(no subject)

Oh yeah, it's tuesday. (doh!)

btw, did you know that lots of schools, like Cornell and RIT, have school on labor day?

sundries

I bought the GTI! It should be officially registered as mine around 09:00 tomorrow. Yay! Selling price was $1700 (asking was $1950). Additionally, my uncle gave me a bike, so now I just have to dig up a bicycle lock and I'll be completely mobile!

At a family gathering yesterday, I was asked a couple times whether I thought I'd stay in Rochester after I graduated, or whether I'll want to move back to California. I was reminded of an incident recounted by Thomas Friedman where a French (?) delegation arrived in Israel. Immediately after their plane landed in Israel, the delegates stepped off the plane onto the tarmac, where an eager press corps pounced with the question: "How do you like our country so far?"

Today was another rather boring day of class. Quantum Mechanics bored me nearly to tears. We received our first homework assignment, and it contains questions such as "Prove that the null vector has zero norm" and "Prove that the null vector is orthogonal to all vectors in a given vector space." Linear algebra is probably the area of mathematics where I feel the most comfortable, so such a belabored review is mind-bogglingly dull. I believe that other students feel similarly. I may talk to the professor about this...

Plasma Physics is proceeding at a slightly less dull pace. At the moment I think it's my favorite class, although that's mostly because we get to talk about tokamak reactors, giant lasers, and so forth. I wonder about the 'learning curve,' though, since I haven't taken two prerequisite courses. I'm going to Gravitation tomorrow too, which I think has lots of potential, since the professor is reportedly excellent. I won't be able to continue going to all of these classes once we get into the full swing of things with teaching and homework to do, so I'll have to choose. [ Maybe instead I'll just follow along in the quantum computing class at Berkeley, since it seems infinitely cooler than the classes here. )-: ]

I ordered the plasma physics textbook.. it was $10 online for a hardcopy, whereas the UofR bookstore sells the paperback for $45. I also ordered a quantum textbook online (from the same place) for $40, whereas used copies are $81 at the bookstore here.

Teaching starts next week and I am not particularly looking forward to it. I am a lab instructor which means that I "teach" (and grade) two three-hour labs each week. Oddly enough there are two instructors assigned to each lab session. Basically I get the feeling that it amounts to supervising undergrads for six hours a week while they work on a lab. I just noticed, also, that my tuesday lab overlaps with the plasma physics lectures. Foo. I should have pursued that research position...

I also noticed that the GTI actually has new front quarter-panels and grill. I don't know why I didn't notice this the other ~3 times I've looked at it, since it's glaringly obvious now. In fact it does show up in the photos I took but I attributed the difference to photographic effects since I had not noticed in person. So it was almost definitely in some kind of fender-bender, although it's unclear when. Seller (whose office is just one floor below mine) says: "I noticed the paint difference about two years ago. I didn't know that (maybe didn't examine clear enough) when I bought the car. I didn't have any accident during my ownership (from May 2000). I bought it from a person (first owner) in my church, and he didn't mention any accident during his ownership. There is also no accident record from carfax. I didn't change the front bumper either."

But anyway, for better or worse, it's mine. I think it will be a good car.

( CARFAX report )

In other news, I just got an email saying I was listed as an author on another abstract being submitted to AGU. I love it when that happens!

( Abstract )

True, it's engineering and not science, but, well, that's why I've switched to Physics and am going to grad school. (-:

I think this week was the 'calm before the storm'. Now grad school begins in earnest, I think.