·:[ Smiling Politely ]:·
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Hey, I still have a blog!

I know what you’re thinking: Nathan stopped updating because he’s all busy now, what with living in a new city and starting a new degree program which involves things like new classes with new projects and comprehensive exams and whatnot.  Well, actually you’re probably thinking: Nathan stopped updating because he’s lazy and has a lot of convenient excuses he’s going to try to convince us are really the cause.

The truth is, I’ve stopped updating for both of the above reasons!  Ponder that, I say!

I assure you there were several interesting topics that I would have discussed these past several weeks.  Also, they would have provoked stimulating discussion!

In other news, through a series of perfectly well thought out and sensible actions that should never have caused any problems I appear to have killed my motherboard.  Unfortunately, my motherboard was pretty much the most outdated part of my system and replacing it is kind of requiring me to replace most of the core of the system (CPU, video, RAM).  Downside: I wasn’t planning on doing this/spending the money to do this for a while.  Upside: Hey, an excuse to do this/spend the money to do this!  Downside: I’ll probably break everything again in a week.  I am of mixed emotions.

Anyway, half the fun of a system upgrade is going back to all those games that I’d been sufferring through sub-standard performance as my old rig aged and showing them who’s boss.  The other half is playing all the flashy new games, but uh, that’ll have to wait a while.  It’s funny, I had kind of resigned myself to slipping into the lapsed-PC-gamer, using the 360 as a kind of a bridge/stopgap solution to having to upgrade for a while longer (but of course I probably just showed up as a software pirate in the explanations as to why I didn’t buy Call of Duty 4 or something.)  But I guess I’ll be getting back into that game sooner than expected.

Also I expect my Serious Business like, uh, compiling code, to go way faster, which is crucial to my success as a grad student, you know?

I can personally vouch for this one.

Apparently the comments have been messed up (mostly my own fault) for quite a few days now.  Things should be fixed now, so you can continue to comment or not comment as you will.

One advantage to living in central Canada:  Amazon ships from Mississauga.  The “free super shipper saving”, which I’ve used twice so far, which used to take 1-2 weeks to get to Fredericton if I was lucky, has basically been overnight here.  I think if I dared pay for the express the goods would be in my hand within the hour!

Went wandering around downtown looking for my bank.  I found it, next to a local game store that, while modest in size, puts any other game store I’ve seen to shame for variety of selection, save maybe the one in Rochester.

If only I knew anyone around to play with.  Next up, to find the record stores.

Collectively, May and June have been pretty much the most intense, busy, nerve-wracking, confusing, and all around crazy period of my life.  These are the sorts of things that other people “blog” about these sorts of situations, where my response is mostly to cut off contact with the outside world until everything settles down.

Well, things have mostly settled down.

The big news (that isn’t really news to most anyone reading this but you never know,) is that I’m now a married man.  Many of you know that my relationship has been, well, a unique one, and I don’t care to discuss that further here.  The important thing is that Mononita Roy is now Mrs. Mononita Roy, married to this goofball right here.  The ceremony was held in Mississauga at the Toronto Kalibari, a Hindu temple devoted to the goddess Kali.  Arranging everything was pretty stressful, but the ceremony itself was relaxed, involved fancy colorful getups, fire, and you didn’t even have to wear shoes.  All in all the coolest wedding I’ve ever been to, if I do say so myself.

On top of that, we are now living in Ottawa, Ontario.  Mononita, this very day, has just started work as a resident in the Internal Medicine program at the hospital here.  I will be starting a Ph.D. at the University of Ottawa in the fall (doing some RA work in advance this summer.)  We are in a nice condo that is virtually next door to the Hospital and a short bus ride to campus.  The few weeks have been mostly a mess of moving, obtaining furniture, assembling furniture, trying to straighten out addresses with everything, and trying to get the phone and internet hooked up, which, after several inexplicable delays has finally gotten through as of the other day.

If anyone wants to see photos of the wedding, know our new contact information, or anything like that, send me an email and I’ll decide whether or not to lie to you.  I’m not quite so bold as to put that stuff online.

The sport of Tennis is not played optimally while wearing dress pants and winter boots.  However, doing so makes for a better excuse than just being plain out of shape.

Well, after spending the better part of last week sick with the worst flu in recent memory, I recovered just in time to fly down to Orlando, Florida, where I am writing from now.  I’m attending the inexplicably named Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI, and presenting a paper here.

I am a terribly boring traveller, so I don’t really have anything exciting to relate, except the fact that I was “randomly selected” for additional searching at the border.  I blame racial profiling!

I’m told that most of the communities outside of Orlando are basically run by Disney, who sell the various utilities/garbage disposal/etc. since they aren’t offered by any municipal government.  A sign that we are truly in a dystopian future, if true!

In any case, I will be back in Fredericton sometime next week.  I say that now based on the likelyhood I’ll update this page between now and then.  (It’s not very high!)

In the meantime, wish me luck for tomorrow morning.

Today’s advanced data-mining user-modeling targeted advertisement in GMail as I was cleaning out my junk mail folder: a recipe for Spam Quiche!

For little good reason, OpenID is now (hypothetically) supported for comments.  Assuming that the plugin works as advertised, anyway.  So, uh, have at, if you happen to care.