Out of my hat

After multiple years of neglect, I’m rereading one of the main proofs from my dissertation. And boy, does it suck. Vertices changing names all over the place, overly torturous logic, the whole bit. Just awful. Wasn’t I supposed to have a committee to stop me from submitting crap like this?

(Well, yes. But I know for a fact that two of my four committee members didn’t read the dissertation at all, and a third read through to the end of Chapter 1; the Awful Proof in Question occurs in chapter 4.)

The reason I’m going back to it at all is that a bunch of this stuff is finally getting published soon — well, almost certainly — and the pre-referee report I’ve gotten back points out how very messy this bit is. The funny thing was that I remember being so very proud of working through the mess of cases and coming out the other side with the proof.

At least I’m sure the result’s true.

Well, mostly sure.

Hm. Been a while since I’ve written one of these, between not having regular ‘net access and my standing rule that despondence is not a good state from which to be blogging.

Anyhow. My laptop sucks.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s a fine machine, and was a time when it was the coolest thing on wheels, without actually being on wheels. It was just that cool. The problem is that this was some years ago, and while the technology is still current enough to run the most recent version of the OS (not that I have the most recent version of the OS…) I’m running into distinct issues regarding processor speed. And resolution. And battery life. And memory. Oh, memory, you’ll be the death of me someday.

So: it’s new computer time, since it’s actually becoming difficult to get decent work done on la machine. Given my current predilections, I’ve essentially got two choices for a suitable notebook, and they begin with “i” and “Power”. The first of these choices is probably the less satisfying, since I have every intention of using the machine for reasonably heavy computational stuff, and so I’m leaning toward a PowerBook.

But.

All the rumour sites agree: now is not the time to buy a PowerBook. Revisions are on the way; wait just a week or three more, voices whisper, and all will be revealed. On the other side of the time pressure is the Special Kewl Offer of a sort-of free iPod Mini that I, as a faculty member of good standing at an institute of higher education, am qualified to receive.

So: if I’m lucky, the new PB release comes in the next month, and my way is clear unless they also jack the prices on the things. But if I’m not lucky, then I can either get a Shiny New PowerBook, or else get a free MP3 player and be one of the chumps who orders from the Dregs of the Old PowerBooks.

There’s got to be a mathematical model here that’ll help…

Well, not quite, but maybe. Right now I’m sitting here half-tired and half-not, with fragments of evocative but mostly meaningless phrases from the latest Tom Waits album running through my head. Given that I haven’t slept well two nights running, you’d think I’d be in bed by now or something.

Spent most of today driving, on my way back from a sojourn down south. It had all of the elements of a good southern trip: friends, math, hand-crafted beer, crosswords, friends. Also the added entertainment of meeting two young children, who decided after a few hours of my acquaintance that I was basically harmless & hence could be safely incorporated into their play structure. (Apparently one of them was quite annoyed this morning at being deprived of the opportunity of waking me up. I’m of the opinion that she owes all of her future birthdays to her parents’ prevention of this action, but maybe not. After all, I don’t see very well without my glasses, and hence would probably miss a lot.)

I had a truly marvellous play on words in my head earlier today, for the name of a software project that I don’t have one-thousandth of the mad skillz necessary to complete. But it’s gone now, and maybe it’s just as well. I worry sometimes that my memory isn’t nearly as sharp as it used to be; then again, I came up with the idea while driving, and most if not all long-distance driving streams of consciousness don’t seem to get archived terribly well.

If I ever get around to making the official List of Things What Make Me Happy, I’m sure that day-passes to rail-transit systems will crack the top 20. For a mere $9, I have in my current possession a two-day pass to San Diego’s trolley network (plus buses, but that’s not nearly as exciting); this will allow me to kill the weekend in style, if by “style” one means “transit goodness Heaven”, which I guess isn’t how most people would use the word. I’m half-considering taking the trolley down to San Ysidro tomorrow and walking across to Mexico just because I can, but I’ve heard that sometimes the line to get back in the country is rather long, and I do have a flight to catch.

“Trolley”. It’s also just fun to say.

One thing I enjoy about vacationing in cities is that it gives my small gift for synchronicity a better chance to operate. Specifically, I left my hotel room earlier this afternoon vaguely wishing that I might happen upon a neighbourhood wine shop that was doing tastings; not two hours later, I had found myself a wine-tasting to experience. Though not in a small shop; this was actually set up at a big outdoor mall (to which I’d gone to visit the Apple Store), and was possibly in conjunction with a cooking demonstration by someone named Alton Brown. Still, I’m not going to complain about the existence of free wine tastings. (I might complain about the quality of the wines in question, though: the Riesling was a little too mineral in flavour for my taste, and both the Shiraz and the Cab on the earthy side of things. The nicest one there was the sparkling Chard/Pinot, but since I’m not that into sparkling wines…)

In other news, my first stint ever as a groomsman came to a successful close yesterday; I’m using “successful” here to indicate that the wedding happened as planned, the bride and groom are safely together and out of the country, and no one died that I know of. There were a couple of minor problems, but I’d imagine that there always are.

• I’ve been house-sitting for most of the past week; given that there are no pets in said house, it’s pretty light duty all things considered. It took me about a day and a half to get over the I’m in someone else’s house all alone wrongness sensation, and am now settled in quite comfortably just in time for the proper residents to return and my own voyage to the other side of the continent.
• Is it possible to be allergic to sunlight? I don’t seem to do very well on bright, warm days if I spent any extended period outside.


• I got a slightly unquiet e-mail from my department secretary today, asking for a bunch of documents relating to renewing my work visa. Guess I forgot to notify the proper Powers That Be in the Urban Commuter College’s System that I am, in fact, a more-or-less documented citizen of the country now. Oops…
• What lese has been going on? Certainly not work; I’ve got a pretty minimal requirement of What Must Be Done by, say, Wednesday and the flight out West: one paper needs to be fleshed out and rationalized. And hopefully, that’s what’s happening tomorrow.

…or maybe that’s just a false memory of a Golden Age of Blogging. Probably, come to think of it.

I’ve been back in the birth-country for about a week and a half now, and somehow in that time I’ve managed to get a bit of work done. (Mostly not research-work as much as money-for-me-work, but who am I to complain? Well, except for complaining about my general lack of M4d C0ding Skillz and general troubles with computers, but I’ve ranted about that elsewhere, I think.) Actual research-work is coming up soon.

I realise that it’s a little odd that I talk about doing so much work while I’m, you know, on vacation. (Nay, more than vacation: by the lights of my current employer, I’m not really even technically working right now, and won’t be until mid-August. At least, if I understand my contract right.) But on the one hand, I’ve got something like eight weeks of time off here, and not enough financial stability to spend all that time in serious tourism or dissipation. On the other, I firmly believe that mathematical research is a leisurely activity (if not actually a leisure activity), and being on vacation means that I can easily devote many placid hours to its pursuit. Besides, it’s my vacation and I can do what I want with it; and what I want, among other things, is to do math. So there.

Another thing I’m doing with my vacation which others might see as work, is re-attempting (and successfully, this time) Umberto Eco’s Baudolino. I wrote about it in this space long enough ago that I don’t want to bother hunting down the reference, but ended up putting it down and never picking it up again. While I think I still like Foucault’s Pendulum better, this one’s still quite charming in its way, and Eco manages to sneak, straight-faced, an awful lot of subtle jokes into the narration. Makes me wish I knew enough Italian to read the original text.

Been a busy couple of weeks here in Nutshell Central. Principally there was Workshop Hell, which I’ve come out the other side of pretty much unscathed, and with a better working knowledge of Fourier transforms and weavelets than at any prior point in my existence. (Thanks here are due to Wendy, who has long been my principal source for explanations of analysis, and came through for me on the whole wavelets thing. Wendy, remind me to buy you dinner next time I’m in the region.)

Aside from that, the rather short term is coming to an end. We’re doing what I consider the fun part of the course — combinatorics, or “counting” if you prefer — which lets me bring in all sorts of problems from different games. I’d been talking to Blue earlier this week, and he mentioned that on one of his Ultimate teams how many different men and women there were, and how many were required for a line on the field. A-ha, I thought to myself a little while later, there’s a combinations question here.

The best new tool for the web I’ve seen in a while is YubNub: it’s billed as a command-line for the web, but infinitely extensible, so really it’s a little like a Forth interpreter for the web. The reason I like this is that I don’t always remember to switch search engines in my FireFox search box, with disappointing results. Typing a prefix command will be easier for me to remember, because it means I don’t have to mix mousing into my keyboarding.

I have an occasional weakness: every now and again, when I find myself at a bookstore and am not worried about money, I will buy a computer book. Principally, these books tend to be about programming in Cocoa, the native framework of my operating system of choice.

This is perhaps a little perverse, since I don’t — as a general rule — program. I certainly don’t program well. (While I’m reasonably competant in a handful of formatting languages, those aren’t really the same thing. Anyone who uses the phrase “HTML programming” probably Does Not Know what they are Talking About.) And really, I don’t need to program. I got out of that racket almost seven years ago.

But I still feel that, somehow, I should be able to program. I think part of it’s a fascination with the idea of a programming language as a mode of expression. Mostly, though, it’s probably that as an educated math geek at the tail end of Generation X™, I feel that some ability with computers is expected of me. I design algorithms; I should be able to implement them myself.

So I go and buy the books, and often try to read them, and then my actual work starts making demands on my analytical brain, which decouples from the part that sees reading as a default idle activity. And the book goes on a shelf (eventually, sometimes languishing in a satchel or my trunk, or occasionally on the floor someplace) and gets glanced at now and again. And, several months after that, I go and buy a new book.

The other week I bought Mike Doughty’s new album; it features a song called “Busting up a Starbux”.

This evening I was out doing math with my most recent visitor, and heard the album — including said song — over the sound system.

At a Starbucks.

This pleases me immensely.

OK, so I’m being bad about updating again. I plead summertime and easy living as my excuse.

Things going through my head recently:

• A long time ago I bought a bunch of “snack bags” (small, sealable plastic bags) on the presumption that there were sandwich-sized or so. They were not, and so since that day they’ve been hanging around my apartment with nothing to do… until today! For today I have determined that they are the perfect size for a coffeemaker’s worth of grounds, which is a very handy thing indeed when one is taking one’s show on the road.
• I feel like I should say something about the Canadian federal scene these days, but really, I got nothing. Conventional wisdom of the moment seems to suggest that Duceppe is going to resign from the Bloc in order to lead the now-headless Pequistes, thereby throwing his party into confusion and sounding the death knell for Charest’s priemereship. This, in turn, probably means a weaker opposition coalition in Parliament, and possibly a weaker Bloc next federal election. (Those votes would, I suspect, go to the NDPs rather than the Libs or the Conservatives, but that’s just a feeling I have and possibly wishful thinking.)
• I’ve been reading a lot of hackish books lately. I should stop, because at some point my neighbours are going to start wondering who I’m shouting “You hack!” at.

Anyhow, coffee’s ready. Time to get to work.