Funny Coinkydink

I'm at school looking for papers in the computer lab I have access to. I go to the "MyUCDavis" web page. The page often has a word of the day feature. What was today's word? Bumbershoot. What does that word mean? It's a noun. It means, "Umbrella."

I didn't know that.

Friday Laundry Blogging

It's not that I wait until weekends to do my laundry so I an con Scottland into folding it for me. It just happens that on the weekends when he's visiting, he likes to fold it or something. In the photo above, Stromboli is shown helping Scottland fold a load fresh from the drier.

UGH.

That's the only word that describes how miserably tired I am right now. I was feeling pretty chipper last night when Scottland called me, but then I stayed up until 1 AM eating toast, drinking tea (yummm, dinner) and reading about gas absorption after I got home from campus at midnight. It's not that I'm surprised that I feel like animated garbage, I just don't particularly like it.

So yeah, school is kinda tough right now. To my legion of adoring readers, I apologize for the repetative nature of my blog. Unfortunately, the Dantean hellscape that is my first term in graduate school is literally the only thing that seems to exist in my world right now. Except, of course, when Scottland comes to visit or when I fly up to Seattle for visit.

I know that my singular fixation on graduate school is not a good thing. I need to force myself to get more sleep and eat better. Sadly, when given the choice between slaving away at the saltmine and taking care of myself, I'd rather continue slaving. Not that that seems to help me do any better in my classes. So far, I've done midling to down-right crappy on my midterms and run the very real risk of being put on academic probation next term, if not outright asked to leave. Not that I'd necessarily miss grad-school at this point.

Anyhow, I'll try and lay off the endlessly repeating "grad school sucks and I'm tired" posts. Even I'm getting bored with them.

A Picture of My Butt

I crashed my bike last Monday. Basically, I went around a traffic circle too quickly, with tires that were too bald on pavement that was too wet from a combination of fresh rainfall and summer tree sap. It was nice that a bunch of people ran over to ask if I was okay and offer assistance. It was not nice that I scraped up my left leg and bruised my hip. Here are pictures. These pictures are from Friday night, so almost five days afterwards.

A Very Stromboli Thanksgiving, Part Deux

This evening, Stromboli gorged on Turkey Feast!!! And, I've never seen her pass out so hard. Normally, she sleeps all curled up in a little ball. This time, she was just sorta splayed out like she was Bill the Cat or something. T'was funny.

Utopia Is A Moment At Your Side

That's the only thing that Scottland wrote on the little card that he sent me in the mail. :) He's arriving this evening for his Semi-Monthly visit. It'll be really nice to see him, especially since the the weather in Davis has been decidedly more winter-like the last few weeks and the lack of insulation in my house is definitely noticeable.

About a week ago, I had a dream about Olga. In the dream, she and I were playin Euchre (sp?) and she was teaching me how to play. Only, in the dream, she kept changing the rules on me in ways that were advantageous to her. It was a very frustrating dream but also mildly amusing. In the end, I accused her of simply making it so that the game was completely random and stated that there was no point in playing a game that was completely random. Only, I think in my dream I was really talking about graduate school.

Ahhh graduate school. How I love to hate thee. I ended up doing as poorly on my mathematics mid-term as I had suspected I did, although the rest of the class did better than they had expected so I ended up towards the bottom end of the grade range. I secrely fear that I had the lowest grade in the class, but I don't want to ask. The professor reviewed the midterm the next day and while some of the solutions to the problems were non-obvious it was clear that the problem with the mid-term was not it was too difficult. It was definitely a bit too long since it took the professor almost two and a half class sessions to explain the solutions. It was still obvious to me that I would have done better if I had simply been more relaxed about the test when I took it. I probably would've been able to think the problems through a bit more and would have done better.

I spoke with Professor El-Farra after we got the tests back and his attitude was very sympathetic. He said that I needed to do more practice problems because that's pretty much the only thing that helps you when your problem is simply one of problem solving speed. So, somehow I need to fit in doing a slew of practice problems.

Anyhow, there's lot's of other stuff going on right now, but I guess I'll save those for other posts when I get a chance. In the meantime, here's a cool webpage that allows you to simulate orbits around a black hole. You'll have to play with it a bit to figure out how to make it work, but it's kind of neat in that it shows how relativity causes orbits to precess around the center of mass.

Please show that the Lipschitz of the Wronskian is Non-Linear over the whole of Sixth Dimensional Translational Hyperspherical Inverse Space, In Greek

That's what some of the problem statements on my mathematics mid-term read like. I can only take solace in the apparent fact that the entire class did as badly as I did. I actually might have done a little better, since I was approaching an actual solution to the third problem when the scant 50 minutes we were allotted to prove that the universe was in fact designed by a benevolent spaghetti-monster was up.

I have a suspicion that Professor El-Farra is going to be very suprised by how poorly the class did on this mid-term. I mean, he couldn't have intended to make the test that difficult. Maybe he did, but at that point, what's the point of giving a mid-term.? He might as well have made our grade in the class subject to our willingness to allow him to take us behind the building and flog our backsides with a cat-o-nine tails. This is apparently the first course that El-Farra has ever taught, so I'm hoping he's only made the mistake of assuming that we're all as comfortable using abstract mathematical reasoning as he is.

But yeah, every time I have an experience like this you should all visualize another piece of furniture being loaded onto the moving truck that's pointed towards the NW. It's not that my patience is wearing thin, but my patience is certainly thinner than it was at the beginning of the year. I suppose I'm mostly being petulant but I'm just sort of pissed about the whole graduate school situation right now. Hopefully the predictions that things will be "better" and more "meaningful" once I've got this term under my belt will turn out to be true. That being said, if they don't, I really won't have a lot of difficulty terminating my graduate school career. My experience at Neah taught me the folly of tolerating a bad situation in the hopes that it will eventually "get better."

So yeah. Blah. The upside is that the 1st year class is going to be meeting tonight somewhere downtown in order to commiserate. Should be fun.

Midterm : First Blood

I had my statistical thermodynamics mid-term today. It wasn't as easy as I had been hoping, but I still think I did reasonably well. There were a grand total of 8 problems, and I totally choked on problems 3 and 4. Basically, I had to do this funky integral and failed to make a couple of logical connections regarding simplification, and also didn't notice that he had placed the solution to the most complicated piece of the intergral at the bottom of the test. *sigh* It didn't help that when I first tried to do the integral and ran into problems, I started to panic. My hands started shaking and I could literally feel the blood draining out of my face. It was nasty. So I skipped to the last three problems and did them quickly and easily enough that I started to calm down. I never did figure out how to do the integral but I figure I'll get some partial credit on those two problems since I think I showed that I knew how to solve the problem. Still, I was so annoyed once I had time to sit down after the test and go over the integral. At that point, I figured it out in about a minute.

So, the lesson learned here is that I need to not freak out on tests. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that my test-taking skills are going to need a bit of sharpening considering that I haven't taken a test since 1998, with the exception of the GRE.

Idle Hands Are The Devil's Playthings

So, I'm so not the Devil's Plaything right now, or something. As you can see, there's been a pretty significant drop in the frequency of my posting. Why? Because I'm ridiculously busy with schoolwork. Tomorrow is my first mid-term and it'll be in Statistical Thermodynamics. I think I'll do fairly well on this one. The mid-term the day after, I'm less sure about. That one's advanced engineering mathematics.

I was in Seattle last weekend for the big Halloween Party at the HOF. It was great. Everyone had a good time. I stayed completely sober. Scottland was so cute in his Scooby-Doo outfit. Pictures can be seen here.

That is all for now. Perhaps I'll post more regularly once midterms are done in another week and a half. But I dunno, there's always the omnipresent threat of homework.