Oh, yeah

Oofta, it has been a bit of time, hasn't it. For the clueless among you, I am no longer at Oxford, and haven't been since December 12th, when I left. The week or so before that was ridiculously busy, as it suddenly occurred to me that I was taking classes besides my tutorial, and it was about time to do something about that. So I did, and suddenly, poof, it was time for twenty hours or so of planes, buses, and layovers, and then I was home.

The three weeks or so after that were not ridiculously busy. By any stretch of the imagination. But I guess, really, they weren't so flagrantly indolent as I like to pretend. The main accomplishments of the break:

• Sleeping. And how. It really was a bit of a project to shift the biological clock around, but a less unpleasant project than it was the other direction. I went to bed as soon as I got home--11 pm Pacific time, 7 am Greenwich time--and woke up at about 6am Pacific time, 2pm Greenwich time. Which is already a pretty substantial shift. And then I progressively woke up later each subsequent day, until by the end of the vacation I was well-adjusted to the healthy, normal wake-up time of noonish. Ahhh, vacation.


• Visiting relatives. Again, and how. Both sides of the family, in a mad yuletide blitz. My dad's sister's family was back from France, so the grand old get-together in Tacoma was of somewhat greater proportions than our typical gala, and there was much feasting to be had. Oh yeah,


• Eating. I'd say "and how" again, but I think you get the idea. Mmmmm.


• A project. Because, by a now-quite-established tradition, no vacation is complete without some kind of geeky programming project. Yes, I program computers in my spare time, because I like it. I'm sorry if any of you feel like you can't be my friends anymore, but that's just who I am. This vacation's project was designing a framework--a simple scripting language--for creating Myst-like adventure games, or anything else that would use an interface like that, I suppose, with images, sounds, music, and video. As several people have pointed out, it was pretty much like Hypercard, from the Macintosh glory days. It was written, like all good programming projects, in Python, using the pygame library, which made everything very, very easy. (Yay!) It also came in handy for


• A treasure hunt. It's another pretty-well-established tradition in the Russell house that every Christmas involves at least one treasure hunt. It's a convenient way to deal with gifts that don't fit under the tree, but an awkward gift isn't a prerequisite, since any old present can be made much more exciting by making it hard to find. In the days of our youth the treasure hunts started out as simple chains of commands--"go to the tire swing", "go to the laundry room", etc. But soon our (read: my) thirst for the more complicated led to more and more involved trails of ciphers, puzzles, and riddles. I really, really like making treasure hunts. I don't want to reveal too much about this year's clues, because if East Flo does The Game and the staff lets me design a clue again this year, I want to reuse at least one idea. But, as I mentioned, my scripting language was handy for one clue, in which my brother and I used digital photos to make an adventure game set in our house, complete with authentic on-site-recorded sound effects, and a forbidding microsoft-paint-drawn Evil Gate. Brian and I are looking for a publisher, so let me know if you've got connections...


• Reading. I picked up The Mathematical Experience again, and read most of it, and got thinking about philosophy of math again. Oh, I have a question for you: How should a person decide what questions are worth asking? Worth dedicating time, thought, energy, money, whatever, toward pursuing wholeheartedly? What criteria do you use?
  
  I also read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, written from the perspective of an autistic teenager. Quite good. Also, the first of the Lemony Snicket books, The Bad Beginning, and I really must find an inexpensive way to get my hands on the rest of them.

One thing I did not do was finish the econ paper for my incomplete. Which means I still have, oh, maybe a page or two to write of that, and I really ought to take care of that before this quarter starts in earnest. I'll get to it, I'm sure.

Now that I'm back at Stanford, the main challenge before me is figuring out where I left all my stuff. So if you've got anything that belongs to me, um, drop me an email, ok? Thanks. I'm on the third floor of Cardenal once again, which is peachy by my reckoning. There are lots of fun people in the FloMo vicinity, and my new roommate, freshman Kevin Lai, seems to be a fan of both Settlers of Catan and Half-Life--which were, incidentally, my two most auspicious Christmas gifts (meaning no offense to anyone who gave me anything else, because your gifts were very nice, too). I think I'm going to like it here quite a bit.

And it is very good to be back.