so it's been 3 months in finland, close to 3 weeks since i've found my own flat and arranged things to .. close enough to livable.

before moving here, i thought i'd be posting every day about my new experiences and tribulations and about the new sights that i'd witness, with my "foreign" eyes. i thought that you'd all be sick of hearing from me ( Read more... )

prospero has been acting up, ever since that last day i spent in pittsburgh. two days ago i couldn't start him, and yesterday i did some arcane sequence of arrangements (power cord off, eject-&-reinsert battery) in order to run windows xp; even then, i couldn't access any wifi networks through any internet programs ( Read more... )

i'm starting to consider celebrating my next birthday.

i used to think of it as getting older and not wiser, becoming of less use and more biased with experience, cynicism and bitterness ..

.. well, you get the idea;
adding more would only start to depress me.

in light of recent events, i've decided that it's not quite easy as i thought, to ( Read more... )

i'm back in ann arbor. i forgot how .. lonely? (solitary, maybe?) summer academic life can be.

despite not being set to eastern standard time yet, i managed a day which seemed like work, served its purpose, yet remained unproductive: the life of a mathematician.

i even stopped by the office, but that was because

1. it's air-conditioned,
   
2. my ( Read more... )

earlier today i went to a vietnamese-chinese place for lunch, and sticking to american custom, at the end of the meal my bill came with a fortune cookie.

at a first reading, i thought the cookie fortune said this:

all things are difficult because they are easy.
wow, methought, that's deep ( Read more... )

i have nothing against my monday workloads. the work is fine, and without it, i'd likely feel like a lazybones and idle my days away: the constraints shape the problem, so to speak ( Read more... )

Here is where we go off the "philosophical deep end." For those of you who want no part of this, you should stop reading now ( Read more... )