Let's see: at the end of this semester, I will be staying permanently at Amy's apartment, and it will be my primary address of sorts from now onwards. It's really exciting, since I finally have a place I can call home. Plus, my housemates are really nice, so I really like being there.
I gave my presentation to the RPI chapter of the ACM last week as well. Believe it or not, it was a success! People genuinely seemed interested in what I had to say, and I got asked back to give future presentations (at least once a semester!). Hooray! Also, they advertised my talk all over campus, which, for me, was quite shocking/flattering, since most talks do not get advertised. About 20 people showed up, which was pretty good, and I got some really good questions. If anyone is interested, the slides for my presentation are up on the main page of my website.
Let's see... what else? Oh! My good friend Amy (who's going to graduate at the end of this semester.. *sniff*) and I decided to dress up together for Halloween this year. My sophomore year and her freshman year, we got dressed up as pirates, and it was a ton of fun :-) Since this is her last semester, I guess we're going to have a repeat just for old time's sake. But, what to be? Our first idea was going to be "Cowboys and Indian" (guess who the Indian would be?). Then we had a "Disney Princesses" idea (I would have been Jasmine), and we even had a girl-version of the "Village People" idea (again I'd be the Indian... but there weren't enough girls!). So Amy and I were talking one night, and I jokingly (emphasize, JOKINGLY) suggested that we go as characters from Sailor Moon. Horrifically enough, she ran with it, and it now seems I will be Sailor Mars and she is going to be Sailor Mercury. Amy's even dyeing her hair blue! I'll post a picture or two if my dignity allows it.
So this last weekend, we carved pumpkins and worked on our costumes. Believe it or not, we actually were able to make pleated skirts from scratch (go us!) and the costumes are probably going look surprisingly good, considering our total lack of any sewing expertise. We're almost done... though I want to save the actual pictures of us till after Halloween, I might post a quick pick of just my costume.. I'm so excited! Our pumpkins also turned out quite nice. Below are two pictures of Amy's pumpkin, my pumpkin, and our suitemate's pumpkin (coincidentally also Amy). I also have a closeup of my pumpkin, which was a black kitty against a moon. Pretty simple, but I haven't carved a pumpkin since I was like five, so it was a heck of an experience for me.
Oh! And of course, I should mention Computer Science Day, which has been the highlight of the past few weeks. Rensselaer hosted the first annual Computer Science Day last friday, in which we welcomed four world renowned researchers to come and talk about research related to a particular topic. This year's theme was Computational Geometry, and our researchers talked about geometry and topology as they applied to db search (Dr. Indyk), Computer Vision (Dr. Ponce), Bioinformatics (Dr. Edelsbrunner) and Random Sampling Methods (Dr. Kannan). It was positively amazing, and I attended all the talks. 12 am Friday, I was elated, and singing random CS carols that I made up, like "Little CS boy", which were horrific knockoffs of existing Christmas carols, such as "Litte Drummer Boy". I will spare you the lyrics. But to see how giddy I was, here is a picture of that Amy took of me and her on the morning of CS day:
Don't I look happy? :-)
Anyways, that's all for now. This post is waaay too long. I will probably post some other random junk about what I've been up to in the next few hours/days. This week is going to be busy, since aside from working on probability, I still have the halloween costumes to make. But you know what? I'm doing well, and I'm doing happy :-) So life is good.
More later!
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