I've been thinking a lot about the roles graduate students--particularly Ph.D. students--play on university campuses, and how that figures in to their identities.

My alma mater is part of me and will always be, with or without horrible acts of violence. The green grass, the brutal winters, the beautiful red-golden autumns1, and the peaceful breezy ( Read more... )

You can pretty much ignore this unless you're really curious. (It falls under my privacy policy, which is that making entries private should pretty much only be for stuff that wouldn't make sense to other people. Nothing on the Internet is actually private, after all.)

( Recent meditations )

I seem to attract stupid conversations in D2. No, I don't participate in them (I hope); they just seem to be drawn to me ( Read more... )

This hungover freshman-looking fellow in McBryde asked me for a "cig" the other day. If it had just been a cigarette, I wouldn't have cared. It doesn't bother me to be mistaken for a smoker. For some reason, though, I couldn't help but think that anyone who called a cigarette a cig was even more of a retard* than a chain-smoker ( Read more... )

I learned this summer about design. A computer scientist is not a manufacturer, to lay roads or build buildings. A computer scientist is an engineer, and his or her goal should be to design. There is a place in computer science for prototyping, but in no other area would it be considered acceptable, in the course of the construction of a building, ( Read more... )