Had a dentist appointment this morning at 7:30. Devon and I got up to the school of dentistry at around 7:20—we drove because it was raining and the transit access seemed a little iffy (parking was a nightmare even at that time—how people can do this to themselves every day I will never know). My hope in getting such an early appointment was that I would be able to get in and out in an hour, then head over to the department and get a good full day of work in. Well plans never go according to plan and I didn't actually get seen by the dentist until after 8:00. The exam was a bit different than I am used to; it's a research hospital and the dentist had to take a careful accounting of my teeth. The good news is that I don't have any cavities, the bad news is that I have to get a root canal on the tooth that the dentist in Providence destroyed several years ago. Didn't make it out of the dentist until nearly 9:00.

With my plans blown, Devon and I decided to breakfast at Panera Bread. We each had bagels. It was then off to school, where I spent the whole day working on my game theory problem set.

Game theory in the morning, after which I had a meeting with a professor regarding a fellowship I am applying for. That went well enough. I then spent a few hours reading for political economy and began working on my problem set. I didn't make a lot of progress even though I worked late. Once again, spent too much time "getting organized" (LaTeX related, this time) and too little time focused on producing results. I need to get a handle on that issue. Also had a second meeting with a professor in the afternoon.

I tried to get moving early thing morning, but things just didn't go according to plan. Didn't make it into the office until 10:15 am, but I did manage to stay until 5:30. Overall, I was also fairly productive, though I didn't get to the game theory problem set that is due on Wednesday. The reading just took me way too long (complicated).

Came home and began typing up my notes for class tomorrow. Also began organizing by class materials, which is something I should have done before classes kicked into full gear. I've decided to start saving the readings for each class for future reference. They are organized by class (placed into sub-directories located in the directories I have dedicated to each class), and are linked to BibTeX entries in my references database. Coupled with some custom keyword entries in the database, I hope this will help me search more effectively through all of my course and research articles. Should be come in handy for general exams, though I am worried about space limitations (PDFs can be large).

Today was the day of the party. I didn't head into the department so that I could make the pulled pork, barbecue sauce, and help with a few other appetizers. Unfortunately, I also didn't manage to get much real work done. I had to make the barbecue sauce three times—a North Carolina recipe I found on the Internet turned out much too vinegary, and a second experimental sauce using orange juice was just horrible. In the end, I just made a recipe up on the fly, which turned out pretty well, all things considered.

Devon didn't get home until 3:30, and we were slow to get everything ready. Didn't clean the house like we had hoped, and were still working on cleaning and cooking when people began to arrive at 7:00. But, almost everyone showed up, and I think (hope) it was a success. People seemed to have a good time, the food was good, and people didn't begin leaving until around midnight.

Long day today, even though I didn't seem to get much done. Went in to the department at the usual 9:00 am, did some reading (or tried to do some reading) for game theory. Then met with Didi, a classmate (2nd year), who wanted some LaTeX instructions. More specifically, I thought Lyx would be a more gentle introduction. Unfortunately, given the size of the install, the age of her system (or, rather, the age of her XP installation), and the spotty performance of the building wireless, the install wasn't completed by the time I had to head to a PRISM tutorial on STATA.

After the PRISM meeting, had my first comparative political economy session, which only ran for 45 minutes or so (spent our time going through the syllabus and assigning ourselves paper and presentation schedules). By the time class was over, the Lyx install had finally completed. But Didi had gone home, so I verified that the install would work, then put the machine in her office and went home.

At home, didn't get a lot completed. Did some reading and worked on my math camp notes (yet again). Also helped Devon prepare for our cohort New Year party, which we're hosting tomorrow night. That, I think, is getting to be a lot of trouble considering the amount of work I have already, not to mention the expense.

In to school early this morning and spent the whole day studying stats and game theory. On the way home, stopped by the bookstore (Barnes & Noble) to pick up Devon's textbook for the German class she starts next week. As it turns out, the book was bundled along with some multimedia CD-ROMs and cost right around $80. I then headed home in the freezing cold (I was on my bike). Spent some more time studying in the evening, but also managed to install my new backup drive. It's nice to have that taken care of. I now have around 161GB of extra space and don't have to worry about the losing my data if the RAID fails.

Class in the morning, game theory, and then to stats (regression this term) in the afternoon. Managed to complete some reading between the classes; unfortunately, it took me more than an hour to get through just 6 pages, three of which I didn't understand (game theory may be rough). Our stats professor was changed at the last minute, and it also looks like the class is going to be rough—the professor has warned us of as much. He did repeat the favorite mantra around here, "grades don't matter", a couple times in hopes of making us "feel better". Of course, he's not the one that has to worry about keeping a fellowship. Home around 3:30, where I got almost nothing useful done for the rest of the night.

No class today and not much in the way of homework, so I decided to just stay home and do what little work I did have. Spent some time working on my application for the FLAS Fellowship, and sent some related emails. One annoyance is that OSU doesn't provide a PDF application with form fields, meaning I have to either hack the PDF or use a typewriter. Since I don't own a typewriter, looks like I will be doing the former unless there is a typewriter somewhere in the department. Need to look for one tomorrow as I think that will take a lot less time than messing with the PDF.

FreeBSD 7.1 was released today. The release notes mentioned an improvement to file locking over NFS, so I decided to upgrade all of my systems at once. I also took the opportunity to update my network numbering so that Tim and I (mostly Tim) can complete our planned VPN. That was pretty much painless, only Penelope (as usual) caused any problems. Not quite sure if the file locking changes made any real differences to NFS performance.

A couple weeks ago, I was sitting around bored and with a couple beverages in me, when I decided to take another look at Ebay. I hadn't even visited the site in years—it always seemed much too difficult to find what I was looking for. Well, it seems they have made some significant improvements. Unfortunately, what that meant was that somewhere between Captain America tights and a nice pair of green stiletto heels, I ran across an iRobot Roomba Discovery (model 4210). Well, the long and short of it is that I bid, and won, and am now a proud owner of yet another device meant to serve my lazy ass. It arrived today (it has a remote!), and to my surprise it actually works. It has been named Ronald, as in Reagan; with the state of the economy, I just didn't think the legacy of Reaganomics should be swept under the rug.

Back to school today, though it was a short day. Class (game theory) began at 9:30 am, and all we did was play a few games. But it looks like it will be a good class. Afterward, did some reading until around 3:45 (my second class of the day, regression, was canceled). On the way home, I had planned on stopping by the bookstore, but the line looked ridiculous, so I just rode home.

Tim and I did run into some trouble when he attempted to run my R script—it crashes out when attempting an aggregate. Think it may have something to do with the newest version, 2.8.1, which he has installed, and some possible changes made to how R handles time series data. The script runs fine on 2.8.0 and 2.7.2. When I got home, tried to get 2.8.1 to compile on my workstation, but it requires gcc 4.3, which I wasn't able to get installed correctly (at least it appears that way). Hopefully, the port maintainer will submit an update soon so I don't have to do it myself.

In the evening, went over to Sean and Elizabeth's for dinner (Sean is one of Devon's managers at NorthStar). We had a good time, though we had to leave a bit early in order to make it to the bookstore, Barnes & Noble, before it closed. We made it there with just 10 minutes to spare and I was able to get the book I need to read for Wednesday.

Well, it's the last day of winter vacation. Spent some time reading Fahrenheit 451 and fixed another bug in my weblog code. Also worked on Devon's résumé some and finished the home sales analysis script for Tim. Added another zip code and allowed for market area delineations based on latitude and longitude coordinates. All that seemed to take up much of the day.

In the morning, decided to take a crack at installing the old NVIDIA graphics card (GeForce 5600) I had lying around into Penelope. Surprisingly, I didn't have to downgrade the driver, which was my worry. Her system is now up and running while I wait for the new fan to get here. Also spoke to Kelli at Credit Union of Ohio about the possibility of getting a mortgage this year. She was very helpful, and it seems that it may be a possibility. Devon and I will have to discuss it more before we make a final decision on whether to go ahead or not. Our lease is up in August, so we have some time.

More work on the weblog today—managed to fix my ability to mark posts as hidden or special topics here on the weblog. That fix was easy enough; it seems I already had the functionality built in, just had turn it on. I also finally completed the cats' scratching post. They have been without one since we moved here, and they were beginning to pick on the carpets a bit too much.

After hearing the story of Journalspace, I found myself very paranoid about our data backup situation, so I ordered a new backup hard drive for the server (500GB Western Digital). Right now all backups are on the RAID or on a small archive drive that only holds daily diffs. About everything we have is on a few drives and if something stupid happened, all could be lost.

In the evening we went out to Wine Maker's and Amul India with Marisa and Matt. Easily the best Indian food I've ever had, and the Wine Maker's also looks interesting. There was some talk of trying it out.

Was woken this morning at 6:00 am by a power failure and resulting blare from Devon's UPS, an APC Back-UPS ES 350. Unfortunately, the batteries in her UPS as well as the one attached to my workstation and server, an APC Smart-UPS 1500VA, are no longer holding a charge. This meant that Crichton and Pilot shut down immediately. Power came back at 7:39 am. When I got up, discovered that one of Pilot's hard drives had been damaged in the power failure, but it appears that gmirror was able to rebuild it. I really should consider getting a better backup solution—one where the full backup of my server is not contained on the same RAID. Right now, only my daily changes are contained on another (small) drive.

Spent a bit of time in the evening pulling the video card out of Penelope, removing the fan and heat sink, and searching for potential replacements. That turned out to be more trouble than necessary—it seems NewEgg is no longer carrying much in the way of heat sinks and fans for video cards. Ended up ordering one off of Ebay. It appears to be an exact match to the original installed on the card, so hopefully it will work. It's coming from Hong Kong, so it may take a few weeks to get here. I'll have to find a temporary solution until then.

Much of the day was spent playing with R and some Portland housing data. Finally put together some presentable charts and graphs, along with a simple regression analysis. Sent then off for Tim and Joan's review.

Stuck around the house today to "get stuff done". Unfortunately, not much of that happened and, frankly, I can't exactly remember what it was that I intended to get finished. I did work for a few hours on Penelope, Devon's workstation. For some reason, the resent upgrades rendered gtkam, SANE, and gtkpod useless—none of the devices could be identified when plugged into a USB port. I was afraid that it had to do with me disabling FireWire support, but in the end it simply turned out to be failed builds of sane-backends and gphoto2, and a permissions issue with mounting the iPod. If I had paid more careful attention to the upgrade process, these problems probably wouldn't have arisen.

Of course, with those issues fixed and all of Devon's devices working correctly again, Penelope decided to get her revenge by making strange revving and grinding sounds not long after I had completed fixing the other issues. Investigating, I discovered that the fan on the video card was failing. Shut the system down immediately and decided to deal with that headache later.

Managed to drag myself up to school again today. Made more progress on my notes, but still haven't completed as much as I had hoped. I should have made it a point to make it up to campus earlier in the break. Out to lunch at Buckeye Donuts with Travis which, despite it's name, seems to be a pretty traditional Greek diner. It was pretty good—all of the ingredients seemed fresh and the gyro meat was quite good. It was then back to the office to get a bit more work done.

In the evening Devon and I headed over to Marisa and Matt's to celebrate the New Year. Had a great time. Dinner was excellent—Matt barbecued a pork (Boston) butt and we brought along a salad. I also got to play a Nintendo Wii for the first time. It was a lot more fun than I had anticipated. I was especially impressed with how accurate the controllers are.