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.

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.

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.

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.

Accomplishing Little

Today I was told by the second of two people that I really could go with a new picture on my homepage, and since I do in fact treasure the honest opinions of friends, I decided to go ahead and take it down while I search for a suitable replacement (I just went through all my pictures recently and found nothing, so I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to do yet.)

Gearing up for the big race at the moment. Campus seems to be going crazy today, what between ECE day, Brenton (a new PhD student who deferred from last year) visiting, and this trip I took over to the ETC to see some Claytronics promotional video (It was really neat; TEH FUTURE).

Also, I found someone who loves The Office (British AND Yankee) possibly more than I do. She was nice enough to offer to copy all the US ones that I hadn't seen and even made me feel like kind of a sellout for missing B.J. Novak's visit on Saturday night (I mean come on, I REALLY want to see him, but why do they put those things on weekends? Don't they know some of us have stuff to do?) We also had an interesting talk about the possibly effects of computers on one's ability to interact with human beings. I often think that I'm losing that ability one day at a time...

Guess that's it. Gotta figure a bunch of stuff out in the hour now before the race...

What, 22/7 Wasn't Good Enough?

I finally bought some running shoes this past weekend. I had been running in basketball shoes for the past few months (which coincidentally is the total amount of time for which I have been running) and they were becoming very uncomfortable. So when I popped open the box after returning home, I found this little gem, which I thought was amazing:












I guess all the rational numbers had already been used up?

Oh also, there's this strange noise occurring in WEAN hall at the moment, and it has been going on for two days. It sounds kinda like guitar feedback, but it comes in and out. I'm thinking maybe it has something to do with the massive A/C units sitting 10 feet above my head, but it's massively annoying whatever it is. Maybe I'm going crazy though...

BlaH!

Just as work begins to really heat up for the end of the semester, I get a cold! Blah! Thanks, to my parents, it is almost impossible for me to skip anything just because I am sick. I always kinda feel like I just using it as an excuse to avoid something at don't want to do. At the same time, I run the risk of getting other people sick, which is very lame!! So I guess my advice would be to stay away from me for a few days!

As we know, there are more important things that work! This brings me to two other reasons why I wish I weren't sick. This Friday is the Random Distance Race, I am going to a Pirates Game, and I am going to the GSA Wine-Tasting event on Saturday.... Blah! I guess I better just sac up, finish my work and have an awesome time. Sounds good? Jah!!