I finally committed to graduate school a few weeks ago. I’ll be headed to Northwestern University in Evanston, IL for the [Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics]](http://esam.northwestern.edu) department.

I really enjoyed both the visit at University of North Carolina and Northwestern the week before last. But I think I could like Chicagoland quite a lot, so I guess that’s where I’m headed!

Almost a month ago, I was helping my good buddy Beals get his Wordpress website set up. On looking close, I noticed something a little weird in a theme he had found(NOT Wordpress proper, to be clear):

D-69-91-134-36:black-abstract-20 tjohnson$ ls -alh *
-rw-r--r--  1 tjohnson staff  528 2008-07-24 08:35 404.php
-rw-r--r--  1 tjohnson staff 3.9K 2008-07-24 08:35 comments.php
-rw-r--r--  1 tjohnson staff 8.0K 2008-10-22 20:44 footer.php
-rw-r--r--  1 tjohnson staff  871 2008-10-22 10:10 functions.php
[more removed here]

As you can see, the footer and functions files are both modified much more recently than every other file, which seemed strange to me. So I took a look at the file:

My girlfriend’s TiVo only has an ethernet port. Well, technically, it only has a USB port. We went looking for a TiVo compatible Wifi adapter but were less than successful. We did manage to find a USB-ethernet converter at Fry’s Electronics, though. But this means it requires a machine there to bridge from Wireless to the wired port, which is a bit of a hassle on her Windows Vista laptop(though, honestly, what isn’t a pain in Vista? </soapbox>).

I’ve officially been accepted to two PhD applied math programs: Northwestern and University of North Carolina. I’ve also been accepted to the Masters of Science program at the University of Washington. Both of the PhD offers came with full fellowship offers(at least for the first year), which basically means that I just need to go and give them the best bang for their buck with my brainpower for five years, and then I’ll have my PhD. Awesome. All three schools are outstanding and have amazing faculty, as best as I can tell.

Winter quarter 08, the hosts.allow files used by tcpwrappers was getting unwieldy. For one thing, we had certain groups of hosts that were all allowed to connect to eachother anywhere, some groups that were only allowed one port on one computer, some that were allowed certain parts of machines. It was basically a mess to try and keep up with it. So I wrote a set of scripts to let us update one place and have it synchronize everywhere else, all in very simple XML files.

I finally finished graduate school applications last weekend. I applied to University of Washington, University of North Carolina, Northwestern, University of Colorado, and University of Nevada. It’s a lot of work getting a bunch of applications out like that: I definitely underestimated it. Hopefully my personal statement measured up to the letters of recommendation that people wrote for me.

I also ended up having an interview with Microsoft that week, just to add a bit to the stress there. It actually went fairly well, though I haven’t heard back on the round-two interview yet. They said it would be a while though.

I’ve been meaning to write this tip up for quite a while, but now that I’ve finally gotten some closure on it, I guess now would be a decent time. While I was in Brazil, there were two ATM machine clusters across the street from eachother, both between the beach and the hostel we were staying at. The CITIbank ATMs were more reliable, but the HSBC ATMs were a bit cheaper. At first, it always seemed worth the small extra, but since I never wanted to get much out at a time, I was racking up the bank charges. Also, several people had been using the HSBC ATM without issue, so I figured I would start using that one instead as well. This worked well the first couple of times, but one of the days I went in to get some cash out, it didn’t dispense. Undeterred, I went to one of the ATM machines someone else had just (successfully) used and tried there, and withdrew the money. This time it worked.

I found a great little LaTeX homework layout for typesetting math homeworks a while back, and I’ve meant to write it up for quite a while. It’s from Harvey Mudd College’s Mathematics Department, engineered to automatically satisfy the department guidelines on how homeworks should be laid out. They also have thesis and poster templates, but the homework installation proceedures and sty files are located on the Homework Class page. Their website also has extensive information on their computer resources. While basically useless for anyone not at Harvey Mudd, it is a model for how this sort of website should look. Everything is clearly detailed at the perfect level, along with suggestions not just for how to do certain tasks, but also when you might want to do something.

Life is keeping me so crazy that I should not be taking the time to write this, but posting a link here was irresistable. David Liff is an amazing photographer. I think the best comment on that page(if you can make it to the bottom without running out and buying a plane ticket to one of these places) is “Your photos have more life than the subjects themselves!”. Wikipedia, you may be proud. David Liff, thank you.

Professor Eric Shea-Brown has written up a nice website explaining what we’re doing with the computational neuroscience modeling. It’s currently on the Why Do Math website at this link: Brain Dynamics: The Mathematics of the Spike.

For my project, we’re starting with a simpler model that is similar in behavior but quicker computationally and (somewhat) easier to analyze mathematically, known as the Izhikevich model(after its creator, Eugene Izhikevich). His website has some amazingly cool videos and a lot of papers on what he’s been doing. His Website