There was really no suspense in my grades. My adviser posted my final grade, an A, for CS765A on Web for Students a day or so after I turned in my exam. I talked to Pablo, who sat next to me in the lab, about CS510.
``You got an 79 in programming languages,'' Pablo told me, ``The cutoff for an A is 80.''
I winced. There were no pluses or minuses in the Stevens graduate program. That last homework had screwed me.
``But Professor Compagnoni told me to give you an A because you did so well on the programming languages qual.''
``Thank you.'' I said. That meant that I had a 4.0 for the semester.
``A lot of students cheated on the homeworks.'' The homeworks were programming assignments in SCHEME.
``Yeah, I know. They talked about it before class.''
``Some of them turned in the same homeworks. We ran diff on them and there were no differences.''
``I hope that you failed them.''
``If they didn't do the homework themselves, then they didn't know how to do the exams.''
``You know,'' I said, ``The homeworks are the same every semester and some of the kids are retaking it because they got a C last time. After the homework is handed in you go over it, so they may have just gotten it out of their notes and shared it with their friends.'' In Stevens's graduate program one needed to maintain a B average, so students often took classes that they got Cs in over for a better grade. Both grades would appear on their transcript, but the better one would be averaged in their GPA.
I was happy with my 4.0 average at Stevens. At SUNY IT, where I got my masters degree, I had only had a 3.58 GPA. Of course I took many more classes per semester there.
My adviser was providing summer support, which meant that I could eat and live indoors all summer. I had already applied and been approved for summer housing and they told me to stay in the room that I was in. We were working on a paper on 3SAT to submit to Asiacrypt 2005. The Asiacrypt submission deadline was May 30. The conference would be held in December.
About a block from my building was a little store named Sassos. Sassos served hot food, and I got into the habit of getting my dinners there. One dish they had that I like was chicken stuffed with cheese and broccoli. They were quick, inexpensive, and convenient. I brought my dinners from Sassos to eat in the dining room of my building. I would have liked to grill steaks, but there was no barbecue grill.
Margarita was taking a compilers class over the summer and had asked me to help her with it before the CS434 final. I purchased the textbook at the book store and looked through it. The book was MODERN COMPILER IMPLEMENTATION IN JAVA. Of course, I didn't know JAVA. I had learned compilers from the dragon book, also called Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools by Aho, Sethi, and Ullman, and used that book in the development of a real commercial native code compiler when I worked in the Silicon Valley. I suspected, based on the book, that the class would just be a big programming project and that she wouldn't need help. It is my belief that any serious compilers class is taught with the dragon book.
I made our 3SAT paper as good as I possibly could, and then sent it to my adviser. She marked it up completely with comments and then gave it back to me to revise. We went through this process a dozen times until just before the May 30 deadline. At this point, my adviser revised it once on her own and submitted the paper to the conference. The program committee was to report our results on August 1. My adviser instructed me to get a passport in case I needed to go to the conference.
My mother picked me up from Hoboken and took me to her house where I had my car parked. Parking rules in Hoboken made it nearly impossible for me to keep my car there, although I did have a Hoboken residential parking sticker. I got in my car and drove two hundred miles to my grandmother's house in Starkville, NY. I had made an appointment for my friend from high school, Kelly, to cut my hair while I was up there. I had had some romantic involvement with her sister Sherry back in the eighties, but Sherry didn't speak to me anymore.
When I got up there, I took my grandmother, my aunt, and my two cousins to dinner. I had salmon. It wasn't unusual for me to eat salmon as I got it from Sassos every Friday when they cooked salmon, cod, and shrimp. My grandmother wore a Cornell shirt. She graduated from Cornell when she was only nineteen during World War II. Back then, not many women went to college. After college she married my late grandfather who was an Army Air Corp flight instructor. They were stationed in Selma, Alabama where my mother was born.
``This is my grandson. He is a PhD student,'' she told the waitress.
After dinner, we went to Walmart, where I stocked up on items that I would need at Stevens. In Hoboken, I had to carry my groceries more than six blocks from Kings Supermarket, which limited what I could buy. Kings also didn't have much stuff, although it had a Manhattan skyline view. I had heard that there was a Shoprite to the west, but I wasn't sure how to get to it. It was at least as far as Kings, anyway. At Walmart I bought a barbecue grill as well as my other groceries. I figured that everyone in the building could use it and that then maybe Stevens would provide propane. There was no way that I was buying propane for all the other students to use.
None of my purchases needed to be refrigerated, so I left them in the car overnight. In the morning I went to Kelly's shop in Fort Plain to get my hair cut.
``So what are you doing over the summer?'' Kelly asked.
``I have summer support at Stevens.''
``Teaching more classes?''
``No, I am done with that. Now I am a research assistant. I have funding for the summer and all next year, as well.''
``Well congratulations. What does a research assistant do?''
``I will do research to publish in papers and eventually put into my thesis.''
``What happened with that thing that you were applying for to fund you?''
``The Stanley Fellowship? Well, Dean Suffel called my adviser and asked her if there was funding available for me. She said that there was, so he decided to use it for students who didn't have any funding. They said that it was no reflection on my qualifications.''
``So how is school?''
``I got a letter from the faculty telling me that I am in good standing.''
``A letter?''
``Yes, every semester the faculty meet and discuss the students. They decide if each PhD student is in good standing, on probation, or dropped from the program. Then they send you a letter with your result.''
After she finished cutting my hair, I paid her and drove back to New Jersey. I drove straight to Hoboken to unload my stuff, including the barbecue grill.
``Tom, I got a barbecue grill for the building.''
``You mean anyone can use it?''
``Well, yes. Maybe ResLife can put it together.''
``Okay, we can do that.''
``Also, if all the kids are using it, maybe ResLife should provide the propane.''
``I will ask.''
Our building had a small backyard, paved with concrete, where the grill would go. There was already a charcoal grill out there which had been used for a building barbecue the first week of summer break. It was my plan to barbecue steaks on the barbecue grill. After a couple of days, I brought my car back to my mother's house and she brought me back to Hoboken.
I got into the lab about eight o'clock each morning and came home at about two in the afternoon. My Japanese roommate also had summer support. ``I am being paid as a research assistant,'' he told me.
``I see. So am I. Where do you work?''
``I don't go anywhere. I am paid to think. I just do that here.''
``Okay, whatever.''
It had been a while since summer classes started, so I emailed Margarita to ask her if she still needed my help. No, she said, the class was easy. That didn't really surprise me. Still, I was a little disappointed because I would have enjoyed helping Margarita with her studies in an unofficial capacity.
By this time I had developed a habit of going to India on the Hudson on Sunday afternoons when they opened for dinner at five o'clock. I usually ordered the lamb saag or the lamb seekh kabob and washed them down with some Sam Adams beer. Sometimes I would order some lamb samosa as an appetizer. I paid with my Ducks Bills, which I had topped off early in the summer. I got to know the waiters at the restaurant and tipped them twenty percent. Sometimes they would bring me a free dessert after I ate. I discouraged them from doing that, though, as I try to minimize the number of sweets that I eat.
I got an email from ResLife on July 22 telling me that my application for a single had been approved. It said:
I hope your summer is going well and you are resting up for the academic year. I am emailing to let you know that you will be moving into room 201 for the fall semester. I would like you to take this weekend to move over. You will not be charged for the single room until the fall semester. You can have the rest of the summer in the single room at the triple rate charge.
Soon I started toying with the idea of starting a blog. I was a member of a conservative forum on the Internet and had met some people on there including a science fiction writer named Kiel. Her husband, who had taught at a state university but now worked as an electrical engineer was named Howard. Kiel encouraged me to start the blog. I had told her that I had done some writing myself, and even tried to interest her in a novel that I had written a few years earlier.
I investigated the different options for keeping blogs, and decided that it would be easiest to just sign up with Blogger.com, a subsidiary of Google, for a free blog. I called the blog Cipher Boy and called myself College Boy. College Boy was also the name that I used on the forum. I started the blog on July 23.
I went to a store that takes Ducks Bills called Bagels on the Hudson. It had a cardboard cutout of Frank Sinatra holding a bag of bagels in front of the store. I bought a Snapple which they rang up at $1.50. It was $1.25 at every other store in town. Then when I gave them my student ID card they said, ``Oh, Ducks Bills. That will be another nine cents.'' I was furious. It seemed to me that they were taking advantage of students and I wrote to ResLife to tell them about this outrage. ResLife wrote back a note saying that the nine cents were taxes. I wrote back and pointed out that there are no taxes on food in New Jersey. I am still waiting to hear back about that.
On Sunday, July 24, my mother and my cousin Sandy came to help me move. Sandy had an Ag degree from Cornell and lived in upstate New York not too far from my grandmother. She was visiting my mother to bring her a load of rocks for her back yard. Between the three of us, we got all of my stuff moved from the third floor to the second floor in about an hour. My new room on the second floor cooked you like an oven. There was no air conditioning but there was certainly a need for some. I felt sorry for the orphans that had had to live there. Tom had set my bed up as a loft and put my bureau underneath it. I piled my boxes of stuff under the bed next to the bureau.
Mom, Sandy, and I went across the street to Ted and Jo's for lunch. Since it was midafternoon, they had a limited menu. We all got hamburgers.
``Thank you for helping me move,'' I said.
``That is no problem,'' Sandy said.
``What do you think of Hoboken?''
``Nice town.''
``I can take you on a tour of campus.''
``Maybe some other time.''
``You really should see campus. It has beautiful skyline views.''
``No, I really have to get going soon.''
There was still an unresolved problem with my room. There was no ladder to get into and out of my bed which was four and a half feet off the ground. I found that I had to scale the foot of the bed to get in and jump off the bed to get out. This was rather unsatisfactory and I was afraid that I would hurt myself. I sat on the bed and looked down at my room. The ceiling in the orphanage was high, a holdover from the days before air conditioning, so that it was possible to stand on the elevated bed and not be able to touch the ceiling. There was a gas fixture which looked like a breast on the wall with the nipple being a square bolt that covered the valve about a foot above the bed. I would show pictures of my room to people and they would always ask why there is a breast on my wall. The desk was in front of the window and there was a giant steam radiator next to it. I could tell that I would not be chilly in the winter. The ceiling fan didn't really do anything to cool the room. I used all three outlets for my three surge protectors and uninterpretable power supply and had set my computer up. At the foot of the bed there was a large closet, but it was only eight feet high and I decided that I could put a fan on top of it and try to blow some cool air on the bed. It was a good plan, but there was no place to plug the fan in. All the wiring and steam pipes were on the outside of the wall and there were three smoke detectors on the ceiling with ugly cables leading to them.
My oral qualifying exam was on Tuesday, so I went over my slides again. On Monday I gave a practice talk with my colleague, Mike E., in attendance. I also went to the Howe Center and picked up a large package that had been delivered for me from eWiz in San Jose. It contained all the parts needed to build a new server for my mother except the case. I had built her old server in 2000 and the video card had failed. I had told her that she needed a new one before more parts, such as the hard disks, fail. Both the old server and the new server had redundant disks in a RAID-1 configuration. The new server would have the extra precaution of a tape drive to back up her files. The old server was running Redhat Linux 9 and the new one would run FEDORA LINUX 4. She would not use the server directly, it would just store her files and serve them to her Windows computer.