@PIT

Wow. Things happen.

I wanted to go to CMU. I SO wanted it. Ranked 1st in the country, leading research in machine learning, object recognition in images, web spidering, genomical computer science... I didn't even understand many of the topics completely! But it was all so exciting, so marvellous - I knew I could help this research! I'd thought about many of them before... if I could develop the idea by myself, I could surely collaborate on its actual R&D, right?

So I made it my goal to get into CMU. Stanford and UIUC were also excellent options with excellent research topics, but they were silver and bronze medals. What I really wanted was the gold. So I learned about the requirements - all the paperwork, recommendation letters, test to take, application forms to fill, money to pay, everything. The whole process. I hoarded books, organized my study scope, and studied for weeks and months to nail that GRE CS-specific test. GRE general and TOEFL I didn't really even study for, except for some last-day vocabulary-cramming for the verbal part of the GRE. The results - 800/800 math, 660/800 verbal in the GRE, 102/120 in the TOEFL, and 850/900 in the GRE CS - top 5th percentile. It felt good to get that score - "Oh man", I thought, "Now I got a chance to get in!".

But nope, rejected. No gold for me. Later, rejected by Stanford. And rejected by UIUC. No gold, no silver, no bronze for me. "Oh well... whatever", I thought. That was 20 months ago.

And now I'm sitting at the Pittsburgh International Airport, waiting to be picked up by one of CMU's most distinguished CS professors, Luis von Ahn, who shares his Guatemalan country of origin with me. And it came almost out of nowhere, just suddenly, in an oh-look-what-happened sort of way. Life's such a joker.

I'm not saying I'm already enrolling at CMU - I'm saying I'm GOING to CMU. I'm going to visit the campus, meet professors, meet my main contact on this search of mine - Luis von Ahn (thank you Luis!!!!).

The other thing on my mind right now is the intense EM radiation my laptop and my cellphone are emitting, both of them at a contact distance with my body. I'm SO worried about that. It's kind of mandatory to have my cellphone on, ready, and with me at all times, and it's nice to be connected to the internet while waiting for several hours in an airport. But I SWEAR (do you ever feel this too?): my testicles, a single foot away from my laptop, hurt. I don't know if it's only psychological or what, but they really hurt. It's that pain that sort of extends to your inner hip and core muscles, sort of a stomach-ache, but in a lower part of the body. It's not nice to know I'm severely exposing myself to testicle cancer in the long, even medium run. To be online or to develop cancer - hmmm, what to choose?

Better turn my laptop's wireless radio switch off. There we go. Now only warmth and gentle humming are transmitted to my lap. And my testicles stopped hurting - awesome. Now I don't have this strong urge to finish off my blog quickly. What I do feel, however, is hunger. I haven't eaten since breakfast and it's 3:20PM. My stomach is feeling that constant, slightly burning sensation you get when you're moderately hungry. But I think I'll let it be. I've been eating too much food lately - starting with the full average-sized, meat-including meals at the TN deployment, and then I ate those family-sized meals my mom gently coerced me to ingest, and then the outing at Panera and the BBQ party at Aunt Gladys'... yeah, too much food for one week. I'll let my stomach linger today.

And now, I'd better get on with reading the paper "Using Reinforcement Learning to Spider the Web Efficiently", by Jason Rennie and Andrew Kachites McCallum. Yay! It's not only me who unnecessarily capitalizes verbs and adverbs without any semantical or grammatical reason. This paper coming from CMU, I'd like to shove it into my former thesis "style corrector"'s sight, and tell him "SEE??? SEE???? Capitalizing words in the thesis title only to accentuate words' meanings is practiced even in a most prestigious university in the USA! So what if it's a grammatical misuse?? It's more effective!"

All right, enough blog jibber jabber. Speaking of Jabber, is that the protocol they use for GTalk? Never mind. Turning wireless radio on, saving entry as draft, turning wireless radio off for my testicles' sake, and reading the rest of the paper.