Pete's Log: stuff

Entry #454, (Life in General)
(posted when I was 22 years old.)

So the death toll for the whole Firestone tire thing has been adjusted from 103 to 101. Apparently two of the deaths in the higher number were pets.

due to some dns problems, esgeroth.org has been unavailable since tuesday. grrr... but not it's back and i can write more worthless stuff.

The whole bw3's thing was interesting on tuesday. Chris Sanabria and David Rink were among the legions of us that showed up.

I've been enjoying the whole olympics thing, even if it isn't live. i find the gymnastics especially entertaining. unfortunately the american gymnasts haven't been doing so well...

Em stopped by tuesday night, checked out the fish and the rest of the place...

wednesday morning didn't start out to well, had to deal with a student lecture in numerical. the slides were written in a 12 point font, which made them pretty much impossible to read. grrr...

Things got better after that as I headed over to industry day. Found Em at the scitor place and got some toys from her. Didn't get many other toys... got a motorola tshirt and a weird ibm thing. Had promising talks with IBM, HP, and Motorola... I only had three resumes with me ... but I definitely want to do some kind of internship/real world thing after i get my masters...

then got lunch at lafortune with Paul and Alice, then went to OS, then decided to go home to do laundry. As I was getting ready to leave, Paul pointed out that I was in fact probably going home to watch Sailor Moon. So of course I admit that it's certainly a motivating factor. So somehow Rob and Paul got talking about Sailor Moon being cartoon porn, and Rob starts trying to explain how cartoon porn adds another level of indirection. He starts drawing on the dry erase board explaining his theory:
             .--------------.
     .------>| cartoon porn |-------.
dude         `--------------'      .v-----.
     `-----------------------------| porn |----> woman
                                   `------'

well, Paul doesn't agree, because he says cartoon porn doesn't point at real porn, because it doesn't represent a real woman. So he modifies the drawing:
             .--------------.
     .------>| cartoon porn |
dude         `--------------'      .------.
     `-----------------------------| porn |----> woman
                                   `------'

but this doesn't seem quite right to me, so I take my turn at the whole thing:
                                               .-- Forms --.
             .--------------.                  |           |
     .------>| cartoon porn |------------------+-.         |
dude         `--------------'.------.          |  -> woman |
     `-----------------------| porn |-> woman--+-'         |
                             `------'          |           |
                                               `-----------'

So, using Plato's whole theory of forms thing, I managed to prove that cartoon porn actually had less indirection than real porn. Paul, having a masters in philosophy and all, agreed that I was right. So I won. It was a rather worthless way to spend some time, but it was entertaining.

So anyway, I came back home, did laundry, watched sailor moon, watched and kind of participated in some weird interactive thing the cartoon network was doing. it was kinda cool, it involved shockwave, but i lost interest after about 5 minutes...

Senior bar was entertaining. There were a lot of people there. Em and I arrived shortly after 10, it was empty. A little later we find Tim (physics grad student) and several friends of his. So we talk with them for a while, which was fun. Then Jeremy Siek and Mike Niemier show up, followed by Arun, Perk, Brian, Lisa, and I don't know who else. Then George C., Tim Brick and a bunch of other people from that crew show up, including Rebecca Weber. Her and I spend quite a while discussing various fun math and computability stuff, along with discussing life as a TA and such. Fun. Finally at about 1 Brian and I took off. Biking home was fun.

Today I failed to wake up. doh! oh well. I need to be here between noon and 3 because today is the last time UPS is going to try to deliver a package. Then tonight I need to TA. we'll see how that goes...