A break from research

It's been a while since I rapped atcha but if it makes you feel better, I've been legitimately busy. Side note: if you come across any papers on emissions credit trading, hook a brother up!

First off, Did You See That Game Last Night? At halftime the lame ABC commentators were all jumping off the Notre Dame bandwagon like rats off the Titanic. Now we have to make sure to jump on the fingers of anyone trying to claw their way back on. Too late suckas. Notre Dame is just getting started and will surprise some haters this winter.

It's kind of weird being here, though, because I've spent most of my life pissed off at the priveleged elite who went to expensive private schools, and now I'm here with them. Walking around campus here has only reinforced the stereotypes--these kids are all white, rich, and overly pampered. On the plus side, it means I might have the chance to fail a couple of them when I get to teach these trust-fund losers.

At the same time, it seems like it makes the experience more fun to follow the team a bit. So I've become a Notre Dame fan against my better judgement. Let's hope I can go back to back to my proletarian roots after leaving this place, and go on to supporting the athletic squads of whatever sad institution having the exquisite misfortune of hiring me. Altough I walk among the undergrads, I am not of them...

On the bike front, I haven't had too much going on. I recently installed fenders on my commuting/touring ride, which is nice since almost all of my recent mileage has come via commuting to and from campus every day.

The big big news is that I go to pick up my lovely girlfriend from Minneapolis in four days! She is totally awesome and I can't wait. Life will be substantially more fun and productive with her here. Plus, she has the rest of my stuff, so it will make our apartment less like a squatter's hole and more like a home.

On the downside, she is really wanting to get a cat now that we are going to have a substantially bigger apartment. I like other people's pets well enough, but I am totally opposed to the idea of owning and caring for an animal that I can't eat. Our family's pets growing up were always pathetic and costly, and I'm not sure I want to go through that again. And then I have this oter idiosyncracy in that paying to feed an animal in a time where millions of people don't have enough to eat kinda freaks me out. Especially if I have to pick up said animal's poop.

So, if any of you have ideas of how to gently discourage my lady from pet ownership, please let me know. This is precisely the only issue on which we've ever disagreed, so it'd be nice to have some good way of getting around it.

Alright. I gotta get back to work. Gotta get stuff done, because next weekend is going to be totally booked.

Pictures from the first ND game

This is one of the parking lots outside the stadium. This place is totally nutso. South Bend only has a hundred thousand people, and then that roughly doubles for seven weekends of the year.
The Goodyear blimp was even there. I think there were two, but I couldn't get both in one shot.The band takes the field.
Everyone got a towel when they came in, and everyone used em.
Starting kickoff.
Some kind of play near the end zone. I'm sure it was awesome.

I'm pretty sure this was a touchdown.

This shot captures both the final score and the disciplined Notre Dame student section. Everybody cheers in lockstep. It's kind of impressive, in a way. It's a lot easier to see if you're actually there, though.

Notre Dame v. Penn St., 9/9/06

As you may have heard, last night Notre Dame trounced JoePa's lame Ninny Lions. All the haters out there can step off now. Total domination at both ends of the field. This game was never in doubt.

The experience was pretty incredible. I headed to the stadium at about 2 and the tailgate parties were in full swing. A hundred thousand people were partying it up in full-on suburban Chicago style. RVs as far as the eye could see. I tried (and failed) to buy a brat from a vendor and then headed inside with my econ cohorts.

It took about a half hour to get through the gate--the ID checkers were total hardasses. The guy even made me sign my ticket book, which I did completely illegibly. Take that!
Once inside we squeezed our way to our seats, er, section of wooden plank. We were all packed in tight and everyone stood the whole time. Which was good, because there was not hardly space for everyone to sit down.

The game was pretty good, but from the standpoint of the student section most of what happened was cheering. There are roughly six standard ND cheers and I think I've got a pretty good handle on them now. The students have bad rhythm so that makes it a little more difficult. My voice is fairly hoarse though.

One downside of having several well-developed cheers is that's all people use. Even the least used cheer must've been done at least fifteen times. It gets old. And if you want to start something new, people are not really open to cheers outside the accepted canon. That's a little frustrating coming from Earlham, where the soccer fans were equally rabid and ingenious.

I don't know if they show this on TV, but after each Notre Dame score the student section does "push-ups" which is like crowd surfing except they grab someone and throw them up in the air for the current number of points Notre Dame has. I had a sweet photo of what this looks like from a spectator's perspective.

On another sad note, it appears that it will be pretty difficult to trade tickets to get my girlfriend into some games. I'm hoping we'll figure something out, but the prospects don't look good.

Speaking of my girlfriend, I got cookies in the mail from her today. Tasty! cuz they're made with love!

In other news, I went to Meijer's today about about about $40 worth of cereal. I love cereal, because I really love skim milk. (It's my secret to racing mediocrity.) Against my better judgement I sampled Kellogg's Mini Swirlz: Cinnamon Bun. Having previously had a weak experience with their Peanut Butter incarnation, I thought maybe I'd try to give the product a fair hearing with their flagship line. Big mistake. The texture is decent, but the damn things taste (and smell) basically like chocolate! If you haven't tried these yet, I don't recommend them.

Mr. Breakfast apparently disagrees. He must've been eating something else, because what I had was a totally weak cereal experience. I'll probably still get around to finishing the box before I get to the generic bagged frosted flakes I've had hanging around for months, but it might be awhile.

On a pleasant note, the newish Tony's Cinnamon Krunchers was delish! It's basically the same cereal as the venerable Cinnamon Toast Crunch (heretofore the world's only deep-fried cereal), but it seems to hold milk better and keep its crunch longer. The only weaknesses are that it's super-unhealthy and of course a lot of the sugar inevitably gets washed off by the milk. They really need to find a way to make that stick better.

The photos don't seem to wanna upload, so I'm going to try it again in the next post.

The first two weeks

So now I've had two weeks of real class and I'm starting to get a sense of what this is all about. Luckily, it can be summed up in one sentence:

Grad school is really really HARD.

I spent about 30 hours on one microeconomics problem set this past week. It had nine problems, and I never came up with any sort of final answer for two of them. We went over two of the questions on the day that we handed in the assignment and it turned out that both could have been done in about 20 minutes by anyone with any sort of clarity of thought. It's like I was trying to fix a watch with a sledgehammer.

So, of course that's completely demoralizing, but the best I can do is to keep studying and hope the next one turns out a little bettter.

On another note, this is the first football weekend. We are playing Penn State at home and the place is starting to fill up. Traffic is starting to get ugly, and old men are camped out with lawn chairs on the corners just outside campus with cardboard signs for tickets. I went to lunch this morning with a visiting professor and we spotted Joe Montana in the restaurant. No joke. Dude was having lunch with his family or something.

Also, I am writing this post from my BRAND NEW LAPTOP! That's right! The GLOBES people hooked me up witha sweet new ThinkPad T43, complete with a fingerprint scanner! So that is nice. I don't have the internet tubes hooked up at the apartment yet, but it is already very nice not to have to use the library computers all the time. The whole campus has wireless, so I can pretty much work from anywhere. And I can still do work off-campus and save it to the hard drive and just copy it over once I get on-campus. So it's not too bad not having internet at home.

I am downloading Notre Dame's student licensed Mathematica right now. I am stoked about that because I have very weak math skillz and it will be nice to check my calculations against the machine. (For the geek-impaired, Mathematica is a program that can do math for you. So all you need to do is learn how to type in the question. Unfortunately, for any sort of sufficiently complex problem, figuring out how to ask the question is the hardest part.)

I am going to get batteries for my camera after I'm done here. I've got some crazy stuff to show you. Apparently Notre Dame is the #1 tourist destination in Indiana, and I'm starting to see why.

On a bit of a downside, there was some kind of paperwork mix up and I didn't get my first paycheck. I'm okay in the short term, but I really hope they get it figured out before next week or I will be hitting up a lot more boring meetings for free food.

Have I mentioned the glut of free food here? Every single event has food. I think I probably could go a whole week only eating school sponsored food. It is really spectacular. No free beer yet, though.

That's pretty much everything going on around here. Stay tuned for some game day photos.