went to connecticut this weekend to meet up with the rest of my family at my grandmother’s house. my sister even brought her dog.

<p>we spent a lot of the time doing yardwork. my grandmother has managed to hang on to a big house with a sizable amount of land (well, a lot considering that it&#8217;s the middle of suburbia) but can&#8217;t really get around well enough anymore to keep things maintained herself. plants seem to grow at an incredible rate in connecticut. in maine most of the vegetation is killed every winter and the few plants hearty enough to survive a maine winter usually aren&#8217;t the kind that grow quickly. everytime my father goes down to visit her, he brings along tools and cuts away huge swaths of the ever-expanding vegetation. and everytime he goes down, it&#8217;s grown back and creeped even further out.</p>

<p>so we spent most of the daylight hours on saturday and sunday raking leaves, clearing the branches that had cluttered up the lawn over the winter, and cutting down vines. the whole time, miranda (my sister&#8217;s dog) ran around happily smelling all the new connecticut smells and alternating between cooking herself in the sun and cooling off in the shade. despite a little sunburn, i have to admit that a little exercise feels good every once in a while.</p>

<p>on sunday night my aunt (who also lives in connecticut) came over and we all went out and watched <i>A Beautiful Mind</i>. good movie. some of the visualizations of how he &#8216;saw&#8217; patterns in numbers were kind of cheesy but otherwise it was good.</p>

<p>at 0607 this morning i was roused from <span class="caps">REM</span> sleep, pulled my shoes on, got in the car and rode to the train station. got on the Shoreline East railroad to New Haven, transferred to the Metro North commuter train, rode into Grand Central, got on the subway to 42nd st, transferred to a 1 train up to 103rd, got out and walked to my apartment. took a quick shower (my grandmother forbid us from taking showers while we were there, citing some &#8220;water shortage&#8221; or something that connecticut is having) and walked to work. considering how poorly my body typically deals with the morning, i&#8217;m impressed that i can even remember parts of my day.</p> 

well, chris has pulled through for me again. he has talked one of his friends into teaching me how to skateboard. this same friend also plays Go…which means that i could potentially shake that bug. excited

<p>i was really hyper today and had to spend some time on the elliptical runner to work it off.  i said this in my lemming log, but i found an opening for a pHd program in molecular electronics in Delft.  according to yura, this is on the train route between Paris and Amsterdam.  i don&#8217;t even think i&#8217;ll get in, but i&#8217;m still excited to count it as a possibility.  :)</p> 

Question. Why do I feel more comfortable talking with Lani on LJ than here? Why do I find Thraxil, which is cooler than LJ by a mile, and soemthing I’m dying for as one of my own, more intimidating? Why am I more scared of looking like an idiot here? I can look like an idiot anywhere. It must be me. I’ll resolve to be more of an idiot everywhere… and find happiness that way.

so I just got back from Washington DC, after successfully being oriented for my upcoming trip to Osaka University this summer. For those of you who don’t know the deal, there’s a sweet NSF program available for students in the biomedical sciences and engineering to go to Japan, Korea or Taiwan for 8 weeks in the summer, fully on the gov’t dole. look into it.

<p>the cool upshot was that I had plenty of free time, so I got to see some of the old crew, including colin, lani, bri &amp; alex, and sara. it dawns on me that despite living next door during all those years I was growing up in bawlmer, I know jack shit about DC. it&#8217;s actually kinda a nifty town, with a decent metro. I only went to shows in the bad part of town when I was in high school, and I guess it set the mode for my impression of the city. it&#8217;s come time to guess again, I guess. </p>

<p>fun fact: there are not one but <u>four</u> Mariott hotels in Crystal City. and I guess there are enough John Connolly&#8217;s around such that another one had a rez in the <span class="caps">REALLY</span> nice one, so for 10 minutes I was checked into the wrong suite. damn shame, cause the room I ended up in didn&#8217;t have the high speed data jack, whirlpool tub, balcony or 50&#8221; TV the first one did. the $585 temporary authorization on my credit card is sure making me nervous though&#8230; could be the most expensive 10 minutes of my life. crystal city is interesting. it&#8217;s an endless strip of <span class="caps">HUGE</span> hotels, conference centers, nameless government buildings, and nothing that looks like it would support human life at all. it looks like a level from unreal tournament or something, I&#8217;d expect to see rockets screaming at my head rather than people walking around. my theory is that it all transforms in a giant robot with the pentagon as the head to defend us when all hell breaks lose. kinda like the <span class="caps">SDF</span>-1. </p>

<p>the speakers at my orientation included Dr. Junku Yuh, whom I learned is not only a male (whoops) but is also an underwater robotics expert. him and another one of the speakers were pioneers in <a href="http://www.snakerobot.com">Snake Robots</a>. pretty cool things, used in the september 11th tragedy and other S&R operations. the presenter actually showed some grusome images taken from inside the rubble including a severed arm and a head, which I thought were in somewhat poor taste. but I digress. also there was Dr. Rita Colwel, director of the <span class="caps">NSF</span>. a member of my thesis committee was a post-doc in her lab, so I got to shake hands and convey a greeting. I touched a famous person, wow. she was telling us about how the <span class="caps">NSF</span> was looking to increase graduate stipends to ~30K per year, which seems like a rediculous sum of money. but I ain&#8217;t complaining. she was also telling us about the new <span class="caps">NSF</span> initiatives to ramp up spending on nanotech and biocomplexity integrative studies; all in all the <span class="caps">NSF</span> is doing some good work. too bad dubyah was looking to cut their funding. hope he doesn&#8217;t. </p>

<p>and finally, on a dismal note, this dartmouth kid who has stalked several of my friends, and is a notorious asian fetishist, is being sent to korea on our tax dollars. sigh. creepy kid. </p>

<p>anyhow, that&#8217;s my week.</p> 

anybody have any idea why eight military choppers flew by the lab this morning? does the president have a meeting or something?

Dear Diary;

<p>I don&#8217;t say much these days. And not too much otheer times&#8230; but I&#8217;ve been busy. I just finished 100 poems in 100 days on <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/sarahsmiles/">Sarah Smiles&#8217; LiveJournal</a>. It was great to do them on LJ because there were so many people cheering eachother on. Now I&#8217;m tired and wondering what to do next.</p>

<p>Just thought I&#8217;d share.</p> 

[setting: harish, gordie, darya and I walking to the store to get our mid-afternoon sugar fix.]

<p>harish has mastered the trick of launching a penny at high speeds by snapping his fingers and is demonstrating it to the rest of us. we walk by a grassy area and see one of the campus&#8217; many grey squirrels bouncing around doing squirrel type things.</p>

<p>harish: &#8220;check it out; i&#8217;m gonna nail that squirrel.&#8221;</p>

<p>harish goes into his windup. before he can launch, the squirrel whips around to face him, plants its feet and stares directly at him with the most hardcore do-<em>not</em>-fuck-with-me look i&#8217;ve ever seen from human or rodent alike. </p>

<p>harish freezes and his arm slowly comes down. we all back off nervously, trying not to make any quick movements as the squirrel continues to stare us down.</p> 

so i’ve decided to post an add in the city paper to make friends with fellow recovering anti-social types.

<p>so far:</p>

<p>&#8220;wanna meet other people who hate other people?&#8221;</p>

<p>&#8220;will provide dark corners&#8230;&#8221;</p>

<p>&#8220;let&#8217;s be awkward and misunderstood together.&#8221;</p>

<p>any ideas?</p> 

i’ve finally gotten around to adding markov back into thraxil. back and better than ever. markov now uses all posts, diary posts, and comments to build the transition matrix (in the old version, it only used the frontpage posts).

<p>for the time being, the markov post is only updated when someone posts someting (anything) so you can&#8217;t just sit and reload over and over for new markov posts. once i make some performance tweaks, that might be added back. </p>

<p>and of course, if you get sick of the markov posts, you can always turn it off by unchecking the &#8220;show markov&#8221; box on your user settings page.</p> 

No need to comment on the poetics, it is just the closest thing to a diary entry I could imagine… and it is datestamped… at least in my mind.

<p>The Persephone Year</p>

<p>The Persephone year, my trap</p>

<p>of endless night broken</p>

<p>by days of dark slumber,</p>

<p>never returns</p>

<p>me to a morning </p>

<p>spring of bright delight.</p>

<p>Seven bloody seeds stain</p>

<p>my lips and my soul,</p>

<p>etched with the smoke</p>

<p>memory of their lives.</p>

<p>Seven songs play on my tongue</p>

<p>and I am left to siren</p>

<p>their memories in the place of my own.</p>