Greetings from AZ

I'm in a suburb of Phoenix right now, and I'm enjoying it a lot =D My hosts are awesome, and they are being very generous, driving me places and such. The wedding I'm here for is today, so I hope that'll go well. I went to ASU last night, saw I Heart Huckabees, went to Fatburger and ate a Fatburger, and went back to my friend's apartment until my ride came. I go back to IL tomorrow. Good times.

Grad School Funding!

I recently got confirmation that I'm being offered a research assistantship at University of Illinois. It's a project being headed by Professor Richard Sproat in my Department of Linguistics. The project I'll be working on is to automate the task of locating "named entities", i.e. things like proper nouns, within text of different languages. Should be interesting.

I must take no credit for getting this position. It was all God's fault :-P I came to Illinois not knowing exactly how I'd be funded and was fully prepared to have to take out loans. The head of the department said they had no more funding. But I trusted that God would provide for me. Soooo, there just happened to be this position that opened up which my last job qualified me for. How neat ;-)

Here's a picture of me that I took today!

Boycot Kodak!

I came across this article on Slashdot where I learned that Kodak has won a lawsuit against Sun Microsystems for violating an obscure patent that Kodak holds.

The suit involved Sun's Java language, which has served programmers and users in extraordinary ways for many years now.

Kodak isn't even using this patent, and I'm sure Sun didn't know they were violating it. But regardless, Kodak is now evil and so I am adding to my public forum a call for people to decry this action and send generally bad vibes in the direction of Kodak HQ.