The new commute definitely has some drawbacks. I am rarely able to get a seat on the train and much more of it is walking, so I'm able to do a lot less reading and it's pretty much impossible to study chess in those conditions. Still, it's slightly faster and it's only a minor drawback. Nothing is perfect. Also: more smelly bums sleeping on the train, especially early in the morning.

Stanford is apparently offering a free machine learning class over the internets. There are two levels, advanced and not-advanced. The advanced level requires you to basically treat it like school: you do all the homework, etc, while the other one doesn't have many requirements, but you're expected to follow along. I'm interested, but I don't know how much programming/what sort of programming knowledge it requires. I haven't looked at it in too much depth, but some sort of listing of pre-reqs would be nice. I think it would work well with the data mining class I'm taking for realsies. EDIT: I just looked at the pre-reqs for the real counterpart of the free course and it seems to presume a higher level of programming sophistication than I currently have. So I may do the non-advanced version. Woo free learning. I hope I'm not taking on too many projects, though. I'm working through an intro to programming text, taking a class on data mining, and studying chess a bit (I can dial that down quite a bit). I'm certainly willing to slack on my job if that's what it takes, but I don't want to "overcommit" myself (some of these things obviously have little "real" commitment, but I like to follow through on my projects).

There have been marvellous Turner-esque clouds rolling over the lake.

I am considering whether to have Mexican food for lunch again today. It's $5. Today is beef tacos. I should ask for no lettuce because the lettuce they put on is the cheap, almost yellow stuff that all Mexican restaurants seem to have. It barely counts as a vegetable, so I don't feel bad about leaving it off.

I think it would be pretty cool to have a TARDIS ringtone on my phone, I guess, but I don't know how to do that. I don't even know if my crappy phone is capable of doing it. Time will tell.