Yesterday I went to the 2008 Newport JVC Jazz Festival, and I figured I'd review it a bit here.

We started off the morning with a set by the Mark Rapp band. Mark Rapp is a trumpet player, somewhat modern. He uses a wah about half of the time, and it's pretty cool. His band was good, too. The guitarist was a little over-the-top, but he was generally good, and the bassist was excellent. Oh, I almost forgot to mention, Rapp also played didgeridoo, which was cool.

So, after Rapp, I saw a bit of Lionel Loueke, who was an …

I've only got one more week left of summer research. This time next week, I'll be back on the East Coast. I've already sent my desktop off to a cozy garage, and am posting this from my laptop. It was a pretty involved process - I needed to move all of my RSS feeds from Liferea to Google Reader, copy over my .vimrc and .emacs files, get a list of all of my webcomics… But all of that's done now. So, yeah, now I'm even less likely to post to this blog. Woo hoo.

So, yesterday I went to Jax Bicycle Center in downtown Claremont and I bought a new bike. Yep, I'm completely crazy. But it's such an awesome bike. Thin, barely treaded tires like a road bike, upright seating position, and nice hardware. It cost a mint, but hopefully I'll put it to good use. With PLs on Pomona next semester, I'll need it to get to class. So, yeah, that's what I've been up to…

Not much else interesting to report. School is school. Meh. But, hey, at least I got a new bike.

Why pay somebody to tell you about yourself, when you can just ask your friends to do it? That seems to be the premise of this site, which I saw on an old note of Richard Mehlinger's (yes, Facebook is weird like that). So, yeah.

Today marks my first week back in sunny California. Actually, scratch the "sunny" part – it's rained here almost every day since I arrived. It's still nice to be somewhere where the average daily temperature has more than one digit, though.

Class is exactly as I remembered it. Hours drag by, but days seem to end almost without beginning in the first place. I'm staying on top of my homework, which is a good thing. We'll see how well I can keep that up, particularly when biology and STEMS (signals and systems engineering) start to load it on.

I've also started …

So, apparently, people actually have read this blog. I haven't the foggiest idea why somebody would want to do that, but I suppose it means that I actually ought to post here once in a while. I guess I can at least try. I'll start with the last, you know, three months.

It's been at least as crazy a semester as I thought it would be. I ended up pulling a few more academic all-nighters than is strictly good for me, but I think I survived anyway. Some surprises included Discrete being a much more challenging class than I had …