from the desk of stinkpot

found a cheap internet cafe and so i thought i’d check in … sadly, i’m sick as a dog right now. left the windows of our tent open one hot night and slept outside of the sleeping bag. when i woke up at sunrise, it was about 50 degrees and i already had symptoms of […]

oh and this blog will likely grow barren for the next two weeks. christina and i did manage to find a relatively inexpensive flight to europe to go and watch our soccer game. of course, since we’d already gotten leave from work and were going to be in europe … we decided to turn the […]

as usual, we had an eventful weekend. stephanie, my younger and only other sibling, graduated from high school in new york city. i’m really proud of her – she’ll be chemE in the fall at upenn and she won the science medal at her graduation. what more does an older brother / engineer need to […]

gawsh, i’m starting to appreciate how difficult it is to develop algorithms. it seems that the function representing the novelty & utility of an algorithm vs. effort exerted looks like 1-exp(-x): the first couple of breakthroughs in a field come easily, but improving on them can be quite hard. in my case, i’ve been working […]

holy crap! the script i wrote about here actually came through – christina and i got world cup tickets to see the usa’s first match!!! they’re playing in some town i’ve never heard of: gelsenkirchen. argh, figuring we’d shoot first and apologize later, we grabbed the tickets immediately. (my script has alerted me to available […]

i turned 23 on wednesday. i celebrated by taking my one final of the semester, which went surprisingly well. (i was pleased for two reasons: 1) i was able to put down a reasonable answer for each question; 2) my sense of academic apathy, first nurtured in senior year of undergrad, has finally blossomed this […]

christina and i took an impromptu trip to maine 2 weekends ago. her firm was sponsering a convention for grants administrators in portland. (yes, even people who underwrite grants have symposia.) the convention was from monday-wednesday; we decided to go up on saturday and spend two nights camping and biking along the maine coast. (being […]

sadly, it looks like we won’t be buying a house after all this summer. everything just didn’t come together, which is too bad, since christina and i were both excited to have our own place. fortunately, things probably worked out for the best. one of the reasons for my sanguine outlook is that we’ll have […]

i’m really hungry. it’s amazing – the students and faculty i work with don’t seem to eat at all. without anyone’s lead to follow, i constantly find myself forgetting to eat lunch. luckily, christina has taken a shine to cooking since we’ve moved to boston, which means that i usually enjoy a solid dinner. unfortunately, […]

argh, dsl (and therefore the webserver) was down for the past 6 days. can’t wait to ditch verizon when we move …