Sprinting off of the starting blocks is no way to run a marathon. The first mile is a great thrill: first place is exhilarating. The cramps in mile two: not so great. Eating last night’s dinner again in mile three: unpleasant. Dropping out of the race in mile four: well that just sucks. Finding the next race is fun, though. Until you realize the goal is to run a marathon.

Sprinting gets you somewhere near-by really fast, but if you’re trying to go somewhere far it’s just unsustainable.

So perhaps I’m not learning how to walk. I’m learning how to jog.

My idiot tax for January was in the self-checkout process at Wal-Mart. While talking to my dad and checking out I decided I needed cash so I chose to withdraw $40 on the ATM card. The problem is, when I went to pay for dinner an hour later, there were a total of no $20’s in my wallet. Whoops, I’m an idiot. How I forgot to pick up the cash the machine dealt me, not quite sure. Thus my idiot tax has been paid.

Tomorrow will be a good test for one of my own theorems: “most people are fundamentally good people.” Chances are better than not that if you drop your wallet, forget your credit card, etc. - whoever finds it is a good person and will act accordingly. I would conjecture chances are *really* good, like >95%. For example, I left my credit card in the drive-thru at Wendy’s the other week. I realized this that night. Forgot to do anything about it the next day. Two days later I drove back out there and they had it for me. I’ve got faith in people. Cash is a different ball game, though. I wouldn’t blame someone for claiming my idiot tax and calling it a lucky day. I also wouldn’t be surprised if I’ll be able to pick up the money tomorrow and it being my lucky day. Most people are fundamentally good people.

The next day the horse came back bringing three wild horses.
“How wonderful!” his neighbors exclaimed.
“We’ll see,” responded the farmer.

The following day the farmer’s son broke his leg riding an untamed horse.
“How terrible!” neighbors told him.
“We’ll see,” responded the farmer.

Soon after the boy was drafted, but was ineligible because of his broken leg.
“How wonderful!” his neighbors rejoiced.
“We’ll see.”

It is amazing how quickly a summer can expire. In my previous post I was sleeping in a temporary bed, working on a temporary desk, and living off of all the nerd toys and clothes I could cram into my Jetta. Now, I have my bed, my desk, my bookshelf, my lamp, etc. Coolidge house is no longer and I am a Rhode Islander. I think the moving entirely out of Chapel Hill and entirely into Providence aided in coming to terms with the fact that I’m no longer an undergraduate. As it turns out my summer stint at Brown isn’t a summer stint at all. It’s a whole new journey.

With luck I have landed in a neat part of the world, a great living situation, and an initial set of friends who manage to be very intellectual, interesting, and fun at the same time. I have now been sailing a few times, observed creative home brewers while home brewing, been to Waterfire (which is pretty neat), and driven a U-Haul up a good chunk of the Eastern seaboard. Not a bad start for a new location.

Now, if only I could determine a more concrete academic direction to take from here…

Work at the CIT began on Monday. I’m trying to learn the Tablet PC API’s as quickly as possible. It turns out to be pretty neat stuff – recognition, at least in some forms, is less black magic than one might imagine. Today I played on the Computer Science softball team. Good fun, for sure. I had a homerun and a few base hits. We wound up winning 43-11. Good game. Good day. Tired as heck. Good night.

My new address will be 29 Creighton Street, Providence, RI 02906. I’ll be sharing the first floor unit with Rhiannon, a recent Brown graduate who is my age, and a yet to be determined third room mate. The place has a backyard, grill, front porch, two huge living rooms, full basement for storage, and on site laundry.

My office in the CIT building, where I’ll begin working on June 4th, has also been assigned: CIT room 355. I’m crossing my fingers that its a windowed office. It is kind of neat to see my name appear on Brown’s official graduate CS student page. Once I’m settled in I’ll make the home page more exciting. I’ll also have a new e-mail address: ksj@cs.brown.edu.

One week left in Chapel Hill… crazy.

Turns out, by any reasonable measure of success, I would not have made the mark. I scored a 48% out of 100 on my physics final. The caveat, here, is that this is physics and this is a professor who designs his tests to average around 50%. It just so turns out the average grade on the final was a 44. So I scored better than average by correctly answering less than half of the test. Simply crazy if you ask me. The class size wasn’t small, either, at around 45 students. Most of which are physics and chem majors, and a few of us computer science types thrown in as well.

I guess that’s one way to do it.

So, in the way of fun stuff on the horizon I alluded to last post, here are the two major projects I’ll be working on:

Edneo.com - A little experiment in on-line educational materials. The thought is there are many subjects which would be nice to have audio/visual materials available on-line. Think YouTube meets Wikipedia. The format, I anticipate, will be short segments (10 minutes) on topics I have the capacity to discuss (ie: computer science… not physics!). If it looks like a promising idea perhaps I’ll recruit some Brown folks to do mini-lectures on other subjects.

Personalized News Aggregation - Put this in the experimental/nerd bin. The premise is using some of the text analysis techniques I’ve been learning about and applying it to news as it is published on the internet. Ultimately, by looking at the content of some bit of news the program should be able to infer a general sense of what the piece is about. By combining this information with articles you have read in the past it should be able to determine how closely related the articles are. Finally, if it seems to be something of interest, the news is delivered to you. Ideally it would be like having a little person somewhere on the internet filtering news for you and picking out the things you are most interested in reading. Realistically who knows how bad it will be :)