March 2008

Awesome morning

I had to document this, and I'm not sure if anyone will find it particularly interesting, but this made my morning. I wake up, and as soon as I sit up my phone rings. I will not document the time at which I woke up, for the simple fact that I am ashamed.

Me: (groggy) "Hello?"

Mar: "T CHENNNNNNNNNN!!!"

Me: "Marium"!

Mar: "T Chen are you sleeping?"

Mar: "No Marium, I just got up...(hears laughter in the background) whoa who's there?"

So Karen's in Ohio (I'm from Ohio, and these are my best most awesome friends from home), so she and Marium are with Prasanthi and her sister...sigh I miss them. :(

After I hang up, though, the following ensues:

::BEEP::

Text #1: We miss you pal good luck this week!" (accompanied by some weird picture of marium flashing what only can be interpreted as gangster signs)

I chuckle amusedly, and then I reply and then prepare for my day.

::BEEP::

Text #2: check your facebook prasanthi sent you kind of a strange message and after she sent it karen sent you another one trying to take credit for it. this is the

The text stops here. I will imagine that either one of the other girls wrestled the phone away from her, or by accident she only sent part of it.

I decide to go take a shower. Upon my return, I see this:

Text #3: this is for real, marium now. the opposite is the truth. karen wrote the 1st msg. :) Bye!!

So in my confusion, I didn't have time to check facebook, and I went to have lunch with my father. The text messages sat in the back of my head, however....which one was real? Was the last message karen trying to mess with me and pretend to be someone else? or was the first one right? Who knows? THE SUSPENSE BUILDS.

Not until late afternoon, however, when I had access to facebook again, did I realize...oh I should check my wall!

I notice, as documented in my phone, two posts.

At least they didn't lie.

Post 1.
tiffany, you are such a good friend to me. I think it's okay that you are a man and an alcoholic. I like you just the way you are. Have you told all of your friends your real name? Just in case, it's Armando. Now the world knows. talk to you soon!

Great.

Now everyone knows my nickname from high school.

Post 2.
One guess as to who the true author of the previous post is.
Here's a clue. Her name starts with K and ends with aren.

AHA!

So the second text message WAS A LIE!

LIES! IT IS ALL LIES!!! OH THE HUMANITY.

By the way, I am not a man.

And I'm not an alcoholic.

karen's actually the one who is a man.

just kidding, karen. please don't come to california and attack me.

This has been my day, besides the eating food with family and trying to get these projects/papers/presentation done.

I have to write a LOT of pages in the next 2 days. Wish me luck.

Ah, the little things in life...

SIGCSE 2008

DR. RODGER IS AWESOME!

She did a great job this year. I will elaborate more about this soon, since I am working on a lot of stuff right now, but the computer science education conference was excellent.

I am in Portland right now, and yesterday we helped run a session on peer led team learning. Here are some of the leaders:

The picture is a bit large--I'll edit it shortly and put up others.

I crashed the volunteer dinner yesterday--i have some amazing pictures from the games we played--they're spectacularly nerdy but awesome at the same time. Stay tuned. One was angels and devils. If you want to see the pictures, those who know me can check facebook.

But YAYYYY I got to see Joanna!
Saw Professors Astrachan, Forbes, and Duvall as well...it was great! I finally got a copy of the CS unplugged book. There are some really interesting things on their website, if people are interested.

I even got to see Dave, Dan, and Daniel, and all the other great students from Duke/Other schools. I will give more details in a bit. However, SIGCSE is a great opportunity to meet more people interested in teaching and who really get the foundations of what we want to teach in computer science.

Tonight I saw Danny, one of my awesome amazing spectacular friends from college today, and we went on a food spree with her best friend Joel. And when I mean food spree...anyways. I'll put up photos.

More to come in a bit...

Learning a new language

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

Okay so apparently in RMySQL you have a difference between SendQuery and GetQuery, such that you have to do something after you do SendQuery.

I don't know if that makes any sense, but I have wasted many hours on this.

I need to put up pictures from the retreat. In all of my laziness, I have yet to do this.

The quarter is quickly coming to a screeching halt, and I feel like there's not enough to do everything that I want to do.

Next week there's Atul's Translational Bioinformatics SUMMIT, which will be held in SF.

Unfortunately I'm not going...too many meetings that would have to be canceled, etc. Plus we have an exam on Wednesdsay in his class. Tuesday is the BMI 211 presentation, and then I have to leave on Thursday for SIGCSE 2008 in Portland, which Dr. Rodger (of Duke awesomeness) is in charge of this year.

I'm so excited!

Not only do I get to see Joanna, and Dr. Rodger, but all of my old computer science processors and my friend Danny, who is currently living in the area.

I'll have to figure out how to get research done during this time as well...

Oh well, one day at a time, right?

Man, I miss dancing.

Really Cool Virus...

This is pretty cool, especially for those people who like the mac.

Well, Friday night and I'm going to do research. Why? Because I'm really excited and want to do it.

I don't know if that's sad, or dedicated, but I've been playing on facebook and youtube so perhaps my dedication is waning.

Open Mouth, Insert Foot

Ah yes, once again I have managed to say something rather dumb and not realized it until later...

I didn't even realize the humor of my words until during dinner when Noah pointed out what I said...and David just cracked up at it...

Walking back from lunch, we were about 5-10 minutes late to Marina's talk today. One of the professors briskly walked by, and remarked: "You guys are late to Marina's talk."

Immediately the first thing that popped out of my mouth was

"Well, so are you."

Now looking back at it, I think it's still kind of amusing, however I realize that I have this tendency to be frank with everyone, regardless of status.

Ah, Mr. Peters of Centerville High School yore, I remember one day when he looked at me and asked my opinion of two poems, and I gave a quick reply. His eyes widened as he remarked:

"WHAT? What is this?! Tiffany has...an OPINION?"

My reply:

"Shut up."

As if they could not get any bigger, his eyes widened more as he scanned through the class and remarked, "did you just hear that?"

Hopefully more people are amused than taken aback by my comments...

Sometimes my social ineptness amuses even me.