Since thursday after the clogic exam until about the start of today I have suffered on and off from a very extreme case of "what do I do with myself." For the first time in a while this semester I've experienced the phenomenon known as "illusory free time": no work due in the immediate future. What always results from this is guaranteed goofing off mixed with strong guilt over not getting on some of the longer-term things I may have to be done. At an extreme, however - namely, when the illusory free time lasts longer than just one afternoon, which was the case this past half-week - it results in waking up depressed and having moments throughout the day filled with a very deep "what do I do with myself" in nearly every level of interpretation of such. This yields a powerful desire for doing something, with complete inability to come up with anything to actually do - very frustrating.

People burn out when they lose their balance. My general approach to doing things (work, activities, etcetera) involves applying a moderate amount of energy over long periods of time, with possible bursts of high energy on things I care about. Normally, though, this is characterized by a majority of my time spent doing work inefficiently, that being interspersed with short bits of goofing off, which serves to keep stress levels and energy expenditure low. What happened this time around, though, was a multiple-day period of -no- energy, lots of guilt, and lots of vague unfulfilled desire to do "something".

What I would like to be able to do is fill that sort of time with a seemingly somewhat difficult strategy: most obviously, it should get used for taking care of long-term projects and various chores, and it also needs some sort of mental health activity, such as going for a walk. Both of these are high-inertia tasks (hard to get started, not as hard to continue), but probably worth trying to do in times like that.

I meant to post the above yesterday, and missed it. Instead you get it today, with( two photos )to make up for the miss.

tags: balance, energy, frustration, introspection, quotes

[cohort is watching Princess Bride]
movie: "Life is pain. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something."
me: "Painkillers?"

tags: movies, peanut gallery

You're not as special as you think you are. And that's okay.

What are your little quirks that you think no one else does? Maybe you always put all the same numbers on the microwave or think that your appliances talk to each other when you are gone just like The Brave Little Toaster.

My parents took me to Jurassic Park when I was 5 so to be honest I can tell you which door handles are on every door in a building because raptors can't turn knobs.

What are your little quirks? I bet someone else shares them. :)

urban hike #8 (numbered counting urban hike "maurice" in san francisco and the west virginia walk) was a short one, about 7 miles, since it took place later than usual due to brunch. a little longer than that if you include the walk from coca cafe. stops included voluto cafe (where kepod was working), the church used for the last scene of dogma, and tazza d'oro. weather was perfect! good times. still no title for it yet, so if you have any ideas...

tags: nablopomo, urban hike

Poll #1482290 daemon
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 61

How do, or would you, pronounce "daemon", when used to refer to a unix background process?

I don't want to start a flamewar over correct pronunciation, but I realized that I am not sure what other people say.

tags: linguistics, poll

I realized about mid-afternoon Thursday that it was November 5: the day when British people celebrate, by setting off explosives, that they once stopped some people from setting off explosives. I don't know if I'll be in time for any leftover fireworks, but I will be in London from about Monday noon to about Wednesday noon. This checks off another one of those ancient self-imposed to-dos: I remember writing, in the "personal brochure" we had to make in eighth-grade English class, that I someday wanted to visit Europe, "especially France and England." Prime London targets are the British Museum, since mkehrt has posted about it at least once and described it as a fascinating place, and a whole laundry list of other spots that have some literary connection for me. I feel like I have to add the "for me" part because, while I expect the hordes of tourists will be trying to scope out Shakespeare's theatre or Dickens' pub and so on, I'll be poking my nose around 62 New Square (from the delightfully British Sarah Caudwell books) and 110A Piccadilly (from the pages of Dorothy Sayers). But I will have to face the crowds somewhere along Baker Street; I already know in advance there's no 221B, but that's not going to stop me from having a look at the road, at least. Any other suggestions for things to do or see in the city on the Thames would be quite welcome, especially if they're things I can do for free or comfortably in November.

Flights from Grenoble don't exist, and flights from Lyon are like $270, so I've instead worked out this marvellous low-budget option where I go to London via Geneva for $130 — which means, I suppose, that I get to throw in a quick stop in an extra city for less-than-free. Also thanks to an unexpected European holiday, which is really what makes the whole trip feasible. I found out about two weeks ago — maybe less — that November 11, or Armistice Day from World War I, is a holiday in France, so we're all getting off work. With Wednesday thus free, I took Yan's advice at work and used two of my remaining RTT days on Monday and Tuesday. Flying on the weekend cost more, so I don't start for Britain until Monday, meaning I go to Geneva tomorrow morning by the 11:17 a.m. train, meaning I had today free as a much-needed catch-up day. (I slept until past 11 this morning.) So if anyone's got any hot Geneva tips, send them my way too.

The weather, naturally, is being characteristically uncooperative. Except for the first half of my day at Annecy, every time I've arranged a trip I've gotten wretched atmospheric condition. Gloomy and grey and rainy the whole time I was in Germany, cloudy and then rainy on my two days in Paris, and now the meteorologists are predicting nothing but rain and clouds (or possibly snow?) from now through Wednesday, both in Geneva and London. This is really disheartening. I've had a quick look through my Paris pictures, and a lot of the daytime ones look absolutely disgusting because the sky is solid white (or light grey) and the buildings are just dark grey. and there are few things that sap all the joy out of wandering around a new city more than getting soaked and frozen progressively while you do it. Here's hoping that nature has a surprise in store for the weather bureau.

Speaking of pictures, though, I should say that I finally forced some photos through the editing pipeline in order to create "Life in Grenoble: September" on my photos website. Even after some cut-throat paring down and deliberation, the final set from just my first month here came out to 87. They cover, mostly, my apartment, a trip to the Bastille, a quick foray into the city, and then that long-ish suburban hike I took through Meylan and Corenc.

namely, because without my chosen gimmick of posting photos, one would actually have to think up something to say every day. I have lots of thoughts, but no time today to coalesce them.

( allegedly from "paradise" )

tags: look around you

After spending more than 2900 words talking about my Paris trip, I'm now going to try to write a shorter thing about time — which I'm sure everyone reading this has voluntarily and in bucketfuls after fighting through my last three posts! (I have this major habit of turning my posts into these massive opuses. And I know the plural of "opus" is "opera," but that rather gives the impression that I'm composing my entries along the lines of "Fiiiiiigaro! O journal mio," which is not quite the case.)

Well, anyway. Getting messed up in Paris twice because my camera clock hadn't been adjusted for Daylight Savings Time reminded me of some people's complaints that the concept is dumb or shouldn't exist. Gustavo had an interesting post early in the week about clock time in Europe generally being way ahead of solar time, which all means that the sun reaches its highest point at maybe 2 p.m. rather than noon. I don't see anything wrong with that — I mean, I highly doubt that noon functions as the midpoint of anyone's day, unless you're on some crazy schedule where you get up at 4 a.m. and go to bed at 8 p.m. With that as a starting point, I decided to re-derive Daylight Savings Time myself by ignoring the current implementation and instead figuring out what I would do if I wanted to accomplish what Daylight Savings Time says it does. The resulting picture — the picture that convinces me that DST should exist — is here. If you click the link, you see the non-DST sunrise and sunset times (blue and red lines) for Cleveland throughout the year. Behind them are the "get up" and "go to sleep" times for what seems to me like a fairly typical adult schedule, from 6:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. Now, if the point of Daylight Savings Time is to better align people's waking hours with when the sun is up, then there's pretty clear evidence for a clock shift of one and a half to three hours between mid-March and the beginning of October. So my conclusion is that, in Cleveland at least, we should change our clocks further ahead and for not quite so many months. Jacksonville, Florida, at the same degree of longitude as Cleveland but at a much lower latitude, and Hartford, Connecticut, at the same latitude but a different longitude, might dispute this, but I haven't run their numbers yet.

A side effect of all this thinking, though, is that I came across the Wikipedia pages called "List of Time Zones," which struck me as an incredible muddle. First off, there are 40 of them instead of 24, which includes such fractional bizareness as UTC+5:45 as well as theoretically impossible inanity like UTC+14. (So in effect, as the article points out, if you pick the "right" time to simultaneously ask people in the "right" places what the current date is, you can get three different answers.) In between, we have giant countries all in the same time zone, tiny countries moving the International Date Line by skipping days (à la England, 1752), American counties being divided four-fifths in one time zone and one-fifth in the next, cities deciding to semi-officially offset themselves by 10 minutes, and a variety of observances or non-observances of DST. I may be perhaps fanciful in my imagination, but isn't this the exact sort of muck time zones were invented to fix in the first place?

Quoth Wikipedia, talking (interestingly enough) about pre-time-zone days: "Clocks differed between places by an amount corresponding to the difference in their geographical longitude, which was usually not a convenient number." Well, that's progress!

About several months ago, I spent some time in New York, mostly with Ken and sometimes with other people. I went to two birthday events for Ken and it was pretty good. I also saw the High Line, which was ok. Then I went home to see my parents some more. We went into New York again and saw the Skyscraper Museum (awesome) and the High Line again.

Then I went to Pittsburgh. I hung out with Chris and Lea and jcreed and gwillen and William and Alan and some other people. There was a Seven party, which should have been mildly awkward (I am a bit too old for college parties) but instead was awesome due to the conglomeration of old people hanging around outside and the drunken type theory. The Underground Tour happened, but I missed it because it was only three hours (!!!!!!) and started at seven (!). I had eat'n'park with Alan in the middle of the night and went to jcreed's party (during to the UGT), which existed because he is now in Philadelphia. Lea and I hung out in a coffeeshop but not quite enough.

Then I came to Seattle. I hung out with Cynthia and Karl a lot until other people got back from the summer, and then I hung out with the other people and them. Amanda now lives in my house which is pretty cool. Alice, Tom and Jess now live in San Francisco, which is significantly less cool.

I went to Alice, Tom and Akiva's housewarming in San Francisco. The morning of, I watched several people move Akiva's stuff into their house. Then Tom, Akiva and Jess' POD arrived via a mechanism only slightly less awesome than orbital drop, but with more pneumatics. I helped carry stuff up the stairs, and put Jess' stuff in a UHaul, which was driven to Jess, Brewer and cprides and helped carry it up the stairs. Then we got alcohol with a UHaul and prepared the house for a party.

The party itself was pretty awesome from my perspective; it was good to see all those people at once again.

The next day, on not enough sleep, Akiva, Dan Blanford, Carolyn and I participated in a puzzle hunt, which was ok but would have been awesome on more sleep. Then we had a quick dinner with Tom and Alice and I returned to Seattle.

At some point my sister returned from the Frozen North. She brought my parents, who had spent the last parts of the trip on her ship. We went to a lot of delicious restaurants and also to Bainbridge Island, via ferry.

At some point before or after that, there was a Math Party in our house, which involved lots of drunk mathematicians and was pretty fun, except for the drunk, bitter Chinese man shouting about politics.

About a week ago, I went out to dinner with my sister, just returned from firefighting-and-surviving-chemical-attack school in Florida, for her birthday.

I did almost nothing of interest on Halloween.

Tonight after TGIF, I went to dinner with Jacob, Glibert, V, Justine and another ex-undergrad named Mike. Then we (minus Jacob) went to Solstice. Now, work?

It looks like I will not be going to the CTY New Years reu, which makes me sad. However, I will be going to Istanbul instead, which is super awesome!

location: cse 602 tags: adventures, emilly k, new york, party, pittsburgh, san francisco, seattle

A wikipedia link in the topic of #cslounge today led me to spend a good chunk of time reading about foreign gestures (and also about the pioneer plaque and voyager record, which are also very interesting). of particular note is the indian greeting "namaste": it has several translations, the most eloquent of which is as follows.

I honour the place in you which is of love, of integrity, of wisdom and of peace. When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, we are one.

( i could easily do two of these a day )

tags: friendship, life, look around you, quotes

http://journal2.alanv.org/?p=1227

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Today, I was bored, so I decided to go down to the computer room and watch some TV. It was the first time I had watched TV in well over a year. Caught the tail end of Access Hollywood, then switched and watched a bit of the new Survivor.

The thing that I kept noticing, and that eventually drove me crazy enough to stop watching (after only about half an hour), was the number of cuts shows and commercials nowadays have. You’d think there’s a new FCC regulation that you can’t have a single shot longer than a second or something, for fear of offending someone.

Seriously, I think the only shots I saw that lasted longer than literally a second were commercials where the background was changing constantly (annoying), shots where a single person was talking to the camera (Survivor interviews, at least… the Access Hollywood interviews constantly cut between shots even while they were interviewing someone…), and the long scenic shots in Survivor like where they focus on a bug and then shift the focus out to the tribe banner or something. (The new Survivor intro is particularly guilty of this… even when showing the people, they show at least two shots of each competitor in the 1 second of screen time they give them.)

I noticed this a while back in music videos as well… the new (and old) music videos for Daughtry, for example, feature almost-constant cuts between scenes.

Has our society really gotten so ADD that we require constant changes in imagery to remain engrossed?
Or have shows always been like this, but I’m just now getting old and weird enough to notice?

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today I took our second constructive logic midterm. it went pretty well, except for the part where we were required to prove an adapted version of Gamma --> A; Gamma,A --> B => Gamma --> B for a different sequent calculus. my proof was put together during the last minute of the exam, and was very shaky... it didn't quite cut it.

( sunset over the amazon )

tags: academics, look around you

All right — with apologies for the continued delay, as promised, here's the conclusion of my super-long write-up of my trip to Paris last weekend. It left off with me going back to the hostel to sleep Saturday night, and then Sunday I already discussed part of in my moody post two back.

( Mathematical games on the metro )

( Père Lachaise cemetery )

( An interesting dinner )

( Strangers on a train )

Remember, remember, the 5th of November...

j4cbo needed a way to avoid "boom!" if he wired up this transformer incorrectly, and he also needed a way to power it on and be able to depower it in a hurry if things went wrong. The toaster killed two birds with one stone; it limited the current, and not only that, but it has a handy on/off switch (one that releases bread when you turn it off!).

As an added bonus, it has a control for how light or dark you would like your circuit.

I have decided to engage in this "update your blog once a day this month" thing. My goal is to find and post a photo (as per this) once each day. Since there was one day this month that I didn't post, I'll open today with two:

( hiding these pictures behind a cut is hardly doing you a favour )

tags: look around you

today, I am working on the eighth constructive logic assignment and also studying for the second midterm for same. I am told that last year, at around this point in the semester, they moved on to talk about various other logics. this semester, we have been doing prolog and twelf, and it has had me on edge. up through the proof checker assignment, I found everything engaging and interesting, but now it has seemed like the class has transitioned from "teach about this logic system" to "look what i can do with this obscure language, let's have the students do this too".

it is probably worth noting at this point that when I entered lecture yesterday a good amount late, I saw frank twelfing it up just as in the previous several lectures, and my thoughts immediately began wandering to other actually thought-provoking logic foo: I proceeded to spend the entire lecture talking about infinite logics on #cslounge with mrwright, which I found much more fulfilling than the prospect of spending all my attention on watching twelf code be written.

several assignments ago, we wrote a proof checker in SML (it was said by veterans that a different language would have been better, but I was okay with that since I am comfortable with SML). you would feed it a proposition, and it would apply rules and say "yes, this is provable", or "no". it was quite cool. now, the current assignment is certified theorem proving, which means in addition to "yes" or "no", the proof checker should also tell what the proof is. for doing this, they have ported the proof checker over to twelf, which apparently naturally wants to spit out the proof as it goes along. in my experience so far, twelf is very clever conceptually but a sizable pain to actually work with. now, the systems-oriented hacker in me says "just hack up the SML checker to generate a proof", which would be unpleasant stylistically but overall very doable. this assignment, on the other hand, is seeming like nothing but jumping through a lot of hoops, figuring out the obscure syntax, and doing nothing actually requiring of thought that I haven't done before.

in short, I would like for the culminating parts of this course to feel more like a polishing up of the thought-provoking subjects we were taught during the first half, and less like a program of indoctrinating the undergrads with an introduction to the sort of stuff that the graduate researchers do - not that I have anything against that sort of research, but I cannot bring myself to personally care about it, and thus doing this sort of assignment feels very inappropriate.

tags: academics, frustration

I still have to say something about the rest of my time in Paris before my next trip comes up (this weekend) and I end up with too many new things to write about.

( Getting there and to the hostel )

( Montmartre; lunch at Amélie's cafe )

( Walking tour: Arc de Triomphe, Champs-Elysées, Tuileries, 7th arrondissement )

( Eiffel Tower and dinner )

I suppose this is long enough for one post... and it's 12:30, so I really ought to be in bed. I'll finish writing up Sunday in a new post tomorrow, with apologies for the continued delay.

Surgery tomorrow. Really really nervous. I'm torn between just wanting it over and wanting to postpone it for months and months. Not looking forward to being poked & prodded, drugged up and cut open. Really on edge and shakey. Also terrified that I'll be that 1% where this isn't benign. Noooot a good night.

Send some good thoughts my way tomorrow morning, please?

mood: scared

http://journal2.alanv.org/?p=1219

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So this weekend was full of worry, worry, worry oh god worry.
Had a doctor’s appointment today and everything was better. Yay doctors. I have a followup appointment in a month, but he doesn’t expect any issues.

Relatedly, I have to say that I’m a big fan of Kaiser. This makes two randomly-assigned doctors now, and both have been extremely knowledgable and friendly and approachable. Neither rushes you, and they both joked and chatted and generally made you feel at ease. I also like the convenience of having everything there… last time, I headed down one floor to get blood drawn, and it took very little time due to the HUGE number of blood-drawing stations they had.

Besides that, today has apparently been SPEND MONEY OMGZ day. This morning I bought this 1TB HD. I maybe should have waited until Black Friday, but I kind of need it now (my external drive is down to 4GB of free space), and it’s a good price anyway (assuming I get the rebate sent in and such). I can always buy another one during Black Friday if they’re really cheap. And if not, I can sleep in instead. Yay.

There was also the $15 copay for my doctor’s visit. Not a lot, but meh.

There was also also going to Best Buy (which was right there) and picking up the complete Firefly series. That’s another chunk of change.

My credit card is sad now. :P I’ve more than doubled the balance on it today.

So that’s been my day. Yay my day.

Edit: Yes, I voted. I voted by mail a month ago.
Also, now that I’ve actually updated my spending spreadsheet, looks like I nearly tripled my credit card balance today. Awesome. :X

Also, Maine, WTF is wrong with you? This is upsetting.

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On a whim, I had an ad-lib/fill in the blanks on the whiteboard in the cluster today.

For the phrase:

410 Loves You _____ ______ _____!

Suggestions were:

1. With a sword
2. In the butt
3. Like a pufferfish
4. No it doesn't
5. In Soviet Russia
6. And Your Mom
7. Kill them All
8. Haha I lied


What else can you guys come up with?

Mondays have been remarkably unpleasant for me in general this semester. Here's why:

1030-1120: give 213 recitation
1120-1200: answer students' questions - this has been keeping me longer and longer as the weeks go by
1200-1230: quick lunch at joe's hotdog stand, a brief ray of sunshine in my day no matter the weather
1230-1330: 412, or, if I'm lucky, free time for lunching or spending in the cluster
1330-1500: human memory, a class which I have not been hating but rather finding lecture increasingly of the "I want this to be over" variety
1500:1630: AI, a class whose lectures have always been of the "this is so easy why do I need to pay attention" style; I wouldn't go if the lecture hall didn't have power outlets at each seat
1630-1730: kgb.
1730-1800: food at trucks

Sometime during those last two items, something in me goes "this is the end of your day and thus starts a new one". I know this because whenever after that point I go to remember something that happened from earlier in the list, my memory goes "yeah, that happened -yesterday-".

You might think this is great, because it means have a fresh day ahead of me made of unscheduled afternoon, evening, and night... You will note that unlike the rest of the days of my week, this one begins with an item which is absolutely required of me, so I have no liberty to sleep in by a few extra tens of minutes if I feel I need it. The way my body handles sleep is incomprehensible enough that this seems to make it severely unhappy. So while it is true that I have an extra day, I end up completely out of go by that time. As a result, I have never successfully gotten any real work done during this time - for emphasis, I'm presently lying on the couch in the place where we ate truck food since I didn't get around to leaving, and instead fell asleep for twenty minutes.

tags: academics, energy, sleep

Back from going "BACK TO PARIS" in a very mixed frame of mind, which I'm not entirely sure how to explain in a reasonable number of words. I think the shortest possible version of the story, as I wrote to Mars, is that I blame the weather. What I think I'll try to do is explain the core of the mixed-feelings bit now and then save a second post for the chronological list of what I did and saw in the city.

Weather: I knew going into the trip that it was going to be cloudy all Saturday and rain all Sunday, so I arranged my plans to get all the outdoor and walking essentials done on the first day, with all the indoor stuff saved for the second day. The biggest thing, of course, was going to be a visit to the Musée d'Orsay, the huge impressionist museum in a former train station that I've wanted to visit for years and years. We didn't go there on the 2000 trip, I suppose, because the Louvre generally takes precedent, and we saw that instead. Well, then I was walking along the Champs-Élysées Saturday afternoon and happened to pass a few movie theatres. One of them was still showing "Le Petit Nicolas," a very popular five-week-old movie here in France that I've been kind of wanting to see. Ticket prices in Grenoble are... not so good, by my old-fashioned U.S. standards: I think the best I've seen is about €6.30, or about $9.45. The base Paris price seemed to hover more around €11, but then I noticed that all showings starting before noon on any day are only €5.90. Eh bien, you can see the plan forming in my mind for Sunday. "Petit Nicolas" at the cheap 10:35 a.m. showing, then lunch at a little sandwich cart or something, and then Musée d'Orsay for a lot of the afternoon.

So I went to see the movie on Sunday morning, and when I came out a little after 12:00 I saw that it had rained, which got me into this nice mood of having my staying-dry plans work out perfectly. For lunch, I decided to combine a few ideas by grabbing a sandwich from the rue de Grenelle in my "old territory" (from the 2000 trip, of course) in the 7th, then eat it while contemplating the Eiffel Tower along the Champs de Mars. The sandwich was excellent, large, and quite cheap by French standards, so again I was congratulating myself on my good luck. But then the trouble began, even though I didn't know it yet. I should know that it's impossible for me to "contemplate" M. Eiffel's "tour de 300 mètres" without wanting to take a whole bunch of pictures of it, and one angle is often not quite enough when it's so easy to walk a little bit over that way to have a second, and maybe a third from up close and underneath would be nice, and hey now that I'm so close I wonder what the line for the stairs is like... short, but I guess the price is a bit high, and the weather's kind of horribly grey and cloudy and windy, so I don't really want to be stuck up there if it's starts pouring... maybe I'll sit on this bench and slowly eat an apple while I think it over...

I did decide to not go up and to head over to the museum — on foot, which naturally led to various other small deviations and criss-crossing of streets for photos. About halfway along, it did start raining, thereby providing a third ego boost for having made the right decisions. So imagine my immediate deflation as, when rounding the final corner to the museum entrance, I came upon a massive, massive sea of umbrellas! The line, if you can call it that, to get in came out the door, back and forth across the entrance steps (think Mellon Institute) about five or six times, and then down the length of the block all the way to the next corner. And the scene was not very much enriched by a bunch of insistent foreign people waving for-sale umbrellas in everyone's faces and saying "Parapluie parapluie, 'brella 'brella" over and over again. Although they did remind me that, if I was going to stand out in the rain for ages, I probably didn't want to do it in just my spring jacket.

About 10 minutes later I had procured from a souvenir shop down the road, for €6, the cheapest umbrella I've ever seen in my life — in fact it broke later that evening. But at least it didn't leak, so I went back to the Musée d'Orsay line and took up my place at the end of it. There were two people immediately in front of me, about my own age, who were more enterprising than I was — and there were two of them, so one held their place in line while the other went out on reconnaissance missions. From them I learned that the line was expected to last an hour, that it was presently 3 p.m., and that the museum closed at 5:00. Thinking that over, one expected hour in the museum with 6 billion other people was starting to sound kind of unappealing. In the end I reached the same decision as my two informants and decided to give up. Which, you know, I regretted about 10 minutes later, finding that it was actually only 2:40 and not 3:00, that those 20 minutes made a significant enough difference in my mental equation to change the look of things, and that I was now idea-less in some ol' place (jcreed-style) with nothing to do except get wetter and wait for an 8:30 p.m. train. I thought of a consolatory tea, but all the nearby restaurants and things wanted at least €5 for one, and I'll do a lot of things before I pay $7.50 for a cup of hot water that had a few leaves sitting in it for three minutes.

What I actually did for the next five hours will be covered in the next post, I think, but dang it if I'm not really torn over the way things went Sunday. I don't even know, now, if I should try to book another €90 day trip to Paris (if it's possible based on the train schedule) for some future weekend just so I can go to this one museum. It would be the most amazing waste either way. On the one hand, I spend like half a week's pay to spend two hours with a bunch of splattered oil on stretched-out cloth. On the other, I miss one of the largest collections of my favorite type of painting, in a place that is normally impossible for me to get to, at a time when I'm like half an inch away from it on the map of the world. Can I count on ending up in Paris again in another nine years? Is six hours minimum in a train worth two hours in a museum? Why, oh why, why did I decide to save freaking 40 centimes on a movie, that I could still have easily seen whenever back "home," when this one-of-a-kind now-or-never sought-after museum was just waiting for me to beat the crowds at 10 a.m.? There is the sticking point.

I need brains, not in the zombie sort of way but in the brainstorming sort of way. This is a baseball diamond in the pool. For my final project in Civil and Environmental Engineering Design (i.e. my capstone) we need to construct the pitchers mound for a home run derby inspired by the poem Casey at the Bat. It can rest on the sides of the pool or on the bottom or is can float and be tethered so it doesn't float away. The hard part is that there needs to be some sort of way for the pitcher to get to the mound without getting in the water and pitch a ball without falling off... He is 6'6" 300 lbs.

We are encouraged to ask friends for ideas and it's good for us to learn how to do the math required to prove ideas that aren't ours in the first place because it is good practice for real life.

So there's the background and problem statement, what i am asking from your is ideas. I have a few of my own but it is always nice to get suggestions from people who are not trained engineers. I am also looking for help thinking of things that float that we could use to float our raft if we go that direction. I would love something unique and quirky like 2 liter pop bottles of hundreds of balloons made from condoms to make our raft really stand out.

Also we are interested in making jerseys for our group to wear when we test so if you are creative and could help me out with that the course number is 12401, the title is Civil & Environmental Engineering Design and we want a baseball theme.

malloc() (n., from the Latin mal-, which means bad, and the Latin locus, which means place) 1. a function to return a bad place to store data; a routine characterized by slowing down a program and wasting space. "Half my goddamn students used ~ for the heads of their linked lists. Didn't bubblingbeebles tell them about the & operator in 213?"