I was still keeping a daily blog and I was interested in converting it to print form. I wrote scripts and programs to retrieve my blog entries from the web, put them in chronological order, and extract the text from them. Then I wrote programs to convert them from blog format to LATEX format. I wrote a LATEX skeleton file and Makefile and was able to print my blog with typesetting. Of course, I didn't print it, as it was far too long.
I got up about five o'clock Monday morning. It was raining and windy out. I used an umbrella but by the time I got to the lab, I was drenched. I was still working on the 
-of-
election paper. I had sent it to my adviser and was expecting comments back from her. Writing papers was frustrating as after I came up with a draft, I had to wait for days or even weeks for my adviser to read it and make comments.
The Russians found a British ``rock'', full of electronics in a park in Moscow. This rock allowed spies to upload and download information as they walked by. The Russians were outraged and I wrote in my blog that they were jealous of British technology. This got picked up and carried in the blogwatch column of the London Telegraph. This was good exposure for my blog and I was tickled. I immediately started getting a ton of hits on my blog from England, most of which had the online version of the newspaper as the referring page.
My sisters birthday was not until February 10, and I had put a note on the birthday present that I sent her not to open it until then. She ignored the note and opened it right away. It was a copy of the book HACKERS AND PAINTERS: BIG IDEAS FROM THE COMPUTER AGE by Paul Graham. The book was full of essays. I had enjoyed Paul Grahams' essays after my sister pointed me to one of them on the web. She was pleased with the present.
I worked on my CS625 Distributed Computing homework, which involved proving some theorems about a leader election protocol and a Byzantine agreement protocol. I wasn't enjoying CS625 that much, but I felt that the material was stuff that I should know when designing cryptographic protocols. On Friday, January 27, I got the draft of the -of- paper back with my adviser's comments. I immediately started implementing the comments in the paper and soon got the revised paper back to her to go through the process again.
I arranged with my former adviser from SUNY IT, Jorge, to give a talk to his CSC553 Cryptographic Data Security class on -of- election schemes. I arranged it for spring break so that it would not interfere with my regular schedule. The purpose of the talk was three-fold. The first and foremost reason was to pad my end-of-semester status report with a talk at another university. The second reason was to see and catch up with Jorge. The third reason was to see some friends that were still at SUNY IT. I sent an email to a coed named Shawna who had attended my masters thesis defense and told her about the talk.
On Saturday, my mother, my sister, and my sister's youngest two children (she has four altogether) came to Hoboken to have lunch with me at India on the Hudson. After lunch, I showed my sister where I work and the view of the Manhattan skyline from behind the Babbio Center, which was still under construction. My sister had dropped out of Cornell many years earlier and was now working on a bachelors degree by taking classes online. She was studying math, but would soon change her major to biology. Since I went to India on the Hudson on Saturday, I cooked my steak on Sunday.
On Tuesday, January 31, I received a tin of chocolate chip cookies in the mail that Kiel baked. I found them to be quite tasty. I typed the return address from the package into my computer for future reference.
We ran into a problem with our elections paper. The standards for cryptography definitions had become much more rigorous since the eighties when Josh wrote his thesis. This meant that, in some cases, it would not do to simply point to his thesis for definitions for our paper. We were already having troubles with some of the definitions for our paper and this just added to them.
At this point graduate school had not yet crushed my soul, in fact I was not even aware that I had a soul to crush. I was happy. I worked on interesting problems, had enough money in my pocket to live uncomfortably, and got up each morning looking forward to coming into the lab. Sure, student housing wasn't as nice as the 880-square-foot two-bedroom apartment that I had had in the Silicon Valley or even as nice as the one-bedroom condo I had recently sold in Vernon, NJ, but it wasn't bothering me. I didn't really like living in the orphanage, but it was tolerable and I had a routine which I enjoyed.
I wasn't writing much software, which is another thing that I enjoyed, but I wrote a lot of software working in the Silicon Valley so it was nice to do something different. It surprised me how many of the graduate students in computer science were not ``hackers''. By hacker I mean someone who is proficient at programming computers and enjoys it. I had been aware since my undergrad days that it was possible to get a PhD in computer science without really knowing how to program but it still surprised me. I started studying computer science because I enjoyed programming and wanted to do it for a living. I couldn't even guess what motivated students who weren't interested in programming to study computer science.
I found a paper that Josh published at STOC '94 with another election system that we could modify the same way, but that brought up a different set of problems. The STOC '94 paper had a property called being ``receipt-free''. This meant that a voter could not prove to a third party how he voted, which is useful in eliminating coerced votes. This was not a useful property for our application though, and required communications assumptions that I considered unreasonable for our purposes. I concluded that we should write our paper as a patch that can be applied to either election system, but which brought in as little material from those systems as possible.
On Friday it was pouring and windy out. By the time that I got to the lab I was quite wet and miserable. I discovered that Simon and Schuster was promoting a new novel by putting up a fake webpage of news from the future when the United States would become the Islamic States of America. While I am concerned about radical Islam and about demographic trends in Europe, I do not think that there is a serious risk of the United States falling under Sharia Law. I considered this website to be inflammatory and divisive. It was a good way to sell books, though.
On Sunday, I got up about seven o'clock and went out the door to get some coffee only to find that an army of police occupied my block. There were more than half a dozen police vehicles with their lights going and uniformed cops everywhere. I went to the store on the corner.
``What is with all the cops?'' I asked a woman.
``There was a shooting last night.''
``Here? On our block? Are you sure?''
``Yes. A couple of kids were in a fight. One came back and shot the other one.''
``Wow. That won't help property values.''
After a couple of hours the cops finished up their crime scene work and left. Soon after they posted a sign in the foyer of our building asking anyone who had any information on the shooting to call them. As if a person wouldn't know that the police would be interested in such information without a sign. The sign would remain up for a year and a half before someone bothered to take it down.
I got an email saying that the 2005 parking decals were extended until March first while Stevens and the city continued to negotiate the parking situation. It seemed to me that what Stevens needed to do was to get the students more involved in local politics. There was a local election coming up and the students could be a powerful electoral force.
We continued to work on our elections paper against the Crypto submission deadline. I studied the dependencies in Josh's thesis and paper to see if I could discover what definitions we would need. The idea was to keep our paper from exploding with cascading definitions. My adviser was not concerned about page limits as she was skilled at making papers technically meet them, but we wanted to bring in as little material as possible. I was beginning to wonder if we would even make the Crypto submission deadline.
I wrote an entry in my blog about competition. I noted that the scent of a winner is pretty strong because winning usually involves some perspiration. I said that competition makes everything better, students work harder when they must compete for grades, businesses sell better products cheaper when they must compete for customers, and scientists produce better science when they must compete to publish, for funds, and for tenure. I noted that socialism rewards the loser instead of the winner. So socialism is a form of government by and for losers.
A blizzard on Sunday, February 12, dumped a couple of feet of snow on Hoboken. I took advantage of the cold weather by making chili in my crockpot. My chili recipe is simple. I brown two to three pounds of beef, cut up some jalapenos and other chilis, cut up some garlic, open a couple of cans of pinto beans and a couple of cans of kidney beans, and combine it all in the crockpot. I add a cup of beef broth and cook it on low for five hours followed by one hour on high. It makes enough to last three or four days.
My sister decided that she wanted to get a PhD in neuroscience. Her first thought was to get it at Stevens, but she discovered that Stevens doesn't have a biology department. Stevens does have a chemical biology program in the chemistry department, but no graduate program in neuroscience. She decided to try to get into Lehigh, which was near her house. She still had a year and a half to go in her undergrad program, though. I was skeptical as to whether she would get into a program without a research background and faculty letters of recommendation. I suggested that she get a masters degree first to meet faculty and get research opportunities.
While preparing for the programming languages qualifier, I had found SCHEME to be a powerful and useful language. SCHEME is one of two modern branches of the language LISP. The other branch is COMMONLISP. While SCHEME is a good language for teaching functional programming, COMMONLISP is more appropriate for writing applications. A COMMONLISP interpreter called clisp was already installed on the computer science department network. In anticipation of using COMMONLISP in my research, I went ahead and installed clisp on my home computer. Rather than install clisp from a binary RPM, I downloaded the source and built it on my computer. This took some time, but ensured that it was configured correctly for my system.
On Monday, Stevens was closed as a result of twenty-seven inches of snow. That meant that I had to walk in to the lab on narrow paths on the snow-covered sidewalks. The walk was difficult. When I got into the lab I discovered that the Internet connection was down. That limited the work that I could do. On Tuesday, I gave a draft of the elections paper to my adviser for her comments.
``Here is the current draft of the -of- elections paper.''
``Okay, I will look at it. Did you finish the definition that we talked about?''
``No, I am going to need your help with that. Also, the proof depends on the definition.''
``I will look at it, but I am beginning to think that we shouldn't submit it to Crypto.''
On Thursday, February 23, 2006, I got back my second CS625 assignment. The grade was alarming. The second problem seemed to fit the template for an induction proof and that is what I used but it seems that is not what was expected. I became concerned that I would fail out of school and have to milk cows for a living. Or join a freak show. Anyway, it wasn't good. Professor Wright sent the class an email telling us not to worry about the grade as everyone did poorly and she scales all grades. The next class would be the midterm.
We did not submit our election paper to Crypto. That weekend I installed my new cablemodem which freed me from the slow Internet connection provided by Stevens. Adding Internet service to my cable television service increased the monthly bill somewhat, but not as much as one would expect. After this, Cablevision would call me constantly trying to get me to switch my phone as well. I didn't use the phone provided by Stevens except to answer Cablevision calls. There would be no advantage to switching it to cable except to stop Cablevision harassment. I hooked the cablemodem up to a wireless router that I had in a box under my bed and programmed the router to pass SSH packets on to my computer. I installed a daemon to program dyndns.org to allow me to find my home computer from work.
We were aiming to submit the 3SAT paper to a conference called New Security Paradigms Workshop or NSPW 2006 on March 26. This conference would meet in a castle in Dagstuhl, Germany. Attendance at that conference was by invitation only and it was prestigious.
On Sunday, my mother came for lunch. I was expecting her for dinner so I was taking a nap when she arrived and she complained that it took me too long to get ready. We had dinner and she gave me an eleven pound bag of Basmati rice for my rice cooker. My CS625 midterm was on Tuesday and the week after would be the Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC 2006) which was being held at Columbia.
On Tuesday I gave a talk to the Laboratory for Secure Systems on -of- secret ballot elections. After my talk Professor Naumann sent me an email telling me that I did a nice job. He noted that there are a wide range of interests at LSS so it is not an easy audience. Later I had dinner at Cafe on the Hudson followed by our CS625 midterm. Si, a postdoc, proctored the exam as Professor Wright was out of town. The CS625 midterm did not seem difficult and I believed that I had done pretty well on it. I finished it early and went home, had a couple of Sam Adams and went to bed.
On Thursday afternoon I gave a longer version of my Laboratory for Secure Systems talk to Professor Wright in preparation for my March 16 talk at SUNY IT. She gave some suggestions both for my talk and my slides which I made note of. Immediately after our meeting I revised my slides.
By this time it had become clear that Hoboken would not issue students in off-campus housing parking stickers. We received an email saying that we could purchase a three-month temporary sticker for an exorbitant fee from the city. I decided to pass on that offer.
TCC 2006 started on Saturday with a reception. I skipped the reception as there was no technical content and getting into Manhattan on a Saturday night is not a lot of fun. Early Sunday morning I went to the bus stop and waited for a bus. I waited a long time and no bus came. Then a taxi stopped, so I rode the taxi to the PATH station. I wasn't sure how to get to Columbia so I took the PATH to the World Trade Center crater and then took a subway to Columbia. Mike E. told me that it was faster to take the PATH to Thirty-Third Street, so that is what I did for the remainder of the conference.
I was at Columbia when registration for TCC 2006 opened at 8AM. The talks started at 9AM and continued until 5PM with a break for lunch. On Monday and Tuesday, I was there by 8AM as well, to beat the rush hour and catch the provided breakfast ahead of the talks. I sat through all the talks on Sunday and Monday, but left during lunch on Tuesday so that I could make my afternoon class. My adviser was also registered for the conference but her attendance was sporadic and she didn't sit through many of the talks.