5:56am: I bloody hate when you wake up just before your alarm. I had literally just come out of a dream (of course I can’t remember what it was now, but at the time when I popped awake, I could remember every detail). Also: see 6 hours of sleep.
7:10am: Met up with Devin at the Carnegie Mellon University Center for our first joint workout of the week. We’ve started a good rhythm over the past couple weeks of weightlifting together twice a week, but this week saw a lot of morning obligations on my part that kept me away. Today we did back, shoulders, and chest, followed by a pair of games of racquetball. My previous partner moved away: he and I played for years and actually got really freaking good, though all-time I have about a 40% victory rate against him. He was good. Devin is coming along, though I still beat up on him pretty good 😛 I suspect it won’t last long, considering I hear his girlfriend is also a racquetball fan who also beats up on him; with all this competition, he’s going to improve very quickly.
10:06am: Excellent workout! Shower, head up to GHC to get some work done before 1:30 CSM lab.
10:45am: WHOA FREE CATERED BREAKFAST FROM PAMELA’S omnomnommm.
11:39am: Exhaustion already feels like it’s creeping in. Ugggghhh.
12:50pm: Had a discussion with Aaron and Devin about the “hello this is dog” meme and why reddit seems to think it’s so funny. As in, 20k-votes-in-70-days funny. I think it’s funny, certainly, but worth the effort of upvoting it on reddit and making it viral? Maybe it’s just my general distaste for the site in general, or that I would’ve found something like this significantly more worthwhile. All of 0.001% of the material on reddit is actually amusing / interesting. Which, admittedly, is orders of magnitude better than 4chan.
1:15pm: CSM lab time! So excitezzzzz…..
1:25pm: Decided to forgo coffee and fly by the seat of my pants at lab. Here’s hoping I can brain well.
2:30pm: Student asked me a question about solving for the steady state concentration of the total amount of ligand in a system, and I had to read the question about four times just to understand what was going on. Definitely not braining well.
2:38pm: Another student came up to me asking if I could meet with him one-on-one. This is ok with me. What came next was not ok: “I don’t understand anything.” First of all, that is clearly not true since you are in a graduate-level course. Second of all, there’s no reason for me to meet with you if you have nothing specific to go over, since all I’d have you do is read through the lecture notes until you came across something you didn’t understand, at which point you can ask me to clarify it. Therefore, go over the lecture notes, mark what you don’t understand, and then meet with me. I’m not going to re-enact all of the 1.5-hour lectures we’ve had since the start of the semester.
3:15pm: Later than I’d been hoping, but lab finished and I’m on my way to BST3 to meet with all the PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS who are visiting this weekend. A handful of us (not me, thankfully; needed a break from presentations this week) are presenting on our work to give them a taste of what goes on within our program, followed by dinner and some well-mannered frivolity at the nearby Warhol Museum.
3:30pm: Keith gave a great presentation on the structural end of our program. …even though I really didn’t understand any of it (frankly, structure throws me for a loop. and MD is ridiculously boring. IN MY HUMBLE AND MEANINGLESS OPINION).
3:45pm: Josh gave a fantastic presentation on imaging. Then again, I’m biased, because that’s what I do, too.
4:05pm: Jose gave a great presentation on systems modeling. This would have been my second choice if imaging did not work out. This stuff is wicked interesting. And why am I not surprised that he ended his presentation with a slide comprised exclusively of nyan cat.
4:25pm: Aaron wraps up a great presentation on genomics. He managed to squeeze four distinct lolcats into his slide deck. A man after my own heart.
4:45pm: Outside the presentation room, we congregate for a poster session and generally socialize with the prospective students before eating dinner. For me, this involved talking with Jose and Murat Can as we educated Josh as to the goings-on of our ridiculous email list.
5:05pm: Depart! Dinner was only just being served, but as The Lady’s mom is visiting this weekend, we have our own dinner and evening plans (kicking things off with dinner at Point Brugge. literally no excuse can supersede that restaurant).
6:29pm: The Lady and her mom pick me up from my place. GOIN’ TO POINT BRUGGE BRB ZOMG.
8:35pm: Delicious Belgian-style dinner, complete with one entire bottle of pinot (plus another that we’re bringing home…don’t worry, The Lady’s driving and she didn’t have any), and that was one awesome dinner. Wooooooo.
8:45pm-???: We talk about everything as we polish off the second bottle. We also introduce The Lady’s mom to “My Drunk Kitchen”, “How it should have ended”, and other internet phenomenons that we find amusing. Talk ranges from the meaning of life to the religious health care debate to whatever else you can imagine (intoxication via alcohol tends to wax philosophical).
11:45pm: I walk home: the benefits of living 0.8 miles away.
12:06am: Dammit, my Mahout spectral clustering jobcrashed after 36 hours of running due to an “OutOfMemoryException”? BULLSHIT. Oh well, I’ll debug tomorrow. Er, later today.
12:13am: Craaaaash.
Theatre of Consciousness 