summer 2006 digest

kie: 403 east tompkins st.
kiel: hyper, not ready to sleep.
kio: the hum of the fan, which for some reason wlll not run on "Lo", so it's on "Med"
ankau leganta: just finished "the spelling bee" by brent davis. charming little novel.

it's been an eventful summer, i guess. well, not in terms of the weblog, but otherwise yes. in fact, the former contributed to the latter. what did i do all summer (instead of updating my blog), you ask?

list time!

• worked in the lab kind of a lot (but kind of not)
• wrote my qualifying exam paper, which, imho, came out quite well. essentially, the qualifying exam is the first of three major hurdles in the phd process at cornell. the second is the A exam, which also requires a substantial paper in addition to an oral exam (this is probably the most difficult of the three). finally there's the B exam, the thesis defense. at that point, you're done, so you don't care.
• speaking of oral exams, i broke a tooth somehow. i had been having this tooth pain, but i figured my wisdom teeth were just coming in weird and i was waiting for my dental insurance plan to kick in before i did anything about them. turns out i had a broken molar. god knows how that happened. anyway, i need a root canal (this thursday) and a crown. awesome.
• played a lot of golf. for a while i had the golf bug majorly. i like to play by myself, at least til i get a bit better.
• am in the process of dieting. it's working out pretty well, and honestly, it's not that hard.
• went to myrtle beach for a week with my parents and alex. played 81 holes of golf. my first drive hooked left and broke a lady's window. it also knocked her jewelry box off her dresser, spilling its contents hither and thither. she was so angry she wouldn't let me pay for it. so i drove away. i also caught alex looking through my history for porn. he didn't find any, but it certainly pissed me off. when i was 13, we didn't have the internet for free pornography. we had to watch scramblevision (i.e. the adult pay-per-view channel, which was all scrambly, but visible at times) on channel 29. even with the internet, though, it seems that hot body video magazine (link safe for work) is still doing okay for itself. ahh, those were simpler times.
• moved to a new house (note the address in the kie line). it's down in fall creek, which is quite the nice neighborhood. also there's a nice pedestrian path (cascadilla glen trail) through a gorge that leads straight to cornell. it's only about a mile to school, whereas at 508 dryden road it was like a half-mile. then again, i'm not living in collegetown. this neighborhood has families and children and puppy dogs instead of keggers and screaming and 50 cent beats thumping. not that there's anything wrong with those things per se, but it's just more grown-up down here.
• went to pennsylvania a few times, for various family affairs: graduation parties, lithuanian day (although ours was in york, and not at the mall), etc.
• went to plymouth, mass for the fourth of july. watched kobayashi eat 53 3/4 hot dogs in 12 minutes (don't ask me how they got 3/4, maybe some came back up or something) at the nathan's hot dog eating contest. man that guy can eat. i think everyone felt a little sick after watching. i, on the other hand, ate a hot dog. also in plymouth, at the 4th of july parade, i saw this float:

so basically, i put a lot of miles on my car, golfed a lot, and did some work. it was a pretty good summer.

back to the diet thing, if you're interested. really all i do is count calories, and with the help of the USDA and the internet, it's pretty easy. i hate how those diet infomercials are like "counting calories is hard! here's a new method so you don't have to count!" folks, counting is not that hard. we've all done it since kindergarten. and if you burn more calories than you take in, then you lose weight. it's a standard chemical engineering approach to dieting. maybe i'll write a book and make millions of dollars. "i'm not only the president, i'm also the vice-president.

i am ethically challenged like that. i love infomercials, yet i hate them. i hate that they dupe people into buying useless junk, snake oil, and "home remedies" for cancer and other diseases (commercials for which allege that the entire medical community is involved in a conspiracy to keep people sick and thereby sell more drugs. i'll talk about kevin trudeau another time...). on the other hand, though, i can't help but wonder how easy it is.

you set up the program like an investigative report, you say "i'm not an expert, but...", and you have a series of demonstrations and/or fake testimonials to convince people that your product is worth buying. and people will buy! obviously they do, or the infomercial would have long ago gone the way of "night court". my impression of billy mays aside, i fear that my personal ethical convictions are not strong enough to resist these tempations. do me a favor, if you ever see dr. mantooth's shit-o-matic dog poop remover/toothpaste on tv at 4 am, buy 10 of them. maybe i'll even give you the 11th one free.

hopefully this will be the first of many more frequent blog updates. my goal is to get back to dailies, but lbh, it will probably be weekly at best. we'll see.

oh ps, in esperanto-related news, wikipedia (vikipedio) has over 56,000 articles in esperanto. i love the internet.