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Tuesday May 23
On
May 21, 1861, Richmond, Virginia became the official capital
of the Confederate States of America. Two hundred forty-five
years later, Brittany Kwait would transfer her capital to Richmond,
Virginia. Move-in went smoothly once we figured out where I
was to live and how to get there (not necessarily in that order).
By the end of the night I had most of my stuff unpacked and
organized and had been given a tour of the large & stunning
campus by the one of my three eventual roommates to have moved
in. Exhausted from weeks and weeks of little sleep, I decided
to peruse my pilfered “Guide to Richmond” and turn
in prematurely (for me) so I could swell with vim & vigor
my first day.
Monday morning put the “tics”
in “logistics”. Let’s just say I took the
scenic route to work, walking around a campus lake that could
submerge Fordham’s Manhattan campus. Enervated (so much
for vim -n- vigor!), I entered Jepson Hall, home to the Math
& Computer Science department where I would be working,
and saw a woman who looked vaguely familiar. We exchanged back-casted
glances.
“Brittany?”
Later I asked how she knew
it was me.
“There aren’t
too many women I’ve never seen before on our floor”.
Dr. Call-Me-Kelly (and I
will) Shaw introduced me to some of the other faculty members
in the department and gave me a tour of Jepson and the University
of Richmond campus. En route we found Yuri, a UR junior also
conducting research with Kelly this summer. The two of them
really helped to anchor me. I received a username and password
for the UR network and Dr-Penguin server as well as ID and library
cards.
After returning from lunch
in the city, Kelly & I finally had a chance to discuss the
project. I left her office heavy with zest for my summer
research and a few pounds of literature. I spent Monday night
and Tuesday helping one roommate move in and reading about databases
and their architecture; naturally, these are both required courses
that I registered for next semester.
Yuri and I trekked through the
woods to a local shopping center MapQuest claimed was almost
2 miles away. No distance too far for forgotten coffee filters,
I say.
Wednesday May 24
Kelly and I discussed the
readings and how my DMP work will fit into a larger project to
increase single-chip multiprocessor efficiency by eliminating
cache-to-cache transfers. I left her office with more papers to
read about chip multiprocessors (CMPs). I was also permitted access
to a PostgreSQL, and was linked to a couple of online books on
how to read and manipulate the TPC database.
In the evening, there was
a screening of A Beautiful Mind for all the Research Associates
(that’s me!) as a social kickoff for the summer, complete
with free & delicious Chinese food, which I had never seen
in large catering tins before.
Thursday May 25
Read the new papers and followed
up on a few of their citations. Typed up a few pages about what
I had gleaned from the readings that could prove relevant to the
project and some quick cache facts.
It's almost like summer camp,
minus the food fights and glitter glue: woods, humidity, concrete
slab for a bed, bugs that suck, bite, and sting, surprise, fly,
and scurry (oh my!), and great people who as far as I'll know
will never age, extant only in memories and images—that's
just the way things go....
Friday May 26 – Monday May 29
Kelly had to attend a meeting
and left me to experiment with PostgreSQL, but I can’t seem
to get it loaded! By Monday I learned that the omnipotent ‘psql’
file had been deleted when the OS was reinstalled a few weeks
ago. Kelly will “talk” to a system administrator tomorrow
and try to get the whole thing settled & sorted soon so I
don’t miss out on some SQL fun, following along with the
snake-oil book salesmen scenario played out in the online text
Practical PostgreSQL.
Over the weekend I began my
website design. I considered putting up a transient one in basic
HTML so yinz guys could get started viewing my log, pictures n’at,
but nawh. I’d rather wait and consolidate the funds for
one awesome site launch party. Heh.
Have I mentioned that Yuri
lives next door to me? Well, thanks to the culinary and cinematic
competence of him and his roommate Mark, I ate very well and have
managed to finally start nicking away at my perennially expanding
list of must-see movies. Yesterday was Memorial Day and better
weather could not have been had. I came in early to work and read
a
paper I chose from the references of others that proved very
pertinent. Liz called me around 2 o’clock to tell me that
We [Liz, Yuri, me, Mark, & (later) some of Mark’s friends]
were going to picnic at Pony Pastures [pictures!]
on the James River. The scene resembled a completed jigsaw puzzle,
it was quite picturesque. Being a faultless Memorial Day, finding
a place to park was difficult (for Virginians, anyway) and Mark
understandably chose the path most taken, parking along the side
of the narrow road, half in the shrubs. As We walked towards the
rocks, a police car rolled closer and began to bullhorn that if
the “illegally parked cars” were not moved they would
be towed. Poor Mark. He told us to go on without him while he
would seek out another place to stow his Nissan. Mark returned
nearly an hour later, as cars were being removed like slices of
American cheese from the package at a hamburger joint. Some sweaty
shirtless, middle-aged smoking man let Mark park outside of his
house -- “They” had closed off the parking lot.
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