Exam blues

Two more weeks to go, until the big qualifiers or 'the last important exam' as my advisor HT put it. I am definitely not ready, and I don't think I ever will be.

The problem is the guy who's setting up my algorithms paper is not the guy who's teaching algorithms. In fact, the guy who's setting my algorithms paper has nothing to do with algorithms (he's supposedly in databases), and to boot, the guy who's setting my algorithms paper is unpredictable at best, an Ahole at worst.

I thought I was safely out of his grasp cuz I was never in his area but he managed to muscle his way in. And the other staff think he's a pain and the just let him be. You can never get a direct answer out of him. I tried getting him to talk and he says - dont' worry you've got beautiful hair you'll pass. What the..

Between wanting to say 'fuck off, am not gonna bother' and kissing his ass was a hard choice since I wouldn't get far with either. So far, I've played it cool, giving him his ego boost by showing him I was tense and worried, and reacting just enough to his painful jokes ('the amount of time on the oral exam will be a function of how much you don't know') while not believing a word he's saying. At least I managed to get a printed email with a prescribed syllabus.

Studying biology is getting to be more fun than algorithms and that never happens to me.

Oh well. We'll see how it goes.

add this to the list of why

She held her own, she said, against an international star.

I was simultaneously amazed, proud, and weirdly enough - grounded.

In which I get hit on

Psshhh.....Let me explain.

Incident # 1
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We were at our Alley Bar, which incidentally is becoming a favorite watering hole. We, being, myself, Constable and his wife PM. PM taps on the shoulder of a guy and asks him to take a picture of the three of us.

Sure

After the photo has been taken, we say thanks to this kind dude. He laughs and clumps a hand on my shoulder.

Oh no problem! I could take pictures of you all night long

I said hmm and sipped my beer thinking - What would Danny Ocean do?

Incident # 2
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I was on foot heading back to office talking on the phone with HG, when suddenly a car drives by and a bunch of girls pop their heads out and yells at me - HEY! TAKE YOUR SHIRT OFF!!

Er..baby? A bunch of girls just asked me to take my shirt off.

What?

I watch the car go on for a few meters and pass a very ordinary looking guy. The window comes down, a few heads pop out - HEY! TAKE YOUR SHIRT OFF!!

Hmm...Never mind, honey..you were saying?

New is in

Ever notice how contemporary English focuses less on the choice of big words for conveying something and more on the choice of words put into metaphors? Today I read this from someone's blog writing - 'it's a big deal like Godzilla's penis size' (Ouch). Jon Stewart the other day talked about going and doing his own thing - "I will Simon your Garfunkel ass and take off on my own".

I rather like this. I think it's imaginative, and I could never do it. My brain is not wired to think into metaphors.

On the other hand, as Ykas pointed out - CS people have this urge in them to use some technical jargon to describe something (am thankfully not in this category). I was drawing a graph on the board, you know, with nodes and edges. I erased edges to a group of nodes on one part of the graph, and said loudly - OK now what are these?

The CS guy replies - That is a disconnected component.

Yes Captain Obvious, I wasn't looking for a technical definition.