Still on the road

Nothing deep today, as I'm still a bit strung out from the rapid changes in scenery and roadmap that have been the last couple of weeks. (They've mostly, in fact almost entirely, been good changes, but they're happening at such a dizzying rate that it's hard to keep up.)

I'm in Nevada, TX right now, at the home of the parents of one of my friends from the linear programming class I dropped. (As he's an operations-research PhD student, I'll be referring to him as Black Ops Nick.) I'll be heading on to Houston alone today, after lunch with doissetep, to which I am quite looking forward. The drive down was peaceful and the weather was good, though the traffic on the two-lane roads in Kansas left something to be desired. We spent much of the trip singing. Black Ops Nick had an excellent selection of music with him, and won major bonus points for being able to do the lead-singer tremolo on "Making Love Out of Nothing at All." (I do not require my road-trip buddies to be good singers, but I like it when they like to sing, and it's even better when they have good voices.)

Driving is good thinking time for me; I had an interesting idea about route-planning algorithms which take historical traffic-condition data into account, which I'll post about at length later and hope to get input on from steer and other graph-theory junkies.

Peculiar dream last night: I was at a debate tournament, like the ones I went to in high school, with several people I know from the CS department. ti94 had signed up for the impromptu-speaking category, so I went to watch him perform. He received the topic "Fold something," and had a minute to prepare. He proceeded to fold himself into a weird contorted shape, then delivered his speech with his head poking out from between his legs and his arms wrapped over his thighs. I'm not convinced that's a physically feasible position.

Anyway, time to get a shower and get on the road. Likely staying in tonight, but we'll see.