I'm Back!

And the next two weeks of school are going to kick my butt, but what the hey?

If anyone was wondering, the conference was the most boring thing I have ever attended. Some lady droned on and on for an hour about something called 'WebCT'. By the time she had finished I still didn't know what it was, but apparently it will allow you to communicate telepathically with other people while you are eating lunch and can cure cancer. I might be exaggerating, but no more than she was. Whatever WebCT does, I'm sure emacs does it too.

I don't suppose my talk was much more interesting, but it only lasted 7 minutes so I wasn't in danger of sending people into irreversible comas like she was. I was talking about cardinal B-splines, Lagrange interpolating polynomials, Fast Fourier Tranforms, and Particle Mesh Ewald--graduate level mathematics--to a bunch of marketing guys and system administrators. And they put me right before dinner. So that's probably what they were thinking about during my whole seven minute (and I thought I would have at least thirty) speech--As soon as this dolt is done talking, we can eat yummy food! Yay!.

Since we were staying on the government's dollar, naturally they put us in the nice suites at the hotel. Do you know what the difference is between the nice suites and the economy suites? I was suprised to learn that it is a phone, mounted right above the toilet. Seriously. That is why these rooms cost so much--they have a toilet phone. I tell you, those rich folk are really living it up with their toilet phones.

The Christian retreat was better, though I did a fair job of establishing myself as a social reject. The highlight of the trip was playing two guys in mental chess on the three hour drive back (the most conversation I had the whole time). I mated them pretty soundly, but I was majorly impressed that they were able to keep the board in mind the whole time, especially given that the notation wasn't necessarily familiar to them.

Alas, now I am to be crushed under the steadily increasing burdens of my schoolwork, and I need to catch up in correspondence with a bunch of friends, but I suppose I will be a man and just whimper about it.

For today, I have an edited version of Hamlet Act I. I warn you that you will not find it funny if you have not read the play. Be sure to at least read Polonius's speech to Laertes, I think it might actually have been substituted for the original with much improvement for the play.

I was also inspired to write a poem this weekend, about the mind, but it was a bit of a serious venture, and I am trying not to bore you all away.

More later... (maybe)

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