Really busy. Between school, exams, and church (this next couple weeks only, Easter and making a new bishop), my hands are full.

The animated episode of Fringe was hit-and-miss. Broyles on acid was great, the cartoons were meh, but getting rid of "Bellivia" was definitely a good thing. I sincerely hope they will stop sucking now.

So they have the league chess tournament all scheduled out. They realized they needed an extra week in order to do the round robin with an odd-number of players. The field I'm against looks okay: there are a few weak players, a couple at around my level, and a couple that are probably going to be challenging. I'm playing against somebody from my company in the first week. I think he's a little stronger than me, at least at quick events. He's the second-highest rated in the group.

At work, they unblocked facebook, but it seems they broke google chat. It also seems they added an AT&T cell tower to our building, so we're supposed to get good coverage here now. If so, I approve. I always had to go outside to take calls. Now I should be able to duck into an empty office or conf room.

I'm just curious, is there anybody here that seriously plays poker? Any thoughts on the US poker situation? Also, do you actually make money off of poker, and how? Note: this is purely for informational purposes, I have no interest in playing poker and even less interest in gambling. I am also curious about how people get good at poker and whether there are any good ways of rating poker players. I mean, chess is easy to rate because you have a one-on-one playing system. Poker, however, usually is not. I'd be interested in learning more about rating poker players and what levels people can typically attain...

There's somebody at work who blocks other people from seeing her schedule and doesn't look at other people's schedules when trying to set up or reschedule meetings. This is not a recipe for success. She just tried to reschedule a meeting for a time when I was not available and it's a meeting, um, basically about stuff I (and some other people) will be doing for her. We want to successfully set up this meeting...

I doodled out more proof stuff the other day while ignoring somebody trying to teach my poisson processes (this is, like, the fourth time I've been taught it...). I might type it out sometime, but I'm generally pretty busy these days. This time I brought out calculus to verify some other things and show my answer really is a minimum. You have to play very close attention to the ranges of the parameters. It also involves a lot of boring trig. Still not completely rigorous in all cases.

Last week's How I Met Your Mother was fairly good, though they still have not gotten rid of Zoe. It also highlighted the problem of trusting non-native speakers of a foreign language to do anything with that language.

I saw a preview for Atlas Shrugged with the wifing unit. It looks spectacularly terrible. See here for details: http://m.io9.com/5792663/atlas-shrugged-a-movie-this-demented-ought-to-be-against-the-law The great thing about Rand materials is that a certain species of Rand fan always thinks that the reason you don't love Rand is that you didn't read it carefully enough. No, there are two reasons I don't like Rand: she's a bad novelist and a bad philosopher. Reading carefully won't make me think more highly of her.

Here's an article! http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/05/the-trouble-with-ayn-rand Ayn Rand's movie as the end of civilization.

Anyway, seeing a $SPECIALIST_DOCTOR tomorrow. I also might have to present something to $EXECUTIVE_TEAM. I definitely have to finish up some other important documents.