cww.blog!

It seems I meet cool people when I'm traveling. I met Kurt at Dulles, I met Amy on a flight to Houston, and today, I met Kelsey on the bus. We rode the infamous 61C together from Carnegie Mellon to Squirrel Hill, and upon noticing a frazzled newcomer to the front of the bus having a difficult time discovering the bus pass presentation protocol, Kelsey asked me a question about how our ID cards work as bus passes. I explained it to him, and we talked for several blocks. It turns out he's interested in magnetics applications that are somewhat similar to my own research. I actually discussed the specific concept he mentioned, magnetic nanoparticles, in the Presentation that Never Was. So, he and I will do coffee or beer together at some point.

I started classes today, and my CMU ECE web site reflects the new courses, so you can read about them there. Today's class was Elias's, which will be a good class, and I'll probably learn quite a bit about fiber optics and how all that stuff works, even though I really don't have any particular use for the information that will be in my head at the end of the semester.

In other news, the guys in Los Angeles finally picked up their phone today, and I got a very long-winded description of what happened with my server. They are pushing the blame onto a contracting company called Data Connect, which owes Cogent Communications something like $22,000 for several months of leasing one of their data lines. Cogent shut off that line last week because the payments had become so overdue, and my server was on that line. It seems, despite this, Black Sun still never bothered to call me about it, so they aren't any less responsible. The end result, though, is someone will take my server to one of those shipping outlets so they can pack it up securely and send it to me. That's not going to be a cheap shipment.

Oh, oh, oh, and guess what I had for dinner tonight? I had D'artagnan black truffle chicken sausage, on top of fresh brie, on top of cracked pepper water crackers. And, it was really good.

I'm also still waiting for Katy to officially tag me for the food meme thinger.