Names and situations have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent (me). For clarity purposes, some bits that may have been merely thought at the time, are fully spelt out here.

A bit over a year ago, last class of the semester:

Prof. Travoltus: And I wish you all a successful career and might see you again one day, shall you decide to go for a post-grad in AI.

Dave: Does that mean you are involved in that curriculum too? Oh god, no.

Prof. Travoltus: Indeed I am. And don’t worry, I hate your guts too.

Dave: Why, thanks. You are quite a tool yourself.

Prof. Travoltus: You little arrogant piece of self-sufficient shit. Don’t you think I didn’t notice your constant sneering at every other one of my [very unfunny] jokes and comments, all semester long.

Dave: Same to you sir. By the way, 1970 called and it wants its corduroy bellbottoms back. ’said you could keep the pungent cologne, though.

(more…)

Because this phase of intense self-absorbed navel-contemplation passing off as thoughtful meditation just isn’t about to end now…

the Good

• Last week’s blitz-vacations in London were everything I needed (quite possibly a few things I didn’t need too). I unfortunately didn’t have time to travel to the countryside and say hi to the family (hi auntie, sorry I didn’t make it), but I got to catch up with many longtime-not-seen friends, met a few cool new people etc.
• This week, funding was approved on a research internship I had a applied for, back in February. As a result, I will be spending the Summer in Tokyo, perfecting world domination plans and my army of killer robots at the NII. That is, if I don’t decide to drop out and retreat to a Zen monastery instead. And it is far from excluded at this point.
• I’m “brilliant”. More to the point: I am no longer the only person in the world to publicly hold that unflinching opinion of myself (see below).

the Bad

• Being “brilliant”, I am therefore “way too smart to be wasting time on such trivial matters as those affecting my mood and the quality of my work these days”. Sayeth a certain advisor of mine.
• “Fuck you”, or a somewhat equally disparaging and hardly more articulate variation on the term, may have been my reply to said advisor and coincidentally depositary of a good share of my academic future.
• Despite today being the first day of final exams week (more like the French equivalent of post-grad quals, actually), I have yet to open a single revision book or prepare for any of it. The cause may lie in aforementioned trivial matters of the heart or, more likely, in the sudden realization that I might be heading the way of that very advisor’s somewhat pathetic, if highly regarded in academic circles, life and career.

the Ugly

• In fact, for reasons I can’t fully fathom (although there sure are a couple leads to follow), I seem to have caught the academic-self-doubt bug at the most unbecoming time. I honestly don’t think I will act on it, but the fact I can’t bring myself to even find interest, let alone try and revise for those rather important exams, seems a pretty efficient passive-aggressive way to get there nonetheless.
• Irony of ironies, I think I may have done pretty well today in spite of my utter lack of preparation, which still leaves the question open for the remaining 4 exams I am to take (not to mention, yearly lab project, due next week).

I suppose I still have ten hours (sleep notwithstanding) to acquire a motivation, snort 10g of crushed Red Bull powder and catch up on two weeks worth of revisions.

Will I ? Fuck if I know. Suspense is killing me.

Sara: Yea, he is a bit strange, very moody, the autistic kind, you know… talks a lot, all the time…

Dave: Autistic? talks a lot? That doesn’t make sense… Wouldn’t an autistic temperament imply that he is overly quiet and keeping to himself most of the time?

Sara: Absolutely not! What are you talking about? He’s autistic… Has those weird fits of enthusiasm, gets excited about the smallest things, you know, the way autistic people often behave…

Dave: OK. You aren’t making any sense. We can’t possibly be talking about the same definition for autism, real or pretend.

Sara: Autism??? Who talked about autism, he is autistic: he makes aut, he’s an autist… He paints mostly.

Dave: Oh…

Wherein the author unabashedly stares at his navel while describing in painfully boring details his past and current academic endeavours under the guise of introducing some of the topics bound to become a fixture of this blog.

As morbidly obsessed faithful readers of this blog may remember, I made a decision 18 months ago to go back to school and try for one of these fancy post-graduate degree in Compooter Thingies.

As it happen, my original bachelor was mostly centered around Mathematics and Physics, two sciences that turned out to make for infinitely more entertaining conversation topics than university majors (also, it was sorta interspersed with half a dozen other totally unrelated course of studies). Having come to develop uncontrollable rash-like allergic reactions to the mere mention of either topic, it sounded wise to shift the focus of my academic pursuits over to a slightly different major. Hence Computer Science, or to be exact: Artificial Intelligence (which is, to paraphrase some guy, as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes). As for the “going-back-to-university” thing altogether, it was mostly motivated by the pointed realization that, of the entire spectrum of available jobs, university student was the one I was most happily fitted for: After being a corporate droid for many years, a beach bum for another couple, I figured being paid a [rather mediocre] salary to work on cool research projects while learning semi-interesting things, sounded like a very fun way to pass time before retiring to a desert island in the Indian Ocean. That and the possibility that I may one day be responsible for the enslavement of humanity under the cold, merciless dominion of superiorly intelligent thinking machines.

(more…)

As you may have noticed, pictures are back in full force on this blog. This rebirth is due to my finally caving in to the trend and buying one of these fancy new cellphone things. One of those that come with a color LCD and, gasp, a camera.

I was until now quite happy using my antiquated prepaid cellphone (about 50×100 pixels of monochrome goodness and such cutting edge features as “call”, “send SMS” and even “address book”), until I started gathering last year’s pictures, for my yearly New Year’s Card project, and realized I had close to none. Even though I own a reasonably nice and compact digicam, and use it sometimes when I feel artistically inclined, it just isn’t the same as a camera-phone…

I was never a big fan of cameras, especially in group settings. Actually I suspect the “let’s take a souvenir photo” bug is mostly a female thing, and tends to grow hundredfold with motherhood. But going over all the drunken (and less drunken) pics I took during my stay in Tokyo, with my trusty keitai, I realized how much I liked having those around. To me, they are nothing like the sort of pictures you take with a “real” camera. Cameraphone pics, for one, are lower quality (especially mine, since I purposely downsample them in order to use less bandwidth when sending them over email), which means you treat them differently: being lo-fi, badly lit or with a strong visible grain is expected and nearly part of the journalistic charm of the medium. The other aspect I noticed with myself and friends while in Japan, was the psychological difference: people usually do not react to a phone the way they do to a camera. Phones are slightly less intrusive and allow you more easily to take pictures without breaking the flow of social interactions; with a camera-phone, even usually camera-shy people tend to be more exuberant and less self-conscious. It is possible that Japanese society is special in that respect, considering how ubiquitous camera-phones have become there, but I reckon things will be moving in a similar direction everywhere…

Anyway, from now on, you can expect a fairly regular influx of live views from my life in Paris. Incidentally, this will help me fill my quota of diary-esque entries on this blog, without having to resort much to boring “did this, did that” text entries. I liked the balance I had found with the older keitai log format, with tons of pointless but short photographic entries on one side, longer verbose rants on the other.

For now, enjoy the pretty random pics of drunken friends and Parisian locales.

Saturday, December 23rd, 2006

Woke up naked, curled up in the middle of my living room. Calendar on the wall says it’s been about two months. Paper everywhere. Found a couple dead rats impaled with sharpened pencils into stacks of graph theory and bayesian statistics papers… Decide to burn it all in the building’s courtyard and forego any attempts at piecing back together whatever hazy memories remain of that painful episode.

Tuesday, December 26th, 2006

(more…)

As is now customary around these parts at this time of the year:

May 2007 bring you kittens, happy puppies & ponies with very little thermonuclear wars on the side…

PS: If I recently met you long enough to snap a pic, your face is probably up there. Full size version here for the unbelievers.

PPS: To make up for the sharp decrease in picture-taking this year (linked to a switch from my nifty camera-equipped keitai back to the basics of 19th century cellphone communication), I innovated by adding a couple pics of online acquaintances whom I have not met in person this year, but spent more than a share of my time exchanging communications with. Yea, this is 21st century alright.

PPPS: Collage quality is really not all that great this year. Ironically, part of my studies lately have involved the very algorithmic tools I need, to come up with an elegant solution to this very tricky problem (yay for Operational Research). Unfortunately, said studies also meant I really did not have the time to implement it. We’ll try to have it for 2008.

semester over. stop. made it alive. stop. merry kwanzukkah to all. stop. will resume posting pithy comments on daily activities and the world at large : very soon. full stop.

This just in from our stating-the-obvious department: this blog will undergo a severe slow-down for the month (that is, the month already nearing its end and the slow-down now ongoing for a good three weeks already).

Computer failures, livelihood-earning work, research projects, assignments, sleep deprivation, final exams and overall the sad realities of the M.Sc.’s student life crashing into my own, theretofore much happier, shiny rosy reality… are all to blame for this sudden interruption. Expect some improvement at the end of next week, if I make it this far.

PS: and sorry for leaving last month’s quizz out to dry. I swear I’ll post the results as soon as I’m back among the living.

Just so you don’t think for a moment that I am out there having fun when I leave this blog unattended for weeks on end…

Note that this snapshot entirely fails to convey the real Soviet-era ambiance of my 8am-1pm weekly Tuesday lecture: attended by twelve hardcore students huddled in a 300-seat auditorium, fighting sleep and hypothermia, with the dreary droning of a disinterested lecturer as background lullaby.

Can I get a Hell Yeah for advanced graph theory?!?

Hell… zzz…

I have been dragging a stuffy nose for weeks months now and wake up each day with a fit of dry cough that makes me feel like I’m about to hack up a lung for good. Starting to worry a little bit.

Have I…

• … got common flu?
• … pneumonia?
• … Black Lung disease?
• … lupus?
• … watched one House MD episode too many?

• I am aching from muscles I didn’t even know existed.
• I was, at one point during this week-end, seen clutching to a rope, trying to get from tree A to tree B, 30 feet above ground.
• I am missing small but meaningful patches of skin and pieces of flesh from a couple spots around my body.
• I woke up earlier than if I had to go work. On both days.
• I swam in a lake that must have been collecting fertilizers from surrounding rural areas for the past 20 years. Judging by its color.
• I didn’t drink a drop of liquor, but absorbed enough Red Bull to start growing a second pair of bovine testicles soon.
• I didn’t see a single stripper.

Why the hell can’t my friends do like everybdy else and celebrate their bachelor party by getting drunk and snorting blow off a hooker’s tits in Las Vegas?

Today is the 660th anniversary of the battle of Crécy, wherein the French got their collective ass handed over to them by Welsh archery, suffering a humiliating defeat and going on to start the appropriately named Hundred Years’ War (and you thought Iraq was dragging on).

Today is also the 26th anniversary of Tex Avery’s untimely death, to the greatest relief of talking ducks and horny wolves the world over.

I’m pretty sure something else happened on that day, but I just can’t remember what.

I think I may have solved two mysteries at once.

A clue?

It’s small, got round ears and no longer scurries above my ceiling…

Also, it doesn’t pay rent.

Any suggestion on Disney-sanctionned ways of ridding one’s home of uninvited critters? that doesn’t involve camping out in the middle of the leaving room day and night, flashlight and hammer in hand?

OK, here is one for the Agatha Christie crowd out there:

I come home after a long day at work (and at the pub) to a supposedly empty apartment.

There are three small, oddly shaped, puddles right in the middle of my living room and, although it has been raining today, I live on the 4th of 6th floors (that is: neither under the roof, nor potentially close to any heretofore undiscovered Parisian groundwater spring). The wallpaper-covered ceiling above said puddles shows no trace of humidity.

[...]

Can anyone please point me to an explanation that doesn’t involve an incontinent Siberian tiger breaking into my place during the afternoon and currently sleeping on my bed in the back?