todo es bueno

Some girls are singing christmas carols at the top of their lungs out of a 12th story window (the castillian) overlooking the drag. I guess to celebrate friday. I am waiting below for the 982 bus. It's 4:30 pm. The slanted sun is still bright and the girls are at such an altitude that their voices are distorted. I wave to them. I think they wave back. What the fuck. It's the end of the semester. My bus is white and streamlined, like something out of a science fiction movie. It is almost 2004, and we are alive to see it.

I've been following this story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/02/opinion/02KRUG.html

Krugman's on target, but he doesn't mention the extremely good report that's on the web about Diebold's system. It's written by geeks at Rice and Johns Hopkins. Too technical for the newspaper, which in itself says something about the nature of the problem...

http://avirubin.com/vote/response.html

...which would be that the people who are knowledgeable enough to settle this issue have no political clout. They don't hold office, have a lot of money, or write for the newspaper so they aren't heard.

I passed unit 20 (the final unit) in EE 316 today, and this is one of those days where I surprised myself. Given a set of rectangular waveforms, I was able to determine their source to be a D flip flop connected to a XOR gate. My TA/grader passed me in about 45 seconds, with none of the usual agony. Earlier this morning I demonstrated my design of a binary divider to none other than C.H. Roth, the author of the textbook.

http://www.ece.utexas.edu/faculty/directory/details.php?id=72

I had a few small errors in how I diagrammed the circuit which he spotted instantly, but he cut me some slack.