Nerd Central

I don't know how Mike talked me into it, but I ended up going to the Magic prelease today for the new Time Spiral set. I've gone with him, Judy, and Kelvin to a prerelease for Dissension, so it's not exactly something I've never done before. Still, I can't help but feel a little self conscious being at one of them after having seen the kind of people that go to those things. Nerd Central doesn't even begin to describe it.

Mike, Judy, and them were already set to go to the prerelease in San Jose, and had even gotten together a huge group of 8 people to go. Out here in Ann Arbor, I was expecting to be left out, and didn't particularly mind. Then Mike went and showed me there's a prerelease being held in Detroit a half hour away from me, and he had a friend at UMich who plays. Before I knew it, we were driving out there and then half my day is gone, spent playing Magic. What a way to go.

Iowa

This weekend some of Jin's friends from Iowa came to visit. Jin's from Iowa, and went to high school with one of them. The rest are all former/current students at the University of Iowa. Apparently 4 of them decided this weekend was a good time to drive down to visit some people they knew at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. How they decided they had enough time for a 6 1/2 hour detour to Michigan on top of that is beyond me.

The 4 of them make quite a bunch: a computer science major working at John Deere, a linguistics major taking a year off before going to law school, a senior studying computer science, and a sophomore studying psychology. They all seem to get along pretty well, starting a pillow fight Saturday night that caused enough noise to make one of our neighbors pound on our door. They're also pretty hardy sleepers, since they had one sleeping bag and 2 pillows among the 4 of them, yet somehow managed to spend the night on our hardwood floor.

Some might think they're a little weird, and they wanted to know if they gave me a good impression of Iowa. What immediately comes to mind is 6 people crammed into one car, bubbles of personal space, and a game you're not supposed to think about. It was pretty fun having them around though... weird, but fun. So that's Iowa for you.

Going Home

My advisors are busy people, so finding a time when they're free to talk is somewhat hard. I managed to catch Prof. Bertacco in her office today so I stopped by to ask questions about papers I was reading. She didn't have much time to answer my questions, but she did tell me about a conference she was preparing to go to. It turns out she's preparing to go to GSRC which is in San Jose at the end of September. She asked if I was interested in going, and I jumped on the opportunity. Who wouldn't say yes to a free trip home?

Just then my other advisor, Prof. Austin, walked in and asked if Prof Bertacco had finished a poster for the upcoming conference. She said she didn't know she had to make one, but came up with the idea that I should make the poster and speak at the student poster session. So I have to create a poster about research I have no idea about, and prepare enough so I don't sound like an idiot during the poster session. Not exactly a free trip home, but it's good enough. I thought I wouldn't be back before Thanksgiving, so it'll be nice to go back and spend some time with people from home.

Unproductive

I can't believe the weekend is over. Now that classes have started and I've gotten a chance to meet with my advisors, I finally have some work to do. Then, the weekend rolls around and I end up barely doing any of the things I wanted to get done. Where did the time go?

I guess I can see why Saturday was unproductive. Jin's family friend Perry unexpectedly stopped by and took us out to eat. He did his undergrad at UMich, then took a few years off, and came back to get an M.S. We ate lunch downtown at a Japanese restaurant, then browsed around the local farmers market, and somehow ended up buying groceries at Meijer. I felt bad for dragging Perry around with us on errands, but he had a car and we had to take advantage of it =).

Afterwards, I played some tennis with some fellow grad students, which was both good and bad. It was good to get some exercise, but I'm horribly out of practice. I was using someone else's racquet, so at least I have an excuse... Then I made it back in time to get dinner with my neighbors Adam and Angie. They had invited us over for some pasta and salad, which was great. It turns out Adam and Angie like to play board games and brought a small collection of them with them to Ann Arbor, so we played some Cranium, Balderdash, and Guillotine. That basically took up the rest of the night, and before I knew it, Saturday was over.

Today I don't really have any excuses as to why I didn't get anything done. I told myself that I had stuff I needed to do, yet I somehow always found another distraction to keep me from doing it. I guess I'm too used to working, where I could do whatever I wanted on the weekends. I gotta find a way to switch gears and get myself back into school mode.

Back to School

The first week of classes is over, and it went by a lot faster than I expected. I'm only taking 2 classes this semester: EECS 570 - Parallel Computing Architectures and EECS 578 - Computer-Aided Design Verification of Digital Systems. Both of these classes are high level graduate courses, and this will be the first time I've taken classes like these, so I'm not sure what to expect. So far all I know is that I'll be spending very little time in a classroom, since I only have 1 1/2 hours of lecture every day. That's a welcome change from my undergraduate days, but I guess it doesn't mean I'll be spending any less time at school.

I've been getting everything squared away for my office, where I'll probably spend most of my time slaving away for the next 5 years. I share the room with 3 of my advisor's other students. All of them are older than me, in their 3rd and 4th years toward getting a Ph.D. They're all nice people, and I'm sure I'll get to know them better since we'll be spending a lot of quality time together in that office. Since I don't have much to do yet, I haven't spent much time in the office, but pretty much everyone is there whenever I stop by. If that's any indication of the amount of time I'll be spending there, I might as well just pack my bags and move in.

Last Day of Freedom

So this is it... my last day of freedom from responsibility. This past weekend has been both relaxing and uneventful. However, I did meet up with John, a CSE grad student who's really into board games. Jin and I invited him and his fiancee over, along with Merrick, and the 5 of us got together at my place to play some games. We played some Boggle, which Jin is just too good at, as well as some card games that were new to me, Qwitch and Mille Bornes. John also brought Illuminati, but after telling us that a short game would take 2 hours, we decided to hold off on that for another time. The new games were nothing great, but it was good just to hang out.

Jin also got me hooked on bridge. We started playing one night, just the 2 of us, even though the game is meant for 4 players. We'd go through the initial hands and she'd help me with the bidding, and then one person would play offense while the other person played both sides of the defense. I hate to admit it, but it's a lot more sophisticated than I thought it would be, and it was pretty fun. That night we played until 2:30 AM, and even then we had to tear ourselves away from the cards.

Once school starts, I'm not sure if I'll still have time to do this kind of stuff. It's time to switch gears though, and I've got to see if I can still handle school after having been out for so long.