Radio Free Meredith

Woke up late-ish-morning yesterday and found out that one of enochsmiles' colleagues was defending his thesis in a couple of hours, so we grumbled out of bed, dressed up, and made our way over to the Kasteelpark Arenberg engineering campus. It gets its name from the castle in the middle of it, which used to be an aristocratic hunting lodge but is now about 70% administration offices and 30% lecture halls for people presenting their dissertations. Markulf gave a fine presentation, and after a short roast by Bart, is now Dr. Kohlweiss. We hung around for a little of the reception, enjoying acceptably good wine and little sashimi-on-toast appetizers, then picked up two copies of the dissertation (I need to read the location-based privacy parts of it fairly soonish) and bugged out early to do some errands.

Said errands included picking up several packages that had accumulated at the post office, including presents from my mom for enochsmiles' and my upcoming birthdays. Nothing was actually labeled, so we divided them up according to who liked what best. I am now the proud owner of a wool-lined tan trenchcoat that is ever so slightly shiny and sheds rain like whoa -- a useful addition to my enormous collection of trenchcoats, particularly with the frequency of rain here -- and enochsmiles has a rain/warmup jacket that shines iridescent greenish-bluish-purple, like the carapace of a beetle. Neat stuff.

We then went home and did a bunch of dishes, since we'd made plans for D and his girlfriend S to come over and play poker later that night, briefly forgetting that we were also planning to put in an appearance at Markulf's post-defense party. So, around 9:30 we texted D and asked them to meet us at Metafoor instead of coming straight to our place; they were running a bit late anyway, so that worked out just fine. Many old colleagues had come to town for the defense, and we spent much of the party hanging out with enochsmiles' friend Lothar, a German now working in Norway at a research foundation that does a lot with both privacy and geophysical imaging. I'm not sure what the two have in common, but enochsmiles has been invited to come give a seminar, so we will probably go visit Norway in the next couple of months.

I think talking to Markulf has given enochsmiles some new perspective on his own dissertation. Markulf is one of those guys who seems perpetually organised and on track, but apparently he spent the last four years having a lot of the same misgivings about the quality and value of his research that enochsmiles has had. It's one of those things that is true for every graduate student, but it helps to be reminded that other people have the same uncertainties and still make it through.

Eventually D and S rolled up, and we made our way back home to break out the cards. D had forgotten the poker chips, so after I poured the beers I poked around to find a suitable substitute; we settled on different values of capacitors. It was both enochsmiles' and my first experience playing Texas hold 'em. He is an amazingly good bluffer (go figure!), whereas I play more cautiously and mathematically (but need to learn the probabilities of various hands better). D is quite a good coach, and I look forward to playing with them some more.

They finally took off around 2, and we retired to bed to watch some of Carlito's Way, the first half of which is really good, but I was too sleepy to make it through all of it. So, today I'm going to clean up the after-hangout mess on the dining room table, noodle around some more on the Drupal project I'm working on, and at some point watch the rest of the movie before D's brother's blues-rock band plays at the Machine tonight.

I'm so glad it's finally spring.

In which postmodernism and the decay of the modern university from the inside out drive a man to the brink of madness and ruin, and the one thing he has evaded for the whole of his academic career is the only thing that can bring him back.

Extended discussion later, maybe. I am tempted to start dissecting this beast right now, if only for the fact that if I go to sleep now I will likely have nightmares about it. This is horror of Lovecraftian magnitude, though it more properly follows in the footsteps of Poe. The young man from Providence wrote terror stories, in which the Unspeakable Elder Things are outside not only the ken of man but also of what man can know. In Kirn's tale, as in Poe, corruption and evil emerge from within -- they are born of man, they take root in the narrator, and they suffuse and pervert one of the greatest institutions of mankind. Yet these monstrosities are classic Yog-Sothothery, for they are demons of unreason, blind gibbering egregores that wreak havoc on the narrator's very grasp of sanity. Nyarlathotep walks the halls and eating-clubs of Princeton.

Oh, and by the way, it's nonfiction.

Pleasant dreams.

The die is cast: my qualifying exam presentation is scheduled for 9 May, so it'll be the second to last major thing I do before I'm out of here for the summer.

Between now and then, I need to turn this fuzzy-search project I've been working on and bending everyone's ear about into a fifteen-page paper. Most of that will be taken up by A Concise History of Just About Everything To Do with Association and Similarity Classification; describing the project itself will just be a couple of pages, because really, the system isn't that damn complicated. (Counting the wrappers I've had to write, but not counting the libraries it's built on, the entire thing comes in at just under a thousand lines of code.) I'll also rabbit on for a bit about where I plan to take the project (read: "Get ready, because in another six months this is what I'll be giving my comps presentation over"), which should eat another page or two. The hard part -- the system -- is done. This is the bite-my-lip-and-grind-it-out part.

Current plan: knock out a first draft by Monday, then have it revised by the time yoctohedron gets here on Thursday, so as not to be Horribly Antisocial Girl during that time.

All things considered, this is really no worse than writing up an entire syntax midterm the morning it's due, and I've done that without blinking before.