LaTeX. It’s coming along though.

I have also been using this parsetree package for LaTeX and since have made beautiful parse trees for my homework.

My plan for this long weekend was to get everything done by Sunday, such that on Monday I can use my time to catch up on watching Japanese tv.

Unfortunately, I didn’t actually accomplish anything on Saturday. This is not for lack of trying: in fact, I did accomplish helping make some peppermint cookies with Jono and Angelina (these cookies taste like Christmas). Then I headed over to ACM where sure enough Nathan and David were attempting work on Sucrose. I worked on my CS homework, and by that I don’t mean figuring out what I think the solutions are (because I’m mostly done with that part), but putting it into a pretty LaTeX document was the part i worked on yesterday. There was something wrong with my LaTeX setup on my computer, and the first disk image of MacTeX I downloaded did not work. Either it was a bad mirror I chose to download from, or the fact that I was using firefox, but the second one worked and then I spent a while sitting in the ACM office listening to people blame each other for why Sucrose doesn’t work, as I worked through some tutorials for LaTeX. People got hungry and we went to lunch around 4.

Now let me make my complaint about meals at my dorm. I realize going to lunch at 4 may be a little late, but the fact that dinner ENDS at 6 pm on Saturdays is completely ridiculous. I predict that I will never eat dinner at my dorm on Saturday for this reason — I’m out, doing things, I can’t be bothered to come back that early.

And the lack of food continues. Since all I did yesterday homework-wise was learn HOW to type my CS homework, I still have a lot of work to actually DO. Thus I needed to get up at a reasonable hour and get going to the library. I checked online what time Sunday brunch opens, and on the website it says 9:30. So I showed up around 10am, at which point there were about three people there, and there was basically no food. “Um… when will there be food?” Apparently there is no hot food until 10:30. So I had some fruit and a bagel and one of the two remaining people in the cafeteria griped at me as well about the fact that we can’t wait until 10:30 to eat breakfast.

I guess one option would be to get up early, eat food in my room, study, and then come back for brunch and use that as lunch. But you never know how much food there will be left when you come late to a meal.

Plus, isn’t Saturday night at 6pm to Sunday morning at 10:30 am kind of a long timespan between meals? Normally dinners end at 7pm (still far too early) and breakfast starts the next morning at 7am.

Aside from the normal lack of food on Sundays, this weekend has an added bonus of no food on Monday thanks to Labor Day. I have been collecting food all weekend and I went grocery shopping too (I had no ramen in my room before last night–really tragic) so I definitely will not starve on Monday, but it’s still sort of a nuissance.

So those are my complaints for today. Soon I will be meeting Nathan to think once again about a question or two on the CS homework. It’s kind of confusing and we have reached different conclusions at different times, so we’re going to have one more shot at it, and then (hopefully) submit the homework.

I ended up not actually doing homework on a Friday night (this is not to say I didn’t try). I got my first fine threat in my dorm (no fines yet, and I wasn’t actually making any noise).

I did get sidetracked from potential homework when Nathan came over (the one pictured below) and we showed him how we roll here in my dorm, as opposed to his decrepit, tiny, not air conditioned dorm on the far side of campus. Apparently on the plane ride over he told someone next to him what dorm he was living in, and they said, “Have fun with the roaches!” Great!

However, he did once again both help and distract me from my homework — this time with none other than the intro to Star Wars X-Wing on DOS. Great stuff. Though I haven’t played that one, the graphics there aren’t much worse than the first Rebel Assault game. So it was really 懐かしい and made me nostalgic for video/computer games that actually kept me entertained. Once the graphics and sound gets good, it loses a lot. Also, it’s a pity that none of the old mac games work once they made the switch to the intel processor, because I want to be able to do the equivalent with all my old games.

Somewhere in all of that I think we sort of finished the CS173 homework though actually, now that I think of it. I also think the ACM dudes are probably the people to ask about my ubuntu problems, but for the time being I need to get LaTeX up and running in order to type out the answers to my homework. I also have quite a lot of other homework to deal with this weekend, but if I get any free time I will spend it in the ACM office where all the magic happens, watch Nathan and David attempt to fix sucrose (the computer powered vending machine in the office), and try to get at least some work done.

Or else just practice playing Go, which I first played last night (Mpitt had explained the concept to me many times before, but I’d never actually tried playing until yesterday).

I actually missed a meeting tonight, but what happened was I went to JCT until 6:30, came back, went to dinner, and chilled with the HH 9th floor East (our imaginary floor of friends) in the lounge, which is when we almost got fined for noise (it was an enthralling game of pool I promise). I went up to my room and ACM people were talking to me on IRC asking where I was (I’m famous in the office now. Not only a clueless freshman girl, which is a pretty underrepresented demographic there, but I have spent the last few days pretty much camped out in the office). However I decided I didn’t really want to start going OUT when it was already dark.

So now it’s 1:30 and a pretty enjoyable evening of doing nothing later, I think I’ll work on writing things into my schedule and attempting this whole sleep thing. Cookies are happening tomorrow and I need my energy.