The place is nice, though.

I'm still a little sniffly.

I am so ready to be done here at work. This one project is not set up for success because of staffing problems and poor delineation of responsibilities.

I think this is somewhat absurd, as marijuana is not a performance-enhancing drug: http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/olympics/sns-rt-us-oly-doping-usa-judo-day10bre8750nb-20120806,0,7502817.story

I find Facebook's recent plummet to be unfortunate, as they apparently claim to get 23% of their data center energy from "green" sources and 13% from nuclear. http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-08-01/facebook-says-23-percent-of-data-center-power-is-green It's not perfect, but it's great progress and I appreciate the openness. Well, c'est la vie.

Romney is speaking Acme Industries? This has to be fake. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-romney-obama-0806-20120806,0,7550364.story

Hurray moving. Going to have to get some rope for it and remember how to tie stuff down. http://www.instructables.com/id/Truckers-Hitch-THE-most-awesome-knot-on-the-plan/

The wifing unit wasn't a big fan of the new church - it had a lot of Greek and it was all Greek to her. It's an odd thing - one of the chanters was quite obviously not a native speaker, there were some Ethiopians, the person in front of me was obviously Romanian, there are probably some Russians, there were a lot of kids and you know none of them speak Greek terribly well if at all, so why all the Greek in the service? The music was different (ie, Greek style rather than Russian style), so even that could not be used as a cue. I've hung out with the Greeks enough and remember enough random words from Attic to be totally fine with that sort of thing, but the wifing unit has pretty much only been in Russian-style churches and is quite monolingual. Anyway, I think it will grow on her as she becomes more acclimated.

I hope vacuuming is sufficient to cure the house of cat hair. It would be inconvenient to move in and then discover we need some kind of deeper cleaning.

Whenever I mention that my boss is still uncertain about whether she is going to be able to fill my position, other people in the department are horrified. It's great. I wonder how my boss's interview today is going. I hope she gets it. The organization will do just fine without us. It will do just fine without me, but it will be somewhat inconvenient for the short time it takes my boss to find a new job if they don't replace me.

I think this is a fantastic photo, but I disagree with the last part of this sentence: "Science makes the world a better place, and it makes us better people." Science has done little for moral development. It's nice that we can all feel good for a moment about the Mars landing, but it's a fleeting moment. A lot of what drives technology is the desire to have more effective ways of killing other people. This is the way it has always been and always will be. I do believe that science has made the world a better place in many ways - no more smallpox, no more Third Reich - but it in no way helps us solve fundamental moral problems. The hubris!

the machine learning final was a little tough - I had to cope with a slight problem in that I had to be done by 9am Friday instead of midnight Friday. Also, some stuff was extremely slow in running - too slow. Well, things worked for the most part, he said I should've used a linear classifier because the non-linear would be too slow (it was). Anyway, that was a fun class, hard work, etc etc.

This. Is. Great. http://io9.com/5932169/the-abbreviation-omg-is-almost-100-years-old