Wow, a lot has gone on since I last wrote anything interesting here. My apologies. I'm back at school for my senior year, and am more than a little jittered as to what, exactly, I'm to do come graduation time. While I've got until June, it feels rather frightening to not know what follows. It occurred to me that my whole life has been spent to date ensuring that I'd have every imaginable opportunity open to my on my graduation day -- and it's largely come true. In some ways it's absolutely delightful and an incredible privilege, and in other ways it's just frightening. I know I can choose to do one thing now and then another later, but the decision feels enormous for the time being.

I've since turned 21, but intense schoolwork has hampered my ability to do anything really interesting about that. With luck, this coming weekend should open up some opportunities to remedy this misfortune. =) My birthday itself, on October 26, was really cool -- my girlfriend threw a surprise party for my the Saturday before, complete with a scavenger hunt that took me from friend to friend, dinner in Palo Alto, and "daverave99". We were coming back from dinner when I saw my sophomore roomate and I heard some music coming from the lounge area in my girlfriend's dorm. I ducked in. "Surprise!" shouted a few dozen people -- and I was! Nobody had ever thrown a surprise party for me before! My best friend (Nathan) was there with two laptops hooked up to my new speaker system (more on that later), mixing between the two and using MP3s and CDs to run the party. A friend from my sophomore dorm brought a huge blacklight and there were astonishing quantities of high-quality alchohol there. I love my friends! =) Incidentally, Nathan ended up meeting and very much liking Vanessa's hallmate Yoko and the two (only a week later!) make a very, very cute couple. Wow. =)

This weekend we went up to the Castro (gay) district in San Francisco for Halloween -- my goodness, I don't think I've ever seen such elaborate costumes before, even in a circus! I just went as The Tin Man (from The Wizard of Oz), clad in tinfoil-covered, staple-bound pieces of scrap cardboard, all held together with duct tape. =) I think my favorite part was walking around quite stiffly and awkwardly and generally robot-like -- a lot of people laughed and enjoyed it. Near the end of the night I alternately morphed into C3PO and the Sweedish Chef: we were all getting quite silly. Anyhow, I came back to face two evil midterms the next day, but survived them. (barely)

I'm taking Artificial Intelligence, Intro. to Philosophy, Intro. to Psychology, Intermediate Soccer, and Swing Dancing. Fun quarter: it's all about thinking and foot motion. =) AI is quite difficult: this weekend we simultaneously had to be starting our programming project (othello), working on our next problem set (see the horror in postscript or PDF), and studying for our midterm that was today. Whew! I suppose Stanford isn't exactly the sort of place to go to slack at, despite what rumors might say. ;)

The book, yes, is still happening, it's just been a long, slow, painful process of hearing a tidbit from the publisher, figuring out what to do, waiting until I can do something, doing it, submitting it, etc. I'm not very good at writing books yet...[sigh] I hope it's an acquired skill!

Two new writings should be up on the site, concerning multicast and cyber-communism (not mine), with more works to follow hopefully. =)

I recently acquired a very cool pair of speakers: the Klipsch Promedia2-400's -- you get 4 speakers and a subwoofer, and the system absolutely kicks ass. As mentioned above, my friend threw a party with it. When I first got the speakers, I turned them up to 75% and in about 15 seconds, my downstairs neighbor was at the door, rather irate. I didn't turn it up again for a while. =) I also got a new computer from Compaq (lowest price! weird!): an Athlon 500 with 128Mb of memory, a TNT2Ultra graphics card, SoundBlaster Live!, DVD, and a 27Gb hard drive, all with Win98 & Word 2000 and USB/Firewire ports on the front and back for $1440 (before shipping, handling, and taxes, but after including a 280 VA UPS from APC!). Not too shabby, and about $500 less than what I calculated it would cost me to build it from scratch. I've had a few problems with the system (it sometimes doesn't like to boot if my (generic) monitor is attached to it!), but it's pretty sweet. My roommate was gawking at the framerate I was getting in the Quake 3 demo. =) [laugh] No, I don't play video games much. =)

Well, that's all for right now. I've been learning in psychology about exactly how bad sleep debt is, and it's bad. Night-night!