💾 Archived View for gem.sdf.org › jquah › news › news2004.gmi captured on 2022-01-08 at 14:03:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Settling down in the Washington DC area, and following the example of my new office colleagues by keeping a live journal of it all.
After today's class, Chris Flake invited his fellow grad students to lunch at Bojangles, a fried chicken restaurant chain that enjoys wide popularity in North Carolina and nearby states. Recalling my own happy memories of Bojangles meals from my high school days, I eagerly joined the departing caravan and set out for the nearest Bojangles, with transportation provided by Brian Alford.
The line was not too long by the time we got there, although the commute through lunchtime traffic prolonged what might otherwise have been a twenty-minute drive. Among the side dishes I chose was an order of mashed potatoes, which I later regretted when seeing the fried potato wedges that my dining companions had chosen instead. Too many years away from North Carolina had caused me to forget which Bojangles side dishes could be counted on for consistently delicious taste.
This afternoon Chris Flake hosted a kickball/barbecue party at his rental home in Silver Spring. I visited the Metro rideguide yesterday and planned an itinerary that would bring me to the party on time, but today that plan had to be scrapped when my unfamiliarity with the bus route had me waiting on the wrong side of Baltimore Avenue, so that the bus I needed to catch had moved on before I had the chance to correct my mistake. I crossed the street and ended up waiting another twenty minutes without seeing another bus on the route I needed to take. Giving up in frustration, I set out by foot on what would turn out to be a three-hour walk along route 193.
Having gotten an early start compared with the motorists I knew would be heading to the barbecue along the same route, I hoped that some passing classmates might notice me walking on the side of the road and stop to let me ride the rest of the way in their car. These optimistic thoughts kept me on the lookout for license plates from Arkansas, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and other states from which my various office-mates hailed. Unfortunately, no drivers stopped to offer me a ride, so I arrived at the party after the kickball game was well underway.
The second-year team had the lead when I got there, so my office-mates on the first-year team greeted the arrival of fresh legs with enthusiasm. I joined the line behind home plate and waited my turn to take a swing at an incoming pitch. Standing behind home plate for the first time that afternoon, I made a solid connection with the first pitch, but the run we scored as a result still left our team trailing the second-years by a wide margin. A few more innings passed, and the game came to an end with the second-years victorious.
With little support from the exhausted kickball players, the few who still felt energized enough to engage in a game of football soon abandoned their plan and joined the rest of us for the barbecue in the back yard of the house. The main meal comprised hamburgers and hot dogs, with plenty of cold beverages and snack food on the side. When not chatting with the other grad students or playing hacky-sack away from the eating area, I retreated to the periphery in a half-hearted attempt to prepare for tomorrow's weekly quiz. The party disbanded as evening drew on, and plenty of food remained for Flake and his roommates to enjoy over the next couple of weeks. Shoup gave me a ride back to my apartment, encouraging me to give him a call if I ever needed transportation to a similar event in the future.
My first tour of the capital since the start of spring break last Friday took place as a result of a post by Nichol_storm to the SDMB, inviting Mid-Atlantic Dopers on a day trip to Washington, D.C., which would consist of visits to the standard tourist attractions, including the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Smithsonian museums, and the National Gallery of Art. We met at
Union Station around 11:00, and after meandering in the nearby neighborhoods for a while, we returned to Union Station to eat lunch at the East Street Caf�, which Jurph had recommended in one of the first responses to Nichol_storm's thread. During lunch we planned our afternoon travels on the map I had brought. In the afternoon we set off on Louisiana Avenue, walked past the Capitol and the botanical gardens, and proceeded on a loop which took us around the Mall past the major tourist attractions mentioned above. Along the return trip from the Lincoln Memorial, we passed several joggers and roller bladers, whose dedication to outdoor exercise in spite of the chilly weather and strong winds warranted some mention in our conversations. As the afternoon waned, we found ourselves in the commercial district and decided to stop at Barnes and Noble for an afternoon snack. Following the snack at Barnes and Noble, we set off on 12th street to visit one more museum (the musuem of natural history) before calling it a day. We said our goodbyes at Union Station and then departed to our respective homes.
The long-awaited reunion with my senior year college roommate constituted my second tour of the capital this week. We met at Rosslyn station and continued from there into the heart of the city. Exiting the Metro Center station around 9:30, we were greeted by a clear sky and bright sunlight, which was a welcome change from the chilly, windy weather I endured on Monday. Most museums and attractions would open at 10:00, so we had plenty of time to decide where we would like to start our explorations. Since neither of us had visited the Air and Space Museum for a while, we agreed to begin our sightseeing there. We spent nearly two hours browsing the exhibits, whose extensive documentation provided plenty of reading material to supplement the impressive photographs, artifacts, and replicas. Leaving the museum at 11:45, we strode toward Union Station for lunch. After lunch we found ourselves wandering aimlessly through the southeastern residential area of the city, stopping at a few parks to rest and chat. When rest stops and water breaks could no longer sustain the energy of my friend, who had been carrying a large, heavy backpack all these hours, I had to wish him goodbye at the Potomac Avenue station, where he rode the Orange Line back to his home in Virginia. In the remainder of the afternoon, I traced our steps back to Union Station, and from there back to the Mall and the commercial district. I stopped at Barnes and Noble for a drink of water and a break from the afternoon heat, and then rode the Blue Line from Smithsonian station to my home in Franconia/Springfield, arriving around 17:30.
Today I have been functioning on less than five hours of sleep, having stayed up until 1:45 last night to finish the fourth numerical analysis homework assignment. After waking up at 6:00 and having breakfast, I promptly began to organize my notes for the lecture I had to give in complex analysis today. I arrived on campus at 9:15, which would have been on time if the numerical analysis professor had not scheduled one last make-up class during the 75-minute period preceding our usual class. I had forgotten about that announcement from last Thursday's lecture, so I entered the classroom after most of the new material had been presented. Our usual 75-minute class time was then used as a problem session, which I found very helpful for solidifying my understanding of the homework I was just about to turn in.
In complex analysis I gave a 50-minute lecture, using two different representations of a meromorphic function to derive some interesting identities and compute the sum of a few infinite series. I pieced together the lecture from notes taken in my undergraduate complex analysis course, which was taught by a professor who had a fondness for combinatorics and infinite series.
Returning to my apartment after classes were done, I decided to embark on a run around Lake Artemesia. I circled the lake twice, and within an hour I was back at my apartment, wondering what to do with the remainder of my day.
Having finished the two big assignments of this week, I enjoyed a relaxing afternoon in my apartment, cleaning up my files of archived news stories and sorting through the boxes in my closet to discover what cool stuff I had packed away. My overflowing laundry basket was nearly begging me to attend to it, but lacking quarters and the motivation to walk to the bank, I had to leave the laundry basket as it was.
By 16:30 I was ready for a nap. I slept about an hour, and when I woke up I called my mom to ask how things were going in the new house. After our chat, I set out for the math department, where I would catch up on e-mail and news until about 21:00.
The last numerical analysis class of the semester ended with an interesting quote Professor Osborn recalled from a former physics teacher: "And so, class, our little ship has returned to shore." Osborn wished us luck as we spent the next week studying for the final exam on Friday, encouraging us once again to work through the midterm and problem sets.
In complex analysis, the guest lectures continued, beginning with Sonam's discussion of the problem of estimating the number of zeros of an entire function inside discs around the origin. Carlos took issue with much of Sonam's analysis, especially the sloppy boardwork and the insufficient consideration of cases that could easily be addressed by the Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem and the principle of analytic continuation. I would later agree with Dave Shoup that today we saw Carlos more visibly upset than we had seen him all semester.
Sonam's presentation was followed by Alex's lecture on subharmonic functions. At the beginning, Carlos felt the need to interrupt, using half the board to remind us of convex functions on the real line, of which the subharmonic functions are but a generalization within the class of continuously twice-differentiable functions of a complex variable. After providing this intuitive picture, Carlos allowed Alex to continue, interrupting only intermittently for the rest of the lecture to prompt more detailed explanations from Alex.
This evening I called my DSL provider to obtain a new username and password, since the authentication information I had been using became invalid when my parents canceled their DSL service at the end of April. The customer service representative, Luke, was very helpful, generating a new username and password without asking any pointed questions about the circumstances that prevented me from activating my own account, despite having connectivity since August 2003.
Before testing the new DSL username and password, I spent an hour cooking dinner. When the food was cooked and dishes were washed, I sat down at my computer to check the DSL connection. Pleased to learn that my new username and password successfully authenticated with my ISP, I spent the rest of the evening online, thankful that I no longer had to ration my online time as I had done when connecting through the university's dial-up service. Since my first class on Friday is at 14:00, I could stay up late without regrets, rediscovering the speed of a broadband connection.
The week-long vacation with my family in Michigan came to a close this morning, when they brought me to the Detroit airport. I said goodbye at the curbside entrance of Smith Terminal and then went to gate A8 to catch the first flight of my return trip to Maryland. The two flights and the shuttle ride to College Park went smoothly, so I am now writing this update from the math department computer lab.
While my sister was away at work Thursday morning, Mom and I rearranged her bedroom to take advantage of space that had been opened up when furniture had been redistributed into my bedroom and the newly finished basement. The astounding transformation we accomplished prompted me to joke that we might now try our luck with the chaos of Papa's office. Instead we worked on a more manageable goal: setting up the exercise equipment in the basement. This task occupied most of our afternoon, and with Papa's help in the evening, we also set up the ping pong table, so that the basement is now adequately furnished for entertaining guests.
On Friday Mom and I picked up my sister from work at noon, going out for lunch at Subway, a weekly treat that my sister has been enjoying since she started her summer job at the headhunter company SearchPlus International. After the one-hour lunch break, Mom and I returned home and baked an apple pie using Michigan apples that had begun to turn brown faster than we could consume them. As the apple pie was baking in the oven, a concurrent load of laundry was just finishing its drying cycle, so I pulled out the dried clothes and began folding them, while Mom kept track of the apple pie in the oven. In the evening Papa and Mom attended a free jazz concert in downtown Farmington, while my sister and I stayed home, playing ping pong, reading, and listening to music. At 21:30 the Quahs entertained two Turkish neighbors with tea, apple pie, and ping pong. In reciprocation, we received a bottle of wine and a high-quality ping pong paddle.
Saturday morning brought us to Birmingham, MI, where the Quahs walked the streets of a town that reminded us of downtown Portsmouth, NH. Papa and I bought some household supplies at CVS and then went window shopping at Borders, while Mom and my sister visited other stores like Anthropologie and The Fuchsia Frog. We met at the car in one of the Birmingham parking garages and then drove to Grape Leaves, a middle eastern restaurant, for lunch. In the same shopping plaza, we visited Whole Foods Market to buy some groceries, and then we set off for Grosse Pointe, the other city where Papa had considered buying a house. Stopping at Meijer's for a restroom break, we took a driving tour of Grosse Pointe, passing exquisite lakeside homes, beautifully landscaped walking paths and shaded parks, the lake where teeming boaters took advantage of the sunny summer weather, and the house where Papa had rented a bedroom during a month of house hunting. Exhausted after the day's activities, everyone enjoyed a nap on the long car ride back to our Farmington Hills home, except Papa, who volunteered for the thankless job of driving the car. His own exhaustion prompted him to nap on the sofa when we got home. In the meantime, I worked on stuffing my backpack for the return journey to Maryland, filling a packing box with other items that I wanted for my apartment but did not want to carry on the plane.
After my successful and uneventful travel back to College Park, I checked my mail in the math department mailroom and my e-mail in the computer lab. I was pleasantly surprised to receive an e-mail note from my father, welcoming me back to Maryland. I responded as soon as I read it, and after some web browsing I walked back to my apartment at 17:00. There I checked my mailbox, which was stuffed with envelopes and flyers despite my instructions to hold my mail in the front office until I returned from my vacation to collect it. I sorted through the mail in my apartment, discarding unwanted flyers and putting the telephone bill in a prominent place on my desk. At 18:15 I began a 4.5 kilometer run around Lake Artemesia, returning at 19:00 to take a refreshing shower and get ready for bed.
A lesson learned after lunch today, in lyrical form:
When preparing a dish of curry,
About proportions you'd better worry.
If the quantity of spice
Exceeds that of the rice,
Your stomach might erupt in a flurry.
Then again, perhaps today's vomiting episodes could have been better explained by carbon monoxide poisoning, because the pilots on my gas stove had accidentally been extinguished during the cleanup after Thursday's cooking, allowing gas to leak into the room and leave carbon monoxide as the byproduct of incomplete combustion. On my grocery shopping trip tomorrow, I ought to remember to buy some matches so that I can reignite the pilots on the gas stove. In the meantime, I hope it will be enough to open a window or two.
I attended the free movie Spiderman 2 at the Hoff Theater this afternoon, thankful for the chance to unwind from an exhausting week by watching a mindless action/romance film. I had seen the first Spiderman movie with my senior year college roommate at our undergraduate theater, which charged $2 admittance and offered a substantially smaller screen. Having spent no money to see the sequel, only a few hours of my time, I felt less reluctant to make pointed criticisms of the movie's weaknesses, including awful dialogue (especially in the romance scenes between Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson) and the suspension of disbelief required of the audience, due in large part to the internal contradictions of a story transplanted into the modern era from a time when Cold War nuclear catastrophes still haunted the public imagination.
When the movie ended at 17:10, I exited the student union and was greeted by the strong winds of Hurricane Ivan. With one week remaining before the three-year anniversary of the tornado that devastated College Park on my 21st birthday, a much-weakened Hurricane Ivan made an appearance this evening, bringing powerful gusts of wind and dumping heavy but sporadic rains over the city. The badly-timed departure from badminton club at 19:30 coincided with a particularly heavy downpour, which subsided just a few minutes later when I emerged from my office in the CSS building on my way back to my apartment for the night.
Today marks the 289th lunaversary of my birth and the third day of an exciting and productive four-day weekend. The rapid progress through Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle, which I started on Friday afternoon in the campus bookstore, has brought me nearly three quarters of the way through the book, which is regrettably all I could manage before attending tonight's concert featuring Jamie Cullum, a British musician currently touring the United States.
On Friday evening I demolished my card house with two decisive foot sweeps, reasoning that another milestone as significant as the 250th day of uptime (significant to us base-ten users, at any rate) would not present itself before the arrival of my parents and sister for the Thanksgiving holiday, at which point I would probably want to clear some space to make room for their two-night sleepover.
Saturday brought gorgeous weather to the metropolitan area, prompting me to enjoy a long afternoon walk to Greenbelt, heading east along route 193 to explore communities and shopping centers that I had not visited before. Under the warmth of the sun, my fleece pullover retained so much heat that I was thankful not to have put on my outer jacket when leaving my apartment at 14:30.
Using the extra maneuvering space made available by the demolition of my card house, I spent Saturday night working on the second major furniture rearrangement in my Berwyn House apartment. Leaving only the three bookcases, the dining table, and the microwave cart in their former positions, I moved everything else to a new location. The former bedroom became the office/living area, and the former office became the bedroom.
My first night of sleeping in this new arrangement had the unfortunate side effect of further sleep deprivation, since I woke up this morning at 2:30, apparently having not yet learned to tune out the unfamiliar night-time sounds on the other side of the apartment. Still I welcomed the opportunity to start my day early and continue with Vonnegut's novel, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, homework for my classes, and various home improvement projects that now seemed less daunting, considering that I completed yesterday's massive overhaul of my apartment layout in the span of less than three hours. In particular, my project to streamline the kitchen layout, with the goal of making the Thanksgiving dinner preparations more efficient, already seems to be having the desired effect. Surprisingly, this home improvement project was accomplished using only materials and hardware I already had on hand, and only three new nail holes were created in the process of putting my capricious plan into effect.
I left my apartment at 14:30 to run some errands on campus before tonight's concert at the 9:30 Club. In the map section of the bookstore, I studied the D.C. tourist guides, trying to locate a good restaurant in the vicinity of the club where the concert would be held. The maps and tourist guides that I examined, however, did not classify restaurants by location, so I was unable to determine which restaurants would be within easy walking distance of the Metro station closest to the club. In the end, it turned out to be an advantage not to have a particular restaurant in mind, since we were then open to the possibility of dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant.
When we placed our initial order for two plates of alicha denech (a vegetarian dish featuring potatoes, cabbage, and onions), the waiter recommended we order the vegan platter instead. We followed his advice and also ordered an appetizer of sambusa (vegetarian curry puffs stuffed with lentils, onions, and green peppers). The food was brought out shortly before 18:00, and it was plentiful enough to require nearly forty minutes to consume. After paying the bill, we set off in the direction of the club.
The doors opened at 19:30, and already by 19:15 a long line had formed on the street outside the club. Upon entering the club, the smell of smoke and the din of the crowd assaulted our senses. Thankfully we had remembered to bring earplugs, and our noses soon adjusted to the initially intolerable smells.
Guitarist Justin Jones provided the opening act, an opportunity he met with enthusiasm and the finely-honed skills of a Toastmasters graduate. His performance was short but sweet, offering the crowd their first taste of live music for the night. The featured act arrived much later, after a good forty-five minutes had passed since Justin left the stage. By that time the crowd was eager to hear the hits they knew from Jamie Cullum's latest album, Twentysomething, but Jamie played only the title song at the outset of his performance, promising to play other hits after the crowd had heard some of his lesser-known compositions.
Jamie also demonstrated great skill at working with the crowd. He invited audience participation throughout the performance, encouraging us to sing along with the riffs and background vocals. The final song had the audience singing a three-part harmony while Jamie and his band provided the lead vocals and the instrumental part.
We left the club at 23:50, which gave us just enough time to catch the last train headed to Greenbelt. An hour later we were parting ways at the College Park station.