en route

Trotting this globe thing
As far as the sun reaches,
I search for ...


Got that?  It's an interactive blog post.  You get to choose how my haiku ends.  :P  You get two syllables.

So right now I'm chillin in YOW (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada).  I bid a fond farewell to Olex, Julius, and Patrick at O'Hare today, as well as to my grandparents and aunt and their dogs at the house this morning.  I said goodbye to Bloomington and the Llama school yesterday, and my parents the day before that.  It's a sad time.  :(

I did get my visa, though, which was supremely exciting.  I've never had a nifty sticker in my passport before!  I'll post a photo of it on CERNtainly, which I have decided will be my new blog (thanks, Venus!).  I also have met some kind people already on this trip: a woman who was seriously jonesing for cigarettes (which she had been denied since entering LAX this morning at 10 a.m.) and gave me and a girl from Mexico headed to college a little cheer; a security worker who told me that in French they say, "Simple is fashionable," and that I was dressed very nicely; bag throwers (I didn't actually meet them) who ensured that my bag was THE FIRST ONE OFF THE CAROUSEL FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER (BEST DAY OF MY LIFE); and a little girl who gave me a big, bright smile when I was just getting bummed out about leaving everyone.

Agh!  There are so many adventures to report!

The trip to Chicago?  Great success!  We watched the fireworks at Navy Pier for the New Year and rode home in a limo first thing in 2010, and we spent some time in the fabulous Museum of Science and Industry and famous Gino's.  There was also city exploring and German card games and random fun.

After that?  I brought Julius and Olex back to Columbus, we saw Avatar and my friends from high school (hi, guys!), then headed to the Llama School to hang out with Patrick, Roy, Thabang, Sean, and Amethyst.  They experienced caving (Patrick and Roy, too; also photos of that should appear on Sean's Flickr page soon) and Torchwood, and we did karaoke and general hanging out.  We also had some fun adventures just cleaning the clothes from caving; they'd frozen into amusing shapes.

Anyway, this is it for this blog, y'all.  University was a blast.

<3

since you been gone

A rush of food, a
Slowdown of time, where is my
Graduation?  Here!

 I guess it's been a while.  Nearly a month?  Sheesh.  Okay, since then...

Thanksgiving: I went home to see the folks and the high school dudes (Robbie and Jacob!) and to introduce all of the above to Evan.  Then we went home-home to see extended family and eat way too much and play board games.  :D

School: I picked up my honor cords from the math department for graduation.  Egad, it's almost here!  I had my last code demo for Operating Systems today-our filesystem assignment.  Good to be done!

Food: What've I made the last few weeks... well, last week I made really delicious shepherdess pie (so named because of the crazy vegan feminist chicks who wrote the recipe):

Seitan, 16 oz. Soy sauce (tamari), 1/4 cup Olive Oil, 2 tbsp Onions, raw, 1 large Garlic, 3 clove Mushrooms, fresh, 3 cup, pieces or slices Frozen mixed vegetables, 3 cups Vegetable Broth, 2 cans Flour, 1/4 cup Potato, raw, 5 lbs Milk, 1 cup Salt, some Pepper, black, some

Peel and boil the potatoes until they're soft (doing the rest of these things in the meantime).  Put the onion, seitan, soy sauce, olive oil, and garlic in a frying pan on whatever heat is required to sauté.  Sauté that stuff!  Then add the mushrooms and frozen vegetables, allowing them to heat all the way through (i.e. not be frozen).  In another pan, mix the vegetable broth and flour until they're not lumpy, and then mix that into the pan with all the other goodies.  Once the potatoes are done, mash them with the milk and some salt and some pepper.  Put the chunky stuff into the bottom of a casserole dish (when I made this, it took two 9x9 dishes) with more salt and pepper.  Then spoon the potatoes over the top and bake the whole thing at 425 for about 40 minutes.

This week, I made a recipe from my friend Carlo:

Red kidney bean curry

2/3 cup olive oil
1/3 cup chopped fresh ginger
2 medium onions, finely chopped
6 cloves garlic, chopped
2 tsp salt
3 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp ground tumeric
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
15 oz tomato sauce
3 cans red kidney beans, undrained
3 plum tomatoes, diced
1 cup cilantro, chopped

1. Heat oil in a deep sauce pan over medium heat for one minute. Add ginger, garlic, onion, and optionally, chili, and let sizzle for one minute.
2. Add tomato sauce, salt, and remaining spices and cook for an additional five minutes, stirring frequently.
3. Add the tomatoes, and undrained kidney beans plus one additional cup of water.
4. Bring it to a boil, then reduce to medium heat and let cook uncovered for 10 minutes. Remove from heat. Garnish with cilantro. Serve over rice.

DELICIOUS.

Life: I'm figuring out still what it is that I'll do with my Spring.  I just got an interesting call today that may lead to a job, but I'm not sure about it yet, and I don't know if I should jinx it by telling all the Internets about it.  :)  I should have a clearer idea by next week.  I've also gotten really into playing Silent Hill, and Patrick has the old King's Quest games on his computer!  WOOOO, BITCHES.  I feel like there's some other stuff I want to say... what, though?  Oh, I've been banned from playing Christmas carols or hanging Christmas decorations or wearing Christmas accessories while in Llama School.  Heartbreaking, truly.  I sneak them in, though.  I ran the CS talent show over the weekend, and that was a great success!  I also gave myself another haircut, as you can see in the photos.  I'm learning how to skid on a fixed-gear bike (haha, though I am not nearly as good as that guy).  I'm starting to look into a bike for my trip (hooray, graduation present!), and enjoying watching my favourite Christmas movie: The Year Without a Santa Clause.  Love, love, love!

Life is good at Llama School, and here's to hoping that that doesn't change in the next week and a half.  A week and a half, y'all!  Oh, btw, there will be a cake reception at L-School after the ceremony, and all my devoted readers are more than welcome to attend.  :D

temporary insanity

A bay and a boat
And a sunset with the boys:
Those Canadians.

Visiting Evan and Jeff and Jeff and Ben is always a killer time, and this past weekend was no different.  I flew out to SF for a couple days at the beginning of what is probably the busiest week I will have in college.  URGH.  But I had the tickets and needed a break.

Friday Jeff and Evan and Jeff's friend Adelaide (sp? She is from France) collected me from SFO for a tour of Napa and dinner at the Culinary Institute of America.  Expensive and delicious.  :D  I picked up a few bottles of wine (the dessert wines were amazing!) to bring back, but sadly they are currently camping in (other) Jeff's apartment.  Along with my camera.  :(

That night, Evan and I went to hang out with other Jeff and his girlfriend, Em.  We had delicious wine and cheese and chilled in their hot tub; Anton came over later and showed off these thingies that he has that are called Freelines.  They're super cool!  They're sort of like a Ripstik with no connector.  Anyway, he seemed to be pretty good at them, and it was neat to watch.

We also tried to see The Men Who Stare at Goats, but the showing started at midnight, and I had already been up for 23 hours and traveling and... well, Evan said it was good.

The next day I had been invited to go rock climbing with my friend Joe, but that didn't end up working out.  *sigh*  So Evan and I did some city exploring and hill climbing and met up with Ben to go out for sushi in Japan town.  We also got... bubble tea!  Woo!

After that, we were ON A BOAT.  Sailing through SF Bay for Em's birthday was quite a treat; as Barrett mentioned in his album, "much singing of the Lonely Island ensued."

I got to go clubbing in SF that night, but, alas, not at the DNA Lounge.  I'm pretty sad about that.  :(

Then it was pretty much time to go!  Eek!  So Evan and I had breakfast at a little jazz cafe (sic) in the Mission.  It was a pretty fun weekend, I gotta say; and I'm super excited for when Evan comes to visit at Thanksgivingtime.  Now back to the salt mines... with play performances 4 nights this week and two major projects due, I really shouldn't be writing this blog post at all..

>.<

trick || treat

Cackles and giggles
Intermix, seep through the dark,
On All Hallows Eve.

Happy Halloween! Well, I guess now it's Rabbit Rabbit day instead, but that's almost as good.

So at 21, I'd never been a Valkyrie for Halloween before.  I figured it was time, so I got together some sort of ridiculous looking pieces.  Grey bikini with silver studs?  Check.  Fur cape?  Check.  Fur leg warmers?  Check.  Gold gauntlets?  Check.  Oh, and the hat.  I didn't take a camera with me, and the only picture that seems to have surfaced so far of the thing is sort of silly-looking (i.e. my facial expression is sort of odd), but here you have it: me posing with Boba Fett and a mop masquerading as a spear.

My roomates kept me busy going to their shows this weekend; Patrick and Dan performed and Patrick DJed and Dan and Peri performed and Patrick performed.  It was noise-tastic.  :D

At the Mad Scientists' Ball (the CS/Info/CogSci/Psych/SLIS/Phil/Math Halloween party that I was on the committee for), there were slews of interesting costumes.  There was also another Valkyrie... she was a folklore and ethnomusicology major or something, and she wussed out and wore a flesh-coloured body sleeve under her swimsuit stuff.  I was jealous of her sword, though.  I wound up beating out Marie Antoinette and a Scotsman for sexiest costume and am now the proud owner of Saw II and Treehouse of Horror on DVD.

The Bloomington Annual Zombie Walk was this weekend, as well.  Roy and Jill came over.  We dolled ourselves up in two kinds of fake blood: corn syrup + maraschino cherry juice + Sriracha (which combination was admittedly less than successful... sticky and foul-smelling? ew) and Elmer's glue + red glitter.  We also had Twinkies, inspired by Zombieland (which you, dear reader, should certainly go see!).  Unfortunately, we were a bit late for the walk, and the police had already broken it up by the time we arrived.  *sigh*

The Twinkies came in handy, though.  One solitary group of trick-or-treaters graced Llama School's porch, and I guess they had been jaded by visiting too many college student houses.  Instead of "Trick or treat!", we were simply asked, "Is there any candy here?"  Little bastards.  :)  We gave them Twinkies, though.

I also went to see a Haunted House that a friend of a friend had set up in his basement.  It was actually not bad, and I had a lot of fun.  Sadly, that activity represented a failure to go see Paranormal Activity, which made it tragic in any case, but at least it was sort of enjoyable.

Anyway, the Llamas had a good night of mischief.  Chas was Gumby, Sam a caped clown, and Dan and Peri were Ponyo and Sosuke.  Adorable!  Patrick decided to be the grown-up and not go in costume, but I think he had fun, anyway.  I guess maybe I'll be sensible and boring someday, too.  (Just kidding, Patrick.)

Also, I really like this image that someone shared with me this morning.  XD

magic, as usual

The smell of lightly
Cooking pumpkins on porches
Wafts to Halloween.

Chet and Roy came over this weekend so that we could get our pumpkin carving on, and it was a good time.  We pizza'd hard, watched Ghostbusters, and sang along to Aladdin (well, Roy and I did; I guess Chet had sensibilities or some such nonsense).  I hope this Indian summer doesn't rot our pumpkins, which are currently located on the Llama School porch, before Halloween.  :(

On that note, my Halloween costume is now complete.  :D  I'm pretty stoked about the Mad Scientists' Ball (CS/Info/CogSci/Philosophy/SLIS Halloween party).

I had a phone interview with Facebook this week, the language-knowledge half of which I futzed horribly.  But I redeemed myself with algorithms and data structures.  I get to go on to the next stage... which involves solving one of the Facebook puzzles at http://www.facebook.com/careers/puzzles.php (they're fun, if you're into that kind of thing; check it out!).

I am continually intimidated by the musical knowhow in this house.  I had my piano midterm this week, and I was excited like nobody's business about playing the James Bond theme for it.  Then my roomates--3 of them across two bands--put on a show at a Café in town, and I was reminded that I haven't been studying music for, um, 10 years.

It's midterm week, which means no work!  Well, except for studying, but who does that?  I only have one exam left to go: Networks.  Let's hope that this temporary lull in work doesn't put me to sleep...

As for recent movies that are worth watching, I definitely recommend The Saddest Music in the World.  It involves a woman with glass, beer-filled legs who sponsors a contest during prohibition for musical ambassadors from every country to journey to Winnipeg and show off how sad their country's music could be.

another week, another recipe

Sweaters are out, on,
Brisk air chills cheeks, whispering,
Pumpkin season's nigh.

It's coming up on Halloween!  I finally got the last doodads for my costume (a Valkyrie, for those not keeping score at home), and I'm getting excited about the Mad Scientists' Halloween Ball (http://tinyurl.com/madscientistsball2009).  It's also feeling like fall, and this week the stuff I cook, um, tasted like fall?  I'm a decidedly non-scientific chef, so here's the best I can offer recipe-wise:

1 large butternut squash, cubed
3 large parsnips, cubed
2 medium-large sweet potatoes, cubed
1 red onion
2 green peppers
4 carrots, sliced in little disks
1 tsp.-ish pumpkin pie spice
1 Tbsp.-ish red pepper
4 cans vegetable broth
2 cups uncooked rice
enough olive oil for sautéing

The basic thing is to make sure that the squash, parsnips, and sweet potatoes get cooked enough to be edible.  I put them in a pot with the 4 cans of broth for about 30-45 minutes before I added the other stuff.  I added all the spices to them at the beginning so there'd be tasty juices flowing around.

The onion needs to be chopped up, ditto with the peppers, and sauteed for a little while.  There's no better smell than sauteeing onion.  Mmmmm...

Then everything goes in the pot and it hangs out on low heat for around 30 minutes (for the rice and carrots to cook).  When I ate mine, I added a glob of goat cheese to it for extra deliciousness, but it's hardly necessary.

Uhhh.. so everyone in my house seems to be ailing with one thing or another.  Sam had some kind of cough + nausea going for him for a while, and now Dan has headaches and chills.  My throat is turning a little rough, which does not bode well for a performance in a few weeks... >.<

This past weekend, I went to see Holiday, a film starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn.  It was hella classy, and the fact that it was showing at the local semi-fancy cinema didn't hurt, either.

What else, what else... oh, I ran into my first race condition today doing OS homework.  (A race condition is, in essence, when two pieces of code are running at the same time and the overall programme only works properly when one accomplishes something before the other gets to something else.)  Initializing handles for threads to access the consoles of our system seems to depend upon, surprise, their memory pieces all being set up properly first.  That sounds dumb now, but it was damn hard to figure out.

In other news, I don't know who's heard about the new breakthrough in thought about DNA, but now we know how DNA pieces twist themselves up to fit inside of our cells (a single strand of DNA is something like 2 metres long).  The old theory was a very messy sort of knot, but the new theory is a "fractal globule," which is a sort of Hilbert curve (a curve which densely fills space and never crosses itself) in three-space.  This sort of reminds me of that XKCD from a while back...

a long wrap-up

A large enough curve
Can appear flat; go find
Once again its end.

I'm sure some of you collected Beanie Babys, too.  I was all into that stuff.  I started after they had been around for a year or so, and this left me at a distinct disadvantage.  Many of the damn things had already retired, which led to their being unavailable in the price range of and 8-year-old.  At some point during my collecting, I decided that I wanted to get all the cats in the set, but there was one that had been a part of the original release and had gone away before I could get it: Flip.

Well, good news!  No one cares about Beanie Babys any longer, and this has led to a drastically improved availability.  I was out with Roy and Jill and Chet on Friday night, and we happened upon FLIP THE WHITE CAT AT A MARSH.  I got the IU nomination for the Churchill scholarship (officially!  woot!), so Jill offered to get it for me as a celebratory present.  This thing ain't leavin' my sight.

In other news, Atomic Age Cinema is still going strong in Bloomington (god, I can't believe I just linked to MySpace for that), and I went last night for a delightful showing in FULL 3-D of the original The Mask from 1968.  It was on a VHS tape, for crying out loud.

Other random occurrences from this weekend: I won a couple dollars in poker, I rewatched Kung Fu Panda (it's still awesome), I closed my window for the first time to keep my room warm enough to sleep in, I watched a train go by, wrote more synchronization code for OS, worked on the packet sniffer for networks (which I will probably write a real post about sometime... I really think it's cool), got some dericious sake from big Big Red, went to big Big Red for the first time, practised piano (my playing test Wednesday will include "This Land is Your Land," and "When the Saints go Marching in."  tough, I know) and ineptly played some Lego Star Wars.

hiatus

Leaves fall silently,
Don't break, don't bother, just ghosts,
Mem'ries of summer.

So I have to say that I really like the new Blogger text editor.  It's way cuter than the old one.

Other than that, I guess it looks like I haven't put anything on here for a while, so here's some things that I've been thinking about/doing in no particular order:

• Alex came to visit me over the weekend.  We went caving (Sullivan's Cave, for those of you in the know), I gave him a tour, he met some of my friends, and we went out one of the nights with "the crew" (hi, Thabang, Brett, and Matt).  We saw Comedy Caravan at Bear's again, and this time it was improv.  A couple of the dudes came over to chat our table up after the show, and Alex had the somewhat dubious pleasure of experiencing drunk guys hitting on me.  I don't recall if I mentioned, but I got asked for my phone number in a very sly (and somewhat amusing) way last weekend at the same bar.
• I read an article recently about "anonymizing" healthcare records.  I can't, unfortunately, find a link to a full paper, but the gist of the article was that 87% of Americans can be found uniquely by using just zipcode, birthdate, and gender.  Maybe you're just as unique as you think you are.
• I am performing in a play on Friday!  It's about a family of three: a woodcutter father, an imaginative mother, and a pushed-around daughter.  I am the third.  The script is here, and for those of you who do not read Spanish (and don't like Google translator's version :) ), it's basically a story about the father coming home, saying, "Oh, wife, I thought about planting an olive tree today."  The wife saying, "Man, this is going to be great!  We can sell that shit!"  Then they bring me in and argue about how much they are going to charge for the olive oil (when the olives are barely thought of and certainly won't be ready for many years), eventually getting so into it that they slap me around a little and our neighbour has to come over and point out how ridiculous we all are.
• There is a lot to writing an operating system.  This OS class that I'm in is going to be pretty intense.  Our assignment for this week was to look through the source code and answer a few questions about it, and it's a crapload of C.
• I'll be awesome at C by the end of term.  My networks class will all be in C, too, so EXTRA PRACTISE.
• I'm still looking for an internship/short-term job for spring, for any of you out there in real-world-land who might happen to know recruiters.  ;)
• I was recently informed that I am not too tall to be an astronaut.  Also that Bill Stone, the guy who I was all excited about working for, is a total jerk.
• I forgot a lot of parkour over the summer, but Roy is whipping me back into shape.  We'll see how that goes.  :D
  
• My roommates are thinking about fostering a puppy!  We can't adopt one, mainly because we have no idea what we would do with it after the school year ends, but fostering is totally doable, and our house would be so puppied and happy.  ^____^
• There is going to be a live-action Akira movie?  That should be interesting.
• I saw Ponyo (the new movie from the Miyazaki, the guy who did Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, etc.), and it was pretty trippy/awesome.  Also recently, I saw Up, Coraline, and Jabberwocky.  All of these are great.  Up is by Pixar and is soooooo cute, and parts are really hilarious.  Doug the dog is awesome.  Coraline is really weird and disturbing, but it's by Tim Burton, and that guy's gold.  Jabberwocky is by Terry Gilliam, and I don't think I need to elaborate on that.
• I'm planning my grad party, and it looks like it's going to be an excursion up to Chicago for New Year's.  It seems dumb to have a grad party before I actually graduate (plus I'm going to be absurdly busy before that), and there's no way to cram it in between graduation and Christmas, and I have a lot of friends I want to see who are from far away, and I like Chicago, and I don't have plans for New Year's.  So I think that's going to be it.
• Moebius strips are always more awesome.  A friend shared a link to a moebius strip music box on Google Reader recently.
• Grad students don't always seem more dedicated to their degrees than undergrads.  Being in some grad classes, I've been exposed to people who are really just in it for the paper.  :-/  It's sort of disappointing, but I guess you never get away from some kinds of people in real life.
• I gotta decide what to study in grad school.  I'm leaning towards some kind of engineering, maybe?  I want to do something thoughtful but not entirely sedentary.  Doing some kind of natural science would be fun, too.  Really, I still want to just be Bill Stone, just not an asshole.  Getting paid to be an adventurer still ranks highly on my list of priorities.
• Cooking is awesome.  Not only am I treated to the dinner rotation creations of my roommates, but I've been hanging out with another friend the past couple of days, and we made anise (basically licorice-flavoured) ice cream root beer floats.  Mmmmmmmmmm....
• Funny things are changing their legality status.  Facebook's TOS was determined to violate Canada's privacy laws (didn't they just get in trouble for that earlier this year?  Jeez, guys.), certain amounts of drugs are being legalised in Mexico (I believe the language is an amount appropriate for "personal and immediate use"), parts of California are raising taxes on their medical marijuana sales (a fairly sound economic idea if you look at the numbers), and I'm endlessly amused by international copyright laws, of course.  While in Germany, it was like pulling teeth to find a fecking Youtube video that I could listen to music from that wasn't blocked due to copyright, and things like Pandora didn't work their, either.  I've been reading a little bit about Canada's changing copyright laws for music distribution, and a bit about the DRM blocks that Apple had put on their iTunes tracks, but that stuff's just so silly.
• What's up with people accusing celebrities of hiding their genders?  It's all the rage, of a sudden.  Lady Gaga, that African runner, who next?

Anyway, that's really just a braindump of some general things that I've been pondering.  I felt like I should make a blog post, and... well, that's what came out.  :)