hot for teacher!

you just knew that every news item, blog post and other media interaction that picked up on this story would title it after the Van Halen song.. of course!

what news item? ok, lean in.. this has gotta be on the down low... you know how when you were in high school there was that teacher, the really young and pretty one, who either taught an obscure class or was a student counselor, something nondescript and you would do whatever it took to walk past her and make eye contact in the corridors or be in her class as many times in the day as possible, sometimes staying back after the class and making up fictional questions just so that you could talk to her?

so now that i got you going about that hot teacher that you had the hots for, what if i kicked up the hotness factor of the story by mentioning to you, what if along with that first hot teacher was also a second hot teacher at the school! double the pleasure, double the fun! aren't you wishing you were back in high school now? how about we take these two teachers and put them together in an empty classroom? ooof, i can barely look straight now, forget about typing!

anyways, transplant our story to Brooklyn, NY and we have these two high school teachers.. while the rest of the school was watching a talent show in the auditorium, said teachers were displaying a completely different yet unique and highly-appreciated talent of their own in private in a classroom! extra.. extra.. read all about it!

what i find really strange is that they were busted by the janitor! that has gotta be a first! almost every school janitor i have met is some bananas short of a bunch, lift not quite going to the top floor, or has some other weird and wild eccentricity. and this one? noooo, this one had to be on the straight and narrow and turned them in, bah! then again, maybe he tried to join in the party and was spurned leading to this fiasco. nothing quite like a janitor scorned eh? of course, this would never have come to light had he not tattled.

ahh well, high school, what a great time.. and now, back to reality

undo the edumacation

the wonders of the Internet never cease. colleges have been offering distance courses for a while now. even graduate level courses have gone fully online - i can attest to that, i'm about 2/3rds of the way through in a Masters program in Project Management from Boston University. some of the best universities have now gotten together to share for free full course lectures and other class material on the web. and when i say best, i do mean Ivy League level and all, not your Phoenix and DeVries 'Universities'..

in their own words -

Our Mission: Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world class education.

Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education.

As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education? At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning.

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment in which that content is remarkably easy to use and where user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

We invite those who share our passion to explore our website, participate in our online community, and help us continue to find new ways to make learning easier for everyone.

i've been browsing through the site downloading material at will.. not because i enjoy studying and putting my head through the wringer out of sheer, masochistic pleasure, but only becausehere is a chance to learn for free, at my own pace, some of the things that i always wanted to learn about - right now i'm downloading coursework on Introduction to Biomedical Engineering & Introduction to Astrophysics

so go on, find some courses or lectures that interest you and broaden your mind!

Michael Crichton

this is coming on a year late, but i still wanted to make a note of it. Michael Crichton's passing away did not hit me very hard at first. it was more like a "oh. ok, RIP dude." moment until the other day when i was killing time browsing through the used books section at the Brattle Bookstore when i came upon a couple of Crichton's books. i took a moment to pause and reflect.

i read Andromeda Strain about the same time as the first Jurassic Park movie came out (early '90s), and i remember being quite shocked that Andromeda Strain was actually written in 1969! and as simply as that, i was hooked by the thought that microorganisms could be intelligently trained as described in the book. i was never a huge fan of the Jurassic Park franchise, so i pointedly avoided those. then i discovered that Crichton had written other books too (remember, this was pre-Internet - the only way you knew what a writer's earlier works were was by looking at the reticent page between the title and the dedication pages).. i started haunting my friends' bookshelves looking for the name Crichton to pop up.. Congo, The Terminal Man, Sphere, The Great Train Robbery.. his spectrum fascinated me, he dabbled with time travel, structural technology, biomaterials, science fiction and space adeptly and seamlessly. for a growing teenage mind this was fascinating - skipping across genres is not something i could comprehend that easily. it's like you love vanilla ice cream. you also love chocolate ice cream. and then one day you realize that you could have both! not just one scoop of one on top of the other, but in swirls, like you'd get out of the machine. wow!

Congo was two borders away - so the story resonated easily. The Terminal Man answered a few questions on what we think and how we think. Sphere expounded my uneasiness with water and depths. The Great Train Robbery i have read multiple times, what a fantastic and daring heist! i have recreated and replayed that scene when Pierce waits for the policeman to go to the bathroom to sneak in with the key.. fantastic! what an amazing tool books are, letting you build scenarios in your own head. the movie completely chewed up this scene, turning a delicious juicy pork chop into a dry wedge of petrified cardboard. in fact i only just watched Eaters of the Dead / The 13th Warrior about a month ago and loved that too.

i would go on to say that some of his books molded me in my formative years, giving me insights and opinions that i had not seen or heard yet, filling me with a healthy curiosity for the marvels of science.

i went on to college with my mind made up that engineering was what i wanted to do. then i read Airframe, and that blew my mind away. once again his theme of man-machine interaction gone wrong reared its head. they should have added Crichton as a writer to the Terminator franchise! his next book Timeline was a delightful romp through time, back to the Dark Ages. the time continuum warp is always good fodder for a book.

his next book came when i had just moved to Buffalo, NY and was starting grad school. i was still unsure what i really wanted to do for my graduate thesis at the time. and then two things happened in almost consecutive weeks. i was auditing a class on biomaterials, not sure what it would be about and met a professor unlike any other i had met. Dr. B made sitting in class for three hours a fun experience. getting to play in his lab was another 'high' all on its own. soon after that i read Prey.

Prey equally horrified and fascinated me. it was my first exposure to nanoparticles and the possibilities they presented. i came up with a few ideas, went to see Dr. B and in a few days we had the beginnings of a thesis. i was completely engulfed by swarm theory and i was thrilled to find out how far technology had come.

State of Fear followed, where he addresses the elephant in the room that no one seems to see - global warming and other environmental issues. the last book of his i read was Next, which comes back to an old favorite theme of his - genetics. it delves into the murky world of venture capitalism and patent protection, very contemporary issues again.

i hear Mr.Crichton has one last card up his sleeve, to be played later this year - Pirate Latitudes is a finished manuscript one of his assistants found on his computer after he died. this book follows in the vein of the Great Train Robbery, but looks in depth at one of my favorite themes of all time - pirates! hopefully his treatment of the story will not have received the effluent-wash that the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise tainted everything with - i'd like to see more young Jim Hawkins & crusty Long John Silver in his book and less of bumbling Cap'n Jack Sparrow & now-busty, now-not-so-busty Elizabeth Swann.

thank you Michael Crichton, you changed my life and opened up many doors. rest in peace, and enjoy the company in Valhalla.

shuffle-o to buffalo

so one day i'm browsing through the bookshelf, and suddenly i realize i cannot find any of my andy mcnab's!! now those of you who don't know me too well probably also don't know how much i love his books, and so it really bothered me to also realize that the books were still in a box back in my old apartment in buffalo! so then i got a-thinking about what the heck else i had left back there! it appeared that there was actually a good chunk of my wardrobe and books and other important documents still back at old 122H..

then i also got thinking, that it would be fantastic to go go check out the Buffalo Sabres play at home, surrounded by raving raging buffalonians rather than in the stodgy confines of boston, in enemy territory! by the miracles of ebay and travelocity, credit card info was transferred and tickets were bought, and before you could say "let's go Sabres" we were headed off to buffalo to watch the Sabres play the Capitals, with the added bonus of watching Ovechkin play - his rugged jawline makes the gf swoon, apparently..



unfortunately the Sabres lost, but the rest of the two-day whirlwind trip was fantastic, despite the snowstorms and biting cold. i retrieved all my missing stuff, had strong sensations of deja vu walking the streets of University heights, past 33H and 122H, eating at Just Pizza, dropping by the library i worked at, peering into classrooms that i rarely sat in and finally meeting up with my thesis advisor and being surprised by how warmly he welcomed me back!


one final note, these small puddle-jumpers for local direct flights make for some rough flying in bad weather, definitely not for the queasy ones!

dog days

contrary to popular opinion, the hot and sultry days of august were not named thusly because animals of the canine persuasion rolled around on their backs and stuck their tongues out.. from what wikipedia tells me, it was coined by the Romans for the period of summer when my zodiac sign Sirius (aka Dog-Star) is directly overhead, coinciding with the period of summer when it is hottest and humidest (can i get away with using that word?) in the northern hemisphere..

if this conjures up images in your head of lying at the beach, or on the patio overlooking a lake, with a colorful drink sporting a tiny umbrella in your hand, while music wafts by on the still air.. then good for you. this luxury seems preserved for those of you still lucky enough to be in college, or else having made your millions, are able to afford taking a vacation at this most unholy time for the beverage production industry..

the end of august also spells the end of summer.. which is a shame, because pretty women every where will soon think of packing away all the itsy-bitsy tops, the teeny-weeny skirts, the yellow polka-dot bikinis.. thus depriving the general viewing (and in some cases, paying) public the small joys of life.. after this the only time you will get to see a fine pair of legs is if when autumn blows around a young lady's skirt and generously billows it up and about a la Marilyn Monroe

and finally, the end of august also means time for school to resume. for most students, it's back to school after a summer.. in my case it means back to college after an almost two-year hiatus. yes you heard it here first, i am headed back to grad school! it's not like i suffer from particularly masochistic tendencies, but this move is the right way ahead for my career. i will still be working, this is all part-time.. though i wish i could go back to full-time college with the money i have now.. heh, that would be real trouble then!

econo-mix

so a book on Project Management actually costs around $144/- and a 12-month Playboy subscription with a free gift costs all of $12/-.. exactly one-twelfth!!

if there ever was a reason to get your kid to become a writer and not a porn star then this has gotta be it!

surprisingly enough though, this flagrant disparity can be easily explained by economics, and the theories of supply and demand

making a few very general assumptions that the supply of paper is consistent for both publications, and that there is just one basic demand curve for buyers of both erotica and textbookotica.. then you can see that the price of the Playboy is driven down by the sheer numbers of people who buy it, as opposed to the masochistic few who choose to inflict personal mental pain by purchasing and then actually perusing (as opposed to using as a paperweight) the textbook shown above.. and their small numbers then proceed to bump up the price of the book..

lesson for the day? let your kids choose to be either writers or porn stars, eventually they will make the same amount of moolah.. what you really want them to become is analysts and consultants, people who make money by telling you what to do with your money.

PS - they could become lawyers as well, but wouldn't you like them to have at least a shred of dignity?

yeah baby!!

the deed is done
it was quite fun
they passed the s!
now he is an MS

all set

DATE: 03/28/06
TIME: 11:30am
PLACE: 202 Parker Hall

freedom is close.

finally

yes, now buzz off!

done deal!

as was famously said by one Dave Chappelle "you're going down biatch!!"

you wouldn't believe it if i said it once, so i will say it twice. besides, when in the SAS they tell you the mission objective, they say it twice so that there can be no mistake. the thesis is done. again, the thesis is done. you will not believe how happy and relieved i am. to all those of you who had to put up with my whining and griping, i thank you wholeheartedly.

just minor editing and corrections left on it now, but i should be defending it in ten days or so. whew, it took a while.. i'm exactly six months off with it in fact, i'd wanted to be where i am now in august '05! anyways, it was more than a labour of love, more than the twelve tasks of Hercules.. it was more like i was the damned thesis' bitch! trust me, not a good feeling!

those who see me on IM will now find me infinitely more pleasant.. that is, until it hits me that i still need to find me a good job. *sigh* the injustice, the damned injustice of it all.

moving on

had my farewell party at the library yesterday. i am nearing the end of my time at Graduate School, and quit my student co-ordinator job at the library. it's been a wild time, since Sept. '04.. a quick browse through the blog archives tells tales of wild partying till 4-5 in the morning, and opening the library at 8, still a tad high.. stories of checking out the local colour and fashions of the month when the Architecture gals come through the library doors.. anecdotes of honest days' work (very few) and times goofing off (very many).. epics of funny moments, mad-hectic days, fixing friends' library fines, cooking the time-sheets to wangle some extra money and a downright good time all through. (follow the links if you are absolutely jobless or bored, and wanna read: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16)

gonna miss the library, but not for too long.. bigger jobs, and tougher challenges await.. onward ho!