I just noticed that it's been almost a month since I posted last. Here are some updates.

First, I got quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Wall Street Journal! That was pretty cool!

• New Search Engine WolframAlpha Has Mathematicians Hypothesizing (MAA Math in the News, 6/22/09)
• Sum Help: New Search Engine for Mathletes (The Wall Street Journal, 6/16/09)
• Wolfram Alpha, A New Online Computation Engine Shakes Up Math (The Numbers Guy Blog, 6/16/09)
• A Calculating Website Could Ignite New ‘Math Wars’ (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 6/12/09)

Second, two of my dear friends from High School came out for a visit. Brian is here for a month and Jesse was here for a little over a week. It's been so much fun to reconnect with them and amazing how quickly we can just pick up where we left off.



Also, we had to celebrate my 35th birthday (they all turned 35 earlier this year), so much fun and many bonfires ensued.



Brian's been helping us make some progress on house projects that have languished for too long and we're grateful that he had the time to come out here. Joel has been working really long hours at work for a while now, and it's hard to make good progress on house projects when both of us are so busy all the time.



Finally, I am pleased to report that I have finally finished the horrid Literature Review (Chapter 2 of my Disseration), at least it is completely drafted and off to my advisor. Jesse was a great help towards the end as he volunteered to read the whole paper from beginning to end to help me figure out what was missing.


From start to now, I've spent 282 hours working on my dissertation. Now on to Chapter 3 ...

In the last week I found out that Halley is dying (bone cancer) and I was on the winning team for a game design contest and met Will Wright (he designed SimCity and Spore, in case you're out of the geek loop). So, sadness on Monday and elation on Thursday.

Joel and some of his colleagues at the bank biked to work today. Joel's round trip time is close to 2.5 hours.

Sorry, I'm not capable of being that lazy.

Some days you need the eloquence of Obama, sometimes you need the light-heartedness of the masked bunny.