School ARCHIVES
06 June 2005
As befits the uterus of Silicon Valley, Stanford University Libraries sends an automated email to the holder of each item overdue by 72 hours. Inside that email is a link to quickly renew the overdue book. My usual instant reaction...
23 May 2005
Last Friday I hit up special dinner at Hammarskjöld, the house where I lived (and serendipitously KM'ed for half of) last year. At the frats, sororities, suites, and self-ops special dinner tends to be an extravagant semi-formal affair, but...
20 April 2005
Last night in class we were discussing the validity of simulation as a model of reality. At first glance this seems totally uncontroversial, but then my friend Tony related this story. He's been taking Persi Diaconis's statistics class, which begins...
07 April 2005
(If you like to term your seasons Brian Jacques/Redwall style.) As a last hurrah, I'm trying to put some coherence into my previous dabblings. Class-wise, this means I'm taking an AnthSci course in prehistoric language migration. I'd been interested in...
30 October 2003
Hammarskjö�ld is, I'm rather sure, a former professor-family residence that was squished and squashed and massaged into student housing. Its narrow-arrow staircase, four southern-plantation-style columns, and random nooks in the wall for displaying collected art are all quite charming. However,...
23 October 2003
I just came back from a great class day, so I'm all fired up to write! Exclamation points! The course in question is called Human-Computer Interfaces: Theory and Practice, and is cross-listed in the CS and Music departments whilst being...
29 May 2003
Molly's lab partner, who hails from outside of Philadelphia, was here doing working on their—what else?—lab when we started discussing marching bands and high school sizes. Molly was totally shocked to hear me say that J.P. Stevens had over 2,000...
08 May 2003
This house is great because of the party I missed by being at Regionals last weekend: To: synergy@lists.Stanford.EDU Subject: BELTANE!! Date: Sun, 27 Apr 2003 17:59:38 -0700 From: Goddess of Fecundity <daisypl@stanford.edu> Hey kids and caboodles! Keep Saturday clear for...
30 April 2003
Yummy pizza focaccia with thin slives of tomato and cheese and oregano was the bread of the morning, and I just finished eating a big hunk of it. Lately I've been going to bed at some remarkably consistent time between...
14 March 2003
Roger's verboten entry is tantalizing and mocking at the same time. It's an in-my-face reminder that I'm not holding up my end of the updating bargain. Regarding why I'd be so narcissistic to think that it had something to do...
10 March 2003
It's 69 degrees outside and I'm eating a carrot—the second of two, in fact. Mondays can get a little rough on the cuisine; our produce deliveries come Tuesday and Saturday mornings. Carrots—especially these big ole full-sized— ones are fun to...
12 February 2003
While solving recurrence relations this morning: Me, whining: "Taking this long to do algebra makes me feel like I'm in eighth grade all over again." David: "Are you kidding?! You were so much faster in eighth grade!"...
12 January 2003
Got back, slightly muddy and grassy, from a sparsely-attended Saturday morning practice (nearly everybody's in a freshman dorm, being either a frosh or on staff, and off on some ski trip or another) to find Rob Jack finishing up his...
05 January 2003
I was sitting on the balcony for just a few minutes and my jeans absorbed so much heat from the shining sun that it hurt. Balcony-sitting was really an alias for all of us spying on all the new folk...
08 December 2002
I'm currently eating cold tuna from the can. I shared with Betsy....
05 December 2002
Found this quote in the Introsems brochure today: "I must study politics and war that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophyÂ… in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, and music."...
03 December 2002
Between CS and the recent slew of frisbee-related email, I'd had more than enough of sitting at my desk by the time the sun started to set. I was getting pretty jumpy and about to go forage in the kitchen...
15 November 2002
Have you ever shrieked with delight at an 18-wheeler backing up into your driveway? Tory and I did five minutes ago because it means eggs and non-skim milk and ice cream!...
13 November 2002
Ton style écrit est riche mais tu traduis trop souvent anglais -> français et tu fais encore des erreurs de grammaire de base.... Je te conseille de lire en français. Mais ton travail est très sérieux et ta participation en...
13 November 2002
Was witness to, and dilettant (studying for today's French exam makes me want to tack on an "e" there) participant in, a conversation last night that managed to have "posit" and (the slang usage of) "mad" in the same sentence....
10 November 2002
It's been a while since I've written anything of consequence, but all I can remember is rain and food and friends. There's been a spectacular storm system accompanying everything during the past few days—literally the first I've seen in six...
04 November 2002
Here's a photo, courtesy of Rob, of what was on our dining room mantel during the house's annual Halloween party. media/synjacks.jpg" alt="synergy jackolanterns" />...
14 October 2002
Last night I made a big decision, and ten minutes ago I unmade it. Feels so much better. (And, no, Tory, this has nothing to do with what you might think.) Sophomore year, bring it on. Oh, right, I also...
05 October 2002
Things that make me sad about Synergy: occasional self-righteous political correctness, "liberal"ism, veganism, etc. when there's not enough dinner for all of us and our EAs and our friends Yep. I think those are the only things that I can...
28 September 2002
Warm, glowy Saturday afternoon. I'm sitting in the mustard velvet chair pulled up to the windows to catch some more sunlight. The sky was thickly blanketed with clouds most of yesterday and this morning; but it seems to have changed...
24 September 2002
Rooms! Yeah! For fall quarter, Molly and I are in a double on the third floor overlooking the yard and woods, next door to Tory and Betsy... at night we can hear the crickets' thrumming. The meeting went really, really...
23 September 2002
This morning, I went back to Cowell Vaden and got some Allegra for the Magic Spreading Insect Sting. My forearm was numb from my wrist to above the elbow yesterday, but the swelling's not quite so tight this morning. I'm...
22 September 2002
Had retreat last night at Hidden Villa, a hostel on a farm adjacent to the Rancho San Antonio open space preserve. Mellow, but nice. Got back this morning, ran a few errands, left notes for—or failed to find—some friends 'round...
28 June 2002
Here's a bit of an annoyance for your reading [dis]pleasure: Caltrain is discontinuing weekend service for the next two years or so as it pursues rail upgrades. Upgrades, schmupgrades. Also, they're raising the fare to $4.50. Sucks....
02 June 2002
Ethanolized dude from dorm whose name I vaguely know walks in and sticks hot dog in microwave, and when I glance up from my computer screen says, "Is it okay to use your microwave?" "Yeah, sure." I go back to...
31 May 2002
Our boat dance was yesterday, and I somewhat resentfully ended up going. By the previous sentence, it's clear that I had low incoming expectations, but it turned out to be one of the more fun events involving ridiculously overdressed young...
29 May 2002
This morning, I remembered that I'd signed up for sack lunches on Wednesday at the beginning of the quarter because I have class almost consecutively from 9am to 2pm, and that I'd checked "turkey" as the preferred meat option. When...
27 May 2002
I guess my updating becomes more prolific directly in line with my paper situation becoming more desperate. Why is it that I can so easily babble my fingers out in this puny Notepad window while behind it, something with the...
27 May 2002
By virtue of not having updated for 13 days, I am officially a bad person. Stone me, don't link to me, and all of that painful stuff. That said, I still don't have anything good to say. Rather, I haven't...
14 May 2002
I need a sandwich monitor. As in, some little twittery insect-type thing permanently perched on my shoulder and monitoring what mouthfuls tasks I bite off. I'm updating now because I'm avoiding finishing up the flyer for the Branner musical. It...
13 May 2002
Neat-o! Earthquake! Well, I guess I wouldn't be so excited if it had actually caused lots of death and havoc. Instead, with a 5.2 on the Richter scale and an epicenter about 40 miles away from here with made it...
13 May 2002
I'm pretty darn spoiled. It seems that, whenever I'm about to be well and truly screwed, something spectacular falls into my lap. In this case, I got waylaid by email-checking on my way into Meyer to finish up my E14...
10 May 2002
Yes, I am still alive, but the past few days have been simultaneously really good and really stupid—hence the silence. The latter half, of course, has been entirely my fault and I'll spare you the details. As for the former,...
06 May 2002
I went to the white party tonight. The decorations were not only really great-looking, but conducive to finger-painting as well—the freshly applied flourescent paint on the walls was still fresh enough for us to salvage some goop to smear on...
06 May 2002
Yeah! We beat the Tarts in both games, 11-8 and 11-9, and the last point was secured by a pass off an unbelievable face/body catch/save (I don't know what else to term it) by Kathy. Thus ends our season. Good...
04 May 2002
Last night was the first time I'd heard of the term "1.5th generation immigrant," and it seems to fit my situation perfectly. If I were in a mopey, pensive mood, I'd talk about it. But thinking's bad for you, so,...
02 May 2002
I still don't get the concept of drinking 'til you're plastered, especially not on a routine basis. It bothers me that really cool people by day can turn into drunken people with no personality and no motor skills. There is...
24 April 2002
Hell is over! Yes! Okay, just kidding. Being in The Magic Flute, if only in the chorus, has been an incredibly enriching experience, most especially Saturday night at the director's RF (resident fellow) apartment after a second spectacular performance. She...
18 April 2002
My laptop is tucked in the corner of the open dressing room closet behind Dinkelspiel auditorium with Papagena's frilly bird costume on the left and her old woman disguise on the right—it's the only place where the power cord and...
17 April 2002
This is gonna be quick because I have lecture in 13 minutes. Woke up just in time for a 9am meeting with Lyle and Vice Provost Bravman. I dunno. Bravman is kinda hard to read. At the very least, he...
12 April 2002
Long day, but it didn't seem so. IHUM section from 9-10:30 was passable, actually, though it seems like our class has more potential than just "passable." Perhaps it's a characteristic of the course: it's neither political philosophy nor very detailed...
11 April 2002
The soap dispensers in the McCullough building's bathrooms dispense foam. How cool is that? I was so impressed that I washed my hands twice. Then, I went outside to read in the time I had before Magic Flute rehearsal, but...
09 March 2002
Crikey. In writing my IHUM paper, I've just tried to describe the mortal-immortal boundary as a wall of abstraction. Help!...
08 March 2002
Lecture was good today. That's right, there was only one—just CS at 2:15 on Fridays. Now that the last assignment's been given, lectures are more overview-of-possible-future-branches than anything necessary for the final. Perversely, I'm much more interested in this stuff...
05 March 2002
I'm quite proud, probably inordinately so, of today post-meridian accomplishment. I'd planned to work on my program between my noon and 3pm classes, but mysteriously picked up a flat tire on the way back from ling seminar. After eating lunch,...
14 February 2002
Two Stanford definitions for you: to shower someone is to bodily pick them up, run into the shower, and turn on the water full blast for a soakin' wet time by all. A rollout is when people come bang vigorously...
08 February 2002
I could've been working solely on Editor Buffer since 6:30pm, but I haven't been. I finished reading a book, Doris Lessing's Ben in the World, that would have been really disturbing had I read—rather than skimmed— it. I tend to...
04 February 2002
I think I've slept in my bed twice in the past eight nights, which could account for the recent dearth of updates. So take a deep breath, cause here goes... Most of those nights are attributable to either the CS...
24 January 2002
Here's an article from the Stanford Daily that attacks one of the things I love best about this school: the dress code and, tangentially, the stick-up-the-ass attitude, both of which are a few notches below any other Bastion of Higher...
14 January 2002
Hiten commented a couple of days ago that I don't get bored very easily, and I guess it must be true. Today, I amused myself, to my friends' great embarassment, by trying to figure out why the Caltrain seat backs...
11 January 2002
Random randomness: Ima, who lives across the hall, sings in Counterpoint, whose concert I went to tonight. (Way too many clauses in that for me to sort out!) They were hosting two all-male groups, Bowdoin Meddiebempsters and the Tufts Beelzebubs....
10 January 2002
Wanna hear something funny? I've swallowed my right contact lens. Suzie came over last night and made fun of me for having Snood's icon on my desktop, then proceeded to play the game herself for a long, long period of...
09 January 2002
So I'm back here after having spent the night out on the quad to get one of the eleven spots in GES7B, Introduction to Wilderness Skills. It meets for two hours every Wednesday night, and takes four two-night trips every...
07 January 2002
Today I got a card in the mail that hoped I was never sorry for any of my decisions, and therewith resolved not to be. But if I could regret something, it might be that I didn't spend enough time...
22 December 2001
Hey! My links have been quirky and dysfunctional on the first try lately, and I've finally discerned the pattern: I keep putting spaces around the equal signs after "href" and "target", and my explanation is that there are spaces around...
19 December 2001
Hm. Somebody should have at least given her CS final a second glance. That somebody was me. I am hereby marking a personal reminder to hold on to my patience until after winter quarter exams are over. Oh well. If...
14 December 2001
Who's done? Me! That's right, I'm done. Yeah I am. I admit, I did sort of rush through my final exams yesterday and today because I was just so anxious to be finished with them. The CS exam was pretty...
13 December 2001
Saturday afternoon through Monday afternoon was a heck of a ride. Upon returning from football and brunch, I cleaned up the battleship program and got straight to work on my medieval women final paper, which took all of Saturday night...
08 December 2001
My left cheekbone is beautifully and hugely swollen, though its volume is gradually diminishing in favor of a bluish-green bruise that resembles a makeup job gone horribly wrong. Ben, I think, was the one who called it the battered woman...
08 December 2001
I don't have time for this update. That statement should be made abruptly and matter-of-factly, à la Collin, also known as Collin (column) Space. I'm not taking math this quarter, but you can attribute that geeky moniker to half my...
04 December 2001
I just took an unusually early shower. Normally, I reserve showers for that low point between 3 and 4am, when I really need the freezing breeze through the permanently open window to snap me out of a tired stupor. Today,...
04 December 2001
Today, I was scheduled to be the first in a series of final project presentations in my PWR class, which begins at 9am. I woke up at precisely 9:21 and thought, quite understatedly, Oops. Now, here was a critical choice...
02 December 2001
I hadn't noticed, at the time I raved about the Bender Room, that it has the most amazing and extensive collection of fiction spanning the continents and the ages: Austen, Tolkien, Shakespeare, Dickens, Rand... Since this collection duplicates what's in...
02 December 2001
I thought that by unplugging from the Internet, I'd have much less stimuli to distract me. "Much less," however, by no means means "absolutely no," so here I am futzing with this site. I originally came here to the Coho...
01 December 2001
I just spent the past hour and a half removing all of the font tags on all of the pages and, instead, linking the pages to a single style sheet. It's been a while since I've actually manipulated HTML instead...
29 November 2001
Thursdays usually promise to suck because classes run from 9 to 5:30, but today wasn't horrible. PWR opened at 9am with an hour of peer review, but we didn't have much to review. The assignment had been to bring in...
29 November 2001
So I have this program due in exactly 25 hours and, yeah, I'm dangerously close to screwed. I had a Big Game ticket, but didn't end up using it. I don't know. The opportunity to go to a Salvation Army...
25 November 2001
25|11|01 00:40 pst The past five days have seen some pretty desperate reloading of everyone's websites, as if hits could magically accumulate into an update. Then I realized that I, too, was guilty. Whoops! So here I am, alone but...
20 November 2001
I got a paper back today that made me happy. I got a paper back today, which made me happy. In the first sense of those concatenated words, it was a paper to be relatively proud of. Contrary to my...
16 November 2001
Guess I'd make a rather shabby prophet. I actually wasted a full additional hour before rushing over to medieval women lecture. Fortunately, it was a guest lecture, which means decreased demand for student involvement. I really liked Nicholas Watson's emphasis...
15 November 2001
In celebration of finally taking that dratted piano exam, I've just whiled away the last half hour and will while away a half hour more before bringing myself to read for that 4:15 lecture get a double chai latté jolt...
11 November 2001
What a binary year! Though I do believe that this is the last of the bunch. It seems as if Roger's issuing a challenge by promising to update four times a week. Well, bring it! Too bad my life isn't...
07 November 2001
So I did eventually manage to get that draft together, but it wasn't so hot. It's a critical analysis of two of our sources for the final paper. I like how every assignment we do is another step toward the...
29 October 2001
I've just been hit with the reality of an IHUM paper due Wednesday, a CS midterm Thursday, a program due Monday, another paper due Tuesday, a third paper due Thursday, and a piano exam sometime in the next two weeks....
28 October 2001
Happy end of daylight savings time! Yes, you ingrates. Savor that extra hour of sleep. Personally, I like the fact that my date-label abbreviation now resembles a whispering sound: "psst!" I headed to the Bender Room of Green Library for...
21 October 2001
I'll bet you didn't know that squirrels have mating calls like crows with laryngitis. Neither did I, but I was enlightened last Sunday morning at 8am. Ah, nature. I also woke up this morning to very loud sounds, but it...
20 October 2001
Since I first began wearing contact lenses the summer before seventh grade, I've lost at least a half-dozen pairs. The flimsy little buggers will jump off my iris if they're too dry, if I'm too tired, if I make a...
13 October 2001
Large nonprofit organizations have been on my mind for the past couple of days. The larger they get, the greater percentage of their effort and resources must be directed toward the administration and management of those efforts and resources. Yes,...
11 October 2001
Want to hear a joke? It's of the type that would go in a YKIGTSW... category, Ã la Roger's YKIGTGTW, except I'm too lazy to create and maintain more categories than my current four oversimplified ones. So, here we go....
03 October 2001
Can I just say that I love CS? The lecture's not terribly fascinating because it pretty much just reiterates and clarifies the assigned reading; neither is section, but I get such a kick out of doing the homework programs. On...
02 October 2001
Wow, a date in binary. I'm getting geekier by the minute. It's okay. I'm still a whole person. At the very least, I don't leak tidbits of secrets and then refuse to tell them fully like some people I know....
01 October 2001
My Mondays are a little odd, but I got a kick out of my afternoon. I have a 10am IHUM lecture, a big fat span of nothingness, and then a 2pm CS lecture. CS is pretty straightforward for now; being...
28 September 2001
Modes of self-propelled transportation spotted: legs bicycle rollerblades skateboard skateboard while on crutches unicycle Oh yeah, no to the second try. Oh well!...
27 September 2001
On with the dewimpification. Yup, just like Deepal and George W., I'm starting to coin my own words. Absolutely on a whim, I auditioned for Talisman. I don't have much relevant background, I did awfully on the short solo, and...
25 September 2001
All the whirlwindishness of the first couple of days days is slowly fading to comfortable routine. I ran a bunch of errands yesterday. First, I stopped by the SymSys office and ran into the director of the program, who was...
22 September 2001
Notice the new time zone? Move-in this/yesterday morning, while surprisingly painless, seems like forever ago. They've been running us around from busy event to busy event until 12:30, when we got back from this thing called a band run. The...
17 September 2001
... and last but not least (because, as you clearly know, I am older than Roger), I'm finally heading off to college. United flight 79 today at 5:30pm—which means, given the current airport mayhem, I need to leave this house...
31 March 2001
If you talk to me online, please inquire often about scrapbook status. Recently, this site has taken precedence. Musn't give in, despite embarassing and hopeless 11-month lag! Was supposed to get a packet from Stanford in the mail today, including...