i prefer pi

Dr. Rauchwerger writes interesting e-mails sometimes:

Folks,As I have warned you on Friday — We will not have class today — See you on Wed 

They always sound so dire…

I ran six miles today! I don’t mind running at the Rec (in fact, I rather enjoy it) but I think that in the future, given the distance that I’m going, I’m going to have to start running outside.

I bought candy from the MSC Bookstore yesterday, and down at the bottom of my receipt, it says “LAST DAY TO RETURN BOOKS 09/09/04″. Maybe someone should tell them…?

Need a Good Doctor?

Courtesy of Annie, a Trigon BlueCross BlueShield commercial. I just can’t stop laughing (not safe for work, although there’s nothing morally offensive about it).

Terms From Computer Science That Would Make Good Band Names Or Song Titles

• The Graceful Degradation
• Byzantine Fault Tolerance
• AJAX
• Internal Fragmentation
• Sleepless Nights
• The Dining Philosophers
• Church Touring
• Hoare Logic
• Rigourous Proof
• Ed Starred Extra

I will gift one iTunes song (of your choosing!) to first person to decipher that last one.

Worst Interface Ever:

I have this Xanga photo storage space, so I might as well use a bit of it.

Click above to take a look at the full size photo that I cropped into my profile picture — the small size doesn’t let you see enough detail to really get a feel for the scale of the mountain. In the photo, I’m standing on the very edge of a trail that runs alongside a pretty steep dropoff. What you see just beyond the rocks at my feet are actually ice fields about a quarter mile below me. The large gray boulders at my shoulder level are probably about a two-hour hike away, and I’m a good five and a half or six thousand feet below the summit — a bit less than two-thirds of the way up.

I have an intense desire to read Les Misérables, but at a stout 1400 pages, it’d probably take me a solid 40+ hours to read. Where am I going to find 40 free hours these days? Conclusion: I should drop out of grad school so that I have enough time to read.

Right on the heels of my enthusiasm about running five miles, I went swimming last night with Stephen Henderson, and I remember now why I hated training for the swim part of our triathlon in the spring. I’m not the world’s worst swimmer (because I didn’t die in the attempt), but I’m pretty close to the bottom. It’s good that I remember that I’m not a super-athlete, just a computer science grad student who isn’t quite as out-of-shape as the stereotypical computer science grad student.

On the back of a package of Korean candy: