NYC Plus Me Makes Three

This weekend I am going to New York City! It will be the perfect way to observe the laborious holiday. Should be a lot of fun.

However, I just learned that my sister is evacuating New Orleans, because of Gustav, the may-or-may-not-hit-New-Orleans hurricaine. It's still a few days away and has not yet warranted a mandatory evacuation, but it's still a bummer. Hopefully things will work out for my peeps down south.

Last Day at Sun

Today was my last day at Sun. It was somewhat bittersweet, as I had a great summer and really enjoyed working on Fortress. I didn't get quite as much done as I wanted, but maybe I'll keep working a bit when I get home...

To celebrate, I went with some other Sun employees, both non-Americans, to a shooting range, where we discharged some handguns. Being non-Americans, they were both quite excited about this prospect, as it seemed to them, very American. While I have used a handgun once before, it definitely, uh, takes some getting used to. It's loud, and I was a little nervous at first. Oh and the last time I used a gun, I had to get stitches...

Going back to school Monday! All in all, a great summer.

Books!

Two new books! I'm afraid these may be the last for a while, as summer comes to a tragic close.

• The Yiddish Policemen's Union: Loved it! Would recommend it to just about anyone!


• Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: Eh... It was okay, and definitely funny in parts, but I would only seriously recommend it to the most capital of the Generation X-ers.

More Fever: Malaria Edition

I am watching Women's Indoor Volleyball right now. We just beat Poland!

It's fun to watch Nicole Davis: I used to cheer for her in college!
It's fun to watch Logan Tom: I used to boo her relentlessly in college!

Olympic Fever

One of the neat things about the Olympics is that it is the one time every four years where you can actually see women's sports on TV. Not just women's sports, but crazy women's sports. For example, just this weekend I have watched women participate in:

Handball
Beach Volleyball
Marathon
Weight-Lifting
Badminton and
Basketball

Fun!

Lance Armstrong: So Thirsty!

I just read on the front page of the Austin American Statesman, that local resident Lance Armstrong used more water than anyone else in the city of Austin during the month of June. You see, since it's so dry here, wasting water is a big no-no. (They even have sweet jingles on the radio telling you so.)

Well it appears that Mr. Armstrong in the month of June used over 220,000 gallons of water! For comparison, the average residence here uses about 8,000 gallons of water. What could Lance possibly be doing with all that water? I'm sure it's something boring like watering his lawn every day, but I prefer to imagine the 7-time Tour de France winner walking around his lavish estate with every single faucet turned on for no reason at all. He's probably thinking to himself, "first Sheryl Crow, and now more water than I know what to do with?! This is living!"

Java You Weirdo!

The following Java is legal. What does it even mean?

public class WeirdAssign {
    static int foo() {
	int a = a = 1; //Strange line
	return a;
    }
    public static void main(String[] args) {
	System.out.println("a is: " + foo());
    }
}

The output of this test is, "A is: 1".

Paper Done!

I finally submitted the camera-ready version of our OOPSLA paper! It feels great to have it out of my hands, and I've been pretty much working on it every day after work the past two weeks and several other weeks this summer.