cww.blog!

As you can see, the weather here is turning from pleasant and warm to wet and chilly. I'm looking forward to wearing my coat, though I wish I had a less bulky outer garment, like a leather jacket or something. I've never pictured myself as a leather jacket kind of guy, but maybe it's time to find out. At any rate, I'll probably cruise through J. Crew on Walnut St. in the near future and see what they have to offer in terms of warm clothing that's not bulky.

I took my VLSI CAD mid-term exam yesterday, and I think it went very well. So well, in fact, that I think a perfect score is a great possibility. Not bad for 15 minutes of studying, I think. The questions encompassed the bulk of what we've covered in class so far: the applications of Shannon cofactors to the Boolean difference and proofs thereof; canonical binary decision diagram optimization; SAT solvers and algorithms that apply to specific applications; and a few other things.

My VLSI CAD class is my favorite class here, and it's rather a shame, I think, that I can't see myself doing anything even remotely related to it in the future. From what I can tell, the class content really only has industrial applications, not academic applications, and I'm finished with industry for a good long time, now.

I've been putting a lot of time, lately, into a project for my VLSI CAD class, as well. It's due tomorrow by midnight, so I still have a little over 35 hours to work on it. It is finished insofar as I don't have to pound out any more code, but there are some bugs I need to fix. The nature of the project is such that I can't tell directly from the program's results where the bug might lay, so I'll probably spend a long time this afternoon, tonight, and tomorrow just staring at my code. Fun times.

I ended up having coffee with Boris on Sunday, by the way, and that went very well. We spoke of old times and new, comparing our journeys to CMU graduate school. It turns out he was doing a summer internship at Intel in Hillsboro, a suburb west of Portland, during the not-quite-a-year I lived in downtown Portland. It's rather a pity we were out of contact then; I certainly could have used another friend while I lived there. He and I have plans to run together soon, and I'm looking forward to it, as he says he knows some cool places to run. Specifically, he mentioned Schenley Park, which is just south of CMU and very large (not quite as large as Memorial Park, for you Houstonians), and I'm excited about that.

Katy has arranged two events for us in the near future: a haunted hay ride this weekend with her friend Vanessa and a Pittsburgh Opera performance, tickets courtesy of the University of Pittsburgh, on, er, the 28th, I think. The hay ride seems cool, but I'm afraid it might end up sucking because of the rain. The opera is Strauss's Ariadne Auf Naxos, and I know nothing about it. I'm disappointed that there will be subtitles along with (usually above) the stage, but I suppose that's a good way of getting new patrons that wouldn't otherwise go to the opera, so I'll deal with it. I'm all for getting more people involved in the arts.

In other news, Tamara has submitted her dissertation to her group of very boring, old men, and she is expecting to defend it the first week of November. Hooray for Dr. Tammy! ;)

So, yeah, all you Texas people should take a good look at that forecast image and figure out why you're still dealing with temperatures in the 90s in October.

That is all.