You blink...

...and it's been 2 weeks since you post. Life just keeps on moving. Let's see... where to begin.
Me, Darren, and JK got to catch up with Tim a couple weeks ago. We hadn't hung out with him since the fall. It was good to catch up. He was telling us about this LGN diet. He wants to "look good naked" for when he gets married this summer. I think that I'm on a GLN diet. I'll let you guys decide what GLN stands for yourselves

Things are moving along with the PhD career. The other day, I got back some comments on my first journal submission. It's sort of interesting. Basically, you go off, and put together this article that you think is relevant and thought-provoking and like very much. Then you send it off to a journal. First, the editor looks over it. If they hate it, then they just "desk-reject" it. If they don't hate it, then they send it off to reviewers (apparently 3 or 4 of them). If they hate it, then they just reject it. If they don't hate it, then they look at it closely and try to shred it to pieces and send it back to you to fix (and fall more in line with a proper way of thinking - their way). This is called a "revise and resubmit." This is where I'm at. Revise and resumbit. This is actually very promising. From what my professor was saying, the comments that we got were very positive. I guess that his definition and my definition of "very positive" differ slightly. But that's just experience talking, I believe.

This comes on the heels of a weekend in Tampa. Warm weather was nice, though the rainy and overcast skies were a bit of a bummer. I actually had a great time down there. It was good to catch up with some people that I had met back in the fall out in Portland. It's like you make some new friends that you get to see 2 times a year and share your frustrations with. And this time, i actually met someone who was interested in the stuff that I was doing. It was cool, we just hit it off, and I think that there's room down the road for some collaboration. I dig it. The other neat thing was that I'm starting to really understand what's going on around me. It's cool to see people present and not just be blown away. I look at a lot of this stuff, and think that I can do work of that caliber. That's a good feeling.

On this trip, I also got to know some of my classmates from the U. a little bit better. It was cool. They're still a little different than me - lots of international students and lots of married people. I really like these conferences. I'm already looking forward to October in San Antonio. I get to see some cool work, hopefully will get to present some of my work, and will get to catch up with some fun people.

Of course, after these conferences, there's always a lot of work to catch up on. I was absolutely exhausted all week last week, and I'm still a little behind on work. Oh well.

The legs are feeling pretty good. Hit the gym on Saturday and balled earlier today. Got a nice lift in on Saturday and skipped a little rope. It felt nice to get back into things. This morning, I played really bad, and shot even worse. Still passed OK, but just couldn't do the things that I'm used to doing on the court. No explosion at all off the ground. I had this play where I grabbed an offensive rebound and wanted to just take a turnaround bank-shot. Normally, I can jump and square up in mid-air and hit that shot. Today, I realized that I didn't get off the ground very far, and that I was going to land before I got square, which would have been embarrassing. So, instead, I just throw up this jump half-hook that went about 2 feet over the basket. So it was embarrassing anyway. Oh well. I think that a full week of working out and skipping rope will help everything.

Went back to church on Saturday. It felt good. It was nice to sit there and appreciate things, even while thinking about the message through a critical lens. Part of the academic training is to think logically on-line. It makes for a very good tool when I listen to sermons. You just sort of piece together the logic quickly and see what they're getting at, and it also helps you discern inconsistent messages.

It was a very amusing situation after church. Darren was going out to Baker's Square afterwards with some people from his I-Team, so me and Rook were going to catch up with them. We made Darren promise to save us 2 seats since we were going to be like 15 minutes late. Figured that it would be cool to catch up with some folks from church. So we get out there, and walk in. There were like 2 tables of 15 people packed in and another table of 5. And Darren didn't come through, so me and Rook didn't have seats. Our option was to just sit at a table ourselves. We figured that we could just talk to ourselves somewhere else just as easily. So we went out to the bar to watch the Oklahoma St.-Texas game and have some bar food. Basically, we drove out there, said hello, and promptly left for BW's. Oh well.

Other random happenings - my laptop died. Well, the hard drive, anyway. So, I have to drop a couple Ben's on a new drive, and 50-spot on the recovery CD's from IBM, which probably should have been included in my original purchase. Oh well. At least I'll have my laptop back working soon. And I'll even have another laptop. Gotta love E-Bay. You can save a good 20%-25% off of normal prices. I just bought a used Thinkpad, selling for about $1050 from IBM's certified used laptop website, for under $800, delivered. Not too bad. It's not state of the art, but it's nice.

I'm also contemplating buying a condo. Great location. Need to take a walk-through and see what's going on. That would solve my living situation for the next few years. It's close to the campus bus routes, and really close to where I live now. I've been needing a home for a while. TFS-HQ has been nice, but it still feels like temporary housing. I hope that it works out.
Anyway, it's back to work. I'll try to get somewhat caught up tonight and tomorrow. And hopefully, I'll even get a little ahead of the game this week. I really need to have a true break when Spring Break rolls around, but that can't happen unless I get moving this week and next.

We'll see. Until then.

-Chairman