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.

Beautiful Days

In Illinois there are many beautiful days, at least in the summer. There generally aren't storm systems that give you a week of no sun and drizzly rain like in MD. There's lots of sun like today. We had a great game of ultimate frisbee at 4 today on the South Quad.

I've also started going to the Shotokan Karate class at the university(Monday and Wednesday nights at 7PM). The first class was a nice workout with familiar exercizes that I love. There will be difficulties with small differences in technique formation, but it's more important for me to just have people to train with.

My classes have very much reading and I'm not used to it yet. Still getting back into school mode, but I am rather distracted for significant reasons :-P Generally I'm getting my work done, though.

Oh, by the way, don't ever get Z-Tel phone service. I used them for four months when I was living in Hyattsville and even though I cancelled they're still sending a bill. Pretty crappy. I've moved three times since I cancelled with them. I hope this gets into some Google searches for people researching this company!

On a brighter note, Navs here is great! But, I still need to get in a Bible Study so I don't slack off too much in my devotions.

Also, there's Smoothie King here :-D And I went there last night with my roommate. He'd never had a smoothie before so it was a genuine experience for him.

These are some pictures...

I have posted 14 pictures here for all to see where I'm living and going to school. Click here to see all the pictures at once.

More sun and people studying outside on the main quad 

A sunny day on campus