::blows off dust::

to the tune of: Surely Justice by Daryll-Ann

Oh right, I haven't updated in over a month. Well, let's see. What's happened since then?

There was this dance, Viennese Ball. I had a great time, a lovely date (at left), and our performance (with my excellent partner, at right) went better than ever! (Photos) I also have a (Jason-centric) video of the performance filmed by Jason's parents, featuring, among other things, Bravman's fiancee.

There was the ever-enduring struggle looking for jobs for the summer. I really think recruiters live in some sort of alternate universe where we college students are just sitting around on our thumbs with nothing better to do but apply for a job with them. Consider the following experiences (if you don't know who these companies are, IM me):

• One company I'd never even heard of wanted me to drop everything in midterms week to go take an off-campus proficiency test before they'd even interview me.
  
• Another took my resume at a job fair and online, assured me they'd contact me, and then told me that they really thought I was qualified to be a "vector arithmetic intern", which turns out to involve rewriting low-level system code to use vectors so it runs faster on this company's processor. Which is funny, because I can't even vectorize Matlab code, and nothing on my resume even remotely implies I'd be qualified or even interested in this job. My guess is no one else wanted this job either, and so they started asking random people they didn't want to take seriously to interview for this position instead. I e-mailed them, politely asking why they thought I was qualified, and got no response.
  
• Another made me sit outside and wait for half an hour while the previous interview ran over because the interviewer didn't think it necessary to bring a watch. Or my resume, as it turned out.
  
• Another kept e-mailing me to set up a technical interview, and I kept e-mailing them times I was available, which they ignored and assigned me to slots that I couldn't make. I never did schedule a tech interview with them because they kept screwing with the date.
  
• Another scheduled an onsite interview for me. But they forgot to tell the people who were interviewing me that. So I find myself nervously waiting in the lobby, watching other applicants come in and head off to interviews, and the recruiter I'd talked to was about to send me home when one of them popped out and saved the day at the last minute.
  
• A call from a recruiter telling Helen I should be at my computer at a certain time, without leaving so much as an e-mail address for me to complain if that time shouldn't work for me. You don't call them, they call you.
  

In the end though, I aborted the job search once I got a research gig for the summer and decided it was the best way to prepare for a possible Ph.D application. But not before I got a second round interview and a job offer. It's such a great ego-booster: External validation that I have marketable skills.

It was nice being able to sleep in Saturday mornings. Of course, this could only last so long, as a certain class induced several all-night coding sessions, though thankfully within the safe confines of the Sleep-Free Zone instead of Sweet Hall, the second floor of which I vow never to set foot on again. We discovered that operating system source code is far more interesting when read in a foreign accent, and we cycled through a variety of them. We cracked ourselves up. And made others question our sanity, perhaps.

We finally made up for our sadly bungled attempt to surprise Dave last August for his birthday by getting him when he least suspected it: his half-birthday. A complete success, and oh was he surprised...

In a cruel twist of fate, it was ridiculously nice outside during Dead Week when we should be studying and is flooding streets now that we have time on spring break. But whatever. But biking around in shorts as the plum blossoms bloom outside our apartment while people at certain other schools were slogging through snowstorms on their way to class, I could hardly complain.