I’m off to St. Louis to get a free refrigerator from my pops. I’ll be holding court at the Majestic Restaurant in St. Louis tonight for anyone who wants to drink beer and eat Gyro with a very happy man.

One minute, four seconds into the Blues v. Canucks game, Mellanby picks a fight with Todd Bertuzzi. Old school, my man, old school. (Bertuzzi laid the hit on Barrett Jackman that ended his season.)

Another great day. I’m starting to pick up Python, a beautiful language. It’s been snowing pretty hard since I left my class. Got quite a bit of work done in the office. I had a meeting with the prof who’s helping me with my paper. He seemed pretty impressed with the things I’d discovered on Monday and last night, and gave me some advice on where to run with it. His observation was that if I could prove all the things I’d discovered, then it’s a significant finding for the field. And I’m quite certain that I’m right. I expect to have it done next week. This weekend is shot though, as I’ll be in the car for about 12 hours. And watching football, hopefully at Takis’ new crib, for three of them.

Jeff forwarded me an email from Caron with a link to the page for E-Bay Whores. Wow. I’m speechless. People are willing to cough up $255 to get a few letters from a fake girlfriend? Don’t they know how many lapdances that’ll get you? If you’re like me at the clubs, maybe five. But that’s besides the point. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was these girls’ parents topping off the bid, trying to keep them away from the horrid creatures that would place a bid on something like that. Or maybe just really drunk people. I better check my credit card statements.

Dream… or dream on? I’ve been tossing the Ankiel wildcard out in every conversation I’ve had with my bro about the Cards’ pitching staff. Ankiel, before the blowup, was a lefthander with a 98 mph fastball and a curveball that mystified me, watching it on a tv from video shot way out in the outfield. I can’t imagine seeing his or Morris’ up close at the plate. He’s as good a hitting pitcher as there is, and he runs the bases as well as any Card pitcher short of Simontacchi. When he came up, we all expected him to have a hard time and flop, be sent back down, but he had the an amazing second half with stellar numbers until the postseason blowup. He’s now coming of age where a normal pitcher will come up to the majors. There are even lower expectations that his first time up (not counting the late season bullpen stint before his rookie year). It would not surprise me if he made the team and showed a lot of doubters some great things. But I’m still one of those doubters, so I won’t stake my reputation on it.

With traditional allies like these…

Natasha: Mommy, I see two beans, a tomato, and a vacuum cleaner inside you!“

Tatyana: Your dad promised not to tell anyone about that! The bastard!

I missed the first week of class, but apparently I didn’t miss too much content. Today’s class was all review of harmonics and general wave analysis type stuff. I did learn something new though, that the human auditory-sensory system is not sensitive to phase shift. In other words, we hear two quantitatively different sounds exactly the same as long as they consist of the same subcomponent sine waves. Pretty freaking crazy. I’ll make a picture to explain what I’m talking about tomorrow.

A while back, I mentioned a German restaurant nearby. Tonight I went and checked it out. I had the Veal Schnitzel Emmental with spatzle and a potato pancake, and the spinach soup for an appetizer. My dinner companion had the Chicken Breast Oskar (which I can’t recommend any more highly) with beautifully prepared vegetables and spatzle, also the soup. And of course we each had a half liter of South Germany’s second finest beer, Franziskaner (second only to Freising’s Weihenstephan). The beer had a mammoth froth on top, the likes of which I haven’t seen since my rampage through Bavaria. The soup was fantastic, very flavorful with a base of clarified butter. The entrees were great, if you ever head up that way, make sure someone at the table who doesn’t have cooties orders the Chicken Oskar. We were the only customers that I could tell, so we had great seats right by the fire. It sounded like they were taking a lot of reservations for people on the weekend, so if you’re not going during the week, call ahead.

I’m all registered for classes now. Acoustic Phonetics and Topics in Computational Linguistics. I went to the CL class today, it’s going to be awesome. It’s a lab class, so we’re broken into three groups and we have to develop a text normalization system in Python, a language I’ve been meaning to pick up. I know two of the dudes in my group, and the third seems to really know his scripting languages. I have Phonetics tomorrow, and I expect that to be really interesting for me too. This is looking to be a fine semester. I should probably be taking another class, but I still have a lot of loose ends to tie up from the dark days of yore.

Just beat Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker. Fantastic game, beautiful ending with superb music. Quite a bit too easy, but I guess it has to be for lil ones to play it. Is it just me, or is spam going out of control? I’ve been getting a LOT of offers to lengthen my wang, and I’m starting to wonder who’s been spreading rumors. It looks like there’s a bunch of viruses going around, seeing as how I’ve gotten about ten emails in the past two hours with a zipped attachment. Well, time to get back to work on the paper. I came up with a more creative title too. Should be a gas.

Well, this is one amazing bird! It’s supposedly the most advanced non-human language user. Winston Churchill’s bird, still living, also makes a lot of sense when he talks. Of course, this does nothing to change my rule that any animal unable to catch a frisbee is fair game for chow.

Talked to my prof about the paper I turned in on Friday. It’s gonna need a fairly major rewrite. He said that everything I said looked correct, but there wasn’t enough. I’d made a negative contribution by showing that something can’t be done in a certain way, and now I need to make a positive contribution by showing how it can be done. I know how it can be done, I just haven’t worked through all the computations. I expect I can have it done in a week. I’ll be starting on it tonight. Basically, I have to redo the formalism without the state switch operation, and something else instead. I know what that something else is, following on work in Paul Dekker’s dissertation. (I’ll have to show that his technique won’t work as he states it in the formalism I’m using.) It should be pretty good, and I think my prof is going to get my neck off the chopping block for a little while. That’s a good thing. Two major advancements achieved in one day.

Wow, Dave got his MT site up and running. Go wish him well in his new digs.

The bulk of my work involves making streaming real audio from wave files I either capture from tape, record live in studio, or rip from CDs that come with the textbooks. (With publisher’s permission in writing, of course) The past few days, I’ve been spending a silly amount of time setting up jobs in Real Helix Producer. I had to input each file individually, which takes a long time, when each CD has over sixty files, and each class has three or four CDs per. I absolutely despise doing tedious busy work when there’s a better way of doing things, so I stopped and looked around the web. It turns out that you can run Producer from a command line, with all sorts of useful flags and wildcards. If I’d only known that before. So I wrote a little batch file that I copy into a directory, it converts all the files exactly like I want it to and then destroys itself. I can get done in two seconds what used to take me twenty minutes. Fantastic.

Matt Lauer’s interviewing a left-wing radio talk show host named Ed Schultz on TV in the next room. Schultz was talking about Dean’s (Yeaeeeagh!) speech in Iowa and justified it thusly: “He’s a hockey dad! That was a halftime speech.” Tee hee!

I’ll explain… First off, the reputation assigned to hockey dads is that they beat each other senseless at their kids’ games. Then there’s no halftime in hockey–three periods, dig?

Well that was a super fun night. My pal Chris took his final comprehensive examination for the math department yesterday, clearing the way for his dissertation research. A cracked rib and a nasty case of walking pneumonia kept him from properly celebrating the event. Tonight he was game enough to grab a super tasty Pia’s cheeseburger and a few cold ones. Then we played some Gran Turismo 3 at his crib. That game is super cool. We got a fantastic winter storm here today too, so the roads are real peachy. It was a bit of a trick keeping myself from using the driving techniques I’d learned in GT3 while sliding around corners in the Concorde. Seriously though, the car handles great in the ice. I’ve never had a car with ABS before, so when the sucker started kicking my feet, I wasn’t sure what was going on. The traction control is pretty nice too, although once I regained the hang of driving on ice, it didn’t kick in too much. After I split there, I checked out a few more places. Had an interesting conversation with a couple of dudes who were talking about the mechanics of the blower in the Mad Max movies. Apparently blowers are more of a hamper on good performance below 7,000 rpm, and this dude who convinced me that he knows his shit argued that the movie was bullshit because Mad Max “switches on his blower,” and that’s just not how they work. Blowers are belt-driven off the engine and are the only source for air intake for the carborateur. So if the blower isn’t running until he switches it on the engine won’t work at all, since it won’t be able to get mixture at ambient air pressure. We concluded that it would work if he had the belt drive on the blower configured through some sort of clutch mechanism and if the blower would be bypassed when the switch was off. There might have been another issue to work out, but I had to split and come home to hit the hay. There were also some classic paleo-liberals talking about the beatability of GWB this November. Old guys drinking dessert wines. If I wasn’t busy discussing post-apocalyptic combustible gas engines, I might have tossed in that his biggest liability is the fact that he vetoed not one spending (or otherwise) bill in the current term. Those jokers in DC spent a lot of our money the past four years, and nobody on the left side of the spectrum is impressed. They will always hate us. And that’s all right, because they’re fucking wrong on everything else too. Nighty night!

I just bought one of these T-Shirts. That’s got to be the coolest marketing campaign I’ve ever seen. I found it at an ad on Sergeant Stryker’s new Cold-Fury-esque website, where I was went after reading this hilarious exchange GWB had with some reporters, at Donald Sensing’s suggestion.

It’s lightly snowing outside. Super beautiful. I heard on the radio last night that we’re supposed to get 1 1/2 inches of ICE and then two inches of powder on top of that. Hilarity will ensue. I’m a big fan of that sitch when you have a decent snow that gets packed down in spots with footsteps, resulting in paths of icy footprints. Then it snows again to conceal them. Treacherous. Hilarious. Fat man fall down, go boom. While sitting around drinking a cold one with C-Bot last night, I came up with a scheme to get myself a free fridge. I’d have to wait until next weekend though. That’s a whole week without a carnation instant breakfast, and hence no whey protein. I’ll waste away. Tonight, I’m thinking of travelling north about a half hour to check out a German restaurant that has Munich style Weisswurst and Franziskaner Hefeweizen on tap. I’m warning you, their webpage is AWFUL. It’s a clinic on how to design an obnoxious and counterintuitive layout.

I don’t know whether to be proud or ashamed of what I just did. I went out shopping for refrigerators, expecting to pay about 350 or so for one. Went to Lowe’s first and found one for $357 I liked and one for $398 I liked more. Went to Best Buy’s and found less, and the same model as the $398 Frigidaire for a dollar more. Made the decision to check out D’s Used Appliances on Monday and see whether he’s got anything decent, and if not, I’d go to Lowe’s and buy the $398 model with a Lowe’s credit card. All that makes perfect sense, right? So here’s where the magic happens. I left Best Buy having bought a nice surround sound system with DVD player and a video game with a spare controller. Total cost: a little under $300. I set it up, and man it sounds awesome! Mario Kart Double Dash in surround sound is a treat everyone should experience.