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I just finished my application to CMU's IMPAQT project. This project attempts to better connect CMU's Pittsburgh campus with its other campus in Doha, Qatar. I think I made some good points in my application, but  I always have trouble with these things. I also tried to keep it light. Let's see how that works out.

Last night Sick Ridiculous and the Sick Ridiculous played a party; the CS CMU Open House Weekend After-Party. The party was great. There were tons of people. And while our set started off a bit rocky, eventually we got it together and made something good happen. This included our final, and newest song, OPENHO~1.MID, a ode to Open House Weekend. I encourage you to go out right now and download it for free at the following uniform resource location: 

http://www.last.fm/music/Sick+Ridiculous+and+The+Sick+Ridiculous/Custom+Party+Music/OPENHO~1.MID

To those of you who showed up and cheered us on, thanks!

 Wow, I just saw a sign saying that today on campus they are having a "beam-signing ceremony" over at the new Hillman-Gates-Computer-Science-Future-Technologies center. I wonder if Steely McBeam is going to be there...

I haven't posted in so long, this is going to be a two part-er!

I went to Pittsburgh last weekend, and did some radical stuff. I saw about as many friends as possible during the 48 hours I was there. I saw Wall-E. It is good. You should see it. Go early in the day, so you are surrounded by screaming kids, as we were. We also went to the Carnegie International Exhibit, "Life on Mars." They tell me this is a big deal in the world of contempo art, and it was in fact pretty rad. "Cave Man Man," while weird, is probably one of the most unique pieces of art I have ever seen. You owe it to yourself to check it out (http://blog.cmoa.org/CI08/2008/02/thomas-hirschhorn.php). Yeah, I don't know why but livejournal won't accept my links... so you'll have to copy and paste that stuff old school (or CTRL-C, CTRL-V for you power users).

In Austin I've been sort of working for two masters, doing my job at Sun during the day, but then school stuff at night. I am working on the camera-ready version of the OOPSLA paper, and I applied to the OOPSLA doctoral symposium on Wednesday. I have found that this isn't so bad, if I just do enough each night. I've found that the best way to do this is to set a timer (1 hour exactly!) and work on my school stuff until it goes off. Then I am free to read and watch "Lost" until bed time. It's a whirlwind life!

Hey I heard from Tom that the CMU Computer Science PhD program was developing a reputation as, the party Computer Science PhD program. Anyone else heard anything like this care to ellaborate? I mean, it certainly sounds like a good thing to me, but I'm wondering how this all got started.

Don't you ever wonder? Why do they call the wheel on the side of the paper towl despenser the "emergency feed?" Is it ever really an emergency, just because you don't have access to paper towels? I propose they call it, the wheel you use on a regular basis because a lot of people don't pull down with two hands.

In other news, today is Mardi Gras. It doesn't really mean a whole lot when you're outside of New Orleans, and I don't feel like I have to go out and party tonight or anything, but it is nice to know that all of my friends are having a ridiculous amount of fun right now (or at least did up until today, since Mardi Gras day is never actually that fun).

Finally, this Friday (like every Friday) is Formal Friday here at CMU. Formal Friday is a creation of simrob. This Friday, I will be suiting up, so won't you do the same?

Finally Finally, listen to Tom7's new Album-a-day, Exile on Atari St. It's pretty good. Highlights include, the first two songs and the one about sugar pills.

Picture taken at CMU. I think it nicely sums up the all-encompassing nerdiness that is my life right now.

Well, it took two days to cook and display our chili, but it was all worth it. Pictures can be reached at my photo spot (pictures.nelsbeckman.com) and over at Thomas' pictures spot.

My department decided to compete in the chili cookoff as a last-second entry, and we kind of turned the whole thing into a party/cook-fest the night before.

Our chili was definitely the thickest, having the consistency of red beans and rice or refried beans. Needless to say, I thought it was great, but I don't think we were winning any awards.

In fact, one guy told us, "Don't quit your day jobs." Hilarious.

Three things to share:

1. I decided I wanted a drink this morning, and I wanted to try something new, so after walking over to the University Center, I finally decided on a "Rip It" engergy drink (Lime Wrecker flavor). Although I was pleasantly surprised when I first tasted it ("The finally managed to get gummi bear flavor in liquid form!") after going through about 5 of my 16oz, I decided it was nasty and was giving me a stomach ache.
   
2. Cold weather is finally upon us. Starting today, I will have a runny nose for the next sixth months.
3. Whenever they show movies in the University Center, they usually have some clever way of saying that the movie is $1 for CMU students and $3 for everyone else. Usually, it's related to the movie somehow. But I thought their poster for the movie hard candy (a film about pedophila) was especially out there. I let you decide if they went too far:

Hard Candy
14 year-old girls: $1
Pedophiles: $3

Well I didn't exactly finish the description of my weekend in a timely manner, and by this point, I've almost forgot about the whole thing, but there were some genuinely awesome times. E.g.)

• Went to Freeride, and picked out a bike. At freeride they have all kinds of old bikes, frames and parts. They quote you a price on a bike, which includes all the pieces you need to get it up and running, and then you get to use all their tools and stuff to fix the bike. They actually have some pretty nice bikes, and come this Thursday, I may be riding an old Raleigh with maximum sweetness and a leather seat. Jake and I spent like 4 hours there on Saturday.
• Saturday night was a party at Serge's, and I did enjoy myself even though I was the DD. A pretty neat mix of peeps.
• Sunday I went to a Pirates game. We had good seats, and the Pirates completed the sweep, so we were all feeling pretty hot.
• Top it all off with a Monday night football party which included all the fried food I could even imagine (fries, fried pirogies, corn dogs... all home made!). Would have been better with a Steeler's win, but I'm still feeling pretty high from the USC and Saints victories.

Doing my best to get work done this week while my advisor is out of town. I am also preparing for a SSSG talk on Monday, which nicely goes along with my practicum work (a report we have to write on our summer experiences).

Oh oh! But I got really excited when I found out a friend of mine from high school is now a starting wide receiver at Southern Mississippi. His name is Damion, and he seems to be doing pretty well. Here is his profile, and here is another one. I used to give this guy a ride home from basketball practice like every day. Although he has gotten a lot bigger and taller...

If you don't care about computers, you can shut your eyes for this entry.

I already had a lot of respect for the programming languages people here at CMU before they created this year's programming contest for the International Conference on Functional Programming. But this contest really put their cleverness in a whole new light. It had a neat back story, and clever problems that were actually fun to solve. I didn't actually compete, but did take the time to work on some of the problems on my own time. For all that, they were rewarded with the greatest recognition a computer scientist can receive: an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The article is a kind of neat look at a pretty obscure topic from a layman's point of view. Worth reading if only because "Yeah I go to school with those guys!!1!"

This is a little late for my first posting of the new semester, but I do feel it necessary to celebrate the new school year blog style. A few notes:

• Today was my first advisor meeting of the semester. It went relatively well.
• I am trying to fool my body into thinking that the semester hasn't started yet by going out every night of the week, and by going on a camping trip this weekend.
• Likewise, I have been watching TV at night, something I did during the summer but never before during the school year.
• I have a new office mate.
• Taffy is delicious.

In other news, I watched the 40-year-old Virgin again this week (I finally bought it). Last night I was stumbling around wikipedia and I discovered that there is actually a name for the whole Will Ferell/Vince Vaughn/Ben Stiller comedy cabal. They are known as the 'Frat Pack.'

Well it seems that I am rather busy at many of the current moments. However, I am currently so bored from working on my literature, survey/final class presentation for Analysis of Software Artifacts (wow, 4 slides written in an hour and 15 minutes? Excellent Progress!!) that I decided I could take a break to talk about the fun that I had this past weekend.

1. I went to my first Pirates game on Friday night. Pirates played the Phillies. Pirates won. Fireworks were displayed, as it was in fact Fireworks night. I really liked PNC Park and in fact had forgotten how much I enjoyed going to baseball games in general. I may have to hit that up more often when I'm working over on the northshore this summer.
2. Rewind earlier that day to where I am running in the Random Distance Run. There are plenty of pictures both here and here, and the results were posted here. 22nd place out of 52 or so finishers. I was all prepared with excuses about how I had been sick that week, etc. but since I was actually pretty happy with my performance (you wouldn't normally think so for 22nd place)  I'll save my excuses for another time!! (I should, however, like to point out that my advisor and I deserved 5th place in the student/advisor competition based on our finishing positions. But maybe, since Marwan and my advisor finished third together, that sort of "uses up" my advisor's position.)
   
3. Saturday night was awesome with trips to the GSA wine tasting and Pittsburgh's Art All Night after-wards. I can't say too much about the different wines because I was driving, but the red wine that I had was good, and most people seemed to be enjoying themselves.

Throughout it all I am working on this survey which will be my final project in analysis of software artifacts. The idea is to compare several different techniques (Data-flow, Model-checking, Type-based, Dynamic) for finding one particular software defect (in this case, race conditions). I have to say that is painful is this is, I'm sort of enjoying it. Thursday is the in-class presentation. It'll be a 50 minute, mini-lecture.

Other than that, not much to say. When this week is all over I will have pretty much emerged into summer and hopefully will be feeling awesome.

Today I was told by the second of two people that I really could go with a new picture on my homepage, and since I do in fact treasure the honest opinions of friends, I decided to go ahead and take it down while I search for a suitable replacement (I just went through all my pictures recently and found nothing, so I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to do yet.)

Gearing up for the big race at the moment. Campus seems to be going crazy today, what between ECE day, Brenton (a new PhD student who deferred from last year) visiting, and this trip I took over to the ETC to see some Claytronics promotional video (It was really neat; TEH FUTURE).

Also, I found someone who loves The Office (British AND Yankee) possibly more than I do. She was nice enough to offer to copy all the US ones that I hadn't seen and even made me feel like kind of a sellout for missing B.J. Novak's visit on Saturday night (I mean come on, I REALLY want to see him, but why do they put those things on weekends? Don't they know some of us have stuff to do?) We also had an interesting talk about the possibly effects of computers on one's ability to interact with human beings. I often think that I'm losing that ability one day at a time...

Guess that's it. Gotta figure a bunch of stuff out in the hour now before the race...

I finally bought some running shoes this past weekend. I had been running in basketball shoes for the past few months (which coincidentally is the total amount of time for which I have been running) and they were becoming very uncomfortable. So when I popped open the box after returning home, I found this little gem, which I thought was amazing:












I guess all the rational numbers had already been used up?

Oh also, there's this strange noise occurring in WEAN hall at the moment, and it has been going on for two days. It sounds kinda like guitar feedback, but it comes in and out. I'm thinking maybe it has something to do with the massive A/C units sitting 10 feet above my head, but it's massively annoying whatever it is. Maybe I'm going crazy though...

Last night I went to this concert on campus; Phantom Planet/Secret Machines. If I had to sum it up in one word, that word would be loud. I'm sure it didn't help that they moved an outdoor concert into a basketball gym because of the rain.

But look, don't get me wrong, I've been to my share of loud concerts, but they had Phantom Planet, what one might describe as indie-style party rock mic'ed up like they were Molly Hatchet or something. It was so loud, that you couldn't even really hear anything, paradoxically... Two of our friends left like within 2 minutes of arriving.

I sound like an old man, I know, but since we were surrounded by 18-year-olds (the highest proportion of fans seemed to be high schoolers and freshman) I felt like one too. Oh well... Phatom Planet ended up being okay, after killing off my midrange hearing, it got a lot better. I saw them back at USC, and have casually followed them since then.

In other news, the milk steamer on my espresso machine is now officially dead! I guess that's what I get for buying a $30 espresso machine. But I regret nothing!

Hey this is great:
Apparently, they are making a movie based on the book, "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" by Michael Chabon. This is a book that I have read recently, and enjoyed at least a fair amount, if only for the neat descriptions of Pittsburgh. (I still get that "Hey I know that place!" kind of feeling when I read books about places where I live. See "Less Than Zero" and "Liquor" for further proof.)

Anyway, the big question is whether or not they will film the movie in Pittsburgh. There are of course tons of money issues, and lots of posturing and back and forth. What it boils down to is whether or not the studio can get workers cheaply enough, or whether or not the city will be willing to give the studio even more incentives. But in a perfect world it would be filmed right here in the good 'ole Burgh. I would love to see CMU's steam plant (otherwise known as the Cloud Factory) as a central character in a Hollywood movie.

In other news, because of this Carnival thing, it's absolutely dead around here. How am I supposed to get work done when I know that everyone else is enjoying themselves so thouroughly?