Things that might be decidedly odd…

Bar-B-Q

For lunch, my roommate Bev, his friend Mary and I went out to the Q Shack in Durham. Mary is visiting from South Carolina (where she’s lived virtually her whole life) and when she heard that they serve hush puppies (a fried mixture of corn meal and wheat) with bar-b-q in North Carolina, the inevitable “my state’s bar-b-q is better than your state’s bar-b-q” argument began to ensue. None, the less the food was good, although none of us was able to finish everything. I had a plate of that typically North Carolinian shredded pork with vinegary sauce along with hush puppies, fried okra, cole slaw and a glass of sweet tea. It was good even if we all did begin to slip into a food coma afterwards.

On the way back, we stopped at A Southern Season over in the University Mall. It’s this large, gourmet supermarket. I didn’t buy anything, but they did have quite the assortment of imported, fancy and just plain rare candy. I was quite amused that amongst all the fancy chocolate, was a bunch of Milka Chocolate. Now, don’t get me wrong–it’s not really bad chocolate–but it’s the cheapest kind of chocolate I’ve seen in German supermarkets. They also had Kinder Eggs although they were in Spanish, had these strange vinyl casings (instead of the foil wrappers), and cost $2.50 a pop.

Fun with English

Yesterday, I managed to assemble the new desk and chair I bought for my room. The desk came with the following interesting piece of text:

CAUTIOUS:
PLEASE DO NOT WORRY IF
STILL SOME SMELL FROM THIS
FRESH PRODUCT WHEN OPEN
IT. AS IT IS NON-TOXIC AND NO
DANGEROUS WHILE USING. IT
WILL GONE IN FEW DAYS
AFTERE EXPOSURE IN THE AIR.

Hmmm…. I don’t know if I trust this desk…

of web servers and clients

For the later part of today, I’ve been working on this assignment for COMP 243 where we have to write a basic web server and client. Everything is basically done. I still do need to do some clean up on the code and a couple easy features. I had no idea a very basic web server could be written in 241 lines of C code (and I’m sure that’s pushing it). Interesting.

In other news today, as I was leaving to go to the grocery store I decided to check my tires. It turned out the right back one only had like 5PSI in it. Hmmm… I drove over to the Amoco to get some air. The air there was free, unlike pretty much every station I’ve dealt with in the greater Oakland area. None the less, as I was filling it, I could hear the air leaking out! Yikes I thought. So, hoping I had 5 minutes of air in the tire, I drove over to Chapel Hill Tire to discover that it was closed (arg). So I went home and remembering I had a full-size spare in my trunk, changed the tire. It was my first time changing a tire and it was very educational. I’ll go in on Monday and see if I can’t get the old tire fixed though.

Meetings

Today I had a lot of classes and a couple meetings. The good news is that COMP 206 (Architecture) looks like it’s going to be a pretty ok class. The instructor is pretty upbeat or at least it seemed that way since I didn’t almost fall asleep in class. Also, I now have a better of what I need to get working on for my research assistantship. I’m working on a collaborative project between nano and gamma involving simulation of some elastostatic objects at nano-scale. Strangely, conceptually it’s not really that far from the stuff I was working on before at the MPI. Get some visual and force measurements of deformable objects, build a model, simulate it. Just different objects with a different potential application. For now, I get to dive back into the world of spring-mass systems, although things are looking to be elastostatic like before (no oscillation).

Earlier this evening I finished my COMP 202 (Algorithms) homework. I still don’t think I really got one of the problems, which of course I spent like 90% of my time on, but oh well, such is algorithms. On the positive side of things, I did get my brain much more into dealing with randomized algorithms and I managed to meet several nice collaborators in the process of trying to figure out solution strategies.

Back in NC

France was nice. My talk was rather well attended, despite the fact that it was in the smaller of two parallel sessions. Looking back, I probably shouldn’t have left for 10 days for those two confenences, but in general it was relatively good. I ended staying in this janky hotel on the outskirts of town. Actually, it wasn’t even in Grenoble proper. The people at the reception didn’t even speak any English, which in France is really just a sign that the hotel is cheap. None the less, the room was decent although it had a penchant for retaining heat even at night when it was 15 degree Fahrenheit cooler outside. Oh well. Life goes on.

Now, I’m playing catch up with school work, although things aren’t really too bad since I’ve managed to keep up with COMP 202 by reading online lecture notes and submitting assignments by email.

I now have a lovely office in the basement that actually has a window. I’m still rather surprised that I got a window office as a first year, but I guess that’s where the basement part comes in. Also, the window has a lovely view of a large metal box that contains (I think) a transformer or some sort of piece of electrical equiptment. Apparently, all the real action is up on the third floor, but I guess we’re forming our little clique down on floor 0 as well.

Today, it rained really hard (I think about 2″ in a few hours), yet it wasn’t really very hot outside. In fact, I think it was in the upper 70s pretty much the whole day, which without the rain would have been pretty comfortable. The left-overs of Hurricane Frances are moving through I guess.

Yesterday, I finally got around to emailing Peter McMorrow after Hilary had given me his email a while ago. He seems to be doing well, enjoying life in Hanford, CA, which for those who don’t know is out in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley. I guess that’s probably better than where he did flight training in Mississippi, but heck, every place has its plusses and minuses.