Today was another great day. First, the class on modular forms was awesome as we went into elliptic curves. Then I learned how to record stuff, so I managed to help out with a Spanish class at Dartmouth by uploading a recording of me speaking Spanish (a professor asked for volunteers to do this). Then I ate delicious lunch at "Jewel of India", where I ate a lot. I met my mom's friend Enrique, an Uruguayan guy that my mom met dancing. A really nice guy. After the lunch we walked around Dartmouth, saw the nice Connecticut river and then I gave them a tour of the library showing them the Orozco murals (the Orozco murals are awesome) and some special rooms in the library which are beautiful.

At night I went to tango class with my mom and Enrique. I learned some stuff for tango and I can tell it would take a lot of work to become good at it. I can't get the rhythm right and the style is considerably different from salsa and merengue where you just follow the flow of the music. In tango posture is crucial (or at least it seems to be) and I don't have it yet. It was fun to try to learn a new dance and I intend on going on Monday's to try to learn it. I will look for some swing lessons too as that seems closer to salsa.

In other news, I saw this week's BSG episode (3 days late) and it was awesome.
Also, I finished the Dark Phoenix Saga the classix X-Men comic. It was fantastic. The first seven issues were formidable and the last two were good but not great, but the whole thing was just wonderful and for a moment there I was thinking it was the best comic I have ever read. A lot of cool things happen in it. I can tell why the comic is a classic.

This weekend is winter carnival at Dartmouth, that means there was no class on Friday and there are a lot of events going on around campus. The green has a big snow sculpture of a submarine (last year it was the white rabbit skiing), the sculpture is nice. In front of the math department there's a frat that made a huge snow couch and then made a snow pillar. On top of the snow pillar they placed a TV, it looks really funny.

Today, I went to Occom Pond and witnessed the winter carnival celebrations, there were several snow sculptures, lots of food, lots of game for little kids (in particular, an ice castle that ended with a sled that lead to the pond itself). There were free ice-skates so that one could skate on the pond, unfortunately there were no more ice-skates my size, so I just looked around and left.

I ate at Lou's today, the food isn't cheap, but the breakfasts are fantastic. I had 2 eggs, bacon, sausage, 2 pancakes and home fries (the home fries are delicious). The meal also comes with a muffin, but I didn't ask for it (the waitress forgot to give it to me). I really like that place, I went there last Sunday as well. I might start going once a week. I was planning on going on Sunday before I decided to go today and take advantage of the Indian brunch tomorrow.

I did a lot of TeXing today, as it was my turn to tex notes for the reading course on "Local Theory". If anyone out there is interested in the notes so far, they are on Lola's website.

I watched a movie today to continue my streak of movie watching. The movie I saw today was Wristcutters: A Love Story, the movie is about life after death. It is a comedy set in the world that suicides go to after they kill themselves. That world is very similar to ours, except that you can't smile and other magical differences. The movie is funny and cute. I liked a lot.

I am looking forward to next Saturday when they show "Lust Caution" by Ang Lee (they are also showing "No Country for Old Men" at the same time, which is unfortunate because I wanted to see it again).

All in all, another great day.

After a busy week and a busy summer, I am back at Dartmouth. I am living in Lebanon, New Hampshire now. I saw my house for the first time. A nice anecdote about my first day is worth writing about:

Set up:
I woke up at 3:30am to be ready to catch the 6am flight to Phoenix. There was a stop at Philadelphia, then Boston. In Boston I met with Chris and Iuli. Since I knew I would meet with them, I only packed books and no clothes, so that I wouldn't have a lot of baggage. I carried to backpacks full of books. They were very heavy.

Anecdote 1:
Arrive at South Station at 6:30pm, the bus leaves at 7:30pm, we walk to Chinatown and eat quickly. I had to run back to catch the bus. The Dartmouth Coach changed gates, so I had to inquire where the new gate was and then I boarded the bus at 7:32pm just as it was leaving. Great timing.
(After writing this anecdote, I realize it may have not been worth reading, oh well).

Anecdote 2:
As I reach Hanover, I immediately go to the gym with Greg and Chrisil (my roommates from last year) and play racquetball. Greg has been playing all summer and thought he had a chance to beat me, well, after starting the game 9-0, I came back and won 15-11. I was extremely tired (and a bit out of shape), but I managed to win. I played Chrisil and I won 15-8. It was fun to play racquetball, even if it was out of my league.

Anecdote 3:
John offered to give me a ride to my new house, but I don't know how to get there, so I give wrong directions and end up calling my roommate. He picks me up. I am now in my new home.

Main Anecdote:
I am all sweaty and I don't have more clothes, I only brought books. My clothes are in my office, but I don't have the new keys to the office, hence I don't have any clothes, towels or pillows. My plan is to go to school tomorrow and shower in the math department (the math department at Dartmouth has showers).

During the last week I have had a series of emails trying to convince Dartmouth to still give me the summer stipend even though I will skip 5 weeks due to being in the REU. I didn't mind losing the stipend for those five weeks, but I would have liked not losing the whole summer stipend. Nonetheless that is what occurred. The good news is that now I have an extra month of vacation to be home enjoying mexican food and the company of my family and lifelong friends.

The Spring quarter turned out to be a very fun quarter learning cool stuff, watching lots of Buffy, having a lot of number theory conversations with a friend, hiking a lot, playing lots of racquetball, watching a lot of movies. It was definitely a quarter to remember, but on the math side, I am glad its over since I don't have to think about manifolds anymore.

Last night I started my manifolds at 10:20am and hacked at the 12 part test for hours until 6:12am with a brief break in the middle. I solved 7 out of 12 and had progress in two other parts. The remaining stuff needed me to know k-forms and I didn't have enough energy to try to learn it from the text. I gave three reads to both the chapter in Spivak and to the one in Munkres, but I didn't figure it out. Also, I forgot my notebook in Dartmouth, I have two green notebooks and I brought the wrong one.

I scanned it in this morning and I got confirmation that it arrived, hopefully it will be enough for a pass. If it isn't at least I learned some cool stuff like the volume of S^(n-1) and the volume of the n-dimensional sphere.

Besides working on that, I've had pretty good times. George arrived and he's a cool guy to talk to. He gave a very good talk on Wednesday on arithmetical congruence monoids. I am not a big monoid fan, but I was interested in his results, he did a good job. Nathan also came back from Princeton, hence the fun started to roll.

In Milagrito news, I had the "Lengua plate" today and it was delicious. I have been consistently eating "Machacado", but I felt like mixing it up today and it was excellent.

Other cool things have happened that merit writing but as a sleep deprived person I can't recall them.

Tomorrow I go home for the weekend. I am taking 3 of the REU students and Nathan. Looking forward to it, I already asked a friend to give them a tour on Saturday since I will be busy with the olympiad.

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.

Went to classes. I had three of them and all of them were fun. Number theory is very geometric, so it is not exactly my cup of tea, but it will be interesting. I don't know anything about calculus on manifolds and the professor seems very good, so I am looking forward to that class. Algebra will be fun, because the professor is excellent and I like algebra a lot.

The graduate student seminar talk was pretty good, unfortunately it was a repeat from a talk I saw in September, I guess it was meant for the prospectives and not for us.

There was a question answer session held by the grad students for the prospectives but it was extremely boring. Some of the grads went on and on about things I don't think are important and the prospectives were getting a lot of information that they didn't ask about. The answer to every question went for like more than 10 minutes. I feel bad for the poor prospectives. Last year when I came, few grads went to the Q&A and hence it felt much more informal and many more questions were answered. In particular, I was very interested in hearing about how Dartmouth funds almost unlimited conference travel for students, something which wasn't covered this time. I hate qual talk in Q&A sessions, I don't know why people care.

At night, we went to the Orient to eat, and it was fun joking around and getting free food that is not pizza (I hate free pizza).

At night was game night, but the fun games like charades were not offered. There was twister, apples, the Wii (I like the Wii). I went downstairs and sang while Greg played Giulio's electric guitar. After a while, we went upstairs with the guitar and a lot of us joined in singing. It was very fun. Although I don't know how much fun for prospectives, two of the girls joined in the fun.

Greg's friend Porter arrived during game night, he is a really fun and happy guy.

I woke up at 9:15am without planning on it and went on to keep working on analysis. It wasn't fun this time because the other problems were of another subject that I don't really understand. So it was like being blind.

After turning in the problem set I went to buy tea for the math department. I bought myself some cookies and ate all of them, I felt fine, but less than an hour later there was free food in the math department that nobody was touching, so I ate some more. I felt pretty bad for the next hour and a half because I ate so much.

There was a math party for the close of the quarter and most of the faculty and grad students were there. There was more free food, but this time I didn't eat. I had to leave soon because I had a party at Montshire because of the close of the program of teaching elementary school kids. I really like Montshire, the place is full of really fun science exhibits, my favorite is one where some metal balls go through a type of roller coaster, but there is action going on all over the place because depending on the size of the balls they take different paths and activate different mechanisms. It was also fun trying to solve some puzzles, seeing a lot of happy children and talking to the other instructors.

At night I went to play racquetball with Greg and a friend of his called Brian. First I played with Greg and won 15-7, it was our most fun match so far, a lot of fun volleys. Then we played the three together. I won the first match 15-7-4 (me, Greg, Brian) and the next match was 10-10-1 (me, Greg, Brian) when Greg hurt his knee. Nothing happened to him, but he decided to stop playing to secure no funny business would prevent his weekend of skiing. Brian and I played a match,k before starting I gave him some tips. Well, he used his knowledge of tennis and ability to learn quickly to almost beat me. He was up 14-11, but I won 18-16. It was extremely fun. At one point my hand was sweating so much that I couldn't direct my shots, so it was all hustle running for balls like crazy diving all over the place. It was insanely fun.

After that, we went to Murphy's (local bar) and hanged out for about half an hour with other grad students.

Today, I woke up feeling refreshed, studied about 10 minutes for my russian exam and then went to take the final. I think I did pretty good, I won't know until I see the grade, but I am certain I did very well. I think I am very good in examinations, I guess it forces me to focus in ways that normal working environments don't have. I also have a lot of fun in that focus environment.

After the exam, I had a meeting with a high school student in my office. He wants to do a project on game theory and I volunteered to help. He asked a lot of stuff about grad school, what it means to study mathematics and we talked about stuff for about two hours. It was fun seeing a student interested in math and trying to learn stuff.
I don't know how much time this mentoring a high school student will take, but it certainly looks fun and it will help me refresh my memory on game theory. I will have time because I don't have to TA next quarter so I am not that worried.

The school showed this movie in the local theater yesterday and I went to see it again. Wow! What a masterpiece. The images are powerful, the story is great, I just really enjoyed this film. What is very interesting is how the images get to you, there are moments you have to turn away for a second, you can feel the pain of the character, or the sadness or the desperation. The movie transports you to this incredible world. It was a pleasure seeing this film again, no doubt I will watch it again as soon as it comes out on DVD.

Besides the movie, I had my last day of classes and after classes instead of working on the final homework assignment for analysis, I have been reading Number Theory. I got this really awesome notes recently and I have devouring over them, trying all the exercises, it has been very fun. I am thrilled about the talks I'll get to hear today on the number theory seminar and on the colloquium.
Then at night, there is a russian class get together which should be fun (for an hour, since I have to come back to the math department to the review session for Math 13).

I will probably have a long night since I haven't started my analysis homework, but it will certainly be a good day.

Saturday was not productive but it a nice day to relax and prepare for the storm of finals (and all the old homeworks I have yet to do).
At night I played poker and got second place among the six that played. I couldn't make a third win in a row. It was fun, I played as good as I can, I did one amazing bluff to get someone to lay down two pair (I had nothing).

On Sunday, I started the day watching "Breakfast Club" on TV (Comedy Central). I've never seen this movie before, it was ok. Throughout the whole movie, I thought I would turn the TV off, shower and leave, but I just stayed and watched the whole thing. It has an 80s feel (which I can only guess from other 80s products, not from remembering how the 80s were since I was practically a baby). The movie is not that funny, although it has its funny moments.

After that I came to the office, put up my top 10 list and did some reading before going to the movie theater to watch "Zodiac". The movie was excellent, I love thrillers and I like David Fincher. Throughout the whole movie I wanted the main character to keep pushing on to find the killer. I was a little disappointed when I found out the main character is actually the man who wrote the story, which makes it a little harder to believe that he was so much of a "hero". It is an entertaining film. It is certainly no Seven or Fight Club.

After eating and browsing a DVD store, I came back to the office and prepared myself for the tutorial by doing the homework. From 7 to 9:15 I did my tutorial duties, which was fun because students had more questions than usual, so I wasn't bored by sitting idly waiting for questions.

After that I played racquetball with Greg. I beat him again easily, but he improved a lot. If we keep playing the games could get much more fun. Although racquetball is a very fun sport, so it is easy to have a blast in the court.

At night, I worked on the homeworks of russian of the last week. I solved them all in about 2 hours and then took a take home quiz on Monday morning. I did well on the quiz, although probably not A worthy. Russian is a really complicated language and even with 10 hours a week, the progress is very slow. It is kind of frustrating. I would really like to learn this language, but it will be impossible to take a class in russian next term, since I have some math classes I need to take. If I make the russian class wait, I will probably forget everything, I will have to find a way to keep working on russian even if I can't take the course.

Doing exercise more often really makes me feel better. I feel full of energy most of the time, and working on problem sets comes easier. It is also very fun.