Friday/Shabbat – Day 235/236
March 28, 2013
Friday was my usual morning of work and TA training and meeting in the afternoon. Wasn’t feeling so well for much of the day and ended up skipping on the Glee Club trip to Boston. Felt my health would be best served back on campus.
Shabbat dinner was something very very exciting this week. The bi-annual Levine CIS@Shabbat. The dinner for Jewish computer scientists (and Louis Petro #psaklouis). Dinner was lovely, the conversations binary and lively and I felt very much at home. I’ve been getting much closer to Ariella recently, and this was another good chance to hang out together.
Shabbat was Aviva’s birthday and as such a surprise lunch was planned. Ariel Menche, her boyfriend had come in for the weekend and we had a great time surprising her with a loud happy birthday, shortly after she awoke. Lunch went for a couple of hours, again in excellent company, though less nerdy than the night before.
The afternoon was a good ‘shluf’ (nap) before coding again till 5:30AM, when I finally got my latest project complete!
Wednesday/Thursday – Day 233/234
March 25, 2013
Wednesday was the usual mix again, nothing exciting. An hour or so on the piano here, a lecture there.
Rehearsal as per usual in the evening, nothing particularly notable here.
Thursday saw the cancellation of physics, due to an overseas professor and a failure of the video projection system. Lunch was a good chat with Robbie Glynn, during which a poorer individual from West Philly stopped by our conversation on tech and garnered assistance from us in figuring out how to use his new calculator.. That was most certainly a unique experience. Spent another hour and a half in Sweeten Alumni House playing on their beautiful Boston Grand Piano. Unfortunately I didn’t bring enough music with me and was relegated to those I knew best (plus a little jazz improvisation).
Lunch at Hillel, a few more long conversations, then back to my room to watch the video lecture for Physics. Then I tried looking at the homework attached to the class and almost gave up on the spot. Intensely difficult problems with little connection to the lecture material. This was going to take some serious hard work.
In the evening I was planning on going to see Patience as presented by The Penn Singers, however unfortunately, my TAing got in the way. I was holding extra office hours for the first milestone submission of their project and got quite caught up helping the numbers of students who were still working on it late the night it was due. Ended up hanging around till midnight and then walking back with a few students.
Monday/Tuesday – Day 231/232
March 21, 2013
I’m really noticing now how long I’ve been away now, starting to miss home quite a lot. The prospect of staying longer for an internship while still appealing has lost a little of the shine and I’m investigating ways to come home at least for a little before starting something of that nature. Physics tutorial was cancelled today due to our professor being on travel, thus I slept in a little later. Almost decided not to go to Networking but thought it might be wise given the upcoming release of project 2. Turned out it wasn’t really worth my time, slept through most of it.
Then it was back to my room for another interview with a big tech company. I’m slowly getting the hang of them but I still wasn’t confident that I aced it. However, I did have an interesting conversation on the rate of convergence for a Taylor Series computation of the root of a real number. Turns out at the end of the day it’s slower than the Babylonian method! Who knew! This was also the last big firm thus far not to turn me down so I was pretty hopeful.
Recitation this afternoon was fun, as I violated the ‘don’t play with food’ rule by demonstrating the importance of version control using jam, candy and pictures made out of the above. The rest of the recitation was a workshop on git and DVCS.
The night was made up of my usual gruelling rehearsal schedule, no rest for the baritone in me!
Tuesday started with a pre-recorded lecture from Prof. Mele of physics as he was still away on travel. A quick break for lunch at Hillel and then a singing lesson which was pretty good today, I’m slowly improving at transitioning between primo and secondo passagio. Also had great fun playing with more of the musical subtleties in the jazz numbers I was performing. Things are going very well on that front.
Office hour, nothing special to report, but that all my funds from working so hard this semester have been guzzled up by the Glee Club. Out of all the money I’ve made, a paltry $12 remains after dues, tour payments and unexpected fees that were levied from last semester. I’m not exactly super excited about that, but I guess the price of admission is worth it.
Tonight’s rehearsal was far too short, only and hour, and was marred by a full club meeting discussing disciplinary issues within the club. More of a sad meeting than anything. It also ran substantially late. No rest for the wicked.