Somehow I missed the past two days in my web journal. Dunno how that happened.
The Astronomy department IM softball team won it's second game of the season tuesday evening, making us 2-4 thus far. If we win our last game of the season, we might have a chance at the playoffs, but we'll be playing the only unbeaten team next week, so I wouldn't bet on it.
Yesterday I worked on my homework set and got a little bit done on my essays, but I still have a lot of work left. It's going to take a lot of effort before I'm done with everything.
With a brief break for lunch at noon and a brief break for dinner at six. My time today was roughly split in half between my research paper (mostly frustrating today) and my essays for NSF (not as frustrating), with a one hour section of lecture in 110B just for kicks.
I wish I had something interesting to say, but on a day like today I really haven't thought about anything interesting. Anything interesting for a weblog, that is. I mean, I could post the rough drafts for the two essays that I have rough drafts, out of the four total required. But that would be even more boring, so I won't. Perhaps when I have final drafts complete I will post them for the entirety of my viewship to read and endure. Who knows, perhaps one of my devoted readers needs a cure for insomnia, in which case I am happy to oblige.
I never seem to post on Saturdays. I'm not sure why. I also seem to forget a lot on Fridays too. Once again, I'm not sure why.
Anyway, I spent most of this weekend working on my essays for the NSF fellowship, just like last weekend. In fact, the past two weekends have been... not as fun as I'd like. Thankfully, that trend is going to continue all the way through the weekend of the 22nd, by which time I will have completed the NSF application, the physics GRE, the general GRE, and the second midterm in my 110B class. Then I'll have about a month or so to do applications for grad schools. Somewhere towards the early part of that month will be my 110B final, the last final I'll ever take as an undergrad. And then there's my research paper, which I have to have done by the beginning of December. But I'd say by the end of December I should finally have some free time.
A few days ago I decided that I'd had enough of emacs, and hence made an effort to learn vi. These are text editors, in case you're wondering. Anyway, I have to say, I don't think I'll go back to emacs. I never really liked using a mouse when editing text, and emacs is so slow to load when I'm working from home that I just got fed up with it. So now I use VI, and although I'm just a beginner and constantly have to look up commands to do things, I think I'm a little more efficient with it than I am with emacs. Plus it's cooler to use VI than emacs, since anyone and their mothers could use emacs.
ESPN.com's Page 2 has a great article on how the alternate universe world series between the Cubs and Red Sox is going. I could barely stop laughing while reading it here.
The astronomy department had it's first triumph this season, toppling the hapless frat known as Pike by a score of 11-8. It was nice to finally get a win. I had a good game at the plate, going 3 for 3 and hitting the ball hard on a line each time.
Meanwhile, work continues to progress on my essays for the NSF fellowship, my research paper, and my homework set in Physics 110B due on Friday.
Normally when I come home on Mondays I'm really exhausted and can't get any work done, but tonight I listened to all three of my Bill Evans CDs while I got a good amount of work done on my research paper. It definitely helped to listen to some jazz piano while working tonight. A very productive day, altogether.
Another weekend will have come and gone, plus most of Monday.
I saw Cal beat up on Washington State University in a swim meet, even though our star player, Natalie Coughlin (holder of several World records), didn't even play. I guess our swim team is good.
I also made a nice dinner using a recipe from a book that my Dad gave me last weekend. It has penne pasta, chicken, sun-dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, some salad mix leaves, and a little bit of balsamic vinegar. I was pleased with the result. It was basically the first time I've ever gone to the supermarket with the explicit purpose of buying certain items with this dinner in mind, and it worked well.
I also worked on my essays for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. I made good progress, but I've still got a lot of work to do before the November 3rd deadline.
I have to concede to the Red Sox fans in terms of pain and suffering. In fact, it's not even close. The way their team tortures their fans year after year is incredible. Also, I'd like to comment that this World Series turned out as badly as it possibly could have, Marlins vs. Yankees. I mean, the absolute worst possible result. That really sucks.
Once again the Astronomy department IM softball team lost a game with the tying run on base in the bottom of the last inning. This time, the tying run was on third base with two out when the last guy up hit a grounder to third for the final out. In addition, we had one guy get thrown out easily trying to advance to second on a wild throw from the third baseman. So, it was a frustrating way to go down, especially with what happened last week.
I watched Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home last night. Two alternate subtitles for that movie include: 1) The Attack of the Big Black Cigar and 2) Just How Much Can We Screw Up the Space-time Continuum? That movie does have some solid comedic moments though, provided you are willing to accept that the crew of the USS Enterprise would be completely unable to adjust themselves to life in a different century.
This one wasn't so bad. The GRE workshop went ok, although I did screw up on a problem that I could have done. But I made a little progress at work, got some of my homework set for 110B done, and went to a meeting for the solar spectroscopy project that I'm sort of working on.
Yesterday my parent's visited me, which was nice. We went out to lunch at this good Italian restaurant and they dropped off a few things for me, plus they got to check out my apartment. All in all it was a good time.
Update on what has happened so far this weekend and a preview of what's to come...
Last night I played in the first ever Astronomy department Texas Hold 'Em tournament. There were 29 people entered in the tournament and after I was eliminated, only four were left. So I did well, and for my time and effort I received a set of poker chips (cheap ones, worth about $3 or $4). For a $7 entry fee and five hours of playing poker, I'd say I did all right! Also, for some reason, it was spontaneously decided that to keep track of how many people had been eliminated in the tournament each person who was eliminated could signify themselves as either 'X' or some combination of Robert Shane Bussman(n). So we had R. Shane Bussman as the first person eliminated, Robert S. Bussman as the second, X as the third, R. Shane Bussmann as the fourth, and so on. I thought it was amusing.
After the poker tournament was over, I headed over to a friend's house for a party that a bunch of undergrad friends of mine from Astronomy were at. So I hung around there for a few hours and that was really fun.
Today, I went to see the Cal Men's Water Polo (ranked #1 in the nation!) play against #16 Air Force at 11:45am. We played a very strong game, shutting down AF in the second half to pull away with an easy 14-5 victory. I was very impressed with the team's speed and strength. However, I have to admit that water polo is one of those thug games where fouls are often not called, mainly because most of the fouls occur underwater where you can't see them. Anyway, that was a fun way to spend my time. Then I came home and ate lunch, then went right back on campus to see the #9 Cal Women's Vollleyball team take on #4 Stanford in a very important PAC 10 matchup. The match was absolutely awesome, with Cal winning 3-2 after being down two games to one. In the fourth game, Cal was losing at one point 18-22 or something close to that when our star player, a Croatian import, Mia Jerkov (pronounced YAIR-cove, not, for example, JERK-off), took control of the game and reeled off two aces and two kills plus an assist to give Cal the lead. From there, we followed through to win the fourth game and carried that momentum into the final game, which was close but Cal won in the end 15-9.
Tonight I'm heading to Castro, Tiffany's co-op because they're having their big disco party tonight. There are always a lot of people at this particular party, so it ought to be interesting.
Tomorrow my parents are coming into town to visit me. They're going to bring a couple of things up with them that I need, check out my apartment, and then we're going to go out to lunch somewhere. The Cal men's soccer team is playing tomorrow at 2pm, so I may go check that out at some point too.
I have my midterm for 110B midterm tomorrow. I've spent basically all week studying for it, and I believe that I am as ready for it as I possibly can be, so we'll see how it goes.
Then tomorrow evening there is a hold'em poker tournament in the astronomy department that I'm going to play in, so that ought to be fun. Then after that is a party at a friend of mine's where hopefully a bunch of my other friends from Astronomy will also be going. Meanwhile, Tiffany is going to hike up Half Dome at Yosemite during the night with a couple of friends from where she lives and arrive at the top around sunrise. She's done it before, and I have done it too (although not at the same time). In fact, I have pictures to prove it, although I don't think I've uploaded them yet to the gallery. Yet another thing to do when I have time.
There were several signs up around campus yesterday saying "Vote, or be Terminated." Well, I voted, but it seems termination happened anyway. I'm not sure yet whether to think it's a disaster or simply humorous that Arnold is now our state's governor. I guess my feeling right now is that if he had run in an ordinary election with a strong list of candidates he would not have had a chance, but then again we did have something like the highest voter turnout in recent time, and he won by a clear margin, so who knows?
Our IM softball team had a chance to win last night. We lost 8-7 with the tying run on second base in the bottom of the last inning. It was nice at least finally to have a chance in a game, even if we didn't come out on top in the end.
I dropped Physics 141A today. The only bad feeling I have about is that I should have done it sooner, but I guess I wanted to see how the first midterm went, and I wanted to make sure that it really was too much to do. Well, it is done. Now I have to concentrate on what's left.
I am considering dropping Physics 141A, solid state physics. The main point is that I don't need it and I have plenty of other important things to spend my time on. We got back the first midterm today in class, and I did ok on it, getting slightly above the mean. But I was really hoping to get an A in the class to improve my physics GPA. Now there is certainly no guarantee that is going to happen. Of course, there wasn't any such guarantee that it would happen before I enrolled in the class, but I believe that prior to the semester starting I thought I would have more free time than I have had so far.
It has been my intention to apply for fellowships for the first couple of years of grad school, so that I am not reliant on teaching or some professor's money to do research, but I haven't even had time to start preparing my application, and the deadline is November 4th. Also, I haven't put nearly as much time into studying for the Physics GRE as I thought I would. Finally, the paper that I'm working on based on my research over the summer is taking longer than I initially planned, and that really has to get done before I apply to grad schools in December. I would like to submit it in the beginning of November, so that if there are changes that need to be made there will still be time for that to happen before grad school application deadlines. In my current line of thinking, each of these things is more important than completing Physics 141A.
You might ask, why 141A instead of 110B? Well, the answer is that almost everything that I'm learning in 110B is very important to concepts frequently used in Astronomy, so it is critical that I have that stuff down. Meanwhile, in 141A I'm learning about techniques and concepts that are frequently used in Condensed Matter Physics, an area of research that is quite separate from Astronomy and hence something that I will probably never deal with for the remainder of my career.
Some reasons for remaining in the course: I feel that the stuff we are about to learn is more interesting than the stuff we have already learned. This is simply a judgement based on the topics of the remaining chapters as compared to the previous ones. Second, I've already completed 1/3 of the homework sets and one midterm, so I've invested a lot of time in the course to simply abandon it at this stage. Third, I have never dropped a class this late in the semester. Then again, I've never been a fifth-year senior before either.
While the main reason for dropping the class would be to free up much needed time for me, it is also the case that my experience so far with other students in the class has left something to be desired. The primary interaction I have with my classmates is on the day that homework sets are due, when I am trying to figure out how to solve the last part(s) of each problem and double checking my answers. However, it seems that most of the other students do things like adding in mysterious factors and using the infamous double-arrow implication sign to go from step A to step B when it is not at all clear how such a procedure was effected to complete their homework sets, which simply isn't the right way to do it. Another issue related to homework sets is that the due date has been moved to Monday, which really doesn't work with my schedule. This is because I have been going to discussion section on Tuesdays up till now, but Tuesday discussion sections are rendered nearly useless because no-one (including myself) has looked at the assignment prior to section, so nobody can ask any decent questions and the whole thing is a waste of time. The other discussion section is on Thursday, when I normally am hard at work on my 110B homework set. This week in particular, there is a midterm in 110B on Friday, so it's guaranteed that I won't be working on 141A until the weekend, which corresponds to two days before the assignment is due without any chance to talk to the professor or GSI in person. Add to that the fact that the GSI has been slow to respond to email the past two weeks and we have a very bad situation.
All this considered though, it will still be hard for me to drop the class. I'll have to talk to other people and see what they think.
Both the 49ers and Vikings failed to meet my expectations today. Minnesota fell behind early to the Vick-less Falcons, then came storming back for a relatively easy victory. Meanwhile, the 49ers scrapped together a 24-17 win against their old coach, Steve Mariucci and the Detroit Lions. And Terrell Owens didn't choke anyone. Yeah.
Unfortunately, however, the Twins were eliminated by the Yankees, going 0-2 at the Metrodome, which really surprised me. I thought they'd win at least one game there, and probably lose game 5 at Yankee Stadium, but Johan Santana didn't pitch well and the Twins offense was shut down again. Additionally, the A's lost to Boston in game 4 of their playoff series in continuing a long tradition of October failures for the baseball teams I root for.
Today was one of the worst days of sports in recent history. The Twins lost to the Yankees, The Giants were eliminated by the Marlins in an atrocious excuse for professional baseball, and California was simply dominated by Oregon State University in football. The only thing necessary to cap the weekend off perfectly is for the Vikings and the 49ers to lose in football tomorrow. As an added bonus, I am hoping that Terrell Owens will attempt to strangle coach Dennis Erickson after the game, a la Latrell Sprewell and P.J. Carlesimo circa 1997.
The Giants kill me on an annual basis. Sigh... Oh yeah, Jose Cruz Jr., you suck!
I just got back from the best baseball game I've ever seen. The A's beat the Red Sox 5-4 in 12 innings, and the winning run scored on a bunt single with the bases loaded and two outs. Earlier, the A's tied the game in the bottom of the ninth by scoring a run with two outs. The best part about the whole thing is that I kept score during the game, so I know exactly how it happened. I also took some pictures during the game, including the game-ending mob of A's players on the field after the winning run scored in the bottom of the 12th. Eventually they'll get posted.