Tuesday was grading day, I worked for many hours grading. After that I worked on Burgess and I got very little sleep before my meeting with Carl on Wednesday. He found a book that talks about Burgess a little different and it was worthwhile to look at it to see if I can use their ideas in my proof. I worked on it for a long time figuring out when they can be used and when they can't and I was satisfied with the results as I don't have to give up much in the size of p to be able to give a big improvement on the bound using these ideas (tweaked to work in my case). It was fun work. After working on math non stop for the last 24 hours (non stop is a lie, as I stopped to sleep three hours and I also had stops to drive from home to school and back) I got my break by going to Asa and Natasha's gorgeous house and watching Project Runway. We ate some burgers and hot dogs and then enjoyed 7 episodes (one of them a double episode) to complete season 1. It was a little too much, but it was fun. The last two episodes I didn't enjoy as much because of how late it was, so I think I found that a good bound is five episodes (with Buffy I could watch up to 7 with no problem and once watched 9 without problems, although I wouldn't try again).

Thursday night after a day at home we went walking around the apartment. There's a kid's playground nearby and I had fun in the swings. I tried to jump as far as possible from the swings by swinging very hard. It was very exciting, I almost fell in my last jump, but I got very far. Yuliia was laughing a lot at my faces and jumps. It was awesome.

On Friday I turned in the grades and then celebrated by watching two episodes of Babylon 5. I was surprised to see Commander Sinclair no longer on the show, but I have been enjoying the new commander and the show overall has been very exciting with a build up towards a big conflict with the Shadows.

Today I went to the movie theater to watch All about Steve the new Sandra Bullock movie. It was funny at times. The plot wasn't great and the characters definitely seem to do contradictory things (illogical to what the characters would seem to do), however it had a good ending and the movie somehow worked for me. Not a movie I would recommend, but not bad.

I decided not to hire a grader for the class I am teaching, but I have 35 students, that means a lot of grading. This weekend I graded two homeworks and then wrote the midterm. It was a lot of work and I didn't even sleep Sunday night because of working on this. Of course, it would have been possible to sleep had I started work earlier on Sunday but I was enthralled with the book in my hands so I started at 10pm. (Note: I did a lot of work Friday and Saturday and thought I was close to done by Sunday, but I was wrong). On Monday the midterm went well and then on Tuesday I graded. The exam had a mean of 83 and median of 84, so I think the exam was a success.

I also wrote down the solutions for the homework to post them online and that took a lot longer than expected (which was most of the work I did Friday). The good news is I did work ahead so the next homework is already typed up and ready to be online as soon as they submit it.

The classes have been going great, I enjoy it very much and next week we'll get into the Law of Large Numbers, so the highlight of the class is on the horizon. Looking forward to it.

The bad side of all this work on the class is that I haven't done any research at all, so hopefully today I'll put in a lot of work on the Burgess project. I suspect Carl's patience is wearing thin as this "small" project has been taking three months, way too long for something so simple.

Other weekly highlights include going to the Hanover Street Festival, watching nine episodes of Project Runway season 5, reading "Walking Dead", playing basketball, dancing salsa and dancing swing.
Life is good.

The class today in the teaching seminar had a guest teacher from the Theater department. She had a lot of cool exercises and she commented on our flaws in teaching and where we should focus (pointing out what we do very well to use that in our planning of classes). It also showed us some exercises that help focus the mind (Brain Gym). It was so cool. There were some exercises which I already knew (which I used in my competitive math days) and more that I didn't know (although my public speaking class in college had them too, but I had forgotten them already).

I also saw The Devil Came on Horseback a documentary about Darfur. The movie was good but I think "Darfur Now" was much better. In any case, the documentary was very interesting and one of the producers (Gretchen Wallace) was there, so we could ask her questions. Gretchen organizes a lot of very nice projects that help out genocide survivors. What her and her brother have done is quite inspiring. Seeing the evil that has been committed in Darfur is saddening, and makes one feel powerless, it is good to see that there are people like Brian and Gretchen that work hard to change it.

For the movie "The Devil Came on Horseback" I volunteered to write the notes from the film society (in every movie that is shown by the Dartmouth Film Society, they give a piece of paper with notes about the movie). This was the first time I wrote something for the film society. Next week I write one for the movie "Last King of Scotland" and after that I will be a member of the directorate for the film society which will mean I will be able to watch all of those movies for free. I am looking forward to that. But it was also very fun to write the notes, I was very proud of seeing my name attached to it. I did quite a bit of research around the Darfur crisis and I used my knowledge I had of the Sudan conflict with the South (from reading "What is the what" and information of the Lost Boys).

In another note, I had an unusually good outcome from accidentally calling someone (you know when you don't lock your cell phone and hence you accidentally dial a number by bumping into something and hitting the dial number, ... I think I didn't explain this right, but who cares, who would still be reading this line). I accidentally called Yulja's house, so then she called back and it was a funny conversation.

Not surprisingly the Thursday entry writes itself "Wonderful day because dancing salsa was awesome".

But I guess there's more to this Thursday. The day started with everyone (and by this I mean Greg) making fun of my haircut. Jokes like "I am amazed you can play poker so well at such a young age, since when can 12 year olds play poker". Then we went to class (Teaching seminar) and it was very fun. We wrote our best and worst learning experiences and Amir's worst learning experience was hilarious. The teacher (in high school) was so bad that the students revolted and stayed out of his class and even made a revolution song. I couldn't help but imagine Iranian kids singing a fight song to protest a class.

I was given the TNS (Thursday Night Salsa) password to be able to send an email to everyone on the list announcing salsa that night (I was the organizer) and I didn't know how to do it, so I just made reply all to one of the emails in the "sent messages" folder of TNS. The problem with that was the recipient list did not get suppressed. Oops.

Salsa was great. At first it was just Yulja and me, but soon more people showed up and I gave them "lessons" (not really as I wouldn't stop the music and would dance with someone between every tip). I danced with someone I hadn't danced before, her name is Adi (I think) and it was fun, she adapted quickly. It was also fun to dance with Safina. Since there weren't that many people, people left at around 10:10. Yulja and I danced 3 more songs before calling it a night. It was nice to dance with Yulja again after 3 weeks of not seeing her.

The other news from today was that my bike got stolen. I am still in shock, but I guess I should have been more careful given that in Thanksgiving break somebody stole the front wheel of my bike. I talked to the campus police and they told me the chance of finding it is negligible because I didn't register the bike. I will have to buy a new one. Fortunately, Giulio lent me his car while he is out of town, so I have a car to move around now that I don't have my bike. Good thing salsa made me forget about the bike.

Recap of things done recently:
-Watched some Buffy and Angel. So far I am 6 episodes in Buffy season 4 and six episodes into Angel season 1 (parallel viewing). Besides episode 6 of Buffy, the season has not been good, Buffy thinks its seasons with long-term perspective, so I expect it to turn around soon and be awesome. Angel is building up to be pretty good, I like the female cop.

-24 had a good episode this week (although not as good as last week). Jack is arrested, let's see what happens, it seems like CTU needs him. Also, Bill Buchanon was fired, which is very sad.

-Algebra. Did my homework for the week, I was very proud of an idea to solve one of the homework problems, I hadn't used the Chinese Remainder Theorem in weird rings before. The class is shaping up really nicely, we are about to prove a big structure theorem using modules (every free abelian group is a sum of cyclic groups or something).

-Went out to celebrate the birthday of another grad student. We went to a bar. The bar had a weird grilled cheese sandwich made with bacon and peanut butter. It didn't taste very good, but I had to try it.

-The discussion on the Dartmouth Film Society meeting was very heated in terms of "Lives of Others". Two of the guys thought it was just solid but nothing special. Complained about how it portrays woman, simplifying Berlin after the wall fell down and technicalities about the ending. SPOILER ALERT: Complaint about ending it in a freeze frame and the fact that there were multiple endings. I disagree with most of the complaints, but one scene at the end I think should have been stripped away. The government doesn't give you the information of the officers, so the scene where he goes to see him (and then doesn't) seems irrelevant for three reasons: 1) It goes away from history (whereas they depict most things with historical accuracy) 2) It doesn't serve much purpose given that we don't see an interaction, we just see Weisler from far away and the writer thinking about it. 3)The writer dedicates the book to the codename of Weisler, not to Weisler, hence that scene would have been as powerful as it was without the previous one.
One reason to explain the existence of that scene is that the writer would have been curious and would try to find who saved him. Hence with that scene they showed us briefly that curiosity and how he realizes he doesn't need to greet the savior. END SPOILER.

Last night I helped grade the Math 13 exams. The exam was a little too easy and not very helpful in evaluating, so it bombed. Hopefully the next exam will be better.

Also saw the latest South Park episode. So far, this season has been excellent. I liked the homage to Night of the Living Dead.

Saw a pair yesterday:
Daisies a 1966 Czech film. It is very random and very weird. It uses strange colors all over the place, jumps from one scene to the next, uses strange avant-garde stuff which reminded me of Stan Brakhage. The movie still works even with all its weirdness and randomness. It does give the idea of be happy and enjoy life.

I went to see Spike and Mike's Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation. It had 19 short animated films. Most of them were very funny and some of them were excellent. It was well worth my time. The highlight was one that was very creative in its presentation, by having a pop op book tell you the story, unfortunately it was not very long. There was also a very funny "commercial" of a mexican restaurant based on a cartoon character called "Dr. Tran", it was very funny.
Something weird about the movie was that most people watching were old people. There was a cute old couple that was very lovey dovey.

At night I went to the Canoe Club (bar) with my roommate Damien. At first I was bored but then the conversation got interesting. France has important elections in 10 days and Damien was explaining the candidates stances.

Earlier in the day I had classes. Alison presented her thesis defense, which I missed because I was out buying tea, but I was in on the celebration. She and her advisor looked very happy. I am glad for them. She did some cool thing with coke bottles representing the Gaussian integers the size of her advisor's door to block him entrance to his door on the day of the defense, it looked nice.

Started the day going to algebra class. Then I went to go buy tea for the department. While having lunch, Greg suggested we should go hiking to Mount Cardigan so we did.

The hike was easy, although the first 20 minutes in a hike are not easy for me, it gets easy once I reach the second wind. The view from the top is incredible and it was very impressive seeing the trees with ice on them. It was also a bit scary because it was a warm day and ice was falling from some trees. Since we had to be back by 3:30 to the math department and it was 2:30 when we reach the top, we had to be quick on the way down. Greg was skiing so no problem being quick for him, but I had to run. I was able to arrive back to the car at 2:55 in just 25 minutes (the climb up took me a little over 75 minutes). I don't think I've had as much fun doing exercise in a long time, running down a mountain it is very fun, specially because of the snow. Running in snow makes you feel fearless, because you know that if you fall it won't hurt that much. I was very tired afterwards, but I felt great.

I was planning on watching "La Jetee" followed by "The Fountain" but I arrived late and decided to come back to the department and watch Buffy instead. The last two episodes I've seen have been incredible (episodes 13 and 14 of season 2). Really fun stuff. Although episodes 11 and 12 were awful and I recommend skipping them if anybody is planning on watching Buffy.

At night I watched South Park and it made me want to watch 300, but I think I will not watch it, I know I can stop this temptation of watching fun crap. The South Park episode was funny but inferior to the last two episodes. To any 24 fan out there, you have to watch Episode 4 of Season 11 of South Park. This website has all of the South Park episodes streamed.

I also started rereading a book. I was reading "Shadow of Poe" in the summer but stopped around page 300 because I started reading Freakonomics. The author of "Shadow of Poe" is coming to give a talk at Dartmouth, so I decided to read "Shadow of Poe". I didn't start again, I started from a scene I remembered being a fun read (page 127) and I hope I can finish by April 19, hence I have a week to read a little over 300 pages.

Working on the algebra homework was quite fun yesterday.
Other fun things that happened were watching a couple of Buffy episodes, where Kendra, the other vampire slayer was introduced.

I did some exercise at night and did my taxes.
Productive, yet uneventful day.

Nothing interesting has happened because I've been studying for the qual. I took it today and I got a master's pass but not a phD pass, so I'll have to take it again. I didn't memorize the theorems precisely, I just had ideas of what was going on and thought I could be quick on my feet and figure everything out. I was quick on my feet, but the committee felt that I should memorize instead. I can't blame them, it would make for a faster test, since we couldn't reach functional analysis.

It was fun doing the qual, although it would have been better to pass, now I'll have to wait two more weeks for the next try. I think I'll start studying for the algebra qual too, so that I can do them back to back or something.