Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Day Two o' Work

Today was my second day of work, same as the first. (Meaning pretty good)
I'm thinking it's going to be a good summer. I like the people I work with. They've got me working on what seems to be a very interesting project. Moreover, it seems like everyone there is pretty cool. Some of us went out to a Jazz club tonight after work, and there are some fun sounding plans coming up in the future.

New York was great, and I feel like I should mention a few of the things I did, but since it's already getting late in the PM, I'm going to do it bullet-point style:


  • Stayed in an AWESOME hotel room thanks to my friend's friend who works there. It was right in midtown manhattan and awesome.

  • Empire State Building, where we went to the 86th floor. (That's not the tippy top, but super high). It was like an hour and a half wait and I hate heights, but it was still awesome.

  • Walked across the Brooklyn Bridge.

  • Hung out with Friends from high school and from college, which made it fun.

  • Remembered how much I loved traveling. Want to make it my full time business, but at least have an excuse to attempt to make money or something.


Wow, what a strange style of writing. Bah!

Sunday, May 14, 2006

I Love New York City. Oh Yeah, New York City.

Whoa, America.
I just got back from my first ever trip to New York City (Okay not technically, but first overnight trip). It was awesome. I had way more fun than I even expected. I thought I was over that sort of thing. Tomorrow is my first day of work, so I don't even have much time to discuss this sort of thing. But let us just say that it ruled. Feeling sleepy.

Also, I practically demand that you check out this animation of the flooding of New Orleans during Katrina. It is very well done, informative and just plain interesting. Enjoy the harvest of the Internet.

Night.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Posts and Posts

Not much here. Glad to be basically done for the semester!
Going to New York City this weekend. Starting work on Monday. Other than that, nothing's really going on!

One of my favorite terms from the Internet is fanboy. I've loved this one since I've first seen it used, both for the accurate picture it seems to suggest of actual fanboys and its connection with middle school grammar mnemonics (For And Not But Or Yet). The point of all this is that I finally stumbled upon the wikipedia article for the term 'fanboyism' and I thought it worthy of sharing.

N-joy.

Monday, May 8, 2006

WHERE are the snakes?!

I'll take it as a given that you have heard of the movie/internet phenomenon known as Snakes on a Plane. What you may not know is that this movie is actually coming out and it's coming out in the very near future (Like August 18th, so pre-order your tickets immediately). Anyways, the point is that last night I went to see Mission Impossible 3 (a not all-together bad movie actually) and it was there staring me in the face: a beautiful Snakes on a Plane movie poster. For posterity I had my friends take a picture of me next to it. Dig on the horrible cellphone quality image. The poster speaks for itself. Enjoy.

Snakes on a Plane Baby!

Tuesday, May 2, 2006

Getting down to the wire

Well it seems that I am rather busy at many of the current moments. However, I am currently so bored from working on my literature, survey/final class presentation for Analysis of Software Artifacts (wow, 4 slides written in an hour and 15 minutes? Excellent Progress!!) that I decided I could take a break to talk about the fun that I had this past weekend.



  1. I went to my first Pirates game on Friday night. Pirates played the Phillies. Pirates won. Fireworks were displayed, as it was in fact Fireworks night. I really liked PNC Park and in fact had forgotten how much I enjoyed going to baseball games in general. I may have to hit that up more often when I'm working over on the northshore this summer.

  2. Rewind earlier that day to where I am running in the Random Distance Run. There are plenty of pictures both here and here, and the results were posted here. 22nd place out of 52 or so finishers. I was all prepared with excuses about how I had been sick that week, etc. but since I was actually pretty happy with my performance (you wouldn't normally think so for 22nd place)  I'll save my excuses for another time!! (I should, however, like to point out that my advisor and I deserved 5th place in the student/advisor competition based on our finishing positions. But maybe, since Marwan and my advisor finished third together, that sort of "uses up" my advisor's position.)

  3. Saturday night was awesome with trips to the GSA wine tasting and Pittsburgh's Art All Night after-wards. I can't say too much about the different wines because I was driving, but the red wine that I had was good, and most people seemed to be enjoying themselves.


Throughout it all I am working on this survey which will be my final project in analysis of software artifacts. The idea is to compare several different techniques (Data-flow, Model-checking, Type-based, Dynamic) for finding one particular software defect (in this case, race conditions). I have to say that is painful is this is, I'm sort of enjoying it. Thursday is the in-class presentation. It'll be a 50 minute, mini-lecture.

Other than that, not much to say. When this week is all over I will have pretty much emerged into summer and hopefully will be feeling awesome.