virus?

My computer hasn't been hooked up to the internet for about a month and a half (ever since I moved).

I turned it on, and a little pop-up came up.

It said "ThisIsTheHeaderofDallas".

There was a button which said 'buttonOfDallas' at the bottom.

I knew, I say, I knew there was something on my computer. grrr. Oh, well, I was planning on wiping it anyway.

summer

I'm subletting. I sent a check for last months rent. It bounced. First time ever. The only thing I can think of is that I wrote the check, and the girl I'm renting from cashed it a week or two ago. Meanwhile, I happily took money out of my account. Fan*bleeping*tastic.

Oh, well.

My girlfriend is here for the summer. She's looking for work. I printed out a job application for working at a movie theater. It turns out the place has a theater in Cleveland, and in my old haunt of Goldsboro, North Carolina. wow. All I can say is "WTF?" I guess it's a small world, but I wouldn't have guessed it.

regards,
me

your purpose in life

My dad went to a conference in NYC a few weeks ago.

It was about finding your purpose in life, and transcending the material image. He was disappointed the first day because the other people there were hippies, and he's definitely the mild-mannered Clark Kent type. But my mother urged him to stay for the second day, and it was what he was looking for. She didn't tell me what he had found, but she said it was good.

She watched one of the videos that he brought home. She said that transcending the false images and finding your true self was like salmon spawning. Thousands are born, but few make it. The analogy was off-beat, I'll admit, but that's how my mom is. Plus, she was on her bike, walking the dog and talking on her cell to me.

So, I was washing some dishes, and I thought, 'if the chance of success is so low, why bother at all?' The answer came right away 'if most don't make it, why do salmon swim upstream?' Because it's what they do.

I'm light as a feather

Visited my girlfriend last weekend.

She has a scale in her house, I don't.

Since last I was there (it was a while...about 2 months) I've lost 9 lbs. or so. Perhaps, being a stats major, I should say '9 lbs. +/- 1 lb.' In any event, it was reading around 163 to 165, and now it said 153.5. The odd thing was, I thought I was gaining weight. Hopefully I'm only loosing muscle mass. Of course, in the long run, that's not so great, either.

Oh, well.


Today I found out my friend is getting divorced. She was the first girlfriend I ever had. Senior year of high school, but we became really close junior year. She was nice. She stayed in contact, but I felt sort of weird after she broke up with me my freshman year at college. It wasn't really a shock, I think we both knew it would probably occur, but it still kind of hurt. And then I wasn't really sure how to act towards her. I sort of got over it. She got married. My mom really liked her husband. He was a nice guy, but I must say that was really weird. I'm sorry that it didn't work out for her. Odd thing, though. I had a dream about her last night. She was in my house (actually, my parent's old one, when I was in high school). She brought this guy along, and I said 'it's nice to see you again' to him in the kitchen, but then I realized it was another guy. I realized because he looked down, and shifted his weight, uncomfortably. He wasn't the same guy, but was embarrassed to say so to me. He was sort of big and burly. Maybe he had a beard.

In the other room, where the piano eventually was, she kept kissing my head, and messing with my hair. Wet kisses, too. My mom thought it was great. I'm not sure how the guy felt about it. Nobody really seemed to mind, but me. I left. Then I was walking down a hill. There was a lawn, and then some trees pleasantly, widely spaced. It was clearly planned, but loosely. The sun was shining, and it was a beautiful spring day. Good for walking. I was going along a dirt road (in a grey suit, I think). I was thinking to myself that I couldn't go back, that I just needed some time to myself. In reality, the incident sort of unnerved me and made me uncomfortable. Then my alarm went off. I snoozed it, and my mom called (good thing, too 'cause I had to work). And she said that my friend was getting a divorce...

odd.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

6 x 9 = 42 mod (13)


Opening night for the Guide = Friday

(and a Happy Birthday, Laura)

Chudnovsky

My mom sent me a New Yorker on the Chudnovsky brothers. There was an article in the New Yorker in '92 about them, and how they had built a super computer in one of their apartments via mail order. Took a while, and a lot of consideration, but they didn't have the money or backing to buy a souped up version. They were using it to computer pi to billions of digits.

Now they have a chair at a New York college, and have a new computer which they don't have a name for. The article names it "It". Their approach is the bad-ass approach they drew me to mathematics in the first place. Honestly, how can you do something so recklessly cool and useful and get away with it? It used to boggle my mind, but now I'm happy people like the Chudnovsky's exist.

Near the end of the article, it said that they were building a new super computer, code-named "C64" (it's better than Nintendo's N64!) with IBM for a "U.S. Government Agency". Right, boys and girls, let's all think aloud. N-S-A.

Who else employs high level mathematicians, buys extremely expensive supercomputers (general in the top, say, 1% in terms of computing power in the world) and is a government agency? They even say on their webpage 'the NSA employs the country's premier cryptologists. It is said to be the largest employer of mathematicians in the United States and perhaps the world.' Plus, from the book 'Body of Secrets' I know that they were the ones buy Cray computers left and right back when Cray was still around.

...Very Interesting...but Stupid!

Ernie's favorite number...

...is 8,243,721.

A friend came through for me a day or so ago.

Also, I seem to be addicted to This American Life. I can never seem to find it on the radio, but it's at www.thislife.org.