Confessions of a Recovering Preppie
by Michael de Mare
Copyright (C)2007 Michael de Mare
ISBN: 1-4196-6327-5
Draft revision of Fri Jan 20 07:05:20 2012
please do not distribute
Confessions of a Recovering Preppie
(C) 2007 Michael de Mare
\chapter{} chapter 1
In late August 2003, I drove my Jeep Cherokee to Utica loaded with all the possessions that I thought I would need for the following year. These included clothes, bedding, office supplies and an HP laptop computer that my mother bought for me. I arrived at SUNY IT which is on a beautiful eight hundred and forty acre campus in the foothills of the Adirondack mountain range with woods, lawns and gorges. I parked my car in the parking lot in front of the Kunsela academic building and went in to find out what I was supposed to do.
In the lobby they had a table set up where they were giving new students packets. I waited on line at the table. After half an hour or so I reached the front of the line and they found a packet with my name on it. There was another table for housing but it seemed that it was for people who had neglected to sign up for housing. I didn't know that you could sign up for housing on registration day. I didn't wait on that line. Then it was time to get my picture taken for a student identification card. This was to take place in the Kunsela Cafe so I went in there and found a long line. After a long wait I got my picture taken and was issued my id card.
Now I needed to enroll in classes. There were signs to enrollment. I followed the signs and found myself in a computer lab. I was told that I needed to get advised before I signed up for classes. I followed instructions and found myself in a classroom with other students. There were two professors there. Rather than advise us individually, they handed out our admissions material. They wrote on the board what the requirements were for the masters degree. I needed to take three core classes out of five, complete a project or thesis and accumulate 33 credit hours in computer science.
I already knew what I needed to take. I had seen what was offered and even selected my classes before I left New Jersey. The professors didn't tell me anything that I didn't already know. After the little lesson in curricula, I went to the computer lab and enrolled in my classes. I signed up for CSC511 Formal Methods in Programming, CSC531 Automata, Computability and Formal Languages, CSC 553 Cryptography and CSC554 Modeling and Simulation. CSC511 and CSC531 were both core classes. I printed my schedule and added it to the folder I had been given earlier.
In the hallway I heard Professor Cavallo asking for someone to work as a teaching assistant for a UNIX class. The class was required for all undergraduate students in the Information Science and Engineering Technology school, also known as ISET. I considered taking the position but I was afraid that it would interfere with my academics. Student loans nearly completely covered my costs. I felt that the debt would be manageable with the money I would make when I got back to the Silicon Valley but working as a teaching assistant might be detrimental to my grades.
I had taken a couple of summer classes at SUNY IT twelve years earlier. That was before they built the dorms so I had to find out where I was supposed to go. I knew that I was to live in building V, suite 3 room 2 of the Adirondack dorms. It was supposed to be a single in a suite of four singles. I went back to my Jeep and drove around the campus until I found the Adirondack dorms.
As I tried to find someone who would give me information about my housing, I thought to myself that a big difference between a private college, such as Clarkson, where I got my bachelors degree, and a state college is that at a private college they don't just abandon you to your own devices when you show up. I felt very lost and I really just wanted to be in a room and be done with the day. The fact that I did not yet have a place where I could sit or lie down was very depressing to me at that moment.
The Adirondack dorms formed two quads with giant lawns and were surrounded by woods on all sides. There was a road that went by them on one side with a parking lot which is where I put my car. On the other side a path led to a small break in the woods between the quads where there was a bridge over a gorge. This path led to the Student Center, where the cafeteria is. On the other side of that were more woods and another bridge leading to the academic buildings.
In the office I was able to pick up my key and meet my residential adviser, a very large black man named Keith. I got a metal cart, loaded stuff from my car onto it and wheeled it to my building. I swiped my student identification card to open the outside door and I rolled the stuff to the bottom of the stairs. My suite was on the second floor so I had to carry the stuff upstairs. The Adirondack dorms are organized into about twenty two-story buildings each of which has four suites. Each suite houses four people. It took several cartloads to bring the stuff to my suite.
I met my suite mates. There were two undergraduates, a high school football player from western New York state named Eric and a skinny kid from Long Island named Rob. My third suite mate was another computer science graduate student named Lincoln. Lincoln was tall and thin with brown hair. Lincoln was definitely not a football player. Lincoln's room was filled with engineering workstations from the nineties including an IBM RS6000, an HP-UX workstation and a Sun UltraSPARC. It was otherwise very disorderly. Lincoln and I hit it off right away and it was clear that we were destined to be good friends.
I thought that Lincoln would be interested in TAing the UNIX class so I told him about it.
"Professor Cavallo is looking for a TA for the UNIX course. Judging by your collection of workstations, that might be a good job for you."
Lincoln said that he would check it out. In the meantime it was getting toward dinner time, so Lincoln and I decided to go to dinner. I was somewhat out of shape from leading a sedentary life and the cafeteria seemed exceedingly far to me. They didn't really have the meal plan set up yet so they were having an open house. The food wasn't that great and there seemed to be many people from the surrounding community there with their kids to take advantage of the free food.
"So where are you from?" I asked Lincoln.
"A small town out near Buffalo called Pavilion. You wouldn't have heard of it."
"My mother studies genealogy. She found some correspondence from the nineteenth century referring to that as the `western wilderness'. How old are you?"
"I am twenty-five."
"Where did you get your bachelor's degree?"
"I just got it here in May."
This surprised me, he had obviously taken some time off and I pressed him about it.
"After I graduated from community college I worked as a bartender for a few years before I came here to finish my education," he told me.
"What type of high school did you go to?"
"Our high school was small. Our community was very rural."
"I went to a small high school too," I said.
"Where did you go to college?" he wanted to know.
"I got my bachelor's degree from Clarkson in 1991. After that I took some classes at Cornell. I have worked as a software engineer for most of the time after that. Mostly worked out in the Silicon Valley."
"How old are you?" he asked.
"I am thirty-three."
"So you are coming back now to get your masters degree?"
"Yes. I took time off when I was in college too. I spent a semester in Navy boot camp."
"Ah."
"They wrecked my legs and sent me home, though." I told him.
It became apparent to me that Lincoln was a bright young man. The way he turned his room into a computer lab struck me as something I might have done when I was his age.
After dinner, I asked Lincoln where I could go to buy some beer. He agreed to ride along with me and we drove off campus to a convenience store where I bought a six-pack of Sam Adams and he bought a case of Budweiser. Our suite had a smallish refrigerator, freezer and a microwave in the living room. We put our beer in the refrigerator. Lincoln wandered outside and I opened a Sam Adams and started drinking it.
After dark Lincoln came back to our suite with a young redhead named Shawna. Shawna was petite and pretty. He introduced us. Shawna and I talked.
"Are you new here?" she asked.
"Yes. I am here to get my masters degree."
"I am a freshman." That made her a member of the first freshman class at SUNY IT. Up until that year SUNY IT had been only an upperclassman university. "Where did you get your bachelor's degree?"
"Clarkson University."
"I was accepted at Clarkson, but I came here because they offered me full financial aid." SUNY IT had, indeed, offered very generous financial aid packages to the brightest students that they could find hoping to start its new freshman class off right. It cost the institute a lot of money but in publications years later they talked about how much these bright young people brought to the campus.
"Clarkson is a good school," I said.
"So what were you doing before you came here?"
"I worked in the Silicon Valley as a software engineer."
"I am studying computer science."
"Very good!" I exclaimed. It pleased me that she was studying computer science.
"Do you have a girlfriend?" she asked.
"No."
"Maybe we could go out," she suggested.
"I am almost twice your age." I was interested but she was so young.
"How old are you?"
"Thirty-three."
"That's not that old."
"How old are you?"
"Eighteen."
We talked for a while and then she left. Lincoln said that her computer needed a new power supply. She knew someone with the computer center and could get one after he told her what type she needed. I went to bed shortly afterward, as I like to go to sleep early. Lincoln locked himself in his room with his case of beer.
\chapter{} chapter 2
The next morning, Saturday, I got up at seven and rushed to the cafeteria hoping to get some coffee and bacon. The cafeteria was closed. I didn't know when they would open. It became clear that it wouldn't be any time soon so I went back to my building. Nobody was awake. I knew Lincoln wouldn't be up for a while because I had walked by his room on my way to the bathroom at two in the morning. He had been quite inebriated. It struck me as foolish to stay up all night drinking beer that way. That was what some people called binge drinking.
I still hadn't been hooked into the Internet. There was an ethernet jack in my room, but I needed to give them my MAC address and be assigned IP numbers before I could use it. There had been a big sign saying that "connection day" was Sunday in the Adirondack lounge. I was very bored and I went through the handouts the university had given me. I also looked through the books that I had bought at the book store the day before. One of the books, The Science of Programming, by David Gries looked interesting. David Gries is a professor at Cornell. It had an approach toward analyzing computer programs that I had never seen before. This book was for CSC511 Formal Methods. Another book was somewhat familiar. This was Elements of the Theory of Computation by Lewis and Papadimitiou for CSC531 Automata. I had started an Automata class at Stanford when I worked at LSI Logic but had dropped it because I couldn't do the class and my work at the same time. I had the text book for that which was Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation by Hopcroft and Ullman. It had since been reworked and a third coauthor added named Motwani. Another interesting book was my CSC553 Cryptography textbook. This was called Cryptography: Theory and Practice by Stinson. I remembered that Stinson had been somehow connected with the Crypto '93 conference a decade earlier. I seemed to remember that he taught at University of Nebraska at Lincoln. On the back of the book it says that he teaches at University of Waterloo in Canada.
I decided to do two things. One was quit smoking and the other was to work out on the weights near the cafeteria in the student center. I decided to defer quitting smoking until I could get the patch. I figured that I should be able to get the patch from the student health center because the website said that they stock many common medications. This may have been naive on my part but when I was an undergraduate they had a "condom tree" in the health center at Clarkson. They probably didn't have to give out many condoms, though, because Clarkson had a boy to girl ratio in excess of four to one. I decided to visit the health center on Monday to get the patch.
My window was missing the screen but it was too hot to keep closed. A bee flew in and it took me ten minutes to convince it to leave. I didn't think that it was a good idea to have a window without a screen in the foothills of the Adirondacks. There are just too many bugs.
##
Saturday evening Rob met a girl named Lisa and brought her back to our suite. Lisa was wearing a teeshirt and a skirt. She seemed nice and I hoped that she would be a calming influence on Rob who was shaking the walls with rap music. She had shoulder length brown hair, pretty brown eyes and was somewhat smaller than me. In appearance she reminded me somewhat of my sister. Rob and Lisa soon disappeared into his room.
Shawna came by with a power supply for Lincoln to put in her computer. Shawna was thin and a little shorter than me. She had bright red hair that hung below her shoulders and an hourglass shape. Her eyes were bright blue. She was interested in why I thought she was too young for me.
"Would you be interested in a woman who looked just like me, except with blond hair and who was thirty years old?" she wanted to know.
"Yes, I would." I replied.
"Well, my sister looks like that and is your age."
"So, why didn't you go to Clarkson?" I asked.
"They offered me full financial aid here," she replied.
"You know that Clarkson usually has good financial aid packages."
"Well, I am here."
##
Sunday was Connection Day. That meant that I needed to go to the Adirondack Lounge with the MAC numbers from my laptop to get connected to the network. At the appropriate time I went there and waited on a line. There were a bunch of students with "dorm support" working there and one was making ethernet cables. I got an ethernet cable. I didn't really need another ethernet cable, but I am smart enough to know to take one when it is free. Then I gave my MAC numbers to a student operating a computer along with my name and room number. He keyed it in and told me that I was good to go. I went home, plugged my laptop into the network and found myself connected to the Internet. I downloaded an AIM-client called Gaim from SourceForge and logged in. I found that my sister, the only person on my buddy list, was not logged onto her computer. I kept the door to my room open. Lincoln came in.
"I am the DJ for the picnic this afternoon," he told me.
"That sounds like fun," I offered.
"I was with the student television station last year and they asked me to do this. We have great audio equipment, I made sure that we bought good stuff."
"I was a DJ on my college radio station. I did a show on Saturday nights."
"Anyway, I need some music to play. You mentioned that you have a lot of music on your computer."
"Yeah, I have a lot of eighties music. Why don't we look at what I have and you decide what you want me to burn for you."
We went through the music and I ended up burning a few CD-Rs for him. The picnic was to be a big outdoor dinner at the cafeteria, which was run by Sodexho, and a lot of non-residential students were expected to be there. Lincoln found the music on my computer interesting, particularly groups like Fleetwood Mac and the Rolling Stones. SUNY IT was primarily a commuter school with on-campus housing for only about seven hundred of its twenty-five hundred students. It also has a lot of nontraditional students so that the average age of its students was 26. Until that year it had been strictly a transfer school. It now had its first class of incoming freshmen. The incoming freshmen were generally better students than the upperclassmen. It was clear what the Institute was trying to do with its new lower division program. Overall SUNY IT was more selective than most schools in the SUNY system, only accepting about one out of four applicants.
The picnic was to start at four-thirty and at about twenty after four my sister signed onto to the instant messaging system. I talked to her for about twenty minutes before going to the picnic. I gave her my phone number and email address and told her about some of my roommates. As I walked to the student center, I could hear the music that I burned for Lincoln blasting from the two thousand dollar speakers he had procured for the radio and television station. I went in the cafeteria and found that the backdoor was open to a big lawn with the building on one side and woods on the other. The food was out there. They had hard roll buns and big pieces of Italian sausage among other things so I made a meal out of the sausage and the buns. There were many commuter students there celebrating the beginning of the new semester. Music from the big eighties blasted from the speakers. I stayed for about an hour and talked briefly with Lincoln.
"How do you like the music?" I wanted to know.
"It is working out well. I am glad that you gave it to me since there are a lot of old people here."
I wanted to ask him to define `old' but I restrained myself. The music I had given him was, indeed, twenty years old.
##
Eric was interested in "old" music as well. He blasted some DOORS music so I went and talked to him. He had a refrigerator in his room, which was against the rules, and a sticker on the refrigerator said "Marijuana: At least it's not crack cocaine." He had an expensive nineteen inch LCD monitor, an expensive computer with several hundred megabytes of hard disk space and a very expensive stereo system. He was a heavy user of peer to peer services and was filling his hard disk with pirated music, movies and pornography. His use of bandwidth slowed down Internet access for the entire suite and possibly the building. He had played football in high school and had the build to prove it. He seemed to be in his mid twenties but he actually had yet to turn twenty-one.
"Hey, Eric! I see you like the DOORS."
"Yeah, the DOORS are cool."
"I have half a dozen DOORS albums. I could burn them on a CD-R for you."
"Sure! That would be great."
So I burned the DOORS albums in compressed digital format for Eric. My hope was that this would help smooth relations with my young roommates. In the meantime I also started compiling a playlist of songs that I wanted to listen to on my computer. The first pass took me an hour or so. I continued refining it for years afterwards. The fact that I was back in school living in a dorm at my age tickled me so much that I ordered the Back to School DVD starring Rodney Dangerfield from Amazon.com.
I drank a couple of beers that I had in the refrigerator. It struck me as a good idea to go to the store to buy more beer.
"Lincoln, do you want to go on a beer run with me?"
"Sure."
We drove a mile or two off campus until we found a convenience store. We each bought beer and started driving back. Lincoln gave me directions, but they were wrong. We got lost but eventually found our way back to campus. I approached a stop sign on campus with huge visibility in either direction so I just made a right hand turn at the stop sign. The university police had that intersection staked out and pulled me over. They decided that they smelled beer and made me take a sobriety test. Then they took out the Breathalyzer. I passed. They asked Lincoln if he had been drinking. He said that he doesn't use alcohol. They said that Lincoln should drive back. They gave me a ticket for failure to stop for a stop sign. I hoped that my insurance company didn't find out about it. It was my first ticket since the eighties.
##
Monday morning I got up at six forty-five AM. I took a shower, got dressed and went to the student center. I got there at seven twenty-five and at seven thirty the cafeteria opened. I got myself some coffee, some orange juice and a big mound of bacon. I sat alone sipping the coffee, eating the bacon and drinking the orange juice. Most of the bacon was too brittle to be stabbed with a fork so I just picked it up with my fingers.
After nine, I stopped in at the Wellness Center. I asked them if they had the patch. They said no, but that I could buy it at a pharmacy such as Walmart. I thanked them and left.
Later that day, I walked from our suite over a bridge, past the student center, over another bridge and to the main academic campus. All of my classes were in a building named Kunsela. My first class was CSC531 Automata. I bought a soda out of the vending machine, found the classroom and took a seat near the front. The professor was Jorge Novillo, who was also the department chair. Professor Novillo, or Jorge as many people called him, also taught CSC553 Cryptography which I had on Tuesday and Thursday. Novillo means "young bull" and Jorge looked like one. He was heavy but carried the weight like a linebacker. He was from Venezuela and had a little bit of a Spanish accent.
Jorge introduced the format for the class. He would assign homeworks but not collect them. There would be a midterm and a final which our grades would be based on. There were twenty or thirty students in the class. It was clear that he had taught this class before, because he lectured without notes. There were many students from India in the class. They all sat together and sometimes talked to each other during the class. I took careful lecture notes in a spiral notebook. Class ran for an hour and fifteen minutes and we were out. At the end of class Jorge went through the book and picked out a lot of exercises for us to do. It was only a short time until my next class, CSC554 Modeling and Simulation.
In CSC554 we were to work in teams. There would be papers throughout the class and a final paper and presentation. I joined a team with a Chinese student named Wen and another student. It bothered me that we had to work in teams. It also annoyed me that he wanted the papers in Word format as I preferred to use \LaTeX. Wen was nice but didn't speak English very well. After class we talked and I suggested that we have dinner together at the Student Center. We went to the cafeteria. As it turned out, she lived in an apartment off campus.
"How old are you?" asked Wen.
"I am thirty-three," I replied.
"You look so young."
"Thanks."
"What are you doing Thursday night?" she wanted to know.
"I don't have any plans."
"Thursday is free bowling," she said.
"Oh, okay. Do you want to go bowling?"
"Yes. We go bowling."
So it was a date. We would go bowling on Thursday night when the Student Activities Board sponsored free bowling at Pinerama. We exchanged cellphone numbers and ate dinner together.
"We should work together in class like Indian students," Wen said.
"What do you mean?"
"Indian students work together. We should do same thing. You see them all sitting together. Then we could get really good grades."
"Okay."
"We study Automata together."
"Sure."
After dinner she left and I went home. I needed to get some supplies at Walmart which I knew was right on the other side of Route 12. I wasn't sure how to get there, though, as the roads all seemed to be going in the wrong direction.
"Lincoln, do you want to go to Walmart?"
"Sure! I've got some stuff I need to get."
"Okay. Do you know how to get there?"
"Yes, I do."
"Good. You can navigate."
So Lincoln and I went off to Walmart. First we stopped at Marcy Discount Beverage which was out of the way a couple of miles on Route 49. There I bought a case of Sam Adams beer. The cashier wanted to see identification and was not happy when I produced my New Jersey drivers license. At the time, New Jersey produced crappy drivers licenses and it looked like something someone made in a computer lab. I looked young, but not that young. Lincoln produced his New York State drivers license. That solved the problem.
Lincoln guided me to the store and we found a parking space in the giant parking lot. We noticed that part of it seemed to be under construction. The signs promised that it would soon be a Walmart Supercenter. We walked around the electronics area, looking at various things that we thought were cool including plasma screen televisions and various computer components. I bought a nineteen inch color television, a printer, nicotine patches and powered speakers for my laptop. All together I spent about two hundred dollars. Lincoln got some small miscellaneous items and the patch. He thought quitting smoking was a good idea, too. We brought it all home and unloaded it. There was technically a twelve beer per person limit in the dorms but I figured I would say that the case was for the two of us. I put a few beers in the refrigerator and the rest under my bed. I put on the patch and threw away my cigarettes. I never smoked again after that.
I went to Amazon.com on my computer. I needed some stuff from there. I ordered Microsoft Office Education Edition and the GNU Octave Manual for Modeling and Simulation. I ordered a used copy of the Hopcroft, Motwani and Ullman book. I had heard that it was easier to follow than the one that I had from Stanford.
\chapter{} chapter 3
On Tuesday I had two classes in the afternoon. The first class was CSC511 Formal Methods in Programming. This class was taught by Professor Cavallo. Many students called him Roger. Roger had shoulder length hair and a graying beard. He spoke with a Boston accent. Roger gave us a lot of handouts written out by hand. He told us that there would be homework every week and that we were to bring it to class with us. No late assignments would be accepted as we would go over them in class. He gave the first lecture which was about the rules of formal logic. We were supposed to be able to determine the truth values of complicated propositions. I figured that this was a class that I could do well in. Lincoln sat next to me. Lincoln had already signed up to be Roger's TA for the Unix class. Roger asked each of us our name and indicated that in a couple weeks he would know all our names. I was impressed because I am not very good with names. There was also to be a term paper for the class but I wasn't sure exactly what it was supposed to be about or how it would be graded. I got the impression that the purpose of the term paper in this particular class was to prove that we were literate. I noticed some kids sitting in the back of the room who didn't seem particularly happy. I talked to one after class.
"Hey, what do you think of Formal Methods?" I asked.
"I hope I do better this time."
"What do you mean?"
"I am retaking it for a better grade. I have to bring up my average to graduate." Getting a masters degree required a 3.0 GPA.
"I wish you luck." I thought that I would like his effect of the grade distribution.
"Thanks."
I wasn't sure what to make of this. On the one hand, he had clearly gotten a C or lower on the class last time he took it. On the other, he seemed to feel that he could do better by retaking it. If he had a C then he must have other classes with Cs to pull his grade below a 3.0 and he felt that this was the class he could best improve his grade in. On the other hand, if he failed the class the previous time, then Roger was a tough grader that I needed to watch out for. I didn't think that sitting in the back of the class was his best strategy to improve his grade, though.
The next class was cryptography. I was anticipating this class as I was keenly interested in cryptography. I had studied cryptography in the eighties under a professor at Clarkson, Josh Benaloh, and was co-author of a paper published with him at Eurocrypt '93. I had taken a class on cryptography in 1990 but the state of the art had changed over the past thirteen years and I was eager to be brought up to date. Once again I sat next to Lincoln. The class was taught by Jorge and he explained the policies to us. The grades would be determined by a paper, a presentation and a final exam. Homework would be assigned throughout the semester but not collected. The final exam would be a take home exam with many of the questions drawn from the homeworks. Since there would only be twenty-four hours to do the take-home exam it was in our interest to do the homeworks. Then he started giving the lecture. He lectured for a little bit and got to one-time pads.
"One-time pads offer unconditional security. A one-time pad requires as many bits of key as there are of plaintext. This requires many random numbers which you can get with a pseudorandom number generator." I raised my hand. "Yes, what is your name?"
"Michael de Mare. If you use a pseudorandom number generator it is not a one-time pad but a stream cipher. You can attack it by predicting the numbers put out by the pseudorandom number generator."
"Computers are deterministic and can't generate truly random numbers."
"This is true, but in order to have a one-time pad the numbers must be random."
He pressed ahead with the lecture but I made a mental note to myself to send him a reference backing up my point. I had all the papers from Crypto and Eurocrypt up through 1997 on my computer with a comprehensive index. I expected that I wouldn't have any trouble finding something to back me up.
##
When I got home, Eric and Rob were waiting for me. I knew something was up. Rob did the talking. "An old guy like you wouldn't be happy living with a couple of young guys like us."
"What?" I thought I saw where he was going.
"We have some friends in another building that we would like to live with. We were thinking that you and Lincoln could trade places with them."
"We aren't allowed to switch rooms."
"Yes, you are. They have a form for it."
"Well, I am not moving. Why don't you guys switch with their roommates?"
"Well, when we have late night parties, you can't complain then."
"You wanna bet?"
"Well, we offered."
"You didn't offer anything. You tried to throw us out of the suite and you called us old."
With that, I went in my room and sat down at my computer. I had a fan running on high in the window blowing directly on me. I really thought that it was nervy of them to try to kick me out of my room. I was also sure that it was Rob's idea. I opened the database of Crypto and Eurocrypt papers on my computer and looked in the index for "stream ciphers." I found a few papers including one by a scientist that Jorge mentioned in class as having won a Turing Prize. This paper clearly stated that a cipher made with a pseudorandom number generator was a stream cipher and not a one-time pad. I uploaded it to my account on the computer science network and emailed it to Jorge.
Once that was done Lincoln was back and it was time for dinner. We walked to the cafeteria on the path over the bridge to the student center. My legs hurt from walking around campus. I told Lincoln.
"Walking around campus is making my legs hurt. It is aggravating my old Navy injury."
"What were you doing in the Navy?"
"I was in the Nuclear Field Program. I had to volunteer for submarine duty and everything. It was a six year hitch. I hurt my legs in boot camp and they kicked me out."
"What happened?"
"We ran two miles every morning and marched around all day. I always made a point of running at the front of the company, like it was a race. I became progressively more pigeon toed and my legs hurt like all heck. One morning I tripped over my own feet during the morning run and skinned my hand. I retook the front of the company though, but my legs really hurt something fierce. I finished the run and we went back to the compartment. Senior Chief asked me why my hand was bleeding and I told him that I tripped during the morning run. He looked at my pigeon toed feet but didn't say anything."
"So you went to the doctor?"
"Not voluntarily because I knew I would get my walking papers if I did. I thought joining the Navy was a mistake but I wasn't a quitter. When I got back from lunch later that day the yeoman told me that I had an appointment in sick bay. I had to go."
"So they sent you home?"
"They started the process by moving me to medical separations. When I went back to the compartment for my stuff, Senior Chief asked me what the doctor had said. I told him that they took some X-rays and were moving me to Division 10. He said that was what he expected."
"How long were you in separations?"
"I was in there for a few weeks while they did my paperwork. I made recruit petty officer second class while I was in there and worked a desk job."
"You could get a wheelchair like Heather there. See her zipping along in her motorized wheelchair?"
"I don't need a wheelchair!" I exclaimed.
"A lot of kids in wheelchairs don't really need them. I know because my mother is paralyzed from the waist down and she does need one. Most of these kids can get up and walk if they have to." We reached the cafeteria and went in to see what they would try to feed us today.
While we were eating, I saw Shawna at another table with some friends. It was clear that she was popular. I waved to her and she waved to me. She had dropped off her computer with Lincoln to be fixed again the previous night. For some reason it kept on blowing out the power supply after she took it back to her room. Shawna and I had developed a rapport during her visits to our suite. She was going to come and pick her computer up that night.
Later that evening I was playing music on my computer and getting ready to open a Sam Adams. Shawna came by to pick up her computer that Lincoln had fixed for her. We were talking.
"I think we should get something for our student activity fees," I commented.
"Candidate for freshman student senate, what can I do for you," she said.
"You are running for student senate?"
"Yep. I want you to vote for me, too."
"I certainly will."
"Anything you need from student government, just ask me."
"Okay. You are involved in a lot of student activities, aren't you?"
"Yes. I am also involved in--"
"I don't need a list. Lincoln says that there is a computer science club meeting on Thursday afternoon. I'm not going but I thought that you might be interested."
"I may just check that out."
After she left, I talked to Lincoln.
"What do you suppose is happening to her power supplies?" he asked.
"Maybe there is something electrically wrong with her computer."
"It works here, but then I give it to her to take home and the next day the power supply is burnt out again."
"Maybe she has dirty power in her room."
"Hmmmm. Maybe."
"Do you want a beer?"
"Yeah, sure."
I gave him a Sam Adams and opened one for myself. I had eighties music going loud enough to hear in most of the suite and neither Rob nor Eric were around. Rob enjoyed playing rap music so loud that it shook the walls. I despise rap music.
"We really should cut down this drinking in the middle of the week." Lincoln commented.
"I don't think it is a problem as long as we just have a couple." I said.
"Just a couple, huh?"
"Yeah, there are only two more cold beers in the refrigerator. The rest is under my bed."
There was a lot of Fleetwood Mac in my playlist, which I was still adding to and deleting from. There were also a lot of tunes from various greatest hits of the eighties albums. There were some Scorpions and some Billy Squier, among other artists.
##
At the end of Automata on Wednesday, Jorge opened the book and started rattling off page numbers and problems. I dutifully wrote them down. It seemed like a lot of homework, but since it wasn't to be handed in, I didn't really plan to do it. Lincoln wasn't in this class but Wen was. Wen and I had already agreed to study together. Wen sat in the front of the room and I sat about halfway back. Jorge hadn't responded to my email with the paper in it and made no mention of it after class as I left. I figured that it would be best not to bring it up.
After my last class on Wednesday, it was time to eat dinner. I crossed the bridge over the creek known as The Mighty SUNY IT, the other one being known as the The Little Wildcat, and walked to the student center. Not knowing what they were going to be serving bothered me. When I got there, I gave my student ID to the woman running the machine.
"Do you have the menu on the web somewhere so that we know what is going to be for dinner? When I came for breakfast you hadn't put it up yet."
She pointed at a menu pinned to the wall. "We post our weekly menu there and there are copies there."
"Thanks." I took a menu. "This way I will be able to plan ahead."
I got a tray and went in the serving area. I waited on the entree line. Shawna came in. "Hey Shawna! How is it going."
"It is going very well. And how are you?"
"I'm doing okay. I just got out of class."
She got in line behind me. Eventually we reached the front and I got a plate and took several chicken breasts.
"That is a lot of chicken," Shawna commented.
"Yeah, I don't want to have to wait on line again."
I got some Dr. Pepper and found an empty table to sit down at. Lincoln came in. I waved to him and he stopped by the table. "Hey. I will be right back, I have to go get some food."
"Okay. See you in a few minutes."
In a few minutes Lincoln arrived at the table with a tray overflowing with food. "Don't you think that is too much?" I asked.
"What do you mean?"
"If you eat all of that you will get fat. You may be skinny now, but that can change overnight."
"Oh. I won't get fat."
"Look at all those potatoes and that pasta and that dessert. You will be putting on weight in no time."
"I'll be fine." He looked annoyed.
"I'm just trying to help. You know at other schools they put the food on the plates so that you can't take as much at a time."
"That isn't what we do here."
##
As we walked back over the bridge he said, "These creeks really become rivers in the spring when the snow melts."
"I can imagine."
"A couple of years ago some kids rode a raft down the other one in the spring. They got the whole thing on videotape. At the end when the University Police arrived they dubbed it with the theme from COPS. We edited the tape in the television studio."
"What did the cops do."
"Oh, they hassled the kids but let them go."
"So how did they catch the kids if they were rafting down the creek?"
"The raft got caught on a branch and they all fell out."
\chapter{} chapter 4
We sat in a classroom in Kunsela and Roger was teaching Formal Methods. We were in the second row and Lincoln was to my left. Roger was calling people by name going around the room and the student he called on was supposed to give his answer to the next homework problem. When a student got a wrong answer Roger would stop and do the problem on the board. The problems were easy, just predicate calculus, but a lot of kids got them wrong. Predicate calculus is a type of formal logic. He called on Lincoln.
"Umm, number seven is true."
"That is right. Mike, number nine?"
"That is p or q."
"Correct." He went on to the next student.
"Ummm, errrr."
"Well what did you put on the homework."
"Ummm."
"You didn't do the homework?" Roger was making the student's embarrassment intense for the benefit of anyone who thought that they could skip the homework.
"No, I didn't."
Roger called out the next person's name and he got the answer wrong so Roger proceeded to do the problem on the board.
I thought that making people say their answers out loud was a brilliant way to make them do their homework. If they didn't do it, everybody would know. Indeed, there were three or four students who hadn't done it. Eventually we got through the homework and Roger started giving the lecture. I took notes but so far the class was just predicate calculus which I knew from a logic class that I had taken as an undergraduate as well as from an undergraduate discrete math class. I had read ahead in the book, though, and I knew that new material would be coming.
At the end of class, Roger told Lincoln to meet him after class about the teaching assistant job. Lincoln was teaching a lab on Friday mornings. We had about an hour until the crypto class so I went to the computer science lab and logged on to check my mail. The computers in the computer science lab ran NetBSD, which is a type of Unix, so I was comfortable using them. At my jobs in the Silicon Valley we used Solaris, which is another type of Unix. The main servers at SUNY IT were UltraSparcs running Solaris. I had even learned to program in the seventies on an old PDP-11/34 running AT&T Unix.
There was a freshman there named Andrew who was working for the system administrator. It reminded me of my job with the computer center when I was an undergraduate. Andrew enjoyed his job and enjoyed learning about Unix. Andrew was a friend of Shawna's but they generally didn't eat dinner together. Andrew and Lincoln had both gone to the organizational meeting of the computer science club.
"Andrew, what happened at the computer science club meeting?"
"We elected Lincoln president."
"Cool. Is he going to free the slaves?"
I thought that I might be interested in the computer science club, so I decided to ask Lincoln about it when he got done with Professor Cavallo. I browsed the web for a while and then it looked like it was getting toward time to go to cryptography.
##
After dinner it was time for my date with Wen. I took a shower and put on some clean clothes. I waited until it was time for the date. She was supposed to meet me at my building. She was late. I tried to call her on her cellphone but it didn't work and she didn't have voicemail. After what seemed like an eternity she rang our bell. I went downstairs to greet her.
"Hi!" she said.
"Hi. Should we take your car or mine?"
"We each take our own car."
"What?"
"You follow me."
This seemed like an unusual way to go on a date but I agreed. I really hated following another car. When I was in high school my friend Wade had invited me to go to a club with him and his cousin Sherry. I was to be Sherry's date. At the last minute, Sherry decided to bring another guy and I was to follow them. This guy tried as hard as he could to lose me, traveling at high speed and weaving in and out of traffic. I managed to keep up, but it was a challenge. We were going to be traveling on the same roads to get to Pinerama, where we were to go bowling.
Wen drove slowly but she had this habit of going through lights as they turned red, leaving me behind. Then she would wait at the next traffic light for me to catch up. I found this frustrating but I have had worse experiences following people. We arrived at Pinerama which was a big bowling alley. We showed our student id's and got a lane for free. Wen seemed very sociable with the guys there and I felt a little jealous. She tapped a guy on the shoulder and then stepped away as he turned to look. I didn't think that she should be doing that when we were on a date. I felt kind of bad that I wasn't spending any money.
"Wen, would you like something from the bar? A drink, maybe? I'm buying."
"No, no drink."
"How about some food, I will get you some food, if you like."
"No. We just bowl."
There was fairly loud music coming out of the public address system with the chime of an incoming instant message occasionally mixed in. We bowled. It was very hard to talk to Wen because she wasn't as proficient in English as I am. On the other hand she knows English better than I know Chinese. I tossed gutter bowl after gutter bowl but Wen didn't do much better. Pretty soon it was over.
"You follow me back," she said.
"Okay. That is good because I don't know my way."
"I know shortcut."
I wanted to say that I would prefer if we skipped the shortcut and took the main route but I didn't. I agreed to the shortcut although I was terrified of getting lost. We left the bowling alley and started our cars. I followed her out onto the main road through Utica. Once again she ran the yellow lights leaving me behind. All of a sudden she made a left hand turn into a residential area. I followed. She navigated through narrow residential streets with me in tow. This wasn't so bad because there were no traffic lights. All of a sudden we were on campus. I hadn't known about this entrance to the university. We pulled into the parking lot behind my building.
"Thank you. I enjoyed our date." I said.
"We should have gone in same car," she said.
"I was thinking the same thing."
After I got home, I found Lincoln playing with one of his servers.
"How did the date go?"
"The date went well. We went bowling, want a beer?" I got two beers out of the refrigerator.
"Sure and you know what goes well with beer?"
"What?"
"Music."
I went to my computer and after a little mousing the sounds of the big eighties filled the suite. The tune was The Zoo by the Scorpions and Lincoln put his fist in the air, closed his eyes and danced for a couple of seconds.
"Anyway, I am going to help Wen study for Automata on Sunday," I said.
"Maybe she is just trying to get your secrets," Lincoln suggested.
"What? That is crazy."
"I would like to be a government official so that Chinese girls want to sleep with me to get secrets."
"Whatever. I'm not a government official and we aren't sleeping together."
"You are connected with the government." This was true, but I didn't like to advertise it.
"Whatever."
We joked around for a little while and had a couple of beers. Then I went to bed. The next day was Friday and I didn't have any classes on Fridays, so all my weekends were three-day weekends. For this reason I had declared Thursday evenings the time for the weekly beer run at Marcy Discount Beverage. We hadn't started that yet on account of my date with Wen. This weekend would be a four-day weekend because Monday was Labor Day. I had homework from all of my classes but somehow the workload seemed lighter than what I had expected. I was surprised that all of the classes except for Automata required some sort of term paper and most of them required a presentation. When I had studied computer science as an undergrad in the eighties there were no term papers or presentations, just lots of programming projects. Programming seemed to be de-emphasized in this program. I guessed that in big SUNY schools known as university centers like Buffalo and Stony Brook where there are hundreds of students in a lecture that they don't use term papers or presentations as extensively. I supposed that this was the benefit of going to a small school. I knew that the term papers and presentations would be good for my grades, particularly in Cryptography. The ability to write papers and give presentations was also highly prized in the Silicon Valley. My positions in industry had been high level enough that I had given many presentations and written many documents.
The next morning I got up early and went to the student center. I worked out on the weights for half an hour. After that the cafeteria was open. I went in and got my usual breakfast of coffee, orange juice and bacon. I had the nineteen-meal meal plan, which meant that I was paying to go to every meal that they offered. After breakfast I went back to my room and worked on my homework a little bit. I tried to call Wen. Her cellphone didn't seem to be working. I wanted to tell her that I had a good time and to thank her for going bowling with me.
Soon it started getting warm outside and I turned the fan up to high. I still didn't have a screen for my window and the occasional bug was flying into my room. I had to close my window at dark when the bugs came out. I had talked to the RA about it and filled out a form but apparently the wheels turned slowly. Soon I turned to the Crypto homework. It was very time consuming and many of the problems required writing computer programs. I had downloaded Microsoft Visual Studio .NET using the Microsoft Academic Alliance account provided by the computer science department. I used it to write software to solve the problems. Many of the problems in the first chapter involved breaking obsolete ciphers. I had a particularly difficult time with one. I was using English language statistics for it. I used brute force computing power to break it and found that it was O Canada in French. I thought that was dirty pool.
"Lincoln, did you get the one in French?"
"The one what?"
"Problem, in the crypto homework."
"I'm not doing the crypto homework. He doesn't collect it."
"But you need to do it to be ready for the take home final."
"I'll deal with the final when he assigns it."
"You know that I have to write programs to solve most of the problems, I doubt that there will be time to do that for the take-home final."
Lincoln was unmoved. He didn't intend to put in any more effort than was necessary. I suspected that this was true of most of my classmates. Lincoln was reputed to be a top student. I thought that this would give me an advantage in the competition for good grades.
There wasn't much to do that day. I thought that maybe I would like to get a PhD after I graduated from SUNY IT. I had toyed with the idea of getting a PhD earlier. In fact the classes I took at Cornell and the class I aborted at Stanford were both to test the waters. I became caught up with the ambition and started visiting computer science department web pages at a number of different universities to see what the requirements were. I found that most schools required a 3.5 GPA and good GRE scores. Most schools also wanted applicants to take the computer science subject test of the GRE.
I had taken the subject test in 1991 and scored at the 95th percentile but the scores expire after five years. I had also scored higher on the quantitative test in 1991 than my current score but I couldn't remember exactly what my score was. I figured that I could retake the GRE if I needed to over the summer and that I might schedule the computer science subject test for when it was offered the following fall. I was afraid that some of my knowledge from my undergraduate days might be obsolete. I didn't want to take it until I had been brought up to date in the masters program. I decided that if I achieved a 3.5 GPA that semester that I would apply to doctoral programs. I also resolved to achieve a 3.5 GPA.
By dinner time I was thoroughly infatuated with the idea of getting a PhD. That night we had chicken tenders which Lincoln referred to as "yummy tasties." Lincoln often had cheerful things like that to say about dinner. He definitely had more of a taste for institutional food than I did. Lincoln and I sat at our table in the cafeteria.
"I want to get a PhD." I told Lincoln.
"What is involved with that?" he asked.
"First you have to get accepted into a program. That is hard enough. Then you take some classes and after a year take the qualifying exams. If you fail them you get to retake them once. If you fail them a second time you get kicked out. Once you pass the qualifying exams you write a thesis proposal. You have to defend the thesis proposal. Then you get to work on your thesis. When you are done you defend your thesis and get your PhD."
"So you have to take qualifying exams."
"Some schools have comprehensive exams instead."
"What is the difference?"
"Qualifying exams show that you have breadth of knowledge over many aspects of computer science. Comprehensive exams show that you have depth of knowledge in a particular aspect of computer science. Cornell has qualifying exams and Yale has comprehensive exams."
"How long does this take?"
"Overall it takes six or seven years, but most schools give you thirty credits for your masters degree. Buffalo requires you to transfer credits on a class by class basis and type up a form for each class. Buffalo makes you qualify by taking classes instead of exams."
"So what do you need to get in?"
"You need a 3.5 average, good GRE scores and three letters of recommendation. It will help that I have published research. You have top grades, maybe you might want to try too. What are your GRE scores?"
"I didn't take the GRE."
"How did you get into the masters program without taking the GRE?"
"I was in the fast track program for a bachelors and masters degree and got in automatically."
"Anyway, I think I want to retake the GRE."
"So where are you going to go?"
"I don't know, maybe SUNY Buffalo or NJIT."
"Isn't it expensive?"
"In the doctoral program people have jobs, like teaching assistant or research assistant, to pay for school."
"Sounds like a good deal."
"It is important to have funding."
"So how do you get funding?"
"From your adviser. It is important to have an adviser with a lot of grant money."
"You have really been studying this, huh?"
"Yeah, I have been looking at it all afternoon. Also, I was looking at it before, when I was in the Silicon Valley. I like to look at the Cornell Q-exams and see if I can do them."
"You like to see if you can do the PhD exams at Cornell--" he sounded incredulous.
"Yeah. It's fun. I'll send you the link. Hey look, it's Shawna! I am going to go over and talk to Shawna."
\chapter{} chapter 5
Saturday evening after dinner Lisa came by to visit Rob. Rob's door was open and they were bouncing back and forth between the living room and his room. I was playing some music and sipping a beer. Lisa was going by my room when she stopped and said, "What type of music is that?"
"Pop hits from the eighties," I replied.
"I think that is so cool. Hey, Rob, check out the crazy music this kid is playing."
"Yeah, we know about that music," Rob said from his room. Lisa popped into Rob's room. Soon the door was closed and the walls were vibrating with rap music from Rob's stereo. It wouldn't surprise me if Rob had some serious hearing loss.
"Why would someone bring a high powered stereo to a college dormitory, anyway?" I asked Lincoln. Lincoln was fiddling with his servers.
"I don't know, why don't you ask Eric," Lincoln replied.
"At least Eric doesn't play rap music." Eric didn't tend to play his music loud but he would sometimes turn it way up for a second or two for reasons known only to him.
Sunday morning I got up and drove to Dunkin Donuts to buy some coffee. The cafeteria wouldn't open until eleven. It seemed to me that I remembered the cafeteria always being open for breakfast when I was an undergraduate. It was also possible that I didn't get up before eleven on weekends back then. The vanilla coffee they served me was weak and kind of gross. I ended up dumping the second half of it down the sink. I went to the student center and worked out on the weights. I didn't know what I was doing but the machines looked self explanatory. I did a set of exercises on each machine. My sister had gotten some fitness instructor certification and gave me advice on how to exercise, but I didn't follow it. After I finished working out I was sore. It reminded me of how I felt after putting up hay when I was a teenager.
What was a preppie doing putting up hay? In 1984, at the end of ninth grade I quit prep school. I had been going to competitive private schools since nursery but it wasn't the academic competition that caused me to quit. I just didn't fit in. I didn't get along with the other students. I didn't get along with teachers. I just didn't get along. I had a beautiful girlfriend who went to Catholic school, but she was moving to Kansas City. My parents weren't about to send me to the awful public school in Englewood. I was moving to my grandmother's dairy farm (which was my idea) where I would go to a small rural public school. In high school I milked the cows after school every night and threw hay in the summer. It was an abrupt change from my privileged existence in northeastern New Jersey. I became somewhat lazy in the public school but the ambition they had inculcated in me in prep school burned bright. I often remember educators telling me that it isn't enough to be smart, you have to do the work.
Sunday afternoon I tried to get a hold of Wen. We were due to have a study date and we needed to coordinate where and when we were going to meet. I sent her an email. Eventually she responded and said that we were to meet in the library at eight o'clock. The library was brand new, and was open for the first time this fall. SUNY IT was very proud of it, as they should be since it cost fourteen million dollars. It was a pretty building with a lot of glass but the use of space inside didn't seem efficient.
I waited in the front of the library for Wen. There were some computer terminals there and I used one to log on to the computer science department mail server. I had to use a program called PuTTY to open a secure shell connection. On my laptop I had a package called CygWin that gave me a Unix and X-Windows environment on top of Microsoft Windows. This allowed me to have secure shell keys and to open X-windows from my laptop.
After I waited for ten or fifteen minutes I felt a tapping on my shoulder. I turned around and there was Wen. "Hey, Wen! I enjoyed our date the other night. I tried calling you to tell you but your cellphone wasn't working."
"Thank you. Chinese man get very mad when he sees me with you. We can't do that again."
"Huh?"
"You know, Chinese man. He get very angry. He don't like us to be together." Yeah, I thought. Chinese man, American girl, same difference.
"Okay. Where should we study?"
I wasn't sure what had just transpired. I had that feeling often when dealing with Wen but this time it was particularly acute. I didn't believe that there was some "Chinese man" who objected to us dating. I wished she would tell me the real reason. Our study date was still on so she must have still liked me.
She led me to the back of the library where there were small rooms with conference tables, white boards and glass walls. We found one that was not in use and went in. I got my copy of the book and my notes out of my backpack. Wen did the same.
Wen opened up the book to the first page of problems suggested by Jorge. She had the numbers of the homework problems circled. She pointed at the first one and said, "Do this one."
"What?"
"You show me how do this one."
I drew out the solution on the white board using markers that I found there.. She said "How did you know how to do that?"
"I had seen this before." I said, referring to my aborted attempt to take this class at Stanford. I had quit that class after the first lecture.
"Okay. Do this one." She pointed at the next problem.
We proceeded through all of the assigned homework this way. It seemed to me that I was benefiting more from this than Wen because I was actually doing the problems and Wen was just watching. Wen had obviously tried the problems though and would probably work through them afterwards. She seemed industrious that way. When we were finished with the homework, it was getting late and was time to go.
"Same time, same place next week?" I asked.
"Yes. That is good."
It was agreed that we would meet like this every Sunday to study Automata. I wondered what had happened to make Wen not want to date me, though. Her explanation didn't make any sense. I wondered what I would tell Shawna since I had told her that I was going out with Wen. I walked home from the library. I would have driven there, but I was afraid that I would lose my excellent parking space by the end of the building. My backpack weighed down on me and my legs hurt. When I got home I was tired. Rob was leaving with Lisa, so I was glad because that meant that there would be some peace and quiet for a while. I went to bed almost immediately. The next day was Labor Day and there would be no classes. The four day weekend seemed to be too long.
The next morning was chilly, so I put on my Navy peacoat before leaving the building. My muscles were sore from working out. I limped to the student center only to find that the cafeteria wouldn't open until eleven due to the holiday. A lot of kids were home for the long weekend. This was different from when I was an undergraduate. When I was an undergrad the university discouraged parents from allowing their children to go home before Thanksgiving. Back then the entire student body was around on weekends, even three-day weekends. I was finding that the ethos was different at SUNY IT. It seemed to me that students who leave campus on the weekend are less serious than students that stay and study. They also don't learn how to be independent. In any case, when I was an undergraduate I didn't have the slightest desire to go home even when it was time for Thanksgiving. Maybe I am just an independent soul.
When eleven o'clock came around and it was time to go to the cafeteria for brunch, Rob finally came home from his date with Lisa. I doubted that he stayed up all night and instead guessed that he got lucky. He denied it. Lincoln and I went to the cafeteria for brunch.
"How did it go with Wen last night?"
"Pretty good. We studied for a couple of hours. She doesn't seem to understand the material so I explained it to her."
"She found a smart guy to help her."
"Thanks. I have noticed that you don't seem to need help in discrete math." Lincoln was taking a "bridge" course in discrete math and had asked me to help him. As an undergraduate I had completed all of the requirements for a second major in math except for one class. I didn't need any bridge classes. Bridge classes were classes that students were required to take to correct deficiencies in their background. Bridge classes count as general electives and only one or two are allowed to count towards the degree. It seemed to me that it represented a deficiency in the undergrad program that a graduate of SUNY IT would need a bridge class in the graduate program there.
"I seem to have a handle on what is going on in there."
"Who teaches it?"
"Roger is teaching it this semester."
"You and Roger get along pretty well, huh?"
"Yes, we do."
"Did he say anything about me?"
"No, we don't talk about you."
"What do you guys talk about?"
"We figure out what I am supposed to teach in the lab and the lab assignment. He lets me develop the actual assignment."
"Nice."
"So what does it pay? Tuition and stipend?"
"Just tuition but I get the money because I already paid my tuition."
"It sounds like a pretty good deal."
"Yeah. I'm glad I'm doing this."
"I guess you are the only TA in the whole department."
"Yep."
"How can you eat so much food? You must be putting on weight."
"No. I'm not putting on weight."
"Wait until you get to be my age."
"What happens then?"
"Your metabolism slows down. Time is not your friend."
After brunch Lincoln and I went to Walmart. There were a number of things that I needed including batteries for my cordless mouse and an ink cartridge for my printer. Lincoln and I walked around the electronics section admiring the things on display.
"Hmmm," I said, "they only want two thousand dollars for that plasma screen TV."
"What would we do? Set it up in the living room?"
"That would be cool. I don't know where we would get a high-def signal, though."
"Yeah, we are lucky to get anything with the cable provided by SUNY."
"We don't even get Fox News Channel. We should complain."
"You know, if you told them that you wanted Fox News Channel, maybe they would carry it. Channelizers are expensive and they only have so many of them, but they are willing to listen to suggestions on how to use them." Lincoln said.
"They have two CNN stations -- CNN and Headline News. They should take one off and replace it with Fox News." I knew that it wasn't unusual for college cable networks to carry CNN and not Fox News. I considered it part of the hostile political environment for conservatives on campuses.
"If you bug them, then maybe when they get another channelizer they will use it for Fox News."
In addition to the batteries and ink, I bought some blank CD-Rs. I liked to burn music onto CD-R and give it to Kelly, a friend of mine from high school that lived half an hour away. Kelly was a hairdresser and she cut my hair. She had a sister named Sherry that I had been involved with many years ago, but I hadn't heard from or spoken to Sherry in decades. I also used the CD-Rs to back up my data and to distribute files. We paid for our purchases and left.
\chapter{} chapter 6
That night Shawna came by to pick up her computer. She had gone through a number of power supplies by now. Lincoln was perplexed as to what was causing them to burn out. Shawna was in Lincoln's room as he screwed the case back together. I was standing in the doorway. He plugged it in and the computer booted up normally.
"Okay. It works here. Is there anything that you do to it after you bring it home?" he asked Shawna.
"I just put the case light in." She said. I rolled my eyes.
"How many watts is that case light?"
"I don't know."
"Well, don't put the case light in," he admonished her. That made me sad because that meant Shawna wouldn't be visiting us anymore. Shawna was a smart girl. I was sure she had figured out that it was the case light that was burning out her power supplies.
"Okay. No case light. I'll let you know what happens."
Lincoln unplugged her computer and she left with it.
We didn't like the food they served at the cafeteria that night. They had some alleged lo mein and some alleged sweet and sour chicken. They did not have Oriental cooking down to a science. We considered this food really gross and I didn't eat it. Lincoln did eat some but not much.
"Lincoln, why don't we go to the Cat's Den to get some food?" I asked later that evening. The Cat's Den was a cafe run by Sodexho on the second floor of the campus center. We could spend our "SUNYbucks" there. SUNYbucks were money we bought as part of the meal plan to spend at the Cat's Den. We were required to buy a hundred SUNYbucks a semester.
"The Cat's Den sounds like a joyous occasion," he said.
We went outside where the cool of night was already taking over. I was keeping my window closed at night on account of the bugs. They still hadn't provided me with a screen for my window. I enjoyed the cool Adirondack breeze when we stepped outside. We tried to follow a shortcut through the woods, out of the streetlights, but it was dark and we couldn't see where the path went. We were worried that we would wander off the path and fall into the nearby gorge. Soon we emerged from the woods by the bridge. Lincoln and I were talking about the food.
"Someone should tell the cafeteria ix-nay on the Chinese night," Lincoln was commenting. Lincoln had lots of comments like that.
At the Cat's Den we put in our orders. I ordered Buffalo wings, extra spicy and Lincoln ordered chicken tenders. I figured that would give their deep fat fryer a workout. They also had pizza but you had to order a whole pizza. They cooked the pizza in one of those pizza ovens with a conveyor belt that is so popular among university cafeterias.
While we waited for our food to come out, we sat down at a table. They had a projector, like the type found in classrooms to project a computer display, projecting television onto a large screen. The channel was tuned to Comedy Central. South Park was on. I would never tune my television to Comedy Central. In fact I hardly watched television at all. Lincoln didn't even have a television. I did find South Park amusing and enjoyed watching it. After about fifteen minutes our food was ready. We brought our food back to our table. The chicken wings had just come out of the deep fryer and burned my fingers when I tried to pick one up. I waited a few minutes for them to cool.
By the time we were done eating, South Park was over. We threw away our empty food and drink containers and headed back to our suite. On the way back, Lincoln told me "They used to sell beer at the Cat's Den."
"What happened?"
"I don't know. I think that wasn't the image that they wanted. It was before I started here."
"That would be nice, a bar on campus. When I was an undergraduate we had something called Itza Pizza on campus and they sold beer. You couldn't buy the beer with your meal plan, though, you had to pay cash."
"I bet they don't sell beer anymore, either," Lincoln commented.
"I don't know what happened to them. When I graduated they were about to close the building they were in for renovations."
"I am sure they set them up somewhere."
"I think they have a new student center with a food court, now."
"Cool."
"Yeah. When I was there in 1993 to have a meeting with a professor he took me to the new student center for lunch. There is a new hockey rink in there too. It is pretty nice."
"Clarkson has hockey?"
"Yeah. Division I. I went to Boston my senior year when Clarkson was in the NCAA finals there. Hockey is a big deal at Clarkson."
"Cool. We are Division III and don't have a hockey team."
"The Pep Squad at Clarkson was banned by the NCAA when I was an undergrad. They were allowed to do a hockey game between Clarkson and RPI, who are big rivals, and they got banned again."
"What did they do."
"They played Three Blind Mice when the refs came out. They also incited violence against the refs when there was a call they didn't like. `Kill the refs' or something like that."
"Our cheerleaders don't do anything that would get them banned. Some of their routines are kind of obscene, though." I had already figured out that Lincoln's idea of obscene probably included a lot of things that I wouldn't even notice. I agreed in principle that people should behave with more decorum, but I couldn't get worked up about it.
"What sort of stuff?" I asked.
"Well they get down and hump the floor."
"I see."
"So you like hockey?"
"I don't really like sports. I used to go to the pre-game parties and the post-game parties but I skipped the game."
"I like to go show support for our teams."
"LSI took us to a San Jose Sharks game once. We had a box. It was great, there were leather couches and food was delivered and everything." I didn't mention that before the game I had never heard of the Sharks.
"Who are the Sharks?"
"They are the Silicon Valley's hockey team."
"I see." We had reached our building. I ran my ID card through the card reader and the door lock clicked. Lincoln pulled the door open. We went into our suite which was unlocked. I unlocked the door to my room and went in. I glanced at the computer, got undressed and went to bed.
Rob was always looking for the big party. He was always sure there was a big party going on and that all he had to do was find it. This caused him to get an idea. He got permission from the university police and printed up posters advertising a big party in our suite on Friday night. He got someone in another building to join in too. I wasn't exactly thrilled, but I figured that I would see what it is about.
Our Internet connection was out for two days. This was because so many student machines were infected with viruses that the network was overloaded with packets trying to infect other computers. I plugged my laptop into the phone line and dialed in to the computer science network.
"The kids just leave their computers in a box all summer without applying any patches so when they come back to school they all get infected," Lincoln said.
"Haven't they ever heard of virus protection software like Norton or McAfee?"
"Dorm support tries to disconnect infected machines from the network but with this many infections, it is hopeless." I could see that that was true. Infection wasn't only on campus, there was a virus which was clogging up the Internet in general. My brother-in-law, who manages a data center, had told me that there is always a flood of virus-generated traffic when colleges open in the fall and that this year was particularly bad.
"I hope they get it back up soon, because I am operating on dial-up."
"I am sure they are working as fast as they can. Where are you dialing into?"
"DogNet."
"They have dial up access numbers?"
"Yep. When I was an undergraduate the only way to get on from our rooms was to dial in. Clarkson only had ten modem numbers and they were usually all in use. So I would war dial until I got in. I would keep on dialing until someone logged off and then I would quickly grab that modem. It usually took me ten or fifteen minutes. My modem was twenty-four hundred baud and I liked it that way."
"Why did you like it that way?"
"I read stuff as it scrolled across my screen without pausing it."
Eric, who couldn't download stuff during the outage, took the opportunity to look at some of the stuff he had on his hard disk. I don't know if he listened to the DOORS music I gave him, though. No one liked the outage and tempers were somewhat shortened.
As the sun went down Friday night, kids started arriving. Rob and Eric had bought a huge quantity of beer and liquor. I didn't like their beer. I knew better than to put mine in the refrigerator under those circumstances. Music was blasting. Soon it became too crowded for me. I wandered to the other building to see what they were doing there. There were maybe a dozen kids there and a big stock of liquor. They had all sorts of sweet liquors that I had never tasted. I tried some of them. I talked to some girls. Soon I became tired and I decided to go home. When I got to our suite there must have been a hundred kids in the living room. Someone from the university police was announcing that the maximum occupancy for a suite was twenty people and that people were going to have to leave. I pressed my way through the crowd. The bathroom was in use. I got to my room, turned the key, and fell in. I felt sick to my stomach. There was still no screen in my window so I just stuck my head out and vomited. Then, as I got undressed and went to bed, I decided that I wouldn't do that again.
The regular late night parties Rob had in our room were pretty bad. Sometimes the music kept me awake and whenever I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night there were a bunch of kids in our living room. Some of them looked kind of scary. I didn't know where Rob got the money to pay for all the booze that he served. I knew that he liked to return bottles and cans for their cash refund. I let him return all my bottles when he could get a ride.
##
I woke up with a headache Saturday morning. I felt sorry for myself as I limped to the cafeteria to get some coffee. I was hoping that the coffee would fix my aching head. I didn't have any Advil or anything in my room. In the cafeteria I sat by myself with some coffee, orange juice and sausage. I sipped on the coffee and nibbled on the sausage. I didn't want to talk to anybody. As was usually the case at SUNY IT, many students had gone home for the weekend. This included Shawna who would go home most weekends. When I was an undergrad going home for the weekend was unheard of.
My cellphone rang. It was my grandmother who wanted me to come over for dinner. I thanked her but said that I wasn't feeling well. My grandmother lived just half an hour away in Starkville. I planned to visit her a lot while I was in Utica. I couldn't imagine living on this rural campus without a car. Neither Lincoln nor Rob had a car. Lincoln rode with me whenever he needed a ride or I needed to go anywhere. Rob got rides from various people including Eric. There was no place that you could walk to. When Rob came home at three in the morning bombed out of his mind, I didn't even want to know who was driving. Rob didn't even have a valid drivers license.
Sunday morning I got up early and did my Formal Methods homework. That completed the homework due for the following week. I typed it up with \LaTeX, a mathematical typesetting package used by many computer scientists, printed it and put it in my notebook. One of the nice things about \LaTeX is that it can make all of the mathematical and logical symbols that I need for the homework. It also allowed one to type things using a standard text editor and deal with it as a regular text file. When the file was ready, one ran it through \LaTeX which produced a DVI or device independent file. The DVI file can then be printed, converted to an Adobe PDF file or converted to Postscript. \LaTeX was primarily a Unix program, but I used a \LaTeX distribution for Windows called MikTeX.
No one else that I knew of at SUNY used \LaTeX. This struck me as odd since most computer science researchers use it. Jorge used Microsoft Word and Roger used troff. Troff was a Unix typesetting system from the seventies. Troff was on the curriculum of the Unix class that Lincoln was teaching the lab for. This struck me as kind of funny, since troff is obsolete, but I didn't mention my feelings about it to Roger. Lincoln said that Roger wrote his thesis using troff. In class Roger mentioned using APL. This gave me an idea of what decade Roger was in graduate school.
\chapter{} chapter 7
That night I studied with Wen. We met in the library and got a study room in the back of the building. I did problems and explained the solutions to Wen. We studied until they were about to close the library. I had driven to the library, so I drove home. Wen lived in an apartment off campus so she drove home, too.
When I got home, I put some music on. You Belong to the City by Glenn Frye played. Rob stopped by my room.
"I love that song." Rob said.
"It was popular in 1982."
"I was born in 1982," Rob said. Now I felt old.
"I was born in 1969."
"Oooh, the sixties."
"Maybe I should check into assisted living."
"Yeah, maybe you should."
On Monday Wen was flirtatious after Automata. This confused me as she had said that she couldn't go out with me. She always brought her laptop in a rolling briefcase and it looked like she was in an airport when she dragged that thing behind her. She had it configured to display in Chinese. I knew that she liked to read Chinese books and look at Chinese websites in her spare time. It seemed to me that she would become more proficient in English if she looked at English language books and websites.
##
That night, Lincoln and I went to the Cat's Den again. I ordered chicken wings.
"I would like an order of chicken wings, extra spicy."
"Our fryer is broken."
"Oh, darn, what else do you have?"
"I can run your wings through the pizza oven."
"Will I get salmonella?"
"Nah."
"Okay, lets try that."
We sat down and the television was tuned to Comedy Central. There was a show called The Chapelle Show on. It was made up of skits. The skits were all racist against white people. We were both white, but we found it amusing. It was a guilty enjoyment since I knew the show was setting back race relations by twenty years.
On the way back to our suite, Lincoln and I talked.
"You know what Rob and Eric like about our building?" Lincoln asked.
"The fact that it is at the corner of the quad and doesn't get much notice?"
"Close."
"What then?"
"The surveillance camera can't pan far enough to see it."
"So we could get mugged in front of our building and nobody would know!"
"On the other hand, the university police can't see all the people coming and going."
"You make it sound like they are drug dealers. You know, I wonder about Rob."
"Me too." Lincoln said. We walked past a police call box.
"Does anyone use those things?" I wondered.
"Yeah. I can pick them up on my scanner. You hear the funniest things in the beginning of the fall."
"Like what?"
"A girl used it. She was so drunk that she could hardly stand up. She was like `I'm drunk and I don't know where I live.' ".
"That is funny."
"Yeah, she was like, `I was with some guy, but I don't know his name and now I can't find my room.' "
"Heehee. Was it a rape?"
"`I don't know what he looks like.' "
"So what did the university police say?"
"They were like, `What is your name? We can look it up for you.' "
"That is funny."
"In the end they had to send a cop to help her to her room."
"What else did you pick up on your scanner?"
"On a few occasions there were kids passed out drunk in the quad. They had to check on them to make sure that they were still alive. They hate that."
"I can see how that could happen."
"Then there is the rape tape."
"The what?"
"Last Halloween some kids bought a CD of a woman screaming. They played it on their stereo until someone called the police. The university police went door to door looking for the rape victim."
"Oh man. What did they do when they found out?"
"They never caught the kids who played the CD."
"How do you know it was a CD?"
"They talked about it in the cafeteria the next day."
"Wouldn't the cops hear the same thing?"
"Nah. They don't have any detectives or undercover cops or anything. They can only react to things they see or get called about. There is no follow-up."
By this time we were back in our suite, drinking Sam Adams in our living room. Rob and Eric were out clubbing. They did that on school nights.
"Hey, Lincoln, how would you like to go with me to Montreal during fall break?"
"That sounds like fun. What are you going to do in Montreal?"
"I am going to visit a Russian girl."
"I wish I had secrets."
I had a good friend named Mike S. who I had worked with at Ikos Systems in the mid-nineties. He is a software engineer who now works for a brokerage. His oldest daughter, Alina, was going to McGill in Montreal. Mike and his wife, Luba, are Russian Jews who escaped from the Soviet Union in the nineteen eighties. They were among the first to be allowed to leave. When they left they were stripped of their Soviet citizenship, so they got American citizenship as quickly as possible. Alina was three when they fled the Soviet Union and she knows some Russian. Before I came to SUNY, Mike had suggested that I visit Alina because he thought that Utica and Montreal are near each other. I wanted to visit Alina because I gave her a copy of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand when she was in junior high and I wanted to see what became of that. I understood that she was quite conservative. I also heard that she was something of a political activist. Alina's mother was a concert pianist and had a doctorate in music.
"Okay, let me know for sure so that I can book the train tickets."
"I'll let you know."
"I'll book our train tickets and hotel room. I just need a solid answer from you. My cousin, Polly, already backed out of the trip."
##
The next evening, Rob brought a screen for my window. He also installed it for me. I thought that was really nice of him and he didn't even ask for money. Maybe it was his way of showing appreciation for helping him with his homework. I was also pleased that Residence Life had finally acted on the work order. I talked to him about it.
"Rob, thanks for putting in the screen. The bugs were driving me crazy."
"No problem."
"I am glad that Residence Life finally acted on my work order."
"Residence Life? Are you crazy. They will never fix it."
"Then where did you get the screens?"
"I took them off of the laundry room."
"You did what?"
"Should I put them back?" he wanted to know.
"Heck, no." Rob's heart was in the right place, even if his hands weren't. I was glad that he was making this good will gesture. He reminded me of my second cousin, Jamie. He was very generous with pure bred dogs, horses, all sorts of things. It was not a good idea to press him too hard about how he had acquired them though. He was a wheeler and dealer. Some of his deals were funny.
When I was fifteen, Jamie was staying with us on the farm. He traded something or other for a harness racing horse. Jamie was a well known horse mechanic. He was banned from an impressive array of racetracks. His plan for the horse was that he would train it to be a riding horse and sell it for a good sum of money. One day, he called me out to the pasture. The horse was there, all saddled up. He claimed that the horse was broken and that I should ride it. I got on the horse. The horse immediately jumped in the air with all four legs. I knew that this was going to be a ride and hung on tight.
The horse took off at a full gallup. It ran under every low branch it could find. It crossed the creek and came around at full speed to a ten foot drop into the creek, stopped suddenly, put its head down and its rear feet in the air. There was no doubt in my mind that I was supposed to fall into the creek. When that didn't work, it continued the wild ride. I abandoned the reins and put my arms around its neck. As it ran back toward the house on level ground, I saw my chance and jumped off. I curled myself in a ball and rolled. Then I got up. I said to Jamie. "So you broke him, have you?"
Another time he acquired a "milking" shorthorn. He brought it in the barn and put it in a stall. He indicated that I was supposed to milk it. I went in the stall with a wet paper towel and a strip cup to wipe the shorthorn off. When I started to wipe the teats, the cow suddenly kicked me so hard that I went all the way across the barn floor. I was unconscious for a minute or two. When I came to, I told Jamie that if he thought the "milking" shorthorn needed to be milked, it would be his job to milk it.
On Friday morning I did my Formal Methods homework while my laundry was in the washing machine. Doing laundry was inconvenient because the laundry room was across the quad. I had to carry all my clothes all the way there. There were a half dozen washing machines and I generally needed two of them. No quarters were needed, the laundry was free. The catch was that there was no hot water. After washing one's clothes it was sometimes necessary to wait for a dryer. I wondered what the situation would be if so many kids didn't take their laundry home when they went home for the weekend.
The next week Rob came home between two and three in the morning each night and caused a ruckus. He was punching walls and acting crazy. Thursday night Rob got home at about three in the morning. Something must have happened to upset him that night because he trashed his room. He smashed his computer and a lamp and broke a chair. I sent the RA an email that Rob was flipping out. I guessed that that Rob's relationship with Lisa was not going the way he would have liked it to.
On Thursday I had a Formal Methods test. The usual format for graduate classes was a single midterm and a final, but Roger wanted more exams in Formal Methods both to force the students to study and to give him many data points when assigning grades. Roger stayed in the classroom during the exam, which must have been frustrating to the Indian students who wanted to discuss the answers. I was the first one done with the exam and handed it in. I took my backpack and started to leave the classroom when Roger stopped me. There was an irregularity with my exam, it seemed. My heart skipped a beat. What could the problem be? "You forgot to put your name on the exam." Roger said. I was glad that Roger caught that because it would not have been nice to not get credit for the exam because I forgot to put my name on it. I wrote my name on the top. After I left the classroom I took a Walmart generic version of a Zantac.
##
"I can't go with you to Montreal." Lincoln announced.
"Okay, what is the reason for that?"
"I have something in my past and I am afraid it would catch up with me if I left the country." Lincoln was apparently not aware of how loose US-Canadian border crossings are.
"It would be on the train," I offered.
"I take the train to Illinois in the summer to go to my summer job at the data center." He worked for an insurance company summers.
"Well, I am going to book the tickets now, so don't change your mind."
"Okay. I'm really sorry."
"It's okay."
That weekend all of my roommates went away leaving me alone in the suite. Eric went back home to western New York for the weekend. Rob took an Amtrack train to his home on Long Island, something he clearly needed given what happened the previous week. I wasn't sure where Lincoln went. I decided to enjoy the peace and quiet while I could, because they would all be back Sunday evening.
With both Lincoln and Shawna off campus, I had no one to talk to except for Lincoln's friend Brian. It was only a few days until October and less than two weeks until my trip to Montreal. I booked a train ticket. I was to take a train from Utica to Schenectady and then catch another train at Schenectady that would take me to Montreal. Going south, instead of north, would have been easier. There were trains that went all the way from western New York to Penn Station in Manhattan. Immediately after my trip to Montreal I would have the big Automata midterm. I had been studying with Wen on Sunday nights, really tutoring her. Soon we would see if that time benefited either me or Wen. At this point I was eating a lot of generic Zantac. My classes made me nervous and I wanted a 3.5 GPA so that I could get into a PhD program. If I didn't get it, there would not be time to make it up later. I needed a 3.5 each and every semester.
My RA called me and left a message on my voicemail that he needed more information about Rob's behavior. I called him and got through.
"So what is the situation with Rob?"
"Every night last week he came home and punched the walls and stuff. It made such a racket that it woke me up. I stayed in my room with the door locked. On Thursday night he smashed his computer and a lamp. I think he also smashed his chair because he is using Lincoln's."
"Doesn't Lincoln need his chair?"
"There isn't room for Lincoln's chair in his room with all of his computer equipment so it has been in the living room. Lincoln sits on his bed."
"Uh-huh. I see. So are you afraid of Rob?"
"He seems okay during the day. It is just when he gets home in the middle of the night that he seems out of control. I think alcohol and drugs are involved."
"Rob does drugs?"
"I don't poke my nose into Rob's personal business." Rob was a major dope fiend. He had told us that he had a court date for pot possession coming up on Long Island. That would cost him plenty. If convicted, his federal financial aid would be cut off.
"Okay. The director will talk to Rob and try to make him an appointment at the counseling center. I will eventually need to know about the damaged chair."
"Okay, thanks."
\chapter{} chapter 8
In Automata, Jorge was discussing a finite state automata. I raised my hand and asked if a particular theorem applied to it.
"It would if this were a deterministic finite state automata but this is a non-deterministic finite state automata," he replied.
My face turned bright red and I was quite embarrassed.
After my next class, I went to the cafeteria for dinner. Lincoln was there. I got my food and sat down at the table next to him. "When is lobster night?" I asked.
"Yeah, you just keep waiting for lobster night," Lincoln said.
"I confused a deterministic finite state automata with a non-deterministic finite state automata in class today. I am so embarrassed."
"I don't know why you take classes like that."
"I like that class. You should take it, after you finish discrete math."
"I don't know about that."
"Besides, it is a core class and you need three core classes."
"This is true."
"I started to take Automata at Stanford when I worked out in the Silicon Valley."
"Stanford. Hmph. What happened?"
"I didn't have time to do the class and do my work so I dropped the class."
"You know what we need? We need an eating club?"
"You mean like People Eating Tasty Animals, also known as PETA?" I didn't know what an eating club was, but it sounded good.
"I mean like they have a Princeton. People pay a fee to join an eating club and then they get good food. They also have parties and dances. They have them instead of fraternities."
"Sounds like something we should have."
"Yeah. We could get some people together and hire some chefs--"
"Wouldn't we need a building?"
"Yeah, we would need a building. Buildings in Utica are cheap, I wouldn't worry about that."
"You know, a fraternity would be good, too. Why doesn't SUNY IT have any fraternities?"
"They can't even fill up the dorms."
"Yeah, but still."
"They just built the dorms ten years ago. Besides, who wants to join a fraternity?"
"Well, maybe a fraternity would have better food."
"It's all about the food with you, isn't it?"
"Yesterday I sent a nine page thesis proposal to Jorge." I told Lincoln.
"Thesis proposal? I didn't know that we need to do a thesis proposal."
"Well there is no requirement for one, but I did it anyway."
"What did Jorge say?"
"I haven't heard back from him."
"When did you send it?"
"Friday."
Shawna came in the cafeteria and stopped by our table. "Hello sirs," she said.
"Hey Shawna! How is it going?" I exclaimed.
"Good, good. It could be better."
"I was just telling Lincoln that I sent a thesis proposal."
"Oh! What is your thesis going to be about?"
"Cryptography."
"Well, I hope that works out for you, then. When will you graduate?"
"December 2004."
##
We sat in Formal Methods. We occupied the second row with Lincoln to my left. Roger was handing back the exams. He gave me mine and I looked at the score. The number was meaningless to me. I looked at the various problems and found that I had made some dumb mistakes but overall did okay. Roger wrote all the number grades on the board from highest to lowest. Mine was near the top. He said, "I will have to see more before I know what letter grades I will assign, but if I had to today..."
My grade was a solid A-. I was disappointed that it wasn't an A. I decided to talk to Roger about how I could bring up my grade.
Between classes I went to Roger's office. His door was closed. I knocked on it. Someone from a neighboring office said, "He is probably out smoking."
I went downstairs and found him standing outside the building pulling on a cigarette. "Professor Cavallo, I am concerned about my grade."
"You got an A-."
"Yes. That is what I want to talk to you about. Is there some way that I can raise my grade?"
"Why do you need to raise your grade?"
"I want to get a PhD and I need an A to get into a program."
"Why don't you work harder?"
"Okay. I can do that. What else?"
"I am going to give you a B for the class."
"What?"
"When you send your transcripts to the next school, I don't want them to think that we didn't challenge you. I am going to give you a B so that you don't get all As."
I decided to leave before he did me any more favors.
##
Speaking of not being challenged, it seemed to me that Lincoln had developed some lazy habits towards his schoolwork. He got top grades, but at a harder school like Cornell or even my alma mater, Clarkson, he would have been challenged more. He enjoyed working with computers and could spend a lot of time working on his workstations. I wondered about his background.
"I suppose you were in a gifted program in school." I suggested. I was pretty sure that the school in Pavilion didn't have such an animal. We were walking back to our suite after dinner.
"No. My high school didn't have one."
"Mine didn't either, but we had AP classes and they sent me to community college my senior year."
"Mine sent me to community college, too."
"If they don't develop the talent of the brightest kids, then how is the country supposed to move forward?"
"They are only concerned about the dumb kids. They figure that we can take care of ourselves."
"Before I went to public school I went to very competitive private schools. We were doing sixth grade math in third grade. Many of the kids hired tutors. I took algebra in seventh grade. Maybe you needed a program like that."
"That would be less boring."
"If you don't provide challenging programs for gifted students then they get turned off to school and do what you did before you came here."
"You mean party all the time and work as a bartender?"
"Yeah. The future of the country is in the hands of the brightest students so they should make some effort to educate them."
"So what do you suggest?"
"In Pennsylvania they have a mandatory gifted IEP for kids who score above 130 on an IQ test."
"What is an IEP?"
"An IEP is an Individual Educational Program. In New York they just have them for dumb or illiterate kids. But if they had a gifted IEP law, then they would have to provide enrichment and stuff to gifted children."
"Sounds like a good idea."
"I think a lot less talent would be wasted in this country if the schools were serious about gifted education."
"What about you? You went to public school for high school," Lincoln asked.
"They had some AP classes and sent me to community college. The thing is that I did screw up until I joined the Navy. After boot camp I became serious about college."
"What do you think the Democrats would do?"
"They would throw more money at the schools and make them teach more politically correct nonsense. The kids would just become less educated."
"They would probably require sex education for preschoolers."
"Yuck. That is child abuse." I made a face.
"Maybe more money for the schools is a good thing." Lincoln suggested.
"The schools that spend the most per kid, like the Buffalo school system or Washington D.C., have the crappiest schools."
"So spending more money doesn't really help."
"If they spent the money intelligently, it might, but they just use it to hire more educrats."
"More teachers is a good thing."
"If they actually teach. The more money that gets thrown at a school system the more layers of bureaucracy there are. My high school had a very limited budget and was able to do pretty well."
"No gifted program."
"They did manage to have a couple of AP classes for me to take. You notice that private schools manage to get by with a lot less money."
"Yeah. I guess more money is not the answer."
##
Political trouble was brewing at SUNY IT. The new four-year program was a success and they were about to implement an electrical engineering program with SUNY Binghamton. Now the university president also wanted to implement a doctoral program in information assurance. I found this exciting. The faculty, however, was concerned that he was short-shrifting the transfer students from community colleges that had previously been the focus of SUNY IT. I was sympathetic to both positions. When I graduated from high school, I was accepted to Cornell provided that I take certain classes and get a certain GPA. So my first semester after high school I went to a community college and took some of those classes. The next semester I went to Syracuse University but my grandfather died just before finals and I withdrew. Then I joined and was kicked out of the Navy. After that I went to community college for another semester while I applied to Clarkson, which accepted me. Most of the transfer students from community colleges did not have my SAT scores, though, and it seemed to me that the future of the school depended on the freshmen. What brought all of this to a head was that there were severe budgetary problems. The president did not hire enough adjuncts that semester to cover the classes that the faculty thought should be covered. The faculty felt that required classes should be taught. The faculty senate voted no confidence in the president. When the president did not resign immediately, all of the deans resigned in protest. This was not as big a gesture as it seemed. They retained their tenured faculty positions. It threw the school into turmoil, though. Lincoln and I discussed it.
"So the faculty voted no confidence in the president."
"Yeah. All the deans resigned, too." Lincoln said.
"I like the president's program, like the information assurance doctoral program."
"That's just a pipe dream. You wouldn't want a PhD from here anyway."
"I don't think that demanding the president resign was appropriate."
"Well, he went to the community colleges where we get most of our students from and said `you are crap and we are going to replace you with our students.' "
"I don't think that is what he said."
"Well, he is ruining the relationships SUNY IT had developed with all the community colleges. You know that SUNY IT has articulation agreements with a lot of them."
"What is an articulation agreement?"
"It means that the community college will have certain content and standards in certain classes and SUNY IT will transfer those classes."
"I think it would be better if we got most of our students through the new freshman program."
"That causes a big burden on the departments because now they have to teach lower division classes for the freshmen that they didn't have to teach before."
I wasn't concerned about the large problems of university politics, though, I was concerned about my laptop computer. Memory that I ordered for my laptop had arrived from Amazon.com. Unfortunately it was the wrong type of memory. It was meant for a desktop. I decided to put it in my mother's computer and order memory that would fit in my laptop. My laptop had 256 megabytes of memory and it needed another 512 megabytes of memory to handle the development and other uses that I put it to. I called my mother and told her that I had memory that I would put in her computer when I went back for Christmas.
##
Before going to Montreal, I decided that I should get my hair cut. Lincoln needed a hair cut too so he rode with me to Kelly's shop in Fort Plain, about forty-five minutes east on the Thruway. As I went through the EZ-pass lane, Lincoln said, "Doesn't it bother you that they can track you with that thing?"
"If they want to track me, it isn't hard. The EZ-pass makes traveling a lot easier."
"They probably have more things reading your RFID tag along the road."
"They do, but they say that they don't retain your id from them."
We got to Kelly's and waited in her shop. I introduced them. "Kelly, this is my roommate Lincoln. Lincoln, I went to high school with Kelly."
"Nice to meet you." Lincoln said.
"Lincoln is the only TA in our department," I said.
"What is a TA?"
"Teaching assistant."
"Ah. Never mind the noise next door. My husband is renovating the building."
"Are you going to rent it out?"
"Yes. We have a bunch of rental units in Fort Plain and in Canajoharie. We have shops too. A massage parlor and a tattoo parlor."
"You are running a massage parlor?"
"No, I rent the shop to them. Lincoln, how do you want your hair cut?"
Kelly cut our hair. I had told Lincoln how much it would cost and what to leave as a tip. We paid and left.
When we got in the car, I said, "I didn't know Kelly was a slumlord."
"Yeah, and she has the stores, too. What is she going to open next? Smutworld?"
Rather than get back on the Thruway, I drove to my grandmother's house, about ten miles down route 80. I introduced Lincoln to my grandmother. Aunt Mary Lynn was having trouble with her computer so Lincoln and I looked at it. It was an old machine and ran Windows 98. We both thought that it needed more memory, but memory was hard to get for such an old model. Lincoln fiddled with the computer for an hour or so and got it working for her. Then we left.
I took Lincoln into Van Hornesville to show him my high school. It had pretty stone buildings with slate roofs. It was donated by Owen D. Young during the Roosevelt administration. We didn't get out of the car though.
"Kelly did a nice job on my hair," Lincoln commented.
"A lot better than buzzing it, don't you think?"
"Yeah."
"Now all the girls will want to talk to you."
Lincoln blushed. "I don't know about that."
We took route 168 to Herkimer where we got back on the Thruway. It was foggy and I had to drive slowly and concentrate hard, so we didn't talk much.
\chapter{} chapter 9
During the week before fall break, Lincoln and I drove to the train station. I wanted to know where it was so that I could find it when it was time to get on the train. Lincoln had some notion of where it was but wasn't entirely sure as he usually got there by bus. Lincoln agreed to drop me off at the train station when the time came. The train station was also the bus station which Lincoln took to go between home and school, so he was familiar with it. This was good because the street signs directing traffic to it were very misleading.
Wen had agreed to let me borrow her digital camera for the Montreal trip. She instructed me to meet her at the library to pick it up. When I got there, Wen said she needed to show me how to use the camera. We spent an hour or so taking pictures of each other posing in different places in the library. It was a good time. Wen had a nice camera and I felt lucky that she was letting me use it. I also was happy to have a good time with Wen.
The morning fall break started I received a call from Amtrack. I answered the phone, "Hello."
"Hello, may I speak to Michael de Mare?"
"Speaking."
"The train to Schenectady is four hours late. You won't make your connection with the train to Montreal. Don't bother going to the train station right away. Go about noon. We will put you on a bus from Schenectady to Montreal."
"Okay. Thanks."
I told Lincoln what they said. "Amtrack just called and said the train is late. They said not to bother going until noon and that I was going to miss my connection at Schenectady."
"So they will put you on another train?"
"They said that they would put me on a bus."
"That sucks."
"You know what I am going to do? I am going to drive to Schenectady and get on the train there."
"That is a smart idea."
"I guess that you won't get to use my car this weekend."
"That's okay."
So I loaded my stuff in the car and drove down the Thruway to the Schenectady exit. Once I got there I followed the MapQuest directions I had printed out to the train station. This was very difficult and I made a few wrong turns, but I got there. There was a big parking lot by the train station and I locked up my car and carried my stuff into the station. I went to the ticket counter and explained my situation. "I was supposed to get on the train at Utica but the train was running late so I came here instead. I ordered tickets on the Internet. It said to pick my tickets up at the train station."
"What is your name?"
"Michael de Mare, that is spelled dee ee emm a are ee."
She typed on her computer. "Round trip tickets to Montreal?"
"Yep."
The tickets printed and she handed them to me. "The train will be here in about two hours. Do you want a refund for your ticket from Utica to Schenectady?"
"Yes."
Her cash drawer opened and she counted out some money.
I had been afraid to be late so now I had to hang around the train station for two hours. There was a Burger King across the street. I don't like fast food but I was hungry. I carried my suitcase to Burger King and ordered some French fries and a Dr. Pepper. That was enough to keep me going for the time being. I used the facilities and lugged the suitcase back to the train station. I sat in a chair, hot and bored, until it was finally time for the train to come.
I got aboard the train and took a seat by the window. The train started chugging north. I stared out the window at the Adirondack scenery. Time passed slowly. Soon we were deep in the Adirondack mountain range. I took some pictures out the window. It seemed like the train was stopping every twenty miles or so. I didn't realize that there were so many remote villages in the mountains. I had heard that Adirondack was Mohican for "those who eat bark." That would be very apt, especially during the cold Adirondack winters.
When we reached the Canadian border, the train stopped for customs. The customs officer, a woman, asked me what my name and occupation are. I said that I was a computer science student. That seemed to satisfy her because she didn't ask me any more questions. There were kids sitting across from me who she asked many questions of including where they were going to be staying. When she got several rows behind me, someone answered "yes" when she asked him if he had anything to declare.
"What do you have to declare?"
"Firearms."
"Firearms?! Why are you bringing firearms into Canada?"
"We are FBI agents. See?" I assumed that they were showing their credentials.
"What are FBI agents coming to Canada for?"
"We are keeping an eye on him."
"The computer science student?"
"He works for the NSA."
"Is there anything that I should know?"
"He is meeting a Russian girl."
The FBI is capable of being very discreet. There is not a chance that I would have heard that exchange unless I was intended to. I supposed that the message that I should be taking away from this was that they were watching so I shouldn't do anything crazy.
It was night time before the train pulled into the station in Montreal. It was the train's last stop and everybody disembarked. I stood on the platform with my suitcase in the crowd of people wondering how I was going to find Alina. Suddenly a pretty young woman said, "Michael?" It was Alina.
"Alina! Hi! You grew up!."
"You grew down."
I laughed. "Thank you for coming to meet me. I am booked at the Intercontinental. Do you know where that is? It doesn't matter, we will take a taxi."
"Okay."
We left the platform and went into the train station. Everything was in French. There was a McDonald's there and the signs in its window were in French. I felt like I was in a foreign city. Then I remembered, I was in a foreign city. We climbed the stairs out of the station and there were taxis waiting along the street. We got in one and I said, "The Intercontinental Hotel, please."
The taxi driver took us on a ride through Montreal. The city lights and street scenes were exciting. Alina and I talked. Pretty soon we were at the hotel. I paid the taxi driver and we climbed out.
"Alina, I just need to check in. Let's go in."
"I'll wait out here."
"Okay."
I carried my suitcase through the doors into the lobby to the lobby. A bellhop took my suitcase and my name. I went to the front desk and told the man there that I had a reservation. He took my credit card and ran it through the card reader on the computer. Then he gave it back and told me that my bag would be taken to my room. He gave me a room key. All of this took less than ten minutes.
I went back out and Alina said, "That was quick."
"They took my bag so I didn't need to go to my room."
"Okay."
"Let's get something to eat. Do you know of any good restaurants here?"
Alina pointed at a sign that seemed to delineate the beginning of Montreal's Chinatown. "There should be something to eat there."
We walked into Chinatown and quickly found a small Chinese restaurant. "This will do," I said.
We went in and were seated. The waiter gave us menus and I ordered a beer. A couple of American men came in with a little Chinese girl, barely more than a toddler. They were seated at another table. I poured the beer into a glass and examined my menu. We ordered our food. I mentioned to Alina about the work I did with codes for the government. That surprised her. She asked some questions which I answered. Our food came and we ate. After we finished eating, I asked for our check. The men at the other table were talking to the waiter as they paid at the counter. Something seemed amiss.
When we got the check I went to the counter to pay with Alina in tow. When I paid, the waiter commented, "At least you didn't tell her about that."
Alina said, "Oh wow."
When we were back on the street I hailed a taxi for Alina. I gave Alina a twenty to pay the cab fare. At first Alina didn't seem to want to get in but then she said "Okay, I understand." The taxi wooshed off to take her back to her apartment near McGill. I walked back to the hotel. I went to my room and found everything in order with my suitcase on the bed. I wasn't sleepy though. I was still worked up from my exciting day. I went down to the hotel bar where I had a couple of beers. Then I went to bed.
The next morning I got up and decided to tour the city. I hailed a taxi and asked him to take me to the old city. We sped through the streets of Montreal. He let me off near a group of tourists. I didn't have any trouble communicating with the cab drivers because they knew some English and I knew some French. I had taken five years of French when I was in school and I could read most of the signs and even understand some of what they said. Any misunderstandings could always be cleared up by explaining that I was paying in American money.
I saw some beautiful architecture and took pictures of it. Then I found a cobblestone street, really an alley, with touristy shops lining either side. I walked down it shooting pictures. It was full of tourists. I noticed some shirts on sale. There were some that said FBI. Those would be illegal in the United States. After I walked several blocks down the cobblestone street, I found some interesting buildings and churches, which I photographed. Then I went back to a regular street and caught another cab. I asked him to take me to McGill.
The taxi delivered me to the main gate of the McGill campus. There were left-wing antiwar posters plastered on the nearby bus stop. I went under the arch and onto the McGill campus. McGill had a huge lawn with a soccer field to my left. Students were sitting under trees and on steps to the beautiful old buildings. Being at McGill reminded me to call Alina on her cellphone.
"Hello," she answered.
"Hi, Alina. This is Mike. I enjoyed dinner last night."
"Me too."
"Thank you for meeting me at the train station."
"Oh, no problem."
"Where do you want to have dinner tonight?"
"Oh tonight too? Oh wow. There is this place that serves smoked meat. Why don't we eat there."
"Okay, can you give me the address?"
"Sure." She gave me the address.
"What time should I meet you?"
"How about five?"
"Okay. I'll see you there at five o'clock."
I walked around McGill and climbed the hills and stairs to the upper part of the campus where there were beautiful views of the main campus below. Overall I got a pretty good workout. I was hot and my legs were sore. I walked back to the main gate and caught a taxi back to the hotel. There I lay down for a little bit. Then I explored that neighborhood a little. Soon it was time to go meet Alina. I hired a taxi and gave him the address that Alina had given me. He drove me through Montreal and dropped me off on a busy street with lots of nightclubs in front of a place called "Charcuterie Hebraique de Montreal Inc." There was a long line to get in the door.
After a while Alina arrived. I took a nice picture of her. We waited on the line. It took us a while, but we eventually got seated in the crowded dining room. A waiter came and took our order. I ordered some smoked meat and a coke.
"You know that coke in Canada is made with sugar," Alina said.
"What is it made with in the US?"
"Corn syrup."
"So I guess Canadian Coke is better?"
"Well, it is different."
We continued talking until they brought our smoked meat in sandwiches. There were two men sitting next to us. One of them said loudly, "You know they have smoked meat in the states."
The other one said, "Yeah, the best smoked meat is in New York."
I wasn't aware of any place like this in New York but I didn't doubt that there was one.
We ate our sandwiches, drank our soda and talked. Soon we were finished. I paid the bill and we left. I asked Alina if there was a place that we could go to have a drink. She led me to a quiet establishment on a residential street where we took a table. A waitress came. I ordered a beer and Alina ordered a sweet mixed drink. The waitress said that their liquor license only allowed them to serve alcohol with food and offered us a tray of food with some nuts and olives and stuff. We ordered that.
Alina and I sat and talked until it was pretty late. Then we left. Alina said that she would take me where I could hire a cab. As we walked by an apartment building, she said that that was where she lived. Soon we were back on a main street and there were taxis. I said goodbye to Alina, got in a taxi and went back to the Intercontinental Hotel where I found my bed.
The next morning, I packed up, checked out and took a taxi to the train station. I stopped in the McDonald's with the French signs and did my best to order a croissant in French. They must have figured out what I wanted because they gave me a croissant. I chewed on it while I waited for the train.
During the train trip back to Schenectady, I stared out the window watching the Adirondack countryside go by. I realized that we would be stopping in Ticonderoga and wondered if my friend Aunt Sue would be there. I waited until I had a decent cellphone signal and tried to call her. I couldn't get through. If she had been there, I would have gotten off at Ticonderoga and visited with her, although I would have had to catch another train home.
When I disembarked in Schenectady I found my car all in order. I got on the Thruway heading in the wrong direction. I got turned around at the next exit and drove back to Utica, more than an hour away. Soon I was home. I sent an email to Wen telling her that I was back and that I had her camera. I told Lincoln that he missed a really good trip. The next day would be my thirty-fourth birthday and Wen said that she would take me out to lunch to celebrate.
\chapter{} chapter 10
On my birthday, I received many emails and phone calls including an emailed birthday card from Wen. I also took off the patch and was nicotine-free. Wen instructed me to meet her at a Chinese restaurant in Utica. I didn't really know my way around Utica so it was with great trepidation that I set out to find the restaurant. I brought Wen's camera. After driving around for a little bit, I did find it and I waited outside for Wen to arrive.
Wen arrived shortly and we went in. The restaurant was a Chinese buffet. We were seated at a table and the waiter took our order, which was simply two buffets. We ate the food from the buffet table, which was pretty good, and Wen took some pictures of me eating. After we were finished Wen paid, as it was my birthday, and we went outside. When we got outside, we ran into Jorge and a couple of women. Wen took my picture with them.
After we took our leave I got directions and drove back to SUNY IT. I had crypto homework to do. I had already implemented the DES encryption algorithm for crypto and now I was trying to implement AES. I was having trouble figuring out how to divide polynomials. I had raised my hand in crypto class and told Jorge that I was trying to implement AES but I didn't know how to divide polynomials. Jorge didn't answer my question. I suppose that you are supposed to learn that in high school but I had been out of high school for fifteen years. Not having the answer, I surfed the web for polynomial division algorithms. I rejected the ones they teach children for not being efficient enough. After studying it for a while I found an efficient approach to dividing polynomials with exclusive ors, a basic logic operation on computers. This would make my program much more efficient. I wrote several small programs to test the algorithm and they seemed to work.
Lincoln and I also had to get ready for our first presentation in cryptography the next day. We were working as a team but we needed to present two possible topics. Later we would pick one to give a longer presentation on at the end of the semester. We were doing timestamping, which I had done research in, and zero-knowledge proofs. I was going to give the talk on timestamping while Lincoln was to give the talk on zero-knowledge proofs. I made slides for our talks using \LaTeX.
The next day I printed the slides in the computer lab and brought them to instructional resources where they converted them to transparencies for fifty cents per slide. When it was our turn we got up to give our presentations. We used the transparencies on an old fashioned transparency projector. The other students were displaying Powerpoint slides on the computer projector. Jorge seemed confused.
"That's good. What is your other topic?"
"Zero-knowledge proofs."
"That guy did them."
"Yes, he is my partner."
"Oh, I see. Which topic are you guys going to do for the final presentation?"
"Digital timestamping."
"Okay. That was good."
I gave the transparencies to Jorge, who didn't seem to particularly want them, and we took our seats. I was sure that we had gotten an A for our presentations. I had, after all, cited my own research, you can't be any cooler than that. The Indian students who came after us seemed somewhat rattled. By establishing myself as someone who had done research in the field, I had set the bar high. I didn't cite one paper that I was a co-author of but rather two papers. One was a technical report at Clarkson and the other was published at Eurocrypt '93.
On Friday I had to tutor an undergraduate in discrete math. Roger had asked me to do this, asking two of us to stay after class and asking us if we would do some tutoring. The student was my age and said that the state was paying for his bachelor's degree because he was disabled. I struggled with trying to explain basic concepts in logic and boolean algebra to him for an hour. He was obtuse. I privately thought that perhaps he should find a major other than computer science.
We had the Automata midterm coming up on Monday. Wen was very nervous about it and I figured that I could get some good practice by helping her. We agreed to study all day Saturday. We met in the library and took a room in the back. I explained the material to her and did problem after problem. Wen said that she should pay me for tutoring her but I insisted that I was benefiting from the sessions too.
At dinner that night I discussed it with Lincoln.
"How did the studying go with Wen?"
"It went well, sometimes it is hard to explain things to her."
"Maybe she pretends to be really dumb so that she can get close to you and steal your secrets."
"I don't know."
"So is she ready for the exam?"
"I don't know about her, but I am ready for it."
"I hope you do well."
"Thanks. Have you noticed how crappy a job they do in the cafeteria on weekends?"
"What do you mean?"
"The entrees aren't very good, there is no pizza. There is no soup. There is a long line at the short order grill."
"Yeah, it is pretty crappy."
"Maybe we should put in a comment card."
"That is a good idea. Otherwise the manager won't even know. How was Montreal?"
"Montreal was nice. I took a lot of pictures. I can't wait to get them back from Wen."
"I'm sorry I couldn't go with you."
"That is fine."
"Where did you stay?"
"At a nice hotel. The bed was so comfortable after SUNY IT."
"Sounds pretty nice."
"Yeah, it was cool. I had dinner with Alina."
"The Russian girl?"
"Yeah. She met me at the train station."
"It seems like all of your girlfriends are from east-block countries."
"I guess that is the just the way it works out."
We were finished eating. We returned our trays and headed back to our suite. "It seems like the only kids who don't go home every weekend are our roommates," I commented.
"Are you kidding? Rob doesn't want to miss a party and Eric has a girl in his room every night."
"Just about. I am sure he has women at home, too, though."
"No doubt about it."
"At least Rob stopped freaking out after he got back from his trip a couple of weeks ago."
"Yeah."
"I haven't seen Lisa around our suite in a while." I liked having Lisa around our suite.
"We see her eating breakfast with a lot of other guys on weekends."
"That doesn't mean she is doing anything with them."
"Well, if she is with another guy, she isn't with Rob."
"This is true. Maybe if he didn't try to get in so many other girls' pants, he would have more luck with her."
"Rob doesn't have a lot of sense that way."
"I know."
Suddenly Lincoln stopped and motioned me to stop as well. He said, "See that?"
"See what?"
"Right there."
Sure enough, not ten feet from us a doe was lying down next to a wall. I wished I had a camera. "I wonder how many kids walk by that and don't even see her."
"Yeah, that is pretty amazing. Wait until the snow piles up and the deer get stuck on the path, though."
"Who do you think will win the World Series?" I asked.
"I don't know. Who is playing?"
"The Marlins and the Yankees."
"Oh my gosh. The Yankees."
"The first game is on tomorrow."
##
On Monday we had our Automata exam. Jorge handed out the exams and the blue books and told us to start. He then left the room. I started doing the problems. There weren't any surprises, I had done these sort of problems while studying with Wen. Pretty soon the Indian students were exchanging answers in an Indian language. I was annoyed that they were cheating. I wondered how I could compete when such rampant cheating was being tolerated. When I was an undergrad at Clarkson, I was not aware of any cheating so I really didn't know how to react. I wanted someone to tell the professor but I didn't want to be the one. It is best not to get involved. The whole class knew that they were cheating, surely someone would report it.
The button came off of my peacoat and Wen agreed to sew it back on. I took it with me when it was time to study for Automata and gave it to Wen. She sewed the button back on with the anchor having the correct orientation and gave it back to me the next time we saw each other. I was glad that she did this as I don't know how to sew.
On Wednesday we got our Automata exams back. The exam was graded and a number was written on the inside cover. That was our grade. Whether it was an A or a C was impossible to know as Jorge did not put up any information we could use to understand our grades except for the mean. The mean was thirty points out of a hundred lower than my grade. Jorge addressed the class.
"I am very disappointed in the exams. Most of you should have done better. In order to allow you to bring your grades up I will assign you an extra credit programming assignment which I will hand out next week. You will have two weeks to do it."
That worked for me. If there was one thing that I know how to do, it was program. I guessed that most of the students in the class had never written a program other than the toy programs written as assignments in undergraduate computer science classes. This was my opportunity to shine.
Wednesday night, instead of putting on music, I put on the World Series. Lincoln wasn't really interested and just played with his computers. I was rooting for the Yankees, of course, and I just assumed that they would win. I hadn't even heard of the Marlins. I am not much of a sports fan. The Yankees and the Marlins had won one game each and this was the third game. When the game was over I told Lincoln what happened.
"The Yankees won game three. Yay!"
"That is good."
"I think that they will win the series."
"Probably."
"The Marlins would have to win three out of the next four games to win the series."
"Then it sounds like the Yankees will win."
"Are you ready for the Formal Methods exam on Monday?" I wanted to know.
"Yes. I am going to study for it some over the weekend."
"I got back my Automata exam today."
"How did you do?"
"I don't have any clue. He just wrote the number grade on it. Look." I showed him the exam.
"How did the other kids do?"
"I don't know. He is going to assign an extra credit project."
"Are you going to do it?"
"Heck, yeah. You know the Indian students cheat."
"Yeah. As soon as the professor walks out of the room they start talking."
"I have never seen anything like it."
##
The Marlins won the next three games and won the World Series. I tried to explain to Wen why I liked the World Series.
"The Miracle Mets won the World Series in New York in 1969 while I was being born in Brooklyn." I said.
"I am not familiar with that period in American history," she replied.
"Anyway, did you watch the baseball game?"
"No."
It seemed like nobody was watching baseball. On Monday about half of the Automata students dropped the class including a significant number of Indian students. Jorge gave out the extra credit assignment. It was worth ten points on the midterm which would bring my grade to a 96 and the average grade, assuming that everyone did it, to a 70. He said that this was in lieu of a curve. The hand out listed twenty algorithms on finite automata that we studied in class. We were to implement up to ten of them for one point each.
After class Wen gave me a CD ROM with the pictures from Montreal on them. I made them available on the web to anyone that I sent the URL to. I sent the URL to Mike, Alina and my family. Wen was very concerned about the extra credit assignment. She wanted to know if we had to use a programming language. Of course we had to use a programming language. You can't write a program without using a programming language. She said that most of the students, including her, didn't know how to use a programming language. I asked her how she could get a graduate degree in computer science without knowing a programming language. She said that she would study it after she graduated. I didn't know what to say. Before you start graduate study in computer science you are supposed to be familiar with the theory and practice of computer science including proficiency in a programming language. When I was an undergraduate we were required to learn Pascal and do many assignments in all of our classes using it. In industry I spent most of my life writing programs in C++. I figured that this would give me an advantage in the class.
On Tuesday we had the second Formal Methods exam. I finished the exam early and remembered to put my name on it. I didn't have a good feeling about the exam when I turned it in, though. I knew that I had made a number of careless mistakes. This class required a high degree of precision and accuracy and this went against the lazy side of my nature.
On Thursday we got the Formal Methods exam back. He told the class that the exam results broke his heart. When he gave the grade distribution he made the letter grades pretty low. I don't think that even Lincoln, who excelled in the class, got an A on this one. I didn't do as well as I had hoped. I met with Roger in his office.
"I am concerned about my grade in Formal Methods."
"I don't know why you did so poorly. You are obviously more intelligent than the other students."
"I don't know. What if I get a B in the class? Maybe I should drop it."
"Don't drop it. If you get a grade that you don't like, you can take the class over for a better grade."
"Will my original grade still count?"
"No. Just your new grade."
"Okay, thanks."
I decided not to drop the class. If I dropped it, I would have to take it over, anyway. So I figured I could take the risk of not getting an A because if I didn't, I could retake the class for an A the next fall. I needed thirty-three credits to graduate and if I took twelve credits a semester, that would be thirty-six credits. That would leave me room to retake Formal Methods.
\chapter{} chapter 11
I designed the data structures and classes for my Automata extra credit project. That came out to about 235 lines of code. It was my plan to implement the algorithms as methods on the main finite automata class. I implemented the state minimization algorithm and found it very time consuming. I emailed Jorge and told him that I would need an extension on the project. He said that many of the other algorithms would be quicker to implement but I argued many would not. He granted a one week extension.
Wen was concerned about her grade on the midterm and wanted to pay me to tutor her. I was happy to tutor her but I didn't want her money. I explained that by showing her how to do the problems, I was preparing myself for the final exam. We continued to study together every week.
The campus activities board was having a Halloween dance in the cafeteria. It was supposed to be a costume party so I decided to go dressed as a graduate student. I told Wen about the dance and she agreed to go, too. I went to the dance. There was a DJ there playing some weird music that I had never heard before. There were maybe a half dozen kids in costumes dancing. I knew right away that this party was too lame. They were giving out snacks and candy.
After a while Wen arrived in a costume. She had on a shiny purple wig and dark glasses. I tried to get her to dance, but she wasn't interested. They put on a slow song. I invited her to dance with me, again, but she wasn't interested. We hung around for half an hour or forty-five minutes, just talking and standing around. I couldn't get her interested in dancing. Meanwhile there were no more students showing up. The dance was lame and I couldn't even get Wen to dance. I gave up and went home. Rob and Eric were at Halloween parties so it was just Lincoln and I.
##
About one-thirty in the morning I got email from Wen. She said that I missed a great time. She said that half an hour after I left she danced. She sent pictures of herself in her costume. She had gotten someone at her apartment building to take them. She thanked me for inviting her to the dance and said that she had never been to a Halloween party before.
The next day was Saturday. Wen and I studied together for more than two hours. I worked through difficult problems using complicated algorithms for her. We went over the midterm. Wen asked me to explain how to do each of the problems. It seemed to me that with all the studying that Wen was doing that she ought to have a good grade. After I finished tutoring Wen, I went to Walmart to get some necessities.
That night I talked to Lincoln about the Halloween party over dinner. "Wen and I went to the Halloween Dance last night. It was pretty lame."
"Everybody knows it is lame. That is why no one goes."
"There were a few freshmen there. Not all Halloween parties are lame."
"All the parties sponsored by the Campus Activities Board are," he said.
"When I was an undergraduate I went to a really cool Halloween party once. It was at a fraternity."
"Fraternity parties are supposed to be cool."
"Yeah. My friend was on LSD and insisted on going so I went with him to keep him out of trouble. I got distracted by all of the women and he disappeared."
"Where did he go?"
"Oh, the fraternity brothers stuck him in a room with a tie-died sheet to stare at. It kept him entertained for hours."
"Oh my gosh."
"He burned out a few brain cells."
"So there were a lot of girls?"
"Yeah. There was this one sorority girl dressed up like a marijuana leaf. That was pretty funny. A lot of sorority girls were there and there were even some girls from Potsdam State."
"They had girls from another college?"
"You have to realize that there aren't very many women at Clarkson. Clarkson is an engineering school and not very many women are interested in engineering."
"So you had a good time."
"Yeah, that was an example of a good Halloween party. The party last night was for lamers."
"So how did the DJ equipment work?"
"That worked great. It was really loud, though. Did I mention that I was a DJ on my college radio station?"
"You did say something about that." Lincoln said.
"I was a really crappy DJ. I never played people's requests and if someone called and said that they were having a party, I put an LP on and went upstairs and had a beer with them."
"Upstairs?"
"The radio station was in the basement of the Hamilton dorm."
"Okay."
"It was during the Gulf War, the first gulf war, and we had a UPI wire. It was a teletype that ticked off the news as soon as they got it. I rewrote the news that came off the teletype and read it on the air every half hour. I thought that was important with the war going on and everything."
"That is cool."
"I played a lot of old music, from the seventies, though, and some people didn't like that. Once my mother visited and worked the radio station with me. She wanted to play some really lame music but I didn't put that on."
"Sounds like you had a good time."
"Yeah, my radio program was on Saturday nights so I had an excuse for not having a life."
"So what did Keith say?" Lincoln wanted to know.
"About Rob? He said to tell him about all the incidents so that it is documented in case they need to take judicial action. Especially when he comes home at three in the morning and blasts rap music. He has gotten complaints from other suites about it, to."
"They won't take judicial action."
"I don't even know what judicial action is."
"That is when they bring you up in front of the judicial board for disciplinary action. The board is made up of students so you can't expect a lot of action from them."
"He has been called in to talk to Scott." Scott was the Residential Director.
"What do you think Scott tells him?" Lincoln asked.
"I think Scott tells him to knock it off and he says he will and then he goes right back to doing what he was doing."
"Yeah, that is probably pretty much it."
"I don't like it when he brings all those druggies over to our suite in the wee hours of the morning, either. The late night parties are pretty bad, but that is worse."
"What happened to the undergraduate you are tutoring."
"I just told him that I can't tutor him anymore."
"Why?"
"Because he is dumb. I think that tutoring him makes me dumber. It is very frustrating and he doesn't pay me that much."
"So what is he going to do?"
"The other guy is still tutoring him." I said.
"What are you going to write your Formal Methods paper on?"
"I just submitted the proposal. I am going to write it about a trick I discovered when I worked at Ikos which I call dynamic virtual methods. This saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs."
"What does Roger say?"
"I haven't heard back from him yet. I have been talking to Jorge about my thesis."
"Already?"
"I actually did most of the work over the past couple of years. I am going to register for three hours of thesis next semester."
"I am going to do a project, instead," Lincoln said.
"You should do a thesis. If you decide you want to get a PhD, a thesis looks better on your application. Oh look, it's Shawna." I waved, "Hi Shawna!"
"I don't want to do a thesis."
"Okay. I am going to go say hello to Shawna."
##
Later that week I made a lot of progress on my Automata extra credit project. Wen wanted a copy of it which she would modify to disguise its origin and turn in as her own. That would be cheating. I said no because it was dishonest. She pointed out that the cheating was rampant, particularly among the Indian students and that they would share their programs. She mentioned that they got the same answers and even the same grades on their exams and weren't punished. I said that just because we were surrounded by thieves didn't mean that we should become thieves. She said that she didn't want to be a thief.
Lincoln got an X-box and a kit to modify it with. He did a lot of painstaking work to install the kit (voiding the warranty). He then installed Linux on it. He bought an LCD display at Walmart and got a HDTV to VGA converter. For his efforts he had an X-box running Linux. I wasn't sure what he needed an X-box running Linux for, but I was sure that there was a reason. I started to think about the possibilities myself. An X-box was a nice little machine that could store all of my music and play it from a playlist that I gave it. I figured that it would be a simple matter to convert the Windows Media Player playlist to a format that could be understood by a Linux program. After all, at my first job I wrote a lot of translators between high level design languages, I ought to be able to process a little XML.
Rob brought home a rotund girl whom he met in a club late that night. When Eric saw her he asked Rob, "So where are you going to sleep?" The next morning I saw her leaving Rob's room. It seemed to me that Rob must be pretty desperate to sleep with her.
##
The deadline for the Automata extra credit project was extended until Thanksgiving. Even then I would be the only person who implemented ten algorithms. I may have been the only person who wrote a program that would actually run and produce correct output. It was nice that my software design and implementation skills had finally paid off in some small way. I now had a solid A average in Automata. My grade was a 96. Now I had to make sure that I kept my advantage going into finals.
Lisa came by that evening. They went in Rob's room and played loud club music for a little while. They must have gotten into something funny in there because when they came out they weren't making any sense. They were giggling and making strange comments to each other. I was glad that they seemed to be back together, though. She seemed to have a calming influence on him. Lately Rob had been having parties in our suite whose guests looked like they were drawn from a Narc Anon meeting, except that they weren't trying to get straight. I figured it was just a matter of time before something bad happened at one of these parties.
I hadn't liked what they served for dinner that night and had eaten nothing but garlic bread. Lincoln and I went to the Cat's Den to get some wings. We talked about his X-Box.
"Lincoln, what are you going to do with your X-Box now that you put Linux on it?"
"Oh, I don't know. I will do stuff with it. Maybe I will put some movies on it."
"How about some music?"
"Yeah, that would be cool."
"I can burn the music onto CDs for you."
"Thanks. Right now I am using them to run a SETI@home type program to try to factor a big number."
"Why?"
"If my machine gets it, I will win a thousand dollars."
"You know what the odds of that are?"
"Not very good."
"Yeah. What are you doing for Thanksgiving?"
"Going home, how about you?"
"I'm going to my Mom's house. We will have Thanksgiving dinner at Aunt Sue's. How are you going to get home?"
"I will take the bus."
I made a face. "That sucks."
"It's not so bad."
"It looks like Rob and Lisa are back together, huh?"
"I think Lisa sees a lot of guys."
"You are probably right. And Rob will sleep with anything that will hold still for long enough. Where were you earlier this evening?"
"I was with friends."
"You say that every Thursday. Were you at Campus Crusade for Christ?"
"How did you know?"
"I saw their sign. Their meetings exactly coincide with your absences. Anyway, my cousin who just graduated from Princeton is very active in Campus Crusade for Christ. She is still at Princeton working for them."
"Oh my gosh."
"Her boyfriend is a PhD student there."
We walked into the Cat's Den. The television was tuned to Comedy Central and Reno 911 was on. I ordered chicken wings and sat down to wait for them to cook. It was hard not to look at the television and I found myself laughing out loud at some of the nonsense. I sipped on my soda. "You know, that show is actually kind of funny," I said.
"Yeah, that is my favorite show."
"How about when the rocket hits the ice cream truck full of fireworks."
Lincoln giggled.
"I wouldn't watch any of this stuff if it were up to me, but it is funny," I continued. "In fact, the only thing I do look at is Headline News and that isn't very often."
Soon our food was ready and we sat down and ate it. By the time we were finished, Reno 911 was over and another episode of Reno 911 was on. I guessed that regular watchers of Comedy Central knew all of the episodes by heart.
Lincoln built himself a computer with two Xeon processors. Xeon processors are the server version of the Intel Pentium and can be put in a computer in a symmetric multiprocessing configuration. He spent a lot of his money from his teaching fellowship on the parts for the computer. He spent a few days carefully assembling it. When he booted Linux on it, it came up thinking that there were four processors. That is because each of the two processors could interleave instructions in a system that Intel called hyperthreading resulting in four logical processors. After assembling this he used it as his main computer.
\chapter{} chapter 12
Another girl spent the night with Rob. It was impossible to miss because she was screaming his name in the middle of the night. I saw her leave and she looked like she was a carrier of social diseases. I asked Lincoln if he had heard her. He said that I missed quite a show.
"Rob brought her last night and she was giving everyone lap dances."
"You've got to be kidding."
"And she was asking people if they had drugs. Hard drugs like cocaine."
"She looked it."
"She is a stripper."
"Figures."
"I think she would do anyone who would give her drugs."
"In other words, she is a crack whore."
"Yeah, basically."
"I bet he caught something. Did you see where they posted information about social diseases by our mailboxes?"
"I bet those spread through these dorms like wildfire."
"It wouldn't surprise me."
"She also was banned from campus by the University Police."
"That takes talent. What did she do?"
"She was living with a kid in his room. A freshman."
"You have got to be kidding me. What did he have to say?"
"He was the one banging on the door all night."
"Rob likes to live dangerously."
Rob had some more late, loud parties which I complained about. He had to talk to Scott. That meeting must have gone well because that night he had another loud party. I called Keith to complain about it. He said that residential life would make sure that quiet hours were respected. I guess he met with Rob after that. We had room inspections the next day, so I moved the case of beer under my bed to my car to comply with the twelve beers per person limit.
Lincoln and I were writing our crypto term paper. I was writing the part about digital timestamping and he was writing the part about Byzantine agreement. It was coming together pretty well and Lincoln was learning to use \LaTeX, the mathematical typesetting system used by most computer scientists. I was determined to get an A in this class.
The cafeteria opened a pasta bar on Tuesdays and Thursdays that served pasta with spaghetti sauce or with Alfredo sauce. Even the vegetarian entree for the Indian students was fattening. One night they didn't have a vegetarian entree and an Indian girl talked to the manager. "Where is the vegetarian entree?"
"Well there is the garlic bread or you can get a garden burger from the grill."
"In other words there isn't any food tonight!" She seemed very angry.
I left a comment card in their box asking them to cook food that didn't make me fat.
I discovered a feature in my router that allows me to block domain names. The domain names may even have a wildcard in them. I started blocking the servers that ads are served from and the servers that leave and read tracking cookies. I told Lincoln what I was doing.
"I am blocking the ads in my router."
"How?"
"I am filtering out the sites that serve them."
"Very smart. I bet there is a better way to do it."
I wanted a computer that ran Linux. My laptop was very useful, but I prefer Linux and thought that it would be a good idea to get a desktop that ran it. I figured that I would need an LCD monitor to make it fit on my desk. It seemed like a lot of money though. I thought that maybe I would do better to install Linux on an X-Box for now. I told my father that I wanted an X-Box for Christmas. An X-box isn't really suitable for heavy computation but it would be fine to surf the web and run \LaTeX. It should also be adequate for the little programs that I would write and run.
I was really getting tired of school. All of the assignments and exams and projects and papers were beginning to wear me down. I thought that maybe I should get someone knocked up and drop out of school. I decided to grit my teeth. Thanksgiving was just around the corner.
##
Soon the cafeteria had the Thanksgiving feast. It was one week before Thanksgiving. A lot of the kids would be leaving the next day and skipping their classes on Monday and Tuesday. I skipped the turkey, as I don't like turkey, but found the chicken parmesan irresistible. Lincoln piled his plate with food while I went back for seconds and thirds.
"I guess you are going to miss your computers over Thanksgiving, huh?" I asked.
"It will be nice to see my family. Besides, I can carry the X-Box back in my bag."
"I don't know how you carry so much stuff on the bus."
"When I come in the fall and when I go home in the spring my mom drives me. Are you having Thanksgiving with your family?"
"I am going to my mother's house but we will have Thanksgiving at Aunt Sue's. Aunt Sue is a friend of the family."
"What else are you going to do?"
"I am going to install that memory in my mother's computer."
"What memory?"
"The memory that I bought for my laptop but didn't fit."
"Oh yeah. I remember that. How much memory does it have now?"
"256M."
"And this will add?"
"512M."
"That should be enough for your mom. What does she do with her computer?"
"She does genealogy. She runs a program called Family Tree Maker."
"My mom just does word processing and surfs the web."
"She does that, too."
"So how are things with Wen?"
"I don't know. I talk to her by email a bit and we study together but that is it."
"Oh well. This food is very tasty." Lincoln usually had something good to say about the food.
"I love this chicken parmesan."
"Tell them. Maybe they will add it to the menu."
"I think that I will do that. One second, let me get a comment card." I went and got a comment card and filled it out. I said that I liked the chicken parm and that I would like it more often.
"Did you put it in?" Lincoln asked.
"Yep. Maybe they will listen."
"All you can do is try."
"I invited Wen for Thanksgiving."
"What did she say."
"She said that she is `crazy busy.' That is what she always says when she doesn't want to do something."
"Maybe she has other plans."
"No, she said she needs to study. All of her family is in Red China. Besides, the Chinese don't celebrate Thanksgiving."
"Imagine that."
"Anyway, I tried."
"So when are you leaving?"
"Tuesday after class"
"Me too."
"I don't really want to drive all the way to New Jersey."
"I don't have to drive. I just sit on the comfortable bus."
"I think that I would rather drive. Do you see Shawna around?"
"Not today."
"What do they do in the Student Senate, anyway?" Shawna was a freshman senator.
"They plan activities and fund clubs."
"Like the computer science club?"
"Yeah. Why don't you come to our meetings?"
"Is it an ACM chapter?"
"No, but maybe we will become one."
"I'll join when it is an ACM chapter."
"Some of the clubs are really just fronts for illicit drug activity."
"Like which ones?"
"The Outdoors Club, for instance."
"What do they do?"
"Illicit drug activities."
"Oh, okay. It seems to me that all these drugs must be hurting the kids grades."
"They don't care."
"They are honor students?"
"What?" Lincoln wanted to know. He seemed confused.
"They say `yes, your honor', `no, your honor.' "
"That is funny. I wonder what happened with Rob's drug charge."
"You know that if Rob is convicted he will lose his student aid."
"That won't happen."
"You wanna bet?"
"They really cut off the financial aid?"
"Yeah. Look at your FAFSA form. No exceptions."
"So I guess he will have to drop out."
"Nah. He is from Smithtown. His mother is loaded. She will pay his tuition."
"You know Smithtown?"
"I know of it."
"Isn't the town you're from a ghetto that they are always talking about in rap songs?"
"No, that is Inglewood, California. I am from Englewood, New Jersey. Englewood is a nice town. A lot of rich people live there."
"Oh, okay. So it's not a ghetto."
"No, but there is some low income housing in it, on the wrong side of the railroad tracks. It is just four miles from the George Washington Bridge." The GWB connects New Jersey with Manhattan.
##
Traffic was heavy as I drove to my mother's house for Thanksgiving break. The eastbound I-90 Thruway to Albany wasn't that bad but the I-87 leg of the Thruway south of Albany was bad. I got off at exit 15 and took route 17 down the last thirty miles or so. I brought two laundry baskets of dirty laundry with me. My mother wouldn't wash them, but the local laundromat had a wash-and-fold service that she would contract with to do them.
Shortly after I got there I decided to put the memory in my mother's computer. My mother is an attorney and has always been an early adopter of technology. When I was a kid she had a Xerox word processor in her office that I would write my term papers on. This was before the Apple II computer opened up computing to the masses. It had two eight-inch disk drives that held 170KB each. When she ran for office, she used it to print personalized letters to voters that blew everyone away. We had dinner Wednesday night with Alina's parents.
My father came to visit. We were in her study and I was opening up her computer. Dad said, "Are you sure that is the right memory for her computer?"
"Sure. It is a DIMM. Why wouldn't it be?"
"Doesn't it have to be the right speed?" My father had a masters degree in math but had worked in computer programming since before I was born. He got the masters degree as a consolation prize when he dropped out of the mathematics PhD program at NYU after his thesis adviser left and I was born.
"I think the memory will slow down if it has to." I inserted the DIMM. Then I plugged in the computer and turned it on. There was an acrid smell of fried electronics. "Maybe it isn't the right type of memory. Fortunately this computer is still under warranty."
"Does it work?" My mother asked from the next room.
"Not exactly, but I am calling HP to get it repaired under warranty." I said.
"I thought I smelled something. I don't think we have the receipt."
"Yes we do. When you bought it I put the receipt in this drawer here. I am going to call them now."
I called HP. I was on hold for a while and talked with them for a while, answering questions from their script. Finally they said that they would send a box and Mom was to put the computer in the box and they would pick it up. They would return the box with the computer fixed a week later. I gave them the address of my mother's law office because she wasn't home during the day to send and receive deliveries.
##
On Thanksgiving we went to Aunt Sue's in Westchester County. I don't like turkey so Aunt Sue cooked some fish for me. Her theory was that the Pilgrims ate a lot of fish. That was probably true, but I doubt that they ate fish native to the Pacific Ocean. I was glad to have the fish, though, because I liked fish. Aunt Sue grilled me about SUNY IT and my social life.
"So are you seeing anybody?"
"Well I went out with a Chinese student named Wen."
"What part of China is she from?"
"I have no idea."
"What do her parents do?"
"I don't know."
"When did she come to the States?"
"She said that she used to work in Texas so I guess that she has been here for a while."
"Where in Texas?"
"I don't know."
"What did she do in Texas?"
"I don't know. It is very hard to talk to her because she doesn't know English very well."
"You should have brought her. We would find out everything for you." Aunt Sue suggested.
"I invited her but she said no."
"What is she doing? Does she have family in the US?"
"No. She said that she needs to study."
"Likely story."
"No, I have been tutoring her in Automata and she really needs to study."
"Oh, so you have been tutoring her, too."
"Yeah, I have been helping her with Automata. She wants to pay me but it works out for me because it prepares me for the exam, too."
"So how often do you study with her?"
"Once a week."
"What else."
"We went bowling and she took me out for my birthday."
"Well, if you can get her to come, we would love to meet her."
"Okay, I will try."
We had cake and various kinds of pie for dessert. Aunt Sue's food was immensely better than Sodexho's and I told her so. I had not really developed a taste for cafeteria food. There was a woman there who called SUNY IT the "Stanford of the SUNY system." I thought that that might be a little bit of an overstatement. She had gone to Herkimer County Community College to get a degree. I had been there, but only to take some classes because it was near home. She had to live there to attend. I figured that SUNY IT definitely had a good publicity machine. I was also pretty sure that they had an articulation agreement with HCCC.
Aunt Sue was a school teacher and her husband, Uncle Bob, was a Lutheran minister. They had two kids, Christopher, who is older than me and Janice, who is younger. I had dated Janice including taking her to my prom but, just before I moved out to California, she had told me that I was like a cousin and she couldn't get romantically involved with me. That was okay, because there was a girl named JuLee from New York that had just moved out to California and I had dated her when she lived in Manhattan. In fact I had dated her in high school, too.
Chris and Jan were there with their spouses. Chris had a masters degree in mechanical engineering from Duke and had been a captain in the Army. He broke up with his first wife while he was in Bosnia. Now he worked for Corning. Janice had two children and lived in New Jersey. Her husband worked in insurance in Manhattan.
We talked until fairly late in the evening and then we went back to my mother's house.
On Friday I slept in. It was nice to sleep in a comfortable bed for a change. The bed at school was small and hard. I had read about high school students testing out the mattresses at different colleges before deciding which one they wanted to attend. It seemed to me that that wasn't entirely unreasonable. I had a computer running Linux set up at my mother's house which she used as a file server. I used that to access my email at SUNY IT. I told Lincoln about frying my mother's motherboard. Lincoln and I already had a draft of our term paper for Crypto. The paper was ten full pages and the bibliography was an additional three full pages long. I also had a draft of my paper for Formal Methods. It seemed to meet the requirement that I demonstrate myself to be literate. I needed to work on the paper for Modeling and Simulation. While leaving campus I checked out a couple of books for that. I actually rather enjoy writing term papers, I just don't like having so many due at the same time. I worked some on my part of the Modeling and Simulation term paper that weekend.
\chapter{} chapter 13
The first day of December we got ten inches of snow. It was a Monday and my first class was canceled due to the snow. It was coming down at the rate of three inches per hour. It was not the first snow of the year, in the winter in Utica it snows every day. It was the first major snowstorm, though. I resented the snow as it went down the back of my shirt and got my feet wet. SUNY IT was busy cleaning the campus out with snow blowers, plows and shovels.
That night Lincoln and I braved the weather to go to the Cat's Den. While we waited for our food, a misanthropic show called The Man Show was playing on Comedy Central. I hoped that no women I knew saw me giggling at it.
"Think it is cold and snowy and windy enough?" I asked Lincoln.
"It is very yucky weather."
"It looks like I have an offer on my condo."
"How much are you selling it for?"
"About twice what I paid for it."
"That is pretty good. Where is it?"
"In western New Jersey, near where my first job was."
"What were you doing with it?"
"I was trying to keep it rented out. It is hard when the interest rates are so low. Everyone wants to buy."
"Must be nice."
"I love the way they plow the walkways with pickup trucks with plows."
"Yeah, it is hard to get out of the way."
"I call it bowling for children."
"Hee hee."
"You know, walking in the snow makes my lower back hurt," I said.
"Why is that?"
"Probably something to do with balancing myself. It is really killing me."
##
When it had been time to turn in the Automata extra credit, Wen said that she lost hers in a computer crash. I don't know whether it was an excuse or if she was trying to buy some extra time. It was true that her computer crashed, but I didn't think that she had done the extra credit first. Jorge commented in class that the only people who did the extra credit were people who didn't need it. My Automata extra credit only came to twelve hundred and fifty lines of code.
Jorge seemed to be enthusiastic about my thesis. He mentioned it in Crypto class on a number of occasions. I hoped that he would be as enthusiastic about my presentation and term paper. Jorge couldn't be there when it was time to give the presentations, so he had it videotaped. The person from instructional resources was to give me the videotape at the end of class, which meant that I couldn't duck out after our presentation.
I talked for ten minutes about timestamping, highlighting my own contributions in the field. Then Lincoln talked about the Byzantine General's problem. We used transparencies for slides, but they wouldn't come out on the videotape, anyway. We emailed in our paper.
In Formal Methods I turned in my term paper. I wasn't sure what sort of grade I would get on it. It could go either way. Roger had said something about feeling generous around Christmastime. In my term paper I had explained dynamic virtual functions and showed how they could be encoded in Dijkstra's guarded language which we had been studying in class. I had even bought a used book by Dijkstra which I cited.
In Modeling and Simulation we gave our presentations. The professor threw me for a loop. I said, "I used to work in the Silicon Valley on digital simulation--"
"You did? What did you simulate?"
"Chips. Digital circuits. We modeled it in a language called VHDL."
"You should teach the class about it."
"What should I tell them about it?"
"Teach the class."
I wasn't sure what he wanted so I went on with my prepared presentation. This seemed to disappoint the professor.
Soon it would be time for our final exams. Rob prepared for finals by having parties and getting wasted every night. I made complaints about quiet hour violations. Wen and I prepared for the Automata final together. We had a sample final to look at and Wen felt that the questions were too hard. She wanted to try the problems individually before getting together to do them. I said that that wasn't necessary. I carefully worked through the problems while she watched. I didn't really think that it was so hard. I was sure that the one at Stanford would have been harder. There was a large amount of material on primitive recursion that wasn't in the textbook. Little did I know that during my first semester in a PhD program I would be the TA for a theory of computation class that required a detailed understanding of primitive recursion. Fortunately, Jorge made his notes available on the web. Unfortunately, they were in Microsoft Word format and had undergone Word-rot over the past ten years so that all the Greek letters had turned into smiley faces. I printed them out anyway to bring with me to the exam, which would be open-book, open-notes.
It was time to register for the next semester. Jorge invited me to do some independent study with him and I registered for CSC581 Seminar in Computer Science as the class number to do that with him. I also registered for three hours of thesis, CSC541 Information Access and Storage and CSC557 Artificial Intelligence. The thesis work was with Jorge and Artificial Intelligence was taught by Jorge. Information Access and Storage didn't sound very interesting but it was a core class and I needed one more core class. It was taught on Tuesday nights from 6pm-8:45pm. I wasn't thrilled about an evening class or about the idea of sitting in a class for three hours at a time, but there weren't many options.
The temperature went into the single digits during the day with negative temperatures at night. Negative temperatures had not been uncommon at Clarkson, which is north of the Adirondacks, but that had been more than ten years earlier. I wore a hooded sweatshirt under my coat to keep my ears from freezing. It continued to snow every day. The snow didn't seem to put a damper on Rob's social life, though.
Rob loved flashcards. Obviously someone had worked with him on his studying when he was a kid and taught him how to make flashcards. He did all of his studying from flashcards that he made with index cards. He made a lot of flashcards and looked at them, but I don't know what good it did. It seemed that his real method of studying consisted of chemical abuse. Lisa came around again.
"I haven't studied for finals at all," Lisa said. "For the past two weeks I just sat around and watched porn." That had the desired effect on Rob so she continued. "I like to look at pictures of naked girls." She could have fooled me. Her interest in Rob was heterosexual and if she had been a lesbian she wouldn't have even been in our suite. Still, she knew how to work Rob.
Eric continued to have beautiful women over every night. I began to think that there must be something to playing sports in high school after all. Eric was more serious about his studies than Rob and was actively preparing for his final exams.
Wen gave a presentation in a class that she was taking with Lincoln called Functional Programming. Lincoln told me that she did much better than she did in her first presentation. Her first presentation had bombed. This presentation at least had the technical details right. Lincoln still made fun of her presentation. Meanwhile, I got an email from Wen asking if I thought that an Indian girl named Dolly was attractive. She was, but I didn't think that was the answer that Wen wanted to hear.
Wen woke me up at one o'clock in the morning to ask me about the computer that she was buying. I gave her the best advice I could but then I couldn't go back to sleep. I put on Comedy Central. It just seemed to be repetitions of the F-word. I turned to Headline News. They were showing a student produced newscast. It was actually kind of interesting. Finally at four I got back to sleep.
On Friday the Gamer's Club was holding a fundraiser. There was a barbecue pit under a gazebo out on the lawn near the campus center with some picnic tables near it. They were cooking steak in there. Lincoln and I bought tickets and they started trying to cook our steak. They hadn't really gotten the charcoal going yet, so they sprayed lighter fluid on it. The University Police came around.
"You aren't allowed to have a barbecue here without permission."
"We have permission."
"Well, we weren't informed."
"We got permission from the student activities office." They gave the cop the name of the person who gave them permission.
"We'll check it out."
"I am sure they have gone home by now."
"We will give their office a ring, anyway."
We were freezing our tushies off waiting for them to cook our steak and baked potato. I told Lincoln, "This isn't a barbecue, it is a brr-brr-que."
"I guarantee that it will be better than anything that they are offering in the cafeteria."
"I am sure of that. I think we should eat it in the cafeteria. It is warmer and they have real silverware in there."
"That is a good idea. I don't think these plastic knives are going to cut it."
Eventually our steaks were ready. I declined my baked potato on the grounds that I don't like baked potatoes. I also didn't think it really got baked. We took our food in the cafeteria. It was fun watching the other students eat cafeteria food while we ate steaks.
Saturday was my mother's birthday. I didn't call her until afternoon to wish her a happy birthday though, as I didn't want to wake her up. We had several feet of snow on the ground and more on the way.
The next week we had finals including the take home final for Crypto. There were fifteen problems and we had to do ten of them. About half the problems were homeworks including implementing DES and AES. Some of the problems weren't too difficult. Most of the problems that weren't homeworks I had written programs to do were problems that were identical to ones I had programmed. I had very little trouble completing ten problems and submitted them four hours early. Most of the students only managed to complete five or fewer problems before the deadline.
In Automata Jorge handed out the exams and blue books. Then he went back to his office. As soon as he was out of the room, the Indian students started exchanging answers in Indian. Not only was it cheating, I found it distracting. There were ten questions and we had to do any five. The questions were hard, involving executing complex algorithms on difficult problems. I was the first one finished and I brought the exam to Jorge.
Soon all my final exams were completed and I needed to go to my mother's house. This was tricky because of the snow. I carefully watched the weather and consulted with my mother before leaving. The state has a lot of resources to keep the Thruway clear and I made it to New Jersey.
I was looking forward to Christmas because I got my mother an iPaq handheld computer and I got my sister a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner. I wanted to see the Roomba in action. Alina, her younger sister, and her parents would be coming for Christmas dinner. We were going to have a traditional roast goose as the main entree. I still had some Christmas shopping that I needed to do.
I bought Alina, who was majoring in medieval European history, a copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, both volumes. I got Mike, her father, a copy of The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth. I had gotten a set of that for my birthday from my father and I liked it so much that I thought Mike should have a copy, too.
My grades were posted. I got As in Automata and Cryptography and Bs in Formal Methods and Modeling and Simulation. There were no surprises although I had hoped to get at least a B+ in the classes that I got Bs in. My overall grade point average was 3.5.
My father got me an X-Box, which I had asked for. I went online and ordered a kit to put Linux on it. I got a wristwatch from Aunt Sue. This was useful because I had been carefully sitting in the seat in each classroom that allowed me to see the clock in the hallway through the window in the door. Now I could sit anywhere that I wanted.
We ate Christmas dinner. My mother had cooked two geese and we picked them clean. There were also many sides including many types of vegetables and rice which had been sauteed in butter and then cooked with beef bouillon. I made a complete pig of myself. My cousin Jeremy, who is a submariner in the Navy, was there. Much to my dismay, my mother put Alina at the children's table. My three nephews sat at the children's table while my niece sat on her mother's lap.
After dinner I apologized to Alina for being put at the children's table. She said that it was okay. I was really angry with my mother for that.
After Christmas I had a few weeks before the spring semester started. My modification kit for the X-Box arrived but I was afraid to make the modifications. I lacked Lincoln's careful dexterity and was afraid that I would ruin the X-Box. Lincoln now had two modified X-Boxes running Linux which he had brought home with him over Christmas break. I had also bought a 60GB hard disk to put in the X-box. The X-box came with a 10GB hard disk. I figured that I could use that in another computer if I didn't get the X-Box modified. I thought that Lincoln might modify my X-Box for me. The solderless kits had been sold out and I had bought a kit that required soldering. I was not highly confident in my ability to solder on a $200 printed circuit board.
I found myself bored during the Christmas break and eager for the spring semester to start. The weather in New Jersey was warmer than the weather in Utica and there wasn't any snow. Instead it was just kind of yucky. There was a major snowstorm but the snow didn't last. I occupied myself by playing with my computer. I toyed with my thesis but didn't do anything substantial with it. I had ten or fifteen pages that represented work that I had spent years doing before starting in the masters program. Soon it was time to load up my car and go back to school. I packed clean clothes, most of my Christmas presents and my laptop up. Once again, the weather was a factor in determining when I could get over the roads to Utica.
\chapter{} chapter 14
When I arrived at SUNY IT on a Sunday the temperature was below zero Fahrenheit. The cafeteria wasn't open for lunch but they had pizza in the Adirondack lounge. It was headed for minus seven that night. I had dinner in the cafeteria. The walk to the cafeteria was lined with eight foot snow banks. A deer was stuck in the path trying to find a way out. It ran up the path, away from me until it finally found a low spot. Lincoln and I went to Marcy Discount Beverage on a beer run. I had forgotten my towel so I had to go to Walmart to buy a new one. The next day it continued to be cold as heck and a ton of snow was predicted, too.
My schedule had all of my classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so Monday was free. First thing Monday morning I worked out on the weights. I had let my exercise routine lapse during the fall but I wasn't going to let that happen this spring. I went to Fort Plain where Kelly cut my hair. I gave her a bottle of Baileys as a Christmas gift. Then I took my grandmother out to East End Grill in Little Falls to celebrate her birthday. She was seventy-nine. The high temperature that day was four degrees Fahrenheit.
On Tuesday I had classes, but I stopped at Walmart to buy a new towel and some more antibacterial hand soap. The snow on the ground made my lower back hurt. My sister recommended some exercises to help with that. We had our first artificial intelligence class. Before class I talked to an Indian student that had been in Automata the previous semester and stuck with it until the end.
"We were all amazed at how quickly you did the exams," he said.
"That is because I knew what I was doing."
"You were just amazing."
"Thanks. I got an A in the class, what did you get?"
"I got a grade that I can live with," he said. I knew that meant a C. At least a third of that class got Cs.
Class started soon. I had my book which I had ordered from Amazon.com the previous semester. The book hadn't come into the book store and none of the other students had it.
"Here is an inexpensive Indian edition that I can order online. I can order them for everybody, how many people want them?" a student said. All of the students besides myself raised their hands.
"I would like one, too," Jorge said. "An extra copy for home would be useful."
"Okay that is five copies. I will put in the order and bring them to class when they arrive."
Jorge gave a fairly general lecture during the first class introducing the concept of artificial intelligence. He was interested in the Roomba that I got for my sister.
"The Roomba uses artificial intelligence to map out its path through the room, to figure out how to get out of tight spots and to handle corners. How does that work for her, anyway?"
"I haven't seen it in action, but she is happy with it."
"Maybe I will get one."
After class I went to his office. "So when should we meet for the seminar?" I asked. We discussed our schedules and eventually choose Wednesday afternoons for the seminar. Then we went into a more general discussion.
"Did I have the top grade in Automata last semester?"
"Yeah. It was you and one other guy." I took note of this information. That probably meant that only two people got As in the class of thirty. Jorge had a reputation for grading hard.
"Cool. So did anyone get a C?"
"I gave out a lot of Cs last semester. So where did you go for Christmas?"
"I went to my mother's house in New Jersey."
"My wife is a lawyer and she does immigration work. She would like to get clients from New Jersey."
"My mother is a lawyer."
"What type of law does she do?"
"She does estate law."
The snow continued coming down but the temperature went up to fourteen degrees. I had Information Access and Storage that evening. So did Lincoln. We ate dinner in the cafeteria before class. On our way there I stopped on the bridge and looked down at the creek. Lincoln said, "I did that and a maintenance guy yelled at me."
"What did he say?"
"Don't jump, it's not high enough."
"They have some really deep gorges at Cornell and students jump off the bridges all the time and kill themselves."
"No one has jumped here. I guess there is less pressure."
"When I was there a kid jumped off and lived. That was unfortunate for him since he was about to be indicted for stealing computers from Cornell and selling them."
"Of course, the one who lives had a legitimate reason to jump."
"They call jumping off the bridge gorging out."
"Yeah, I could see a kid there. He would be like, `I only got an A-. I can't go on.' and jump in the gorge."
"Something like that."
"Anyway, no one has jumped off a bridge at SUNY IT. Most of them don't care if they are failing."
"I noticed the same thing."
We continued walking to the cafeteria. When we got there we found that they were serving chicken parm. They had taken my suggestion and added chicken parm to the menu. There was a sign on the entree line saying to take no more than three pieces at a time. I took three pieces. I sat down with Lincoln and pigged out on the chicken parm. I went back for seconds. Shawna came in the cafeteria. I waved to her. She came by.
"Look, they are serving chicken parm. Isn't that great? I put in a comment card asking for it and now it is on the menu."
"Very good. So you like the chicken parm?"
"It is very tasty."
"Okay. I have to go get my food, now."
Lincoln and I walked through the snow to Information Access and Storage. The class was taught by a scientist from Rome Air Force Base. Rome Air Force Base, also known as Rome Labs, is a research lab and a major employer in the area. It supplied many students to SUNY IT. The adjunct teaching the class had his PhD from Syracuse University and was an expert in the field. Being a core class, there were a lot of students, perhaps thirty or more.
The class would be evaluated with a midterm, a final and a presentation. We would work in teams of two or three and pick a topic for our presentation. Lincoln and I decided to work together. There would be a ten minute break in the middle of the class, which went from 6-8:45PM.
While he was talking, I got out a piece of paper and put it between Lincoln and I. I wrote on it "This class would be better if he served beer and played music."
Lincoln wrote, "And the Indian girls could dance."
We passed notes in this manner for a while, although we continued taking lecture notes. Eventually the class got out and we walked back to our suite. As we walked, my lower back was in extreme pain and my legs hurt from trudging through the snow. They were trying to keep it plowed, but it was coming down so hard that there was still a couple of inches on the ground.
"I hate the way it snows every day," I complained.
"They do know how to handle the snow though."
"Not well enough! My back is killing me and my legs hurt from walking through this."
"You'll get used to it."
"Yeah, my sister told me what exercises to do in the weight room to strengthen my back."
"That should help."
"I certainly hope so."
"So you are going to work out."
"Yeah. I am going to lift weights before breakfast on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays."
"Better you than me." Lincoln didn't like to exercise.
"Maybe you should try it."
"You mean lift heavy things for no reason? Not a chance."
When we got home we drank a couple of Sam Adams and listened to music. Outside giant snow plows were clearing the road and the parking lot. A lot of cars got plowed in, including mine, and would need to be shoveled out in the morning.
The next morning I did my workout. This semester I was going to stick with the weight training. People dug their cars out. Fortunately my Jeep was a four by four so I was able to break through the snow bank without digging. I did have to clear off my windshield and windows, though. All day students were digging out and cleaning off their cars. I found a hot chocolate machine in the cafeteria and started drinking hot chocolate as a way to warm up in the cold. Every time I walked past the student center, I stopped and got a paper cup of hot chocolate which I would sip on the rest of my journey. When I just went to the student center, I would get a paper cup of hot chocolate to take back with me. It was great for keeping me warm.
On Thursday it snowed again. This time they canceled afternoon classes including Artificial Intelligence which met from four to five-thirty. I turned up in the cafeteria at four-thirty sharp for dinner. I was feeling some soreness in my muscles from working out that my sister called delayed onset muscle soreness. Apparently this had been well studied in fitness circles. They didn't have dinner ready right away so I waited for them to bring the food out to the serving line. While I waited I heard an advertisement on their radio for an over-thirty nightclub. I thought that might be something that I would like to check out but they didn't give details on where it was.
We had chicken diablo, which I enjoyed. It was one of the few spicy dishes that they served. Sodexho had a million ways to prepare chicken parts. The chicken parts were all small, as if they came from miniature chickens. I guessed that these chickens would have been too small for the grocery store. I generally like the breasts and legs, just like with women. I ate for a while. Soon Lincoln arrived. We ate and talked for an hour. Eventually Shawna came. I went and talked with Shawna. Then Lincoln and I took our trays to the dishwasher and headed back to our suite. As we walked back Lincoln commented, "These aren't paths, these are ski trails." Indeed the paths were covered with packed snow which made every step slip increasing the amount of work required to walk and giving me lower back pain.
I really wished that it would stop snowing. The novelty had even worn off for the Indian students. They had run outside with their cameras the first time it snowed in November. Although Utica was only thirty miles west of my grandmother's house, it got considerably more snow. This was because of something called the lake effect. The lake effect meant that moisture came off of Lake Erie and blew down the Mohawk Valley dropping it all as snow on the countryside.
I remembered how an Indian student had asked me in October when it was fifty degrees out, "Is this as cold as it gets?" I wondered how he was making out. The Indian students were not used to the cold climate. In Bombay it is always hot and humid. I would rather put up with the cold winters than the hot summers or the monsoon season. It was annoying that getting ready to go outside was like getting ready for a space walk. I was wearing about twenty pounds of heavy clothing to get through the cold, wind and driving snow. I was beginning to think that I should have looked into University of California at Santa Barbara before being in such a rush to enroll in this program. The Crypto conference is held there every August. It has a nice campus with lots of beach front in southern California. I was planning on going to that conference in the summer. I first went to Crypto in 1992.
On Friday I finally heard from Wen. She had gone back to China over Christmas break. Wen agreed to watch the Superbowl with me after I explained to her what it was. She didn't really know anything about football but she was willing to give it a try. I told her about the Superbowl party in the Adirondack lounge. She said that she wasn't interested in that because it was for on-campus students.
Fewer students than usual left campus that weekend. I believed that that was partly because of the weather and partly because it was the first weekend of the semester. The weather made travel difficult. Lincoln and I went to Radio Shack to get a soldering iron and other tools to modify my X-box. Lincoln said that I should have gotten a solderless kit. They had been out. I also started thinking that I should build myself a real computer. It wouldn't be as powerful (or expensive) as Lincoln's dual-Xeon monster, but it would run Linux and handle my jobs with an appropriate amount of dispatch.
The Superbowl was on Sunday. Since Wen had backed out of watching it with me, I just put it on in my room. I knew that they had free food in the Adirondack lounge and I went to get some during halftime. They were all out of pizza and chicken wings but had some chips. While I was in there, I saw Janet Jackson's shirt rip off exposing her nipple. She later termed this a "wardrobe malfunction." I didn't even think that that was the most sexually explicit part of the half time show. What she and Justin Timberlake were doing was nearly copulation. It probably wasn't appropriate for MTV and certainly wasn't appropriate for the Superbowl.
There were some interesting commercials. IBM had a commercial for Linux that was kind of creepy. Chrysler had an ad where all the neighborhood children had soap in their mouths for their comments after seeing a new Chrysler. Pepsi was giving away a hundred million songs through iTunes. I hate iTunes because I don't want to run the iTunes software. I found that in order to use iTunes with the software that I want to listen to it with, I have to burn the music on a CD and then rip the CD. I then have to type all the information about the songs and artists in by hand. This is called the "analog hole" in the DRM. It hardly seems worth it.
The Superbowl is the only football game I watch all year. I don't even always watch that. One thing that the Superbowl shows in an election year was that it was time for primary season. The Democrats were all buzzing about Howard Dean, a far-left former governor of Vermont who was able to bring in a lot of contributions over the Internet from his leftist supporters. I was hoping that he got the nomination because that would make the chances of the president not getting reelected negligible. I didn't notice a lot of interest in politics on campus, though. I fell asleep before the Superbowl was over but the next day I heard that the Patriots won it.
\chapter{} chapter 15
When I worked out Monday morning I found that I was able to do more repetitions than I had previously been able to do. That made me feel good because it meant that I was making progress. After I finished with the weights I went in the cafeteria to have breakfast. I ate bacon, coffee and orange juice. Sometimes I liked to make a waffle, but not that often. After I went back to my suite I took a shower and got dressed. I had no classes on Mondays, so I worked on my computer.
This was the first day since I got back that it didn't snow. Crews were working to clean out the parking lots, though. Places like that which get a lot of snow know how to manage it. On Tuesday I had Artificial Intelligence in the afternoon. In AI we studied the Chinese Room. The Chinese Room is the title of an article by a philosopher in the January 1990 issue of Scientific American. It makes an argument that strong AI is not possible. The argument is like this. Suppose you have a man who does not understand Chinese in a room with a window for receiving Chinese and a window for outputting Chinese. The man has a very comprehensive book that tells him how to construct a Chinese answer given a Chinese query. The room appears to understand Chinese but the man clearly does not. The conclusion is that no one understands Chinese. I disagreed. My position is that the room, as a system, understands Chinese and that the man is just a part of the room. There is no need for an individual part of the room to understand Chinese, understanding Chinese is an emergent behavior of the system.
After class I went to dinner. I staked out a table and got my food. Lincoln arrived shortly afterwards and got his food. We would have Information Access and Storage after class.
"Tuesdays are my busy day," I commented. "I have Artificial Intelligence, then dinner and then Information Access and Storage."
"What do you want to do our presentation in Information Access and Storage on?"
"Cryptography."
"I don't think that is such a good idea."
"How about data mining?"
"That sounds like a topic in military intelligence."
"So?"
"Okay. We will do data mining."
"Data mining is a hot topic. I will order a book about it from Amazon.com."
"Okay."
"Do you think that we should drive to class tonight? It's snowing."
"Nah, let's walk. The weather is too bad to drive."
"Okay, that sounds like a plan."
"Information Access and Storage is not my favorite class." I said.
"Why is that?"
"It is boring. I am not interested in anything on the syllabus."
"So why are you taking it?"
"I need a third core class and this is what was being offered."
"It is almost time for class, let's go."
We arrived at the classroom at ten of. There were already ten or fifteen of the thirty or so students there. We took our regular seats. Although I had the wristwatch, I still sat in the seat that allowed me to see the clock through the window of the door. The class was boring. Lincoln and I passed notes. The professor talked about a subject that I did find somewhat interesting and that was RAID drives. He explained the different RAID numbers and the Hamming codes that allowed the RAID 5 arrays to still work after a drive failed.
In spite of passing notes with Lincoln I took careful lecture notes. Class got out at 8:45 and it was beer time. We walked back to the dormitory through the falling and blowing snow under the streetlights on the path. The light over the callbox in front of the student center went out as we approached it.
"I hate that light. It always goes out when I walk under it." I said.
"It overheats and shuts off."
"Yes, but it seems kind of malignant."
When we got back to our building, I got two beers out of the refrigerator and gave one to Lincoln. I opened mine and gave him the bottle opener. Neither of our young roommates were around. At that hour of the night they were usually at nightclubs. I wondered where they got so much cash to go to nightclubs every night.
"So I guess they are out drinking," I said.
"Yeah. That is what they do every night."
"When I was an undergraduate, I couldn't afford to go to clubs and bars."
"I thought you had a job with the computer center."
"It paid enough for my cigarettes and one six pack of beer every other week. I never went out when I was an undergrad."
"I suppose you had to walk through the snow uphill both ways."
"As a matter of fact, yes."
"You know what goes well with beer, don't you?"
"Music?"
"Yeah."
I put on some music from my playlist. As pop hits from the eighties filled the air, Lincoln and I sat on the couch in the living room and sipped our beers. I drank two beers and went to bed. We got six inches of snow that night.
Wednesday I worked out again. While I was working out a cute girl came in and used the stationary bicycle. I showed off a little.
We were supposed to get another six inches of snow that night. I had been back for ten days and it snowed seven of them. I was really getting sick of the snow. After lunch I walked through the snow to Kunsela and went to Jorge's office for our weekly meeting. He wasn't there. I waited. He didn't come. I continued waiting. An hour went by. Finally he showed up. He apologized for being late.
We talked for a while. This was mostly an organizational meeting where we would decide what it was that we were going to do this semester. I also had three credits of thesis with him so we would be working together a lot that semester. I would take the other three credits of thesis the next semester. I said that I wanted to have some tech reports to show for the work that we would do that semester. He agreed, although the computer science department didn't have any technical report system.
I walked back to my room. We were supposed to get some weather but it seemed to have been canceled. Instead it would just snow from Friday through Sunday. I studied for a while and then went to dinner when it was time for it to open. The cafeteria was open all day but only had entrees on the serving line at meal times. Dinnertime was 4:30-6:30PM. The cafeteria closed at seven. I was at the serving line at 4:30 waiting for them to take the covers off of the entrees so that we could start serving ourselves. Meals were very important to me.
I ate with Lincoln.
"I heard that Rob wanted to borrow someone's car," I said.
"That is stupid. Rob doesn't have a license." Lincoln commented.
"He has not one, but two DWI convictions. He isn't getting his license back anytime soon." DWI is drunk driving.
"Getting busted the first time can happen, but a second time is just stupid."
"And he brags about it, too."
"Don't they put you in jail if you keep on getting DWIs?"
"Shawna says that she thinks Rob is a nice guy. He sure has got her fooled. I told her that he is bad news."
"How does Shawna know Rob?"
"They are in clubs and activities together."
"I heard that Rob is going to run for the Student Senate."
"That is just what we need, a pothead lobby."
"What makes you think that there isn't already one?"
"I thought student government was for the best and brightest."
"Not really. There is a lot of drug activity in student government."
"I guess that makes sense. I saw on O'Reilly that the student government in one school appropriated thousands of dollars to send representatives to a pot legalization conference," I noted.
"That wouldn't surprise me."
On Friday I had no classes. I was sore after I worked out, but I would have the weekend off from exercising. Some books arrived in the mail on using AI in game programming for my AI term paper on animats. Animats are artificially intelligent agents in a virtual world. An example of an animat is a non-player character in a video game. I also had a used book on data mining on order but that would take a little longer to arrive. I hooked up my X-Box to my television and put a game called Wolfenstein in it. I played with the game for a while to see how the non-player characters behaved. I would do this periodically while studying animats for my term paper.
I hadn't seen Rob around since Wednesday night and I was beginning to get worried. I consulted with Lincoln and he hadn't seen Rob either. I decided that if Rob didn't turn up on Monday, that I would call the RA.
On Saturday night Lincoln and I went to the Applebees near Walmart and sat at the bar. We each ordered a Sam Adams and I ordered some nachos for us to share. The bartender was a blonde girl that we called "Beer Girl." We discussed computers and computer science as we sipped our beers. We picked the nachos clean. We had a second round of beers but then it was time to go home. I didn't want to get drunk driving convictions like Rob.
##
On Monday I reported Rob missing. I called the RA.
"We have a missing student," I said.
"Who is missing?"
"Rob."
"How long has he been missing?"
"Five days. No one has seen him since Wednesday night."
"I will start the official procedure we follow when someone is missing."
"Maybe you should call his mother and see if he is there. I have the number."
"I will have to get the number through official channels."
Later, I told Eric that I reported Rob missing. Eric said, "Oh, didn't I tell you? He will be back at the end of the week."
So I called Keith again and told him that I found out where Rob was. It seemed horribly irresponsible to leave campus for a week and a half during the semester when there are classes. I once again wondered how Rob was able to get passing grades.
That day I got two emails from Jorge. One was about finding a machine that I could use to work on the program I wrote as part of my thesis work. The other said that he put publishing tech reports on the agenda for the department meeting. I was pleased because I didn't get a lot of emails from Jorge. I often got the feeling that when I sent him an email that it disappeared into a black hole.
The next day was my sister's birthday. I had bought her virtual walls for her Roomba. I talked with her via instant message and called her to wish her a happy birthday. I had Artificial Intelligence in the afternoon. After AI, I had dinner with Lincoln before Information Access and Storage.
I had been feeling a pain behind my left lung for a day or so. It felt like I had ruptured something. It was probably from working out. After working out Wednesday morning, the pain moved from my left side to my right side. The soreness made me happy because it meant that I was building muscle.
Lincoln told me the name of the website where he bought the parts that he built his dual Xeon computer with. I started browsing the products on that website to decide what parts I wanted to build a computer from. I had decided that I needed a Linux machine and that it should be a desktop. I decided to build it. I had built my mother's server a couple of years earlier and a couple of computers for myself when I lived in the Silicon Valley in the nineties. In the Silicon Valley you didn't have to order parts. You could go to Fry's Electronics and buy all of the parts, including memory and CPU, right off of the shelf. I found one of the most difficult parts of building a computer was putting in the motherboard. For this reason I was attracted to mini-ATX systems that came with the motherboard already installed. They were also small, which was good for a dormitory.
I didn't order any parts yet since I needed to be sure of my finances before making such a major purchase. I talked to Lincoln about the computer I was going to build. We decided that I would install Fedora Linux on it. I found Fedora Linux attractive because I had been using Redhat Linux out of the box until they discontinued it. Fedora Linux is a Redhat product.
On Tuesday I had a meeting with Jorge. After I got out of the meeting I went by the lab where Lincoln was supposed to be teaching. I looked in the window. All the students were there but there was no sign of Lincoln. I called Lincoln on my cellphone. "Hello. Aren't you supposed to be teaching a lab?"
"Oh crap. I will be right there."
Lincoln must have set a record for getting across campus to get to his lab that he had to teach. He got there before the students left and gave his talk and handed out an assignment. I hung out in a different computer lab waiting for it to be time for AI. It was pretty soon and we studied some complex AI algorithms.
The next day I placed the order for my computer. I ordered a mini-ATX case with a motherboard, a one gigabyte DIMM of memory, a dual graphics card, an LCD monitor, a PCI diagnostic card, and an Intel Pentium CPU. The website said that it would ship the next day from San Jose and arrive in a week. I paid with my Discover card which had a five figure credit limit. The store would only ship the parts to the address on the credit card so I had to change the billing address for my Discover card to my local address at school.
On Wednesday I was supposed to meet with Jorge at one, but he didn't arrive until two. We exchanged cellphone numbers to stop those mix ups. Jorge set up a website to put my technical reports on. By this time I had a couple of them. We agreed that we would put the tech reports up on the new website. It wouldn't be linked from the departmental website though, because there was a rule that anything linked on the departmental website had to have hand coded HTML. Jorge didn't know how to write HTML.
\chapter{} chapter 16
Wen called and said that she wanted to come over -- and do laundry. Pretty soon she buzzed our suite and I let her in the laundry room. That afternoon I went to Fort Plain and got my hair cut. Then I took my grandmother out to dinner. In AI a student with an internship with Microsoft was distributing shrink-wrapped boxes of Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 Academic. I took two boxes. I figured I would want one for myself and my father would want one, too. I continued my project of programming my router to block sites that serve ads and tracking cookies.
I wrote a paper describing some of my ideas for my independent study with Jorge. He pointed out a couple of things that needed a little touch up and said that we would put it out as a tech report. Jorge seemed to be satisfied with my work. In Artificial Intelligence we studied search algorithms including one to play chess. The chess algorithm was discovered in 1950, the dawn of computer science.
The seventeen inch LCD monitor for my new computer arrived. Not having a computer to hook up to it, yet, I plugged it into my laptop. I was pleasantly surprised. It was easier to read than my laptop screen and made working on my laptop more pleasant. I anxiously anticipated the arrival of the rest of the parts.
At dinner, I chatted up Shawna. It was nice to talk to such an nice, well-mannered young woman.
"Hi, Shawna!"
"Hello, sir."
"How are classes going?"
"Classes are going okay. You know the classes that all freshmen have to take--"
"No, what classes are those?"
"The general education classes. They are a pain in the neck. My grades are horrible."
"I am sure you can pull your grades up. You will do better when you take more computer science classes."
"I don't know about that."
"What do you mean?"
"I don't really like programming."
"I am glad to hear that they still teach it. There seem to be computer science graduate students who don't know how to program."
Lincoln and I went to the Cat's Den on Saturday night. I found that the food in the cafeteria on weekends often left something to be desired. When we got there, the Charlie's Angels movie was playing. We ordered our food and watched it. It seemed pretty dumb, but the original television show was dumb, too.
"I like the way the bell chimes every hour to tell us what time it is," I commented.
"You should have been here when a student hacked into it." Lincoln said.
"What happened?"
"He programmed it to play Hell's Bells."
"I bet he got in trouble."
"I don't know if they ever found who did it."
"That would be pretty funny, to have the clock playing Hell's Bells so that you can hear it all over campus."
"Yeah. That was pretty neat."
"Now I want to do that."
"Don't get caught."
"Really! How does it work?"
"They just have a computer that drives a loudspeaker."
"Is it connected to the Internet?"
"I don't know."
"That would be worth finding out."
"I wouldn't connect it to the Internet. Rob's computer is hooked to the Internet and now it is infected with who knows what."
"Have you noticed that Rob seems to have been on a bender since he got back?"
"What do you mean?"
"He seems to have been high ever since his trip."
"Now that you mention it..."
On Tuesday, after lunch I stopped at my mailbox. There was a package slip in it. I took the package slip to the mail room. They gave me a giant box. The box was bulky and heavy but I managed to get it back to our building. It had the parts for my computer in it. I put them together, plugged it in and turned it on. It didn't work. It didn't even make a beeping sound to indicate that it accessed the video RAM. I plugged the diagnostic card into it to get the POST code. I turned it on again. AF appeared on the LEDs on the card. I looked that up in my book of POST codes. It seemed to indicate that something was wrong with the motherboard. The hard disk did seek, so I thought that was a good sign. I tried to contact tech support for the mini-ATX bare bones system.
Soon I had to go to Artificial Intelligence. Then we had dinner, which was just awful. Normally I like lasagna, but not when it is made with soy-beef. I just ate garlic bread.
In Data Access and Storage that evening we studied the ACID properties of transactions. It didn't mean that the transactions were on drugs. ACID was an acronym for atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability. There was a long explanation of each of these properties but the upshot was that in a database system a bunch of properties have to be met to make everything work correctly. I don't find databases interesting, so I passed notes back and forth with Lincoln.
##
On Wednesday, I asked Lincoln to look at my computer. We tried swapping some parts, but it did no good. We could not get the computer to work. The system did not come with a manual for the motherboard, so we had very little to work with. I became very frustrated. I tried calling technical support but I couldn't get a real person on the line. It seemed hopeless. I decided that the problem was my cheap bare bones system. I ordered a better one, a Shuttle.
Rob was having trouble with his computer. Lincoln looked at it for him. It was infested with viruses and spyware. An intruder had created an account on it with exclusive superuser privileges and was using it to serve illegal content on the web. Systems hooked to a network like SUNY IT are prized by hackers. There is plenty of bandwidth for them to distribute illegal content or perform other illegal activity.
Lincoln told Rob that he would have to reformat the hard disk and do a fresh install of Windows on it. The machine was too badly compromised to do anything else. I told Rob that he would have legal exposure if he didn't get control of his machine. I said that for all he knew they were distributing child porn with it. That got his attention.
It was still February but there was a thaw. On Saturday it got up to forty-seven and that made me feel my oats. I drove to my grandmother's farm, where they showed me their baby goats. They were really cute. It seemed like spring had arrived. The next day would be leap day, so winter was finally coming to a close. It looked like Kerry would win the Democratic nomination for president and campaign season had begun. I supported the president.
On Monday, the first day of March, I got up early and worked out. Then I went to breakfast where I had my usual meal of bacon, coffee and orange juice. It was a beautiful spring day. There was still about five feet of snow on the ground but it was melting. The creeks turned into rivers and it was fun to stand on the bridge and watch the white water go under. It got up to fifty degrees. I went for a second workout in the afternoon and there were many beautiful women working out. I wondered if I should change my schedule to that time.
While Lincoln and I carefully put our beer bottles back in the case and stacked the cases in the closet for Rob and Eric to return; Rob left the living room littered with beer bottles after his late night parties. There were beer bottles all over the place, including in the windows. The RA came and told us to clean up our beer bottles. I felt that it was up to Rob to clean them up, as he was responsible for the mess.
Lincoln and I decided that we wanted to barbecue some steaks. I consulted the weekly cafeteria menu to determine when would be a good day to do that.
"Hey, Friday is Chinese night."
"Friday would be a good day to have our barbecue."
"Okay. I will call my grandmother to tell her that we are coming."
"Sound like a plan."
"I will invite Wen to come with us."
I emailed Wen to ask her if she wanted to come to the barbecue. She emailed me back saying that she wasn't feeling well that week and didn't even want to go to her classes. She said that she was anxious for the weekend to start.
I needed to prepare a presentation on natural language processing for Artificial Intelligence. The presentation was to be the following Tuesday. Natural language processing means teaching computers English. I tried to find papers on the topic but Citeseer, a site that indexes academic papers, was down. I searched with Google. Eventually I found the website for a 600-level class at another university on the topic. It had detailed lecture notes which I studied and references which I followed.
Wednesday night we had veal parm for dinner. I like veal parm. I didn't care what the animal rights people might say. Lincoln and I hung around the cafeteria after we were really finished eating. I was waiting for Shawna to arrive. Lincoln and I were talking about our upcoming barbecue.
"So we will cook some steaks at our barbecue on Friday."
"Yes. We will have tasty steaks."
"I hope that we can get some Angus steaks."
"What's the difference?"
"Angus steaks taste better. Also, I want to get some with genuine bovine growth hormone."
"Bovine growth hormone makes the steaks yummy."
"Yes. Also, maybe it will act like natural steroids when I work out."
"Natural?"
"You know what I mean. We should be sure to pick steaks out that don't have any mad cow disease."
"Yes, we want to avoid the mad cow disease."
"Oh, Shawna is here. I need to go talk to Shawna. Wait, she is coming over here."
"Hello sirs," Shawna said.
"Hi Shawna! We were just talking about the barbecue we are going to have Friday."
"That sounds like fun. What are you going to barbecue?"
"Steaks."
"That sounds good. I will be going home for the weekend. Have fun!"
On Friday afternoon, Lincoln and I took a drive through the country to my grandmother's farm. We stopped at the store on the way and bought steaks and soda. When we got there, my grandmother was happy to see us. She got along well with Lincoln. They were both Baptists. I had bought enough steaks for everyone including Grandma, Aunt Mary Lynn, her husband Mike, my cousins Polly and Jessie, Lincoln and myself. Aunt Mary Lynn and Mike took the steaks out to the grill and cooked them. Grandma and Lincoln talked.
"So Michael tells me that you are with Campus Crusade for Christ," Grandma said.
"Yes. I am."
"My sons were involved in Campus Crusade for Christ at Cornell. Now my granddaughter is involved with it at Princeton."
"Very nice."
"Maybe you can convince Mike to go to church."
"Oh my gosh, I don't know about that."
Aunt Mary Lynn took Lincoln down to the barn and showed him the animals including the baby goats. Baby goats are cute little critters.
Soon the steak was ready. We ate the steak and declared it delicious. Then Lincoln and I decided it was time to leave. We got in the car and drove to Herkimer.
"Have you been to HCCC?" I asked.
"No."
"Let's go take a look at it. I haven't been there in years."
We drove up to HCCC and parked in the parking lot. There were new dorms built that hadn't been there when I was a kid. We went into a new building that hadn't been there either. There was a sign saying that everyone on campus must have a student ID at all times.
"We should have that rule at SUNY."
"You can't keep people off a public campus."
"You want to bet?"
"Why do you want to keep people off of our campus?"
"In the morning people come and walk their dogs on our walkways. Many times they don't have a leash on them."
"So?"
"I am always afraid that I will get bit."
"Getting bit by a dog on a state university campus would be like winning the lottery. Just think of the lawsuit."
"I just don't want to get bit."
After we explored HCCC for a while, we got on the Thruway and took it back to SUNY IT. On the way back Lincoln told me about his experiences at community college.
When I got home I finished making the slides for the natural language processing part of my AI presentation. Then I started making slides about animats. My slide technology was at least ten years out of date. I didn't want to switch to Powerpoint, though, because it was hard to create mathematical formulas that way. That night there was to be a dance, but I didn't plan to go. I had learned from the Halloween dance that these parties were pretty lame.
Although we had already eaten, we went to dinner as a snack. There was a grease spill from the grill and whole cafeteria stank like a latrine. Going into the serving area, the stench was so strong that it nearly made me vomit. Apparently they had not been cleaning out the grease trap. Rob thought it was funny and said, "I ripped one in there" as he came out of the serving area. Cleaning crews worked all night trying to get the stench out of the cafeteria.
On Saturday it snowed hard. It was almost time to select new rooms and we had to put down $100 housing deposits. I talked with my roommates and we agreed that we would stick together. We couldn't squat, or stay in the same rooms, because they were closing our building for maintenance the next year.
I wanted to stay in graduate housing, one building was being designated for it, but Lincoln didn't want to live with Indian students. He said that they always have a million people over and talk in Indian. I didn't see how that was worse than Rob having a million potheads over and blasting rap and club music.
##
We were asked to decompress data using the LZW algorithm for Data Access and Storage. Sitting there and doing it by hand seemed stupid when I had a computer. I carefully wrote a C program that followed the algorithm and printed traces of what it did at each step. I attached the program to its output to turn in.
We gave our midterm presentations in AI. Most of them weren't very interesting and as I talked I noticed that Jorge had trouble keeping his eyes open. I didn't consider that to be encouraging. I handed in my program in Data Access and Storage and told the professor what I had done. He was impressed and asked me to give a presentation about my program at the next class. I agreed.
\chapter{} chapter 17
We had a midterm in Information Access and Storage before spring break. Artificial Intelligence would be canceled that Thursday so I decided to leave on Wednesday after my meeting with Jorge. I packed up my car including my dirty clothes and sheets and drove down to Kunsela. It wasn't quite time for my meeting so I stopped in the Unix lab and sent some emails. At my meeting with Jorge I learned that I got an A on my AI presentation. After my meeting with Jorge I left Utica for spring break.
The first thing that I discovered when I got to my mother's house was that I forgot the charger for my cellphone. I switched the cellphone off and put it in my car. I had a car charger for it so I would be able to use it on the way back to Utica. Spring break wasn't particularly exciting. I uploaded some papers to put out as technical reports and sent them to Jorge. On Monday I went to the dentist. While I was there I did some maintenance on my mother's server and got a domain name to use to access it.
When I got back to school it was eighteen degrees out and there were snow drifts everywhere. This was disappointing as it was technically spring. My new computer still did not work and Lincoln and I went back to chasing down what the problem might be. We found that when we put memory in it from Lincoln's server, it worked. Clearly the 1GB DIMM I had bought was defective. I ordered memory for the computer. On Monday night we had chicken picata for dinner. It was okay, but I preferred some of the other ways that Sodexho had for preparing chicken. Sodexho served chicken about every other night but, fortunately, had a number of recipes to prepare it.
On Tuesday Rob emerged from his room bedraggled. He said, "I was supposed to be at work an hour ago," and ran out the door. About twenty minutes later he came back. I asked him why he wasn't at work. He said, "They said that I don't need to go there anymore."
Lincoln and I went to lunch. "I can't believe that Rob got fired from a work study job," I said.
"It is almost impossible to get fired from work study jobs."
"What do you think of my Shuttle."
"When it works it will be a nice computer."
"Did you see the CPU cooling system?"
"No."
"It is liquid cooled. The CPU heats the water and the hot vapors rise to the heat sink cooled by the fan. The fan cools them and they become water again. It is like refrigeration."
"Cool."
"Exactly."
"What is it called?"
"Integrated Cooling Engine or ICE for short."
"Very nice."
That evening we had Information Access and Storage. I wasn't able to make transparencies for my presentation because I didn't have any cash. I told the professor about my dilemma. He said that he would pay for the transparencies. By that time instructional resources was closed. I promised that I would have the transparencies the next week. We got back our exams. I was disappointed in my grade. I had expected a higher grade when I had turned in the exam.
The professor went over the exam before he gave the lecture. I looked at my exam morosely while he described the solutions. It seemed to me that I shouldn't have any trouble getting an A in this class. I didn't really want to put a lot of effort into it, though. I started passing notes with Lincoln.
When we got back to our suite after class, I got two beers out of the refrigerator and gave one to Lincoln. Then I located my bottle opener and we got our beers opened. At Lincoln's suggestion I put on some music.
"That exam sucked," I said.
"What did you get?"
"B."
"That does suck."
"I thought I serialized the transactions correctly, but apparently I didn't."
"You should have studied that harder."
"Study? You expect me to study? You've got to be kidding."
"How are you doing in your other classes?"
"Artificial Intelligence seems to be going well. I got an A on my presentation."
"That is good."
I wanted a summer job with Rome Labs. I thought that I should talk to the Information Access and Storage professor about it but I didn't know how to broach the subject. I definitely needed something to do that summer. I had an application in to Rome Labs, but I doubted it would get anywhere unless I talked to someone there about it.
Wednesday morning I got up and worked out. It was my first workout since spring break and I was a little out of condition. Then I went and had the breakfast of champions: bacon, coffee and orange juice. After breakfast I worked on a paper about known plaintext cryptanalysis that I would use in my thesis. Then I went to lunch but they weren't serving anything that I wanted to eat. I halfheartedly tried to eat what they were offering but it was no good.
I had my meeting with Jorge Wednesday afternoon and I discussed what I had been working on that morning. Jorge was interested. We would put it out as a tech report. We talked for about an hour and then I went back and got ready for dinner.
On Thursday I had Artificial Intelligence in the afternoon. We studied automated reasoning with resolution refutation. It seemed to be easier to program than it was to do by hand. After class I went to dinner where Lincoln told me what I had missed in our suite that afternoon.
"So about four o'clock, Rob came out and said, `I've got to go to class.' and ran out the door."
"I am glad to hear that he goes to classes."
"He came back fifteen minutes later. He was like `I'm so stupid; class is at two.' "
"They should have a Marijuana Studies Department for people like him."
"Marijuana studies, huh?"
"Yeah, that would be so that the students who are already majoring in marijuana can get a degree that accurately reflects what they learned."
"I can just imagine applying for a job with a degree in marijuana."
"It should be a law. We could call it the `truth in diploma' law."
"Oh my gosh."
"Shawna is here. I need to go talk to Shawna."
##
On Friday, Lincoln and I went to Fort Plain so that Kelly could cut our hair. After Kelly cut our hair, we went to my grandmother's house. We visited there for a while and then we went to the bowling alley in Van Hornesville. While we were there we each had a beer. Then I took Lincoln on a tour of the back roads in the hills. As we drove through the woods, I told him stories about all the different places that we went by.
"When I was a teenager, we were pulling a wagon load of hay up this hill with the pickup truck when the transmission went out."
"This is a pretty steep hill."
"That is what the pickup truck thought, too."
"So what did you do?"
"We set the emergency brake and pulled the wagon off with a tractor. Then a wrecker came for the pickup."
"You are lucky the wagon didn't roll down the hill."
"That would have been a disaster."
At the bottom of the hill was 168 which leads into Herkimer. I wanted to find the Social Security office in Herkimer to get a new Social Security card. I needed that to show them at Rome Labs if they decided to hire me. The thing is that I didn't know where the Social Security office was. I hadn't been there since the eighties. In the park in Herkimer where I took my driving test, there was a man on the street. I stopped and opened the window.
"Do you know where the Social Security office is?" I asked. He said something in Russian. I turned to Lincoln and said, "I guess that is a no."
We drove around some more looking for it, then I stopped at a store. I went in. "Do you know where the Social Security office is?"
"Utica."
"I lived here twenty years ago and I am sure that there was a Social Security office in this town."
"They closed it ten years ago."
"Okay, thanks."
I figured that meant that I wasn't going to find it. We got back on the Thruway and were back at SUNY IT in fifteen minutes. Soon it was time for dinner. We went to the dining hall at 4:30. There were very few students there because it was early and it was a Friday. With spring having sprung the campus would be particularly deserted this weekend. My shoulders were sore from working out. It was probably that morning that I had caused the injury to my shoulder that would prevent me from moving my left arm for a week a year later. That would disappear as mysteriously as it came.
At five o'clock Saturday morning, Rob came home intoxicated. He turned on his television loud and watched a boxing match. Then he went in the living room and punched holes in the walls. I called the RA on duty. She came to our room and inspected the damage. This surprised me because she had a restraining order against Rob. She was quiet, just writing down some notes and then leaving. She said that our RA would call.
On Saturday afternoon Lisa came over to visit Rob. Lisa and I talked. Lisa suggested that we exchange cellphone numbers. I gave her mine and she gave me hers.
"I think I am going to transfer to Utica College," Lisa said.
"Why is that?"
"The people here are so mean to me. I think I should go somewhere else."
"Okay. Isn't Utica College part of Syracuse University?"
"Yeah."
"We will miss you."
"I'll be around."
It seemed to me that she would probably fit in better at Utica college. Utica College is a small liberal arts college full of girls like Lisa. Transferring for her senior year might not make the most sense, though, because you aren't likely to be able to complete the requirements for your new major in one year.
I studied the requirements for the various doctoral programs that I was looking into. I was particularly interested in the qualifying exams. I noticed that while the subjects of the qualifying exams varied, there were some subjects that almost all schools had qualifying exams in. These included algorithms, programming languages and operating systems. SUNY IT didn't generally offer graduate classes in algorithms or programming languages. The class that Lincoln took in functional programming the previous semester might have helped with the programming languages exam, but it probably would not have been sufficient. I had taken both algorithms and programming languages as an undergraduate but that was a long time ago and I believed that I needed to take classes in these subjects at the graduate level to pass the qualifying exams. I discussed it with Lincoln at dinner.
"I am worried about the qualifying exams."
"Don't you need to get into a PhD program first?"
"Yes, but I should start taking classes to prepare for the quals now."
"If you don't know where you are going, how do you know what to study?"
"Some quals are the same regardless of the school. I need algorithms and programming languages."
"What are you going to do?"
"I am thinking that maybe I will take them at NJIT over the summer."
"That is a smart idea."
"During the regular semester graduate classes in computer science at NJIT are held in giant lecture halls with hundreds of students. I am hoping that it will be less crowded over the summer."
"So I guess everyone is just a number."
"They have a thousand kids in their computer science masters program. They also aren't very selective. They advertise that you can get in with a 2.8 GPA."
"So why do you want to take classes there?"
"It is an easy commute from my mother's house. It is in Newark."
"What is Newark like?"
"Newark sucks. The best urban renewal for Newark would be an atomic bomb."
"I haven't heard good things about it."
"Everything that you heard about it is true and more. The fraternity houses look run down. Can you believe that?"
"What about working on the base?"
"I haven't heard back from them. If I don't hear from them soon, I will assume that they aren't interested."
"I got a call from Keith about Rob assaulting the walls."
"What did he say?"
"He asked me if I felt safe living with him."
"He asked me the same question."
"What did you say."
"I said that his issue seems to be with inanimate objects, not me."
"That is basically what I said, too."
"I don't think that we want to live with Rob next semester."
"What should we do?"
"We should sign up for graduate housing."
"Okay. I guess we can do that."
"I'll tell Eric. I think Rob is going back into counseling."
"What we need is a new building. The Mason H. Somerville Student Detention Center. It could have a counseling wing." Lincoln said.
"They just built the library. I don't think they can put up another building right away."
Rob had set his television up in the living room and Eric had hooked up his Playstation/2. Lincoln enjoyed playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and I enjoyed watching him. I also thought that watching the way the animats behaved in the game was instructive for my artificial intelligence project. I was afraid that Vice City might cause antisocial tendencies, but it was amusing. Lincoln had the cheat codes so he could get all sorts of stuff such as machine guns and tanks in the game. The game was organized into little episodes. In one you are supposed to put on the colors of a rival gang and shoot up a funeral to start a gang war and lower property values. In another you are supposed to start a riot at a factory and steal a truck. Seeing the animats in action was a good adjunct to my studies in artificial intelligence. I had bought and read books that semester including a book called AI Game Development and AI Agents in Virtual Reality Worlds: Programming Intelligent VR in C++. The draft of my term paper discussed a wide variety of artificial intelligence techniques and how they could applied to animats.
\chapter{} chapter 18
The memory for my computer arrived. I installed it and put the computer together. Then I powered it up. It went into the BIOS screen. Sweet success. Then I tried to install an old revision of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on it. I had burned the discs in the UNIX lab. I had used four machines and burned all the discs simultaneously. It didn't work correctly with my hardware so I installed Fedora Core 2 Test 2 on my computer. At the end of the week, Fedora Core 2 would be released and I would install that on the computer. Fedora is a Red Hat distribution of Linux.
On Tuesday as I sat in Artificial Intelligence class, I became uncontrollably drowsy. I slipped out of class and walked to the area near the Registrar. There was a couch there, so I lay down on it and went to sleep. I slept for about half an hour until the noise of people getting out of classes woke me up. I felt bad about missing the last part of class, but I didn't think it would be polite to snore during the lecture.
At dinner I talked to Shawna.
"Hi Shawna! How are you doing?"
"My circumstances are not good."
"Your circumstances?"
"Yes. They are not good."
Now I was concerned about Shawna's circumstances. They were, as Shawna had pointed out, not good. I didn't know which circumstances she was referring to, but I was sure that they were circumstances that she considered important. For this reason I hoped that Shawna's circumstances would improve.
That night I gave my presentation on my decompression program in Information Access and Storage. I explained what the program did and how it worked. I put the program up on the overhead projector while I talked about it. One student appeared to fall asleep. I only talked for about five minutes, though, and then handed the class back to the professor. The professor dove into his lecture.
I tore a sheet of paper out of my notebook and put it between Lincoln and myself. I wrote on it, "I am concerned about Shawna's circumstances."
Lincoln wrote "What circumstances?"
"Her circumstances are not good."
The professor went over the homework and I found that I had misunderstood what we were supposed to do for the homework. During the break I approached the professor and told him that I did the homework wrong. He asked me what I did and I told him. He said, "Well, that is educational, too."
After class Lincoln and I walked back to our suite. Although it was April, it was starting to snow. I found that very depressing. When we got there, I got some beers out and played some music. I wondered what I could do to improve Shawna's circumstances.
"Hey Lincoln!"
"Yeah?" Lincoln had his fist in the air and was dancing to the music.
"What should we do about Shawna's circumstances?"
"What is wrong with Shawna's circumstances?"
"I told you. Her circumstances are not good."
"I would just leave her circumstances alone."
"What do you think about my music?"
"Your music is all about rebellion."
"You've got to be kidding. We listen to Elton John songs for crying out loud."
"Speaking of rebellion, I'm going to play Vice City."
"Cool. I'll watch."
Lincoln played Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for a while. I enjoyed watching it. My artificial intelligence paper was nearly complete, so I was watching just for fun. I had the game Wolfenstein on my X-Box, but I hadn't gotten past the first level. I was interested in how the non-player characters behaved.
At two o'clock that morning, Rob came in with some other kids and played loud rap music in violation of quiet hours. This woke me up. I was used to it but it was still annoying.
The next morning, Lincoln and I went down to the housing office to sign up for graduate housing for the next fall. Graduate housing was to be in building J. Lincoln and I were the only ones to sign up for it so far. After that we went to lunch.
"Well, I am glad that we won't have to put up with undergrads next year."
"We will probably get Indian students."
"At least they don't play loud rap music at two in the morning."
"They play Indian music."
"What is that like?"
"It is like the worst pop music you have ever heard."
"Sunday is Easter," I noted.
"Yeah, I am going home for Easter."
"Okay. You are missing out. The cafeteria is going to have ham."
"Why don't you go to your grandmother's?"
"She invited me, but I am not sure. I don't want to miss the ham."
"You could go eat dinner with her and then come back and eat the ham."
"That sounds like a good idea. Maybe that is what I will do."
"Easter is really important. More important than Christmas."
"I wonder how Shawna's circumstances are doing."
"Forget about Shawna's circumstances."
##
On Friday I drove Lincoln to the bus station. He was looking forward to seeing his family. He brought two X-boxes (which ran Linux) with him in his bag. I thought about how boring the weekend would be without him. My muscles were sore from working out.
"Have a safe trip."
"Thanks. I will see you Monday."
"Okay. Did I tell you that I am going to invite Sherry to go to Crypto with me?"
"You just want to divide Sherry's polynomials."
On Saturday I installed Fedora Core 2 on my computer. First I tried to install it by pointing my yum at the Fedora Core 2 repository and telling it to update itself. That didn't work so I used the CD-ROMs. I couldn't get it to work with seLinux enabled. seLinux, or security enhanced Linux, is a set of modifications to Linux made by the NSA to implement mandatory access control. When I disabled seLinux the system worked fine.
After I got back from brunch, I chatted with Rob.
"Brunch was really disgusting. The bacon was raw."
"When I was a kid, I used to eat raw bacon," Rob said.
"Did you have that with a side of lead paint chips?" I asked.
"I'm going home for a couple of days so don't report me missing."
##
On Sunday afternoon I went to my grandmother's for Easter dinner. I wore a muscle shirt to show off the muscle that I had been building in the weight room. My Uncle Flip asked me about the shirt.
"I am lifting weights," I said.
"How would you like to pick up rocks? That will accomplish the same thing and be useful."
"I like to do my weight lifting in an air conditioned room with girls watching."
"You could throw hay. We will have some hay pretty soon."
"That is okay, really."
"If you ever need a workout, you know where to find me."
"Okay. I will keep that in mind."
Grandma cooked a nice ham which I ate quite a bit of. I hadn't been to Grandma's for a holiday in a long time. When I was a kid, Grandma used to cook holiday dinners and a dozen of my cousins, along with their parents, and my sister and I would attend. This Easter only people who lived fairly nearby were at dinner, though. My cousins had scattered to the four corners of the Earth and hardly ever came around upstate New York anymore. I was only recently back from living in California.
After dinner I thanked my grandmother for having me over for dinner. I told her that I had to get back to campus because I was concerned about Shawna's circumstances. I drove back and got to the dining hall in time for their Easter dinner. They had ham with pineapples. I ate some more ham and looked forward to people returning to campus.
On Monday I got concerned when it was time for Lincoln's first class and he still hadn't turned up. I tried to call his mother to find out when he was supposed to arrive but I got no answer. I would have been willing to pick him up at the bus station rather than making him take a city bus. I hoped that he hadn't gotten mugged at the bus station. Lincoln eventually arrived and said that he had a good Easter. We were happy and that night we had a couple of beers to celebrate.
Rob's alarm went off and he wasn't on campus. The beeping became very annoying very quickly and I called the RA on duty. The RA would have a key to his room and be able to shut it off. The RA said that she doesn't do that. I wrote to Scott, the director of housing, and told him the the RA refused to shut the alarm off.
On Tuesday the cafeteria served chicken parm for dinner. I got seconds and thirds while between classes. All of the students were back and there were lines for the food. The serving people had put up a sign saying that no one was to take more than three pieces of chicken at a time. Lincoln and I chatted.
"Have you seen what they are saying?" I asked.
"No, what are they saying?"
"They are saying that Shawna and I are seen together a lot."
"Well, you do talk to her a lot."
"Speaking of that, here she is, let me see how she is doing."
I went and talked to Shawna.
"How are your circumstances?"
"Not so good. I just broke up with my boyfriend."
"I am sorry to hear that."
"No, it is fine."
Shawna and I chatted for a little while until it was time to leave for class. Lincoln and I walked to Kunsela.
"How are Shawna's circumstances?" Lincoln asked.
"Not too good. She just broke up with her boyfriend."
"Who was her boyfriend?"
"The guy that she just broke up with."
"Did she say why they broke up?"
"No, she didn't mention that. Maybe it was because we were seen together a lot."
We arrived at Information Access and Storage and took our usual seats. I had enjoyed the chicken parm but the tomato sauce was contributing to my heartburn. This class should have been an easy A but for some reason I wasn't getting an A in it. I needed a 3.5 average this semester, too. It was critical seeing as I was going to put in applications to PhD programs over the summer. I had identified four schools that I wanted to apply to: Stevens Institute of Technology, NJIT, SUNY Buffalo and University of Nebraska at Lincoln. I had studied the PhD programs for these schools and felt that I knew what I had to do to at least get through the qualifying processes. Most of them had qualifying exams. At SUNY Buffalo students qualified by taking specific classes and earning at least a B+ in them. There were also varying numbers of credits required. Most required ninety credit hours, SUNY Buffalo only required seventy-two. It probably didn't matter how many credits were required, though, since it takes time to research and write a thesis.
My concern about getting into a doctoral program was causing me stress. I was eating through the boxes of Zantac at an alarming rate. I kept some in my backpack in case I needed it in class. I also carried a bottle which I filled at the water fountain before each class and during the break in Information Access and Storage.
I didn't like having class at night. I also didn't like having a three hour long class. If I had been interested in the material of Information Access and Storage, it wouldn't have mattered but I wasn't. I knew that Information Access and Storage was an easier class than, say, Automata, but I didn't feel motivated. I worked out how I could get the grades I needed without a good grade in this class. I figured that I would have to get As in my other two classes and get at least a B in Information Access and Storage.
Soon it would be summer. I had decided to take classes at NJIT that would help prepare me to take the qualifying exams over the summer. I had read in the college catalog that I could transfer in up to two graduate classes from another university. I only needed nine more hours of which three had to be thesis in order to have the thirty-three credits required to graduate. I figured that if I transferred six credits in then I would be able to just take thesis in the fall semester. I doubted that I would do that, but it would be good to have the option.
As we walked home I explained my problem to Lincoln.
"So I need to get a 3.5 average every semester to get into a doctoral program."
"That shouldn't be too hard."
"Well, I am worried about Information Access and Storage. If I get a B in it then I will have to get an A in my other two classes."
"You can make it up next semester."
"No I can't. The applications will already have gone out. I will need a 3.5 in my summer classes, too."
"You are taking summer classes?"
"Yeah, I told you. At the place with the run-down frat houses. NJIT."
"I am going to Illinois this summer."
"For your summer job with the insurance company?"
"Yeah."
"You like doing that sysadmin stuff, don't you."
"Yes. I enjoy that."
"Did you know that most hackers in the US work as sysadmins."
"Oh my gosh. You wouldn't believe the security measures we take. I don't have access to the critical databases."
"What sort of stuff."
"We hired a company to see if they could get into our facility. They did all sorts of things to get in."
"Like what?"
"Like tailgating people through the doors. We set it up so that the door won't open if there is more than one person in there."
"I would worry more about people getting in electronically."
"They did that, too."
We got back to our suite. I got a couple of beers out of the refrigerator before even unlocking my door. I opened them both and gave one to Lincoln. "These night classes suck." I said.
"For you maybe, since you go to bed so early."
"I will have to take night classes all summer."
"Won't that interfere with Crypto?"
"Nah. Their second summer session gets out before Crypto."
"How long have you been going to Crypto."
"My first time was Crypto '92."
"I guess you will have a busy summer."
"Yep."
\chapter{} chapter 19
Lincoln and I needed to get our presentation about data mining ready for Information Access and Storage. I made slides with \LaTeX. We studied a book on data mining that I had bought used. It was pretty beat up, highlighted and marked by the previous owner. We figured that we could discuss the material in the first few chapters. There were other people also doing presentations on data mining including a group of three Indian students who were planning on using the same presentation that they used the previous semester. They decided to make some changes after I pointed out to them that the student handbook says that turning in the same work for multiple classes means an automatic F.
I discovered that a tool called nmap was part of the Fedora Linux installation. Nmap is used by hackers and system administrators to detect open ports on networks, to determine security holes and even to find out what software other systems are running. I thought that it was very cool. I ran nmap on DogNet to see what it would say. DogNet is the SUNY IT computer science network. It came back after an hour or so telling me all about the computers in the Unix lab. I thought that was pretty neat.
Soon it was time for dinner. Lincoln was in class so I went to dinner by myself. I expected Lincoln to catch up with me while I was eating. They were playing the radio in the cafeteria. It was playing some uncontroversial music. I got my food and sat down to eat. The radio went to a commercial break but not before running a "community grapevine" announcement saying that the FBI warns students not to scan remote systems with hacker tools. It was at times like this that I suspected my email was compromised. Another time that I suspected that my email was compromised was when I heard Andrew telling someone that the FBI had demanded access to my computer science account as a "matter of national security."
I figured that there were ways to entertain myself other than scanning ports. For instance, I could crack passwords. There was a nice little utility called John the Ripper which would break password files such as the one used by DogNet. I knew something about breaking passwords. I had discovered a method of guessing passwords using the statistics of the English language and some obsolete cryptanalytic techniques. Jorge had declined to put that up on the tech report website. I don't know why since that is one of my less disruptive discoveries. Soon Lincoln came to dinner.
"They don't want us to use nmap, anymore."
"Why, what did you scan?"
"Nothing much. I just scanned my own computer and DogNet."
"Did you get in trouble with Nick?"
"No. I don't think they monitor for that on DogNet."
"Then I wouldn't worry about it. You aren't breaking into the computers or anything. You are just scanning to see what ports are open."
"That is the way I figure it."
"Did you make the slides for our presentation?"
"Yes. We just need to print them and take them to instructional resources to be put on transparencies."
"You know that there are three groups doing data mining."
"Yeah. I talked to the Indian students so that our presentations don't overlap but I don't know about the other guys."
"Good job. Here is Shawna."
"Okay, I am going to check into Shawna's circumstances."
Rob and Eric prepared for the impending end of the semester by playing video games on the Playstation/2. This didn't seem like an activity that would help their grades. I got my financial aid letter and it said that there was a work-study component to my financial aid for the next semester. I sent my resume to Nick, the computer science department system administrator, and told him that I had some work-study money. We made an appointment for Wednesday after my meeting with Jorge.
At the meeting, Nick agreed to hire me. He said that he would come up with projects for me to do and that I was also to keep paper and toner in the printers in the labs. I agreed. We shook hands and I went to dinner, which wasn't particularly good that night.
Later that night, after drinking a few beers, Lincoln and I decided that we needed more food. I called the Cat's Den and ordered a pizza. Unfortunately, they didn't deliver. When I was an undergrad, Itza Pizza used to deliver pizzas to our rooms piping hot and let us pay for them on the meal plan. It seemed to me that SUNY IT needed a similar service. Lincoln and I waited a little while and then walked to the student center. Our pizza was waiting for us and we brought it back to our building where we ate it all except for one slice. We left the box with the slice in it in the living room in case one of our roommates decided to eat it. Our roommates would be coming home in the wee hours of the morning.
On Friday was a Student Recognition Banquet which Roger wanted Lincoln to attend. Lincoln mentioned that he had gotten two awards including the best student award at this banquet the previous year. Lincoln put on slacks and a nice shirt. He didn't have a tie. I lent him a tie, but he didn't know how to make a Windsor knot. I put the tie on and knotted it, then I loosened the tie pulled it over my head and gave it to him. He put it on. The purpose of the banquet was to honor graduating seniors.
Lincoln said that he would be back at seven-thirty but it got to be eight-thirty and there was still no sign of him. I got tired of waiting for him and opened a beer. He eventually turned up around nine.
On Tuesday I gave my Artificial Intelligence presentation and handed in my term paper. As I had done with my term papers the previous semester, I bought a report cover to bind it in from the bookstore. My presentation went pretty smoothly.
I stood before the class with my first slide. "Animats are artificial creatures in virtual reality, such as a non player character in a game..." I discussed different techniques that can be used to make animats appear to think. These techniques included rule based systems, fuzzy logic, neural networks, decision trees, finite state automata, fuzzy finite state automata and probabilistic finite state automata also known as Markov chains. I thought that I had a pretty good presentation.
After my presentation, I sat down. Other people gave their presentations, some interesting and others lame. I was anxious to know what grade I got on my presentation.
That night we had chicken parm for dinner. Lincoln and I wallowed in gluttony for a brief amount of time before we had to go to Information Access and Storage where it was time for us to give our presentation. We were near the end of the list of people to speak. We sat through presentation after presentation. The Indian kids did their presentation on data mining. Then it was our turn to give our presentation. I talked first, resisting the urge to say, "Data mining, surprisingly enough, does not involve any explosives."
I mentioned that data mining was also known as knowledge discovery in databases. About halfway through the talk, Lincoln took over for me and finished our talk. We sat down. The third team doing data mining got up to talk. The kid said, "Sorry Mike, but data mining is not the same as knowledge discovery in databases."
The professor asked me to respond. I said that this textbook on data mining sitting right in front of me supports my position. The professor asked to see the book. I gave it to him and told him the page number. After reading from the book, the professor concluded that we were both right. I thought that under those circumstances that I was owed an apology, but I didn't get one.
Pretty soon, class was over and Lincoln and I went home.
"I have the AI final on Thursday," I noted.
"Not during finals week?"
"No, on the last day of class."
"How do you think you will do?"
"I don't know. I should go to the library and study."
"Why the library?"
"It seemed to work pretty well for me for Automata. I want to try the problems on the practice final."
"That sounds smart. Does that mean beer time is off tonight?"
"Of course not. Don't be silly."
When we got back to our suite, we opened some beers and sat on the couch drinking them. I also put on some music. Eric and Rob were never around at that time of night. Rob would be around to have a loud party around two in the morning. Eric would either be on a date or at a nightclub. Rob seemed to think that the imminent nature of final exams meant that he needed to have bigger parties. He also stepped up his illicit drug activities.
The next morning, after I worked out and ate breakfast, I looked at the Artificial Intelligence practice final. I didn't do the problems, but I felt that I would be able to on the final, which was to be open book. I had produced four papers in Seminar, so I was confident of an A in there. If I got a B in Information Access and Storage, I would need an A- in Artificial Intelligence to keep my average over 3.5. I would get a grade of IP, or in progress, for thesis.
When I met with Jorge that afternoon, I asked him what I got on my AI presentation. He said that I got an A. Now I just needed to make a decent showing on the final. After my meeting, I went back to my room to wait for dinner. I read parts of the AI textbook. It occurred to me that one of the difficulties I was having with Information Access and Storage was that there was no textbook for me to refer to. I like to read my textbooks during my spare time so that I know what I am supposed to be learning.
Thursday morning, I ate a long leisurely breakfast consisting of bacon, a waffle, orange juice and coffee. I made the waffle in the waffle iron next to the toaster in the cafeteria. The cafeteria put out batter by the waffle iron every morning, but I was usually too busy to make one. This morning, I wanted to have a proper breakfast as preparation for my AI final. I reviewed for the final after breakfast and had a quick lunch before it was time for the exam.
As I sat in the room doing the exam, I wished that I had done the practice problems. Although I had the algorithms in front of me in my notes, they weren't entirely clear. Some of them were in LISP, a language that I had never programmed in. LISP programs are also hard to simulate by hand because LISP is a functional rather than an imperative language. Iteration was done through recursion and you need to keep track of the stack frames in order to know what is going on. The AI final was worth seventy percent of the grade.
I did my best on the exam and finished ahead of everybody else. I took my exam to Jorge, who was in his office. I was now done with AI for the semester.
When I got back to our suite, Lisa was there. Rob was braiding her hair. She had Rob wrapped around her finger. She was telling him about how mean the girls at SUNY IT are and that she was transferring to Utica College. She mentioned that her roommate had been snooping in her stuff and found some stuff that she shouldn't have had. It wasn't clear what the roommate did about it, though.
The next week was finals week. I only had one final during finals week -- Information Access and Storage. On Friday, I tried to review my notes for that class, but they weren't clear. I didn't have a textbook to refer to. I looked over the old homeworks. It seemed to me that doing the homeworks should have helped prepare me for the exam. I really hadn't paid close enough attention to that class and now I was concerned. Eric moved the television and Playstation/2 outside and sat in the sun playing video games. Rob got as high as a kite. I was beginning to think that I was the only one taking finals seriously.
Perhaps Rob was studying a little, because he came to me with his calculator and said that the mod button didn't work. He wanted to know how to compute a modulus. I told him to do long division and the remainder is the answer. He thanked me. It seemed to me that he probably needed to know that a lot earlier in the semester. He went back in his room and tried it out. Then he came back and said that gave him the right answer.
The night before my Information Access and Storage final, there was a loud explosion across the road from my room in the woods. It woke me up. Lincoln said that he saw a group of freshmen running out of the woods just before the explosion. I knew that Andrew was the ringleader. He had been talking about blowing up dead pieces of computer equipment all year.
The next morning, at breakfast, Shawna said that the authorities had come to her because someone had seen her running away from the site of the explosion and threatened her with prosecution if she didn't tell them who all the participants were. Then they got them all together and had a talk with them about the incident. I don't know what they said, but I didn't think that there would be any more explosions on the SUNY IT campus.
I took the Information Access and Storage final. After the final, I commented to Lincoln that that was it for the semester.
Lincoln said, "Now it is all over but the crying." Coming from Lincoln, this was funny. Lincoln had a slightly higher average than me.
The next day my mother and my grandmother came to help me move out. We loaded all of my stuff in my car. The only grades posted were Information Access and Storage, a B, and Seminar, an A. Now whether I got the grades I needed to get into a doctoral program depended on my grade in AI. We loaded all of my stuff into my Jeep, which I then parked in my grandmother's garage. I wanted to keep my stuff out of the sun. We were then going to the North Country for my cousin's college graduation. We stopped at SUNY IT on the way to Watertown and I checked my grades again. A grade for Artificial Intelligence had finally been posted. It was an A- bringing my GPA for the semester to 3.56 and my overall GPA in graduate school to 3.52. This met the minimum requirements for applying to most doctoral programs.
\chapter{} chapter 20
We drove to Pulaski, where my Aunt Betty lives. We were to stay at Aunt Betty's to see Brenna graduate. Brenna's father, Uncle Johnny, lives in nearby Watertown. My mother, my grandmother and I drove there in my mother's giant Lincoln Navigator. When we got to Aunt Betty's, I remembered that I had forgotten my peacoat in the closet in my suite. It was too late to go back for it now. Aunt Betty wasn't home yet. She taught sixth grade science. We went in the back door and waited for her.
When she and her daughter, Mary, arrived, they took us out to dinner at the restaurant where her ex-husband worked. We had a pleasant meal. We stopped at the liquor store on the way home, where I got some beer. When we got back, I went to bed.
We spent a couple of days at Aunt Betty's before Brenna's graduation. Brenna would be graduating from St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY, about ten miles from Clarkson. On graduation morning we went to Uncle Johnny's and then rode with them to Canton. The graduation took place in a big quad. There was some security as evidenced by the people on top of the buildings. We found chairs on the lawn and watched the graduation.
As they called people to receive their diplomas, I couldn't help but be struck by how many people were graduating with honors. Grade inflation is variable and tends to affect private colleges more than state colleges and liberal arts colleges more than engineering colleges. St. Lawrence is a private liberal arts college. Grade inflation must be rampant at St. Lawrence because fully half of the students graduated with honors and one even got a 4.0 GPA.
After the ceremony we went someplace in the North Country by a lake for the party. I didn't have a party for my college graduation. I didn't even attend the ceremony. My mother says that she was bent that I didn't go to my graduation but if she had told me that she wanted me to go, I would have. To me it was all about the transcript. I didn't see what value walking across the stage would add to my degree.
After the party we went back to Aunt Betty's house. We spent the night there before driving back to my grandmother's, where we dropped her off and picked up my car. Then we went back to New Jersey. I would stay with my mother for the summer and take classes at NJIT.
Monday morning I went to NJIT to register. I got everything I needed at the Registrar's office except that I needed a signature from the graduate adviser in the computer science department. I got lost on campus trying to find the computer science department. When I finally found it, the graduate adviser didn't want to sign my paper. He wanted to see my undergraduate transcript. I pointed out that I had had my undergraduate transcript sent to NJIT. He typed my social security number into the computer and it said that I had a bachelor of science in computer science from Clarkson University. That wasn't good enough for him. He needed to know what classes I took. I pointed out that Clarkson was a good university and the classes would be sufficient and that I was a graduate student in computer science at another university. I also mentioned that I had been one class short of a second major in math. Finally he relented and signed my form. I took my paperwork back to the Registrar and was ready to start classes.
There were two summer sessions and I would take a class during each summer session. The classes would be Monday, Tuesday and Thursday nights from six until nine. The first session I would take CIS610 Algorithms and the second session I would take CIS635 Programming Languages. Roger was the new department chair since Jorge had been elected acting dean. I emailed Roger to tell him that I had registered for the two classes and that I would want to transfer them to SUNY IT. He said that I could transfer programming languages but not algorithms as a computer science elective. He suggested that I may be able to transfer algorithms as a general elective. I said that transferring the programming languages class as a computer science elective was good enough.
On the first day of class, I was sitting in the lobby of the building where the class was to be held. A girl sat down next to me and started chatting. She wanted to know what class I was taking. I told her and she said that she was taking the same class. She asked me what room it met in and I told her that, too. Soon it was time to go in the classroom. We took our seats. Professor Nassimi came in and took attendance. He said that there was one person too many. The girl said that she wasn't registered, she just wanted to sit in on the class so that it would be easier when she took it in the fall. Professor Nassimi said that wasn't permitted and kicked her out of the classroom.
There were only thirty people in the class, but Professor Nassimi taught the class as though he were teaching it in a lecture hall to hundreds of students. He was on the PhD committee so he would be reviewing my application. Nassimi and I did not get along right from the start. When I would raise my hand to ask a question, he would call on me and then talk over me. I thought that was rude. I had no trouble with the material for the class, but whenever he handed my work back, there were all sorts of points deducted for no apparent reason. In graduate classes at NJIT there were no minus grades, so a B+ would be a 3.5. I wanted a B+ in the class to maintain my grade point average. One quarter of the students dropped the class after the midterm.
I found that I had to leave for class by four o'clock or risk getting stranded in rush hour traffic. That left me with over an hour sitting on campus waiting for class to start. I had bought the textbook recommended for the NJIT algorithms qualifier, Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein. I had gotten the cheap softback Indian edition. The class, unfortunately, required a different book which I had to buy at the NJIT bookstore.
I got home shortly before ten each night. I developed the habit of stopping at a Chinese takeout place on the way home and picking up some dinner for my mother and myself. Chinese takeout isn't my favorite food but it was on the way and open. Having nine hours of class a week kept me pretty busy, but I worked on my thesis, too.
For my thesis, I decided to mostly concentrate on old, unpublished work that I did. For chapter three I would use some cryptanalytic work that I had been working on for the past couple of years. I would include the source code to the program I wrote to experiment with the cryptanalysis (some eighty pages) as an appendix. The program used gnuplot to draw some graphs that were critical to the paper. For chapter two, I included some work that I had done in 1992 on cryptography. I would make chapter one specific to the thesis including some work that I had done with Jorge the previous semester. Some of the work in my thesis was considered sensitive by the NSA but I had a letter from them saying that I could publish it.
The weeks raced by and soon summer session one was over. I got a B, which was disappointing. That meant that I had to get an A in summer session 2 or my transcript would be ruined. Programming Languages was taught by Professor Rutkowski, who seemed to be much nicer than Nassimi. His lectures were more interesting, too. He assigned a lot of reading, but I was on top of it. During the time that I waited for class to start, I read the textbook. I got a ninety-eight on the first exam.
He assigned an extra credit project which was simply to write a program to execute deterministic finite automata. This was ridiculously easy and I got full credit for it, raising my grade above a hundred. It was getting toward time for NJIT to respond to my application. After class, Rutkowski would stand in the corner of the room and take questions. One day as I was leaving, I heard him telling someone that "We don't want Michael de Mare at our school." That sounded like bad news for my application.
The next week, I stopped at the admissions office and asked them if a decision had been made. They said, yes, a decision had been made, my application was declined. I was disappointed, not because I wanted to go to NJIT, but rather because I was afraid that if NJIT wouldn't accept me, then no one would. I didn't hold NJIT in particularly high regard compared with the other schools that I was applying to. I was still getting applications and transcript requests out. I was applying to Stevens Institute of Technology, SUNY Buffalo and University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Stevens was the best school on the list. The average SAT scores of Stevens students were a hundred and twenty or more points higher than that of SUNY IT students. I learned this by examining both of their websites. Stevens was ranked by U.S. News and World Report at number seventy-one. SUNY Buffalo was likely to be most responsive to transcripts and recommendations from SUNY IT. The best part of my application is the letter of recommendation from Josh Benaloh, my professor at Clarkson with whom I coauthored a tech report and a published paper.
By the time I took the final for Programming Languages, I had read the whole book. I was the first one done in the exam and turned it in and went home. We didn't get our final exams back, but I heard that I got a perfect score. That meant that my average in the class was above 100. I had an A for sure. That made my grade point average at NJIT 3.5, which is what I needed for doctoral admissions.
I sketched out the S-boxes for a new Feistel cipher that I called the Pineapple Cipher. I thought it was pretty clever and it took advantage of the fact that some powers of two (such as two to the sixteenth) are one less than a prime. That way I would use the finite field generated that way to create a permutation to use as an S-Box.
After Programming Languages was over I flew to Santa Barbara for Crypto 2004. Crypto is held on the UCSB campus and I stayed in a dorm room. The day before I left I got the Stevens application typed out and in the mail. At the conference, I saw Josh Benaloh. He now worked at Microsoft Research. I told him the list of schools that I applied to.
"Stevens? I need to introduce you to Rebecca. She is here somewhere."
"Rebecca?"
"Yes, Rebecca Wright. She is a professor at Stevens. We had the same adviser at Yale."
The conference was very busy with talks all day and a social program every night. One night was the rump session, and there were talks all night that night. Josh found me at a reception and said, "I found Rebecca, why don't you come and meet her."
I followed him and he introduced us. I told Professor Wright that I had applied to the doctoral program at Stevens.
"I am on the PhD committee. I haven't seen your application, though."
"I put it in the mail just before the conference."
"It will be on my desk, then. What are you interested in?"
"Information assurance."
"Information assurance in general or something specifically."
"I am specifically interested in cryptography."
"Very good. Professor Wetzel and I research cryptography."
The conversation was brief, but I knew that my application would get some attention. I enjoyed the rest of the conference. The food was excellent and there was an open bar every night. The talks were interesting and I sat through as many of them as possible. I hadn't been to a Crypto conference since LSI Logic sent me to Crypto '99. After the conference I flew back to Newark airport.
The airplane ride back home was long and I can't sleep on airplanes. First I took a prop plane from Santa Barbara to Los Angelos. Then I took a six hour flight from Los Angelos to Newark. I got back in the middle of the night and was happy to find my bed.
Within a few days I had to go back to SUNY IT. I still needed to take the computer science subject test for the GRE. I had tried to register for the spring but they weren't offering it. My applications would be complete without the subject test, but taking it was highly recommended and I had scored at the 95th percentile on it in 1991. It would be to my advantage to take it.
I talked to a professor at Clarkson and agreed to give a speech to the ACM club that fall. Aunt Sue invited me to her summer house on Lake George during fall break and I agreed to go there, as well. I also expected to go on interviews for doctoral programs. The fall semester promised to be very busy.
Within a few days it was time to go back to Utica for the fall semester. I packed up my stuff in my car, said goodbye to my mother and drove back to SUNY IT for my final semester before graduation.
\chapter{} chapter 21
I arrived back at SUNY IT the Friday before the fall semester. I picked up my key from Residence Life. I unloaded my car onto a hand cart, which I wheeled to my building. Since I lived on the second floor, I had to carry my stuff up the stairs. Lincoln was nowhere to be found but I had a new roommate named Rohit. Rohit was a telecommunications graduate student from India. Downstairs from me a group of mostly Indian women moved into another suite. Once again our Internet connection would be set up on Sunday. I walked to Kunsela and went to Roger's office. Roger had taken over the job of department chair and Jorge was now the acting dean of ISET. When Roger answered the door, I asked him if he had done the transfer credits. He asked me to follow him.
We went to a room with a Xerox and some mailboxes. He opened the mailbox for the department and pulled out a sealed transcript from NJIT. Then we walked the length of the building to the Registrar's office. He opened the transcript. Then he filled out a form and signed it. The registrar said to him, "Your signature is one of the ones that I always accept." He gave her the transcript. Three credits of the six credits I took over the summer were now credited to my transcript.
I went downstairs to the computer lab and signed on. I brought up Bannerweb, which included the student registration system. I dropped Computer and Robotic Vision. I noticed that I needed to take at least nine credits for my financial aid so I added an undergraduate telecommunications class called Intro. Information Assurance. Intro. Information Assurance was worth four credit hours. That was really a computer and communications security class and I thought that I might learn some interesting computer intrusion techniques. It wouldn't affect my GPA because it was an undergraduate class. I had taken two undergraduate classes at SUNY IT in the summer of 1991, just for fun. Those were Astronomy, which I got a B+ in and Chemical Dependency which I got an A in. My grade in Chemical Dependency should not be surprising as I had recently turned twenty-one and was doing a lot of field research.
After I was done adjusting my enrollment, I went upstairs to see if Jorge was available. Jorge was meeting with another professor in his office so I turned to walk away. He called me. "Are you in Computer and Robotic Vision?"
"No."
"There is a problem, the enrollment is low. It is a good class, maybe you should take it."
"Actually, I just dropped it."
"Okay. Why did you drop it?"
"I transferred my summer class and I don't need the credits."
"Okay. The professor here is an expert in the field. He taught it at Penn State."
"That's okay."
I went back to the computer lab where I noticed that Lincoln had linked his email file with /dev/null so that all of his emails went into a black hole known as the bit bucket. I sent an email to the system administrator to point this out and mentioned that it could affect system stability. He fixed it. I thought that that was an odd thing for Lincoln to do. I expected him to show up the next day at the latest and I planned to ask him about that. I went back to my room and hooked my television up to the cable. Since there wouldn't be any Internet in my room until Sunday, I needed to find other methods to entertain myself. I went to Marcy Discount Liquor and picked up a case of Sam Adams. I put a couple in the refrigerator and the rest under my bed. It was hot in my room. I had the window open and the fan was sitting on the window sill; blowing directly on me. I heard that the Mohawk dorms were air conditioned. That sounded nice, but it probably wasn't worth the long walk from Mohawk to the rest of campus. Shawna was going to be living in Mohawk this year.
Soon it was time for dinner. They were having their open house thing again. I grabbed a plate of food and sat down to eat. Shawna came in with a young man. Soon she and the young man were sitting and eating together. I wasn't sure if I should go talk to her while she was on a date, but I did. I went to her table and asked her how her summer was.
"I took some bartending classes, bought a car and got a boyfriend," she said.
"It sounds like you had a productive summer. I took summer classes at NJIT and went to a cryptography conference."
She introduced me to her date, and I shook hands with him. Then I went back to my table and finished eating.
Saturday was an agonizingly long day on account of not having any Internet. I kept on expecting Lincoln to show up, but he didn't. Rohit was already making friends with the other Indian students and having them over. A guy who said that he lived in the North Country moved into room 4. He didn't have much stuff, just enough to make his bed, which he did, and then he was gone. I don't think that we ever saw him again. I was becoming anxious because there was no word from Lincoln and I was concerned that he might have gotten caught up in some sort of terrible mix up where the authorities thought that he was a hacker or something. It was out of character for him not to show up on time for school.
Someone in a nearby building that I had to walk past every time I went to eat or go to class put up a big Bush-Cheney sign in his or her window. I approved of that. There was a Kerry-Edwards sign in the window of building W, next to where I had lived the previous year. I was confident that the president would win the election, but it still made me nervous. If by some statistical fluke Kerry were to win, he would take the country back to the 1970s. He would also cause us to lose the war in Iraq, emboldening terrorists and eroding American interests around the world. Our allies in southeast Asia would decide that we were unreliable causing them to build up larger militaries and develop nuclear weapons. This would result in an arms race between Japan, Taiwan and South Korea on one side and China and North Korea on the other. Other countries in the region would also build up their militaries in response to this. Islamic fascists would take over the Middle East and wage an unrelenting war against Western Civilization. The end result of all of this would be a world war. It was essential to the peace and security of the world that the president win reelection.
At dinner Shawna had shed her companion and was eating with the other cool kids. I stopped by and talked with her. She mentioned that she was living in Mohawk this year, which I already knew. Mohawk was populated by jocks and student government leaders who all believed that they were cool. I would have preferred that Shawna stay in Adirondack and away from the bad influence of the "party hardy" crew, but I bit my tongue. I told her that Lincoln was missing.
When I went to bed on Saturday night, there still was no word from Lincoln. I was concerned. He had just invested a year of his life into getting his masters degree and it would seem foolish not to spend the remaining few months to complete it. I also knew that they wouldn't hold his room for long. Last I had heard from him, he had been working as a Solaris administrator for an insurance company in Illinois. It was the same summer job that he had for a number of years, now.
When I got up on Sunday morning, there was still no sign of Lincoln. Not having any Internet, I was bored so I read from the book for Information Assurance. I read a chapter called "The Anatomy of an Attack." It described how a hacker might decide that he doesn't like your politics and how he would start gathering information about your computers. I found it interesting, although it didn't tell me anything technical that I didn't already know.
At eleven o'clock I went to the cafeteria for brunch. I had some coffee, some orange juice, some bacon and a waffle. I was glum because I was concerned about Lincoln. They would start our Internet connections at one o'clock and I didn't have anything to do until then. I spent a long time in the cafeteria and eventually Shawna came in. I went and talked with her for a while and then I went back to my room. It was hot and I thought that I would like an air conditioner.
Time dragged slowly but soon it was one o'clock so I wrote down my MAC address and went to the Adirondack lounge where a line was already forming. I waited on line. When I got to the front of the line they asked me if my computer was plugged in to the ethernet. I replied that it was, and they captured the MAC address and switched it on though their switch. This meant that I didn't need my MAC address. The MAC address was really the address for my router which I then had the Linux computer plugged into. My laptop connected to the router through wireless. When I got back to my room I logged into the mail server and sent them an email indicating that I had a Linux machine connected to their network. We were allowed to use Linux, but they asked that we tell them and mention our configuration. I am not sure what they did with this information and I objected on principle but I complied. I also had to notify them about my wireless network.
After catching up on my correspondence I surfed the web and listened to music until dinner time. I had transferred the music to my Linux system and written a filter to convert the Windows Media Player XML playlist into a list of file names, one per line. I then told mplayer, a Linux media player, to shuffle this file and play the songs randomly. I don't know how people who can't write simple programs get by. It seems like one would have to do extraordinary amounts of clerical work if one couldn't program the computer to do it for him. That would also make the person so unproductive as to be unemployable.
##
On Monday morning, I got up and had some breakfast. My first class was to be Introduction to Information Assurance at noon. It would be held in Donovan. All of my classes up until now had been in Kunsela. Donovan is a huge building and I allowed myself some time to find my class. The professor was considerably younger than me. He seemed bent on assigning a lot of mindless homework. Eric was in the class along with all of his friends. Eric is a telecommunications major. He wanted to know what I was doing in the class and I told him that I was learning about information assurance. He seemed to accept that.
The professor said that there would be labs. We were to do the labs in the information assurance lab and if we did the experiments anywhere else we would go to jail. This got me more interested than it would turn out to be warranted. If it hadn't been for this aspect, I would have probably dropped the class because it was apparent that everything would be spoon fed to the undergraduate audience.
The professor described what he claimed was the profile of a typical hacker. He said that the typical hacker was a computer science graduate student. I knew this not to be true. I had been following security related news and all the criminal hackers that get rounded up have some college but no degree and work as system administrators. Perhaps he is confused because the first Internet worm was released by a Cornell doctoral student in 1988. Since it was the first one, he considered it research.
At the end of class I raised my hand and asked if there was going to be a homework assignment that day. He said no. After class an undergraduate told me to let them worry about the homeworks.
After class I stopped at the cafeteria for lunch. I once again had the nineteen meal a week meal plan. This meant that I was entitled to go in the cafeteria any time they were open and eat. If you had already been in for a meal, the card reader beeped and they waved you in. When I got back to my room, someone was moving into Lincoln's room.
"What is your name?" I asked him.
"Nate."
"Are you a graduate student?"
"No, but I am twenty-six." Uh-oh. I knew this meant trouble.
"So why are you moving in now?"
"I had an apartment but all of my neighbors were crackheads..." He gave a ten minute dissertation on what was wrong with the apartment, his neighbors and his landlord. It sounded to me like he was a social misfit with a bad attitude. This did not sound promising.
He had a giant stereo system which started blasting rap music so loud that the walls shook as soon as he had it hooked up. I suspected that the stereo had something to do with his problems with his neighbors. It certainly was going to give him problems with me. Unfortunately, my room shared a wall with his room.
I got an email from Roger asking me if I had seen Lincoln. He was expecting Lincoln to be his teaching assistant that semester. I told Roger everything I knew and mentioned that someone had moved into Lincoln's room. Roger said that it wasn't like Lincoln. I agreed.
I went to dinner at four-thirty. I sat alone and ate my food glumly. I was sure that Nate was going to ruin my happiness this semester. What part of the words graduate housing didn't Scott understand? Well, obviously the word "graduate." Some undergrads were okay, but those were the ones that got their degrees with a high enough average that they could get into graduate school. For some reason, the process of earning a degree with a good grade point average seems to make people easier to live with. It probably also helps that graduate students had to get a decent score on the GRE.
After I sat there glumly for an hour, Shawna came in. She stopped by my table and talked to me. I told her about how my happiness was ruined when an undergraduate moved into Lincoln's room.
After dinner, I put on some music and surfed the net. As it got late, an email message came in from Lincoln! He said that he was coming to school and would be there on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. I was pretty sure the guy who moved into room four had vanished so I told him to try to get that room since Nate had moved into his.
Lincoln was anxious to keep the arrangements that he had made for the semester. There was no explanation for his late arrival. I looked forward to Lincoln's arrival. I planned to take him to dinner at Applebees and ply him with beer to see if he would tell me the reason for his odd behavior. I thought that it was very unfortunate that he hadn't sent the email just twelve hours earlier when he could have kept his room.
Lincoln had signed up for Automata that semester, which met on Mondays and Wednesdays. He missed the first class of that. He also signed up for Artificial Immunity which met on Tuesday nights. It sounded like he was going to miss that, as well.
I got an email from the Dorm Support staff about my wireless router. They told me that I had to keep it secured and that I would be responsible for any unauthorized use of it. I had programmed it to only accept my laptop's MAC numbers. A quick check of the router indicated that three other people were attempting to connect to it, all unsuccessfully. I wondered if I could set up a fake Internet and steal their passwords and credit card numbers. Lincoln and I had planned to link our subnets using wireless.
I set up my laptop in the living room and let it connect with my router using wireless. I set up a pair of powered speakers with it. This way I could not only listen to music in the living room, but I could access the Internet and my server as well. This had promising social implications. I liked to sit in the living room and drink beer with Lincoln, but it was hard to do that while listening to music except by turning the volume up on my computer. This resolved that problem.
\chapter{} chapter 22
Tuesday morning I got up early and went to the cafeteria. I had my breakfast of bacon, orange juice and coffee. I was glad that no one was checking my cholesterol. I know that eating bacon every morning makes my cholesterol shoot up. After breakfast I took a nap. I woke up in time for lunch and hurried to the cafeteria to eat a quick lunch. Then I surfed the web to try to find out about artificial immunity. All of my search engine hits were about medicine or biology, which wasn't very helpful. I really had no idea what the term "artificial immunity" meant when applied to computer science or digital security.
For dinner they served chicken parmesan. I felt bad that Lincoln was missing out on this. I sat around the cafeteria eating for an hour, but I had to cut it short because I had class at six. I left the cafeteria at five-thirty and went to Kunsela. I took a seat in the classroom and noticed that there were a lot of students. Although I was wearing a watch, I sat in the seat that allowed me to see the clock through the window in the door out of habit.
The name of the professor was Andriamanalimanana but we will call him Bruno. He came in at the appointed time with a large stack of tape bound books. He handed out the books -- one blue and one yellow for each student. The books were PhD theses on artificial immunity. I was concerned that Lincoln wasn't here to get his. Bruno mentioned that there would be no more copies available after the class. The classroom was full. There must have been at least thirty students. Bruno laid out the rules of the class. We were to do a paper and presentation on a topic that he would assign. That would be the basis of our grades. Then he started lecturing.
It soon became apparent that artificial immunity was like artificial intelligence except that instead of trying to mimic the central nervous system, we were trying to mimic the immune system. Most of the applications for it involve security. That is probably the reason for the full title of the class: Digital Security through Artificial Immunity. The claim was that the immune system is as complex as the brain and does as immense a job. Distinguishing between the body and germs was a major task. By applying the principles used we can get computers to do things that they haven't been very good at.
The class went until eight forty-five. After class I walked home in the dark. The evening was a little chilly. When I got home I had email from Lincoln saying that he had moved into quiet housing. I called him and told him to come over. When he arrived I gave him a beer. There was no explanation for his mysterious absence. I put the music on on my laptop in the living room.
"I don't think that I would want to live in quiet housing." I said.
"Quiet housing isn't bad. My roommates are geeks."
"What are the rules?"
"Twenty-four hour quiet hours. I had to sign a contract saying that I would abide by the rules of the special housing."
"What do they do if you don't?"
"I don't know."
"So you are living with a bunch of geeks."
"Yeah, but they are quiet. They don't even have to make an effort to be quiet. They are naturally just quiet."
"I guess that is what you can expect from quiet housing."
"What about the guy who moved into my room?"
"A noisy undergraduate."
"What is his name?"
"Nate."
"Have you talked to him?"
"Yeah. He doesn't seem to get along particularly well with people."
"Good luck with that."
"Yeah, I am going to need it... I am giving a talk at Clarkson."
"When?"
"We haven't worked it out, yet. I will let you know."
"Who are you talking to?"
"The ACM Club."
"What are you talking about?"
"Life after college."
"Hmmm. Sounds interesting."
"You should join the undergrad telecom class I am taking."
"Why are you taking an undergrad telecom class?"
"Intro. Information Assurance. They didn't teach this stuff when I was an undergrad."
"What is it like?"
"It is really easy. It is taught at the undergraduate level which means that anybody can follow it. He talks about really simple, obvious things. It kind of reminds me why I got bored as an undergraduate and tuned out."
"If we were both in that class we would pass notes back and forth saying really derogatory things about the class and the professor and we would both fail."
"Possibly. At least if he saw our notes. If we learn anything worthwhile, I will show it to you."
"I didn't know we could take undergrad classes."
"Sure we can. We just don't get credit for them towards our degrees and they don't affect our grades."
"What is artificial immunity like?"
"The grades depend entirely on a paper and a presentation."
"That is why Bruno is so popular."
"He is going to assign the topics."
"He will assign topics that really suck and then we will have to write papers about them."
"He handed out two PhD theses today. You might want to stop by his office and get copies."
"I will do that."
"I am giving Jorge copies of my notes."
"That is interesting. Why does he want that?"
"He is interested in artificial immunity."
##
The next day I had a quick lunch before my information assurance class. In class, the professor continued the slide presentation from the previous class. He had gotten the slides from the professor who used to teach the class. These slides were interesting because they explained different ways of compromising systems by sending carefully crafted packets. For example, there is a series of packets that you can send which are called the ping of death. Each packet says that it is incomplete and to assemble it with the next packet. Soon the victim runs out of buffer space and crashes. That sounded like a fun practical joke to play on someone.
Other attacks involved corrupting lookup tables allowing you to impersonate a trusted host, taking over an established connection and many different ways of shutting down someone's network connection. Since the professor handed out copies of the slides, I didn't find it necessary to take notes. This was the sort of stuff I was hoping to get from this class. It further persuaded me not to drop it. He assigned a really trivial homework that was nonetheless time consuming. The assignment was mindless busywork, but it was being graded. I hate stuff like that.
After class I went to Kunsela. I needed to meet with both Nick and Jorge. Jorge wasn't in but Nick was. I stopped at Nick's office and asked him what I was supposed to do for the work study job. He told me to install Solaris on an UltraSparc 5 and set up some software and write some scripts on it to monitor the network and produce graphs of network activity. That sounded easy enough. He would get me an UltraSparc sometime in the near future.
I found Jorge. I told him that I had done a lot of work on my thesis over the summer and gave him a copy. He asked me to be the student representative on the committee to select a permanent dean of ISET. I agreed. Jorge said that he would look over my thesis. I wanted to defend my thesis as early as possible so that I could correct any problems in time for graduation. It was not unusual for students to come back after they were done with classes to defend their thesis or project. I didn't want to do that. Jorge and I copied my notes from Artificial Immunity on the copier downstairs and I left him with the copies.
##
That night I took Lincoln to dinner at Applebees. Applebees isn't the best restaurant, but they were right next to Walmart on the other side of route twelve. It was the only restaurant that I knew how to get to. I ordered the steak and salmon combo. It was obviously frozen but was still better than what they served at the cafeteria. The steak was a little overcooked. We each had two beers with our meal and I tried to find out why Lincoln had come to school late. He wasn't talking.
After dinner we went to Walmart. There was a new candy section and I bought a bag of Peppermint Patties. Peppermint Patties are easy to carry around because they are individually wrapped in aluminum foil. It was my plan to give Shawna candy when I saw her. It seemed somewhat appropriate given our age difference. I also got miscellaneous other things that I had forgotten to bring. Lincoln bought a new pair of shoes. I didn't think that buying a pair of cheap shoes at Walmart was such a good idea and said so. One's feet are too important for that.
We paid and left. As we went out through the inventory control system, Lincoln commented on it.
"The alarm is very annoying. Once I bought a pair of shoes and they didn't remove the inventory control tag. Then every time I walked into a store, the alarm would go off. It took weeks to figure out what the source of the problem was."
"I thought they used RFID so that they could track the inventory to the appropriate item."
"They only use RFID at the pallet level, so far. That allows them to keep track of shipments. RFID is too expensive to put in everything."
"How much does it cost?"
"About ten cents each."
"It will be better when it is cheap enough to keep track of individual goods."
"Not really. Then when you walk down the street they will be able to track you by the RFID in your clothes."
"Like it is really so hard to follow someone. RFID is our friend."
"Soon RFID readers will know what you are wearing and carrying and will flash advertisements tailored to you."
"I like individual service."
We went back to campus. I told Lincoln to come over at eight for beer time. Then I worked on my computer. Now that we had a class, I was able to better direct my search for information on artificial immunity. I found a number of papers and even a conference known as ICARIS. Although this was a new area of study, a lot of progress had already been made on it. I found that the most prominent researcher in the field seemed to be a professor at University of New Mexico named Stephanie Forrest. She had been a coauthor on the first paper to suggest the idea and was an author or coauthor of many more papers on artificial immunity. A number of PhD students at her university wrote their PhD theses on it. Judging from funding notes, they seemed to be supported by DARPA. DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They support high risk research for the defense department and are responsible for bringing us the Internet.
When Lincoln came over, we had the suite to ourselves. It was hard to know what Nate might be doing but it was clear that he liked to go to night clubs and drink too much. Rohit and his friends seemed to rotate between suites. Fortunately it wasn't our turn. I put on the music on the laptop in the living room and got out some beer. I told Lincoln that we saw some interesting slides in Information Assurance and got them out for him. He sat and went through them.
"Very interesting," he commented.
"This is good stuff. We also get to do labs."
"Who are you going to send a ping of death to?"
"We have to do the labs in a special information assurance lab that is not connected to the network."
"No reason you can't do extracurricular research."
"Actually, we were warned not to."
"Do you think the whole class will be like this?"
"I hope so. Friday is the last day to drop it."
"I still don't understand why you are taking an undergrad class."
"I need to take nine credit hours for my financial aid."
"Not if it is your last semester."
"Really? Maybe I should drop it."
"I would. You might enjoy the class, though. I don't know."
"How is Automata going?"
"Automata is interesting."
"Are you doing the homework?"
"No. He doesn't collect the homework."
"If you don't do the homework you will get a crappy grade."
"I think I will do okay."
"He gave a third of the class Cs last year."
"Yikes. That is pretty hard."
"Yeah. I got an A."
"Yes, you mentioned that."
"What made you decide to take Automata?"
"I needed another core class."
"I thought you had three."
"I think I need one more."
"Okay. You know what I plan to do with the candy that I bought, don't you?"
"No. What do you plan to do with it?"
"I plan to give it to little girls."
"Little girls?"
"Well, Shawna."
"Shawna will like that."
Soon I became very tired. It was all I could do to keep from falling asleep right on the couch. Lincoln went back to his suite and I turned off the music and went to bed. I wouldn't have any more classes until Monday. My schedule kept me busy on Monday through Wednesday leaving me with four day weekends.
\chapter{} Chapter 23
My Aunt Mary Lynn needed help with her computer so I asked Lincoln to go out there with me on Friday. He said that was fine, but we had to work around his lab. He was Roger's TA and taught lab on Friday mornings. I said that we could leave after his lab. So it was settled that we would go out to the farm on Friday.
I arrived early for dinner that night. I wanted to see Shawna. Shawna didn't usually come in until later so I sat and talked with Lincoln well after I was done eating. Eventually Shawna came in. I waited until she sat down, then I went over to her table and gave her a York Peppermint Patty.
"Wow! Thank you. You didn't have to do that."
"Anytime. I have a whole bag of them that I got at Walmart."
"I am going to save it to eat after dinner."
"Okay. How are your classes going?"
"I am taking graphic design classes. I have big projects in all of my classes."
"Graphic design? What happened to computer science?"
"I changed my major. I don't like programming."
"Changed it to what?"
"Information design."
"Okay. Talk to you later."
I was disappointed that she changed her major. I figured that I would give her a piece of candy every time I saw her. I went back to my table and bussed my tray. Then Lincoln and I left. I told Lincoln to come over at seven. SUNY IT now carried Fox News Channel and I thought that we might like to watch The Fox Report, a national news program, before beer time.
Shortly before seven, Lincoln rang our bell. I let him in and we went in my room. I turned on the television which up until then hadn't got much use. I set the channel to Fox News Channel. Shepard Smith recounted the day's events. After the Fox Report was over, I got a couple of beers out of the refrigerator and gave one to Lincoln. Instead of putting on music, we decided to watch The O'Reilly Factor. It was good to know what was going on in the world.
After we got tired of O'Reilly, I told Lincoln about Information Assurance.
"We have to write a term paper. I turned in my topic today."
"What was your topic?"
"Iterated ciphers."
"Huh?"
"You know, like DES, AES, Blowfish, etc."
"That sounds interesting."
"The professor holds the kids hands all semester working on the term paper. By the time someone reaches college they shouldn't need supervision to write a term paper."
"What does he do."
"Oh we have to turn in a bibliography at such and such date and an outline at another date, etc. It is so grade school."
"Some kids wouldn't start on it until the night before it was due."
"The solution for kids like that is a bad grade."
"Remember they are undergrads."
"We were writing term papers with no supervision by fourth grade."
"That was a competitive private elementary school, right?"
"Yeah. But college students should be able to do at least as well as a fourth grader."
"Yeah, that is true. You are the one who signed up for the undergrad class."
"I know. It has become annoying. The professor makes us watch videos put out by telecommunication companies. What a waste of time."
"That sounds pretty awful."
"You would think that he would teach the class. He is the professor. This is a teaching college."
The next day we had Artificial Immunity after dinner. Fortunately Shawna came in before we had to leave the cafeteria and I gave her a piece of candy. She commented that I was going to give her diabetes. After class we listened to some music and drank some beer.
##
The next day after class, Nick got me an UltraSparc 5 out of a room where a large number of donated UltraSparcs were being tested. He took it up to a locked lab on the third floor near Jorge's office. We got it plugged in. We went back to his office where he burned a number of discs to load Solaris from. I took the discs upstairs and put the first one in the CDROM drive. I typed boot at the console prompt. It said that it couldn't boot from the hard disk. I spent half an hour playing with the bootstrap program until I finally figured out how to get it to boot from the CDROM drive. Once it booted, it presented some dialogs and installed Solaris. A few times I had to go back to Nick to get additional discs burnt. I named the computer Edif after my deceased dog.
I got IP numbers assigned to the machine and connected it to the network. I set up an account on the machine so that I could log in remotely. I installed my Secure Shell key but it still wanted a password. After the machine was in good running order I closed the door and it locked behind me. From now on I would have to access it remotely.
##
On Friday, after Lincoln's lab, we drove to my grandmother's farm. Lincoln looked at the computer and I talked with my grandmother. My grandmother wasn't getting any younger and one of the reasons that I had chosen SUNY IT was so that I could spend some time with her. We stayed for a couple of hours and then went back to SUNY IT. On the way back, I talked about my thesis.
"I need to defend my thesis."
"When are you going to do that?"
"I don't know. I am making slides. I want to do it as early as possible."
"How early?"
"Early October. Before fall break."
"Why so early?"
"So that I have plenty of time to make revisions if I have to."
"Sounds smart."
"Anyway, I was wondering if you could help me practice for my presentation."
"What do you want me to do?"
"I will give practice talks and you listen. Then you can tell me how I did."
"Okay. I can do that."
"Thanks."
I made forty-five slides for my thesis presentation. Some of them had graphs from my thesis. I arranged with Lincoln to try them out on Monday afternoon when a classroom with a projector was free. On Monday I brought my laptop to school. After Information Assurance, I hurried to Kunsela and set up in the free classroom. I waited a while for Lincoln to show up. He arrived five minutes late. He took a seat in the back. I took note of the time and started talking. I gave my talk. When I was done, I checked the time. Only ten minutes had elapsed. Not only was that too short for a thesis presentation, there was no chance that someone could apprehend forty-five slides in ten minutes. I conferred with Lincoln. Lincoln said that I talked too fast and that I should slow down.
When I got home I worked on my slides some more. I added some slides and clarified others. I was going to give another practice presentation on Wednesday.
That night we had slop and gruel for dinner. That was the usual fare. Lincoln and I sat in the dining hall along with a few other kids including Brian. Lincoln mentioned that Nate was in the class that he was teaching. I wasn't surprised as the class was required for everyone in ISET. They had expected there to be two sections to the lab, but that semester there was only one. That made things a little easier for Lincoln.
"How is your wife and child doing?" Lincoln asked Brian.
"They are fine." I never figured out exactly what Brian's situation was.
"Shawna should be coming in, soon," I said.
"Do you have candy for her?" Brian asked.
"Yes, I do. I bet she will stop by our table to collect it."
"I don't know about you."
"For some reason, everybody is talking about it." I mentioned.
"I can't imagine why. Here she comes now."
Shawna came in and stood between Lincoln and I. "Hello sirs," she said.
"Hi, Shawna. I have something for you." I gave her a York Peppermint Patty.
"Thanks."
"Are you going to come to my thesis defense?" I asked.
"Sure. When is it?"
"Sometime in early October. Probably before fall break."
"Okay. Just let me know when and where."
"Great! Thanks."
"Who else is coming?"
"I expect Andrew will be there." Andrew was also a sophomore.
"Okay. I am looking forward to it. What is it about?"
"Cryptography."
After I got home from dinner, the buzzer rang. Rohit answered it since it was probably for him. I heard a woman talking to him. I looked out the window and Sherry was there. I figured that when she asked for me, I would let her in. Instead of asking for me, she asked Rohit questions about me including a question about my finances. Rohit couldn't possibly know the answers. Pretty soon she left. It seemed strange that she would come to my apartment but not ask to see me.
That evening Lincoln and I watched The Fox Report and had some beers. I mentioned that I had sent a draft of my thesis to Roger. In order to prevent the draft from being confused with the final copy, I had used a \LaTeX package known as draftcopy. This package printed DRAFT in large gray letters diagonally across every page.
"So I got only one comment from Roger." I said.
"What was that?"
"He wanted to know how I got it to put DRAFT on every page."
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him the \LaTeX code that did it. I mentioned that I don't know how to do it with troff."
"So how is Information Assurance going?"
"It is as easy as sin but the kids are going to get crappy grades anyway. Today half the kids skipped the lecture and didn't turn in their homeworks."
"They don't care."
"That is obvious. I not only want to get an A, I want to get the only A."
"How will you do that?"
"Easy. I will just do enough better than the other students that they can't compete. It really shouldn't be too hard."
Around nine o'clock I became very sleepy. I dozed off on the couch. When I woke up, Lincoln was gone. I dumped out my beer and went to bed.
On Tuesday morning I got up at seven. I took a shower and went to breakfast. At breakfast there generally were more adult employees of the university stopping by for coffee and donuts than students. The undergraduates wouldn't get out of bed at all if they didn't have classes. After breakfast I went back to my room and checked my email. SUNY Buffalo has an automated application tracking system. It wasn't kept strictly up to date, though. The person running it, Yvette, emailed me that they had everything except for Jorge's letter of recommendation. I didn't want to bug him about it, but I figured that I should remind him. The UB application was for the following fall, so there was plenty of time. I included my resume in all of my doctoral applications which turned out to be a good idea. Both schools that eventually accepted me wanted to take advantage of my experience writing software. In the end I would cancel the Buffalo application before they could make a decision.
I got up in time for lunch. Lunch was my least favorite meal. None of their lunch menus really appealed to me that much. It also wasn't very good socially. Sometimes I ate with Lincoln or Brian, but mostly I ate lunch alone. It was too hard to coordinate with other students to eat lunch in a group.
After lunch I worked on my term paper for the undergraduate telecommunications class. I studied the literature about Feistel ciphers from Crypto conferences going back to 1984. I paid particularly close attention to cryptanalytic efforts. The landscape seemed to littered with broken codes. Whit Diffie was an expert in this sort of cipher and had obtained the spec for a Soviet version that was used in the same way as DES (Data Encryption Standard). I wrote to him to ask for a copy of the spec. He replied promptly, sending me a uuencoded tarball with the TeX source in it. I thanked him for the information.
We had chicken parmesan for dinner that night. That was my favorite Sodexho meal and made up for the crappy lunch. As I practiced the sin of gluttony, Shawna came in. I talked with her and gave her some candy. Soon I would need to buy another bag of candy.
After dinner we went to Artificial Immunity. Bruno had already assigned the topics for our term papers. Mine was "Artificial Immunity and Pattern Matching." On the piece of paper assigning the topic, he had given me some pointers to papers that I might want to look up. I thought that was a good topic because Artificial Immunity is really a pattern matching system. After doing the literature search, the term paper should be easy to write.
The lecture that night involved a complicated combinatorial analysis of an artificial immunity system. It contained the level of detail that one would expect from a PhD thesis. I was actually getting a lot out of this class. I hadn't known what to expect when I signed up for it. Just as Shawna said this was her graphic design semester, this was my computer security semester. It would be good to get some security under my belt before going to a doctoral program to study it, but my classes this semester were too late to affect my application for Stevens. If I wasn't accepted at Stevens, I would send my final transcript to the other two schools in January.
After class Lincoln and I went back to my suite. We never went to Lincoln's suite because it was quiet housing so we couldn't listen to music and I had the beer. For some reason, Lincoln didn't want to drink in front of his roommates. We had some beer and listened to some music but it was pretty late and I was tired. He left about ten o'clock and I went to bed.
On Wednesday we had another Information Assurance class. Teaching must have been too much work for the professor because he had us watch another "webinar." I had already noticed that the webinars were not always factually correct. I really thought that it would be better if he taught the class himself instead of putting on a video. SUNY IT is a teaching school. Professors do not need to do research in order to get tenure. So teaching was his only responsibility.
I gave another practice presentation. This time it lasted fifteen minutes. It was still too short and I was still talking too fast, but there was progress. Lincoln said that it was easier to follow. I was going to try again on Monday.
I didn't like dinner so during beer time that night I called The Cat's Den and ordered a large pizza. Then Lincoln and I walked up there and picked it up. We ate almost the entire thing. I left the remaining slice in the box in the living room in case one of our roommates wanted it.
\chapter{} chapter 24
After breakfast on Thursday I worked on my slides. I revised the ones I had and added a few more. I only had one or two more opportunities to practice before my thesis defense. I felt that ought to be enough for a half hour talk. Jorge had asked me to attend a conference at SUNY Buffalo but I declined. I wanted to go but I had to prepare a midterm presentation for Artificial Immunity. I felt that I needed to concentrate on my core responsibilities first before taking on additional ones.
We had fried clams for lunch. I could feel the cholesterol hardening in my arteries. After lunch I started preparing slides for my Artificial Immunity presentation. Over the course of the semester, there would be three presentations in Artificial Immunity. So the trick was to give an interesting presentation but to leave enough material for the next presentation. I also prepared a presentation for Information Assurance on Linux security.
When it was time for dinner, I brought my car to the student center so that Lincoln and I could go to the beer store after dinner. Going into the second floor of the student center from the parking lot, I saw Shawna outside the door sucking on a cigarette with some friends. I don't know why young women are fascinated with cigarettes, I suppose that they believe it will make them look older. I was disappointed. I didn't lecture her, though. I gave her a piece of candy. She had bought a car the previous summer so it was possible that she drove, rather than walked, to the student center.
At dinner, Lincoln and I chatted.
"Have you seen the menu for the rest of the week?" I asked.
"No, how is it?"
"The usual. Thanksgiving on Sunday."
"Every Sunday here is Thanksgiving."
"I don't like turkey." I made a face. "The good news is that they are offering tortellini as the vegetarian entree. I think that I will eat that."
"You sure like to plan out your meals in advance, huh?"
"Yeah, I don't like surprises."
"We can always get pizza."
"Yes, there is that possibility. I added some slides to my thesis presentation."
"How many does that make?"
"Sixty-two."
"That is a lot of slides."
"Yeah, but my presentation doesn't seem very long."
"We will try it again on Monday."
"Shawna is coming in. Hey! Shawna!"
"Hello sirs." Shawna said. I got a peppermint patty out of my jacket pocket.
"Here is some candy."
"More candy! Thank you."
"No problem."
Shawna went to go get some food. Lincoln and I bussed our trays and left. As I went through the student center, Rob asked me for a piece of candy. I said no. He asked why not. His friend said, "Grow breasts." You would think that Rob, of all people, would know that. Lincoln and I went upstairs and got in my car to go to the beer store. On the way there the radio played Californication by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I hadn't heard that before, but I liked the song. I decided to get a copy of it for my computer.
I got a case of Sam Adams and gave beer guy my Discover card. He rang it up. Then we drove back to the Adirondack dorms. I carried the case of beer to my building. It was kind of heavy to carry across the quad and I was still concerned about being stopped by an RA. Technically we weren't supposed to have more than twelve beers per person. When we got there I put it under my bed. I put the old case in the closet and we would put the bottles in it as we emptied them. Lincoln said that he would come by at eight for beer time and I went into my room and worked on my computer.
***
Soon it was time for my thesis defense. It was the Friday before fall break. Lincoln couldn't make it because he was teaching lab. I got a video camera from instructional resources. I had a blank video tape from Walmart to put in it. My family couldn't be there to watch me defend my thesis but I would tape it for them. I had my laptop with the presentation on it. I went to set up in the room but there was a class running past its allotted time in it. I waited for ten minutes. Then I went and found Jorge and told him the situation. He said that the room should be free. When I got back to the classroom, the students were leaving, but my presentation was already running late. I only had the room for a limited time. My last practice presentation had lasted twenty minutes. I expected the final presentation to be longer because there would be questions. I had learned to count to five before switching slides so that the audience could absorb what was shown. I gave Jorge a printout of the slides.
I set up my laptop in the podium and plugged it into the VGA cable. I turned on the projector and pushed the buttons on my laptop that made it send video to the projector. Shawna and Andrew took seats in front of the podium and Nick took a seat to the back. The three professors: Roger, Bruno and Jorge took a row of seats in the middle. It was time. Jorge introduced me.
I started talking. I paged through the slides as I talked. This went for five minutes before Roger asked me to go back to a previous slide. Roger had a lot of questions. Then he saw that Jorge was following along with the hard copy. He asked Jorge if he could see it. Jorge gave the printout to Roger. I resumed my talk.
Roger frequently interrupted my talk with questions, which I answered. I had to think on my feet. Fortunately my experiences in the Silicon Valley gave me a certain amount of poise. It also helped that I was required to take speech classes and give presentations in prep school when I was a kid. I wasn't nervous but my mouth was getting dry. Lincoln's lab was over and he slipped in the room. The talk and questions went on for half an hour. Finally Bruno asked, "So your claim is that if you can minimize this function you can break RSA?"
"I don't want to make that strong a claim," I said. "The function must be logarithmic on the size of n and we currently don't know if that is the case."
Bruno nodded and I finished up my talk. Jorge told me that I had to leave the room while they discussed it. I tore down my laptop and the video camera and everyone left except for Jorge, Bruno and Roger. In the hallway I talked with Shawna and Andrew. They were both impressed with my work. I returned the video camera and bought a bottle of water out of the soda machine. Then I went back and waited outside the room.
They were deciding if my thesis would pass. I wished that I was a fly on the wall in that room. I sat down on the floor with my backpack next to me. The minutes ticked by. After they had deliberated for half an hour they came out. Jorge said that I passed but Roger had some revisions that he would like for me to make. Roger said that he would get in touch with me. I called my mother and told her the good news.
Lincoln and I walked out the front entrance of the building to the parking lot. I had my stuff loaded to go to Lake George. We drove back to Adirondack to get Lincoln's stuff. I had consulted MapQuest for directions on how to get there. Soon we were on the highway.
It took a couple of hours to get to Aunt Sue's house near Silver Bay on Lake George. There was a lot of driving through the Adirondacks involved. We had packed our clothes and a case of Sam Adams. I also had my laptop computer and the tape of my thesis defense. We arrived at her house in the afternoon. We unloaded the car and went in. I was pleased to see Aunt Sue and I was also pleased to be at Lake George. Aunt Sue got out a container of cocktail shrimp from the supermarket and we snacked on it.
We put some beer in the refrigerator. Aunt Sue and Lincoln talked. I mentioned to Aunt Sue that Lincoln was a member of Campus Crusade for Christ. That pleased her. She cooked tuna steak for dinner. She asked Lincoln how he liked his tuna. Lincoln didn't know because he hadn't had tuna. I told him to eat it rare. She grilled the fish on the grill outside. It was very tasty. Aunt Sue is a good cook. We had a couple of beers with dinner and then I went to bed.
The next day Aunt Sue brought Lincoln and I to Lake George Village. We bought tickets for a cruise on a steamboat called The Mine-Ha-Ha. It would be a while before the cruise so we wandered around the village for a while. I got some coffee while we waited. Soon it was time to board. The boat blew its big whistle.
We got a table on the main deck, inside, on the starboard side of the boat. The bar was to the aft. Once the boat was under way, I got us each a pina colada. The captain announced the mansions on millionaire's row as we went by it. Unfortunately that was on the port side, so we figured we would see it on the way back. When we finished our pina coladas we got some Sam Adams beer and sipped on that.
We went all the way up the giant lake with the captain announcing all the points of interest as we went by. He talked continuously through most of the trip. I pointed a few things out to Lincoln that weren't announced such as Little Suicide which Chris, Jan and I used to dive off of when we were kids. It was a fun tour and oriented Lincoln on the lake pretty quickly. When we got back, Aunt Sue picked us up. We went part way up the lake and stopped at a grocery store. Aunt Sue said that she would be back and went in. Lincoln and I went across the street where there was a bar. We had a beer and talked with the bar tender. After the stop we continued driving up the lake to Aunt Sue's house.
When we got back we watched the video of my thesis defense. It came out pretty well except for a buzzing noise in the background. I planned to load it on my computer and make a DVD of it when we got back to SUNY. Aunt Sue started cooking dinner. She made another tasty dinner for Lincoln and I. We had some beer with dinner. We were celebrating my birthday which would be on Thursday. Aunt Sue had NPR on in the background. That was the only radio or television that could be tuned in around there.
The next day Lincoln and I went up to Fort Ticonderoga. Lincoln and I toured the fort. We stood up on top with the cannons and I showed Lincoln how the cannons could control the boats in both Lake George and Lake Champlain. I told him about Fort Ti's history. How the French lost it to the British. How the British gave it up to the Americans without firing a shot. It didn't seem as though the fort was particularly defendable.
We toured the displays of antique firearms, knives, uniforms, etc. Some dated as far back as the French and Indian War. It was very interesting and gave a feeling for how life was like for the troops garrisoned in the fort back then. We read about how the fort was abandoned and people carried off the stones to build houses. Then the fort was restored as a museum. All in all, we spent a few hours at Fort Ticonderoga.
We drove back to Aunt Sue's house and had another nice dinner. I tried to lead Lincoln up a path through the woods but we took a wrong turn and ended up back on the road. I decided that it wasn't meant to be. The next morning Lincoln and I packed up our clothes, the remaining beer and my laptop and drove back to Utica. When we got there we stopped at Walmart where I bought a device to digitize video and a VCR. It seemed like a lot of money to spend on one video. They were about twenty dollars each. One only defends his masters thesis once. When we got home, I hooked the VCR to the digitizer. I hooked the digitizer to my laptop. Then I digitized the video of my thesis presentation.
I transferred the video to my Linux computer and started applying filters to it to try to get rid of the low frequency hum. After experimenting with different filters, I made a bandpass filter that seemed to fix it. The problem was that once I separated the audio from the video to apply the filter, I couldn't merge them together again right. Lincoln and I spent a few hours trying to fix it but then I gave up. I went back to the laptop. The digitizer came with software for encoding DVDs so I made an ISO 9660 file that could be played on a DVD player and transferred it to my Linux computer. My Linux computer had a DVD writer while my laptop only had a CD writer.
I burned several copies of my masters thesis defense onto DVD-ROM including one for each member of the thesis committee. I made one for Shawna, as well.
I had email from Professor Wright at Stevens Institute of Technology asking me to come for an interview. I agreed and asked when she wanted to schedule it for. I mentioned that Fridays work best for me because of my class schedule. I was excited because out of many applications only a few people get interviewed. The admissions picture was looking up. It seemed as though this semester would involve more travel than previous semesters. I told Lincoln the good news and he was excited for me.
\chapter{} chapter 25
On Thursday afternoon, I met with Jorge.
"Today is my birthday," I told him.
"I am having a party tonight. Why don't you come over."
"Uh, okay. Where do you live?"
He drew me a map which I was sure that I could not follow. He also gave me a phone number to call. I agreed to be there at seven.
Later, I tried to go to the address that he told me and got lost. I couldn't reach him on the phone, either. Eventually I gave up and went back to my room. The phone rang and it was Jorge, asking me where I was. I replied that I got lost and couldn't reach him on the phone. He started to give me new directions and I said to give me an address. He did and I ran it through MapQuest. My printer didn't work so I copied the instructions down from the computer. With the MapQuest directions, I was able to get there in short order.
I wasn't sure which house it was. The one that seemed to be the most likely candidate had the lights out and the blinds drawn. As I stood there trying to figure it out, a man came with a box of beer. I asked him if he knew which house belonged to Jorge Novillo. He replied that he did and that was where he was going. He took me around back and we went in the back door. I entered in the kitchen. Jorge was there along with two women who I didn't know. I had met them at the Chinese restaurant a year earlier. There were a few more miscellaneous people there. It was enough to make a crowd. They gave me a beer. There was some sort of Greek food on the table and they started serving it. They gave me a plate of it. I drank my beer and ate my food.
Most of the people there were very extroverted. They were talking and laughing and I made comments when it was expected of me.
"Who are you going to vote for?" one of the women asked. "Not Bush, I hope."
"Actually..." I started.
"You know, I might vote for Bush," Jorge said.
"Did you notice that the Indian students all get the same answers?" the student who brought the beer asked.
"Yes, they get the same wrong answers. I give them all C." Jorge replied.
It went on for a couple of hours. Then Jorge indicated that the student who brought the beer and I should go upstairs with him. I had never met this student before, which seemed unusual. The second floor turned out to be furnished as a separate apartment. Jorge had a big screen TV, a fancy stereo, a computer desk and some nice couches in his living room. We sat on the couches and Jorge turned on the TV. We talked with the TV going in the background. After a while Jorge started snoring. I thought that might mean that it was time to leave. The women came upstairs and I noted that Jorge was asleep and asked if I should go. They insisted that I should say. Jorge woke up. Then they filled a special cup with some sort of tea leaf and poured hot water in it. We passed the cup around, each taking a sip through the straw. This was an South American tradition.
When I got home late that night I called Lincoln. Lincoln doesn't go to bed until it is time to get up. Lincoln came and we had some beer together. I told Lincoln about my adventure. We drank a couple of Sam Adams and then Lincoln went home and I went to bed.
It was only a week until I gave my speech at Clarkson and I had written out my comments in the form of slides that I would look at on the monitor of my laptop while I talked. I wasn't going to project them. Lincoln agreed to help me practice for the talk.
On Monday after class we went to an unused classroom and I practiced my speech. It went for half an hour. Lincoln thought that it was good. That night, at dinner, Lincoln and I talked.
"So I will drive up there Thursday morning, give my talk that evening and spend the night in a hotel." I said.
"How far is it?"
"About one hundred fifty miles due north. I will take route 12 to route 11."
"That is almost in Canada."
"Yeah. It was cold when I was an undergraduate. I remember one night I left my car on the street. It was forty below zero that night. About one in the morning the police called and told me that I had to move it so that they could plow. I put on underwear, long johns, a jumpsuit, a sweatshirt and my Air Force ROTC extreme cold weather parka. I went out to my car. The oil had turned to jelly and it took me ten minutes to get it to start. Then I took it in the parking lot. I ran it for forty minutes to let the battery recharge. The temperature gauge never moved. It was stuck on cold."
"Forty below Fahrenheit or Celsius?"
"Forty below Fahrenheit equals forty below Celsius. That is where they intersect."
"Oh."
"Hey look, Shawna came in. I am going to go give her a piece of candy."
Shawna came by our table and I gave her a York Peppermint Patty. She said, "Thank you, sir."
"I am giving a talk up at Clarkson on Thursday," I mentioned.
"Oh, what is the talk about?"
"Life after college."
"That should be interesting."
"I hope so. I am going to drive up Thursday morning."
"Well, have fun."
"Thanks. I will."
Shawna went to get her dinner.
"It will be interesting to see how Clarkson has changed since I was an undergraduate." I said.
"In what ways do you think it has changed?" Lincoln asked.
"Well, when I graduated they were building CAMP, the center for advanced materials processing. They also built the student center. I don't know what else they might have built. That was more than ten years ago and back then we said that in ten years the science center would break in half and slide down the hill."
"I doubt that."
"I guess I will see."
"What else?"
"I remember the students at Clarkson as being more studious than the undergraduates that I have encountered here."
"Maybe they still are."
"I hope so."
The next day I worked on term papers until it was time for Artificial Immunity. I read a lot of scholarly papers. Some people cite websites in their term papers. I always cite scholarly work. This may be why I get good grades on term papers and a lot of people don't. In both my term paper for Artificial Immunity and my term paper for Information Assurance, I had my own ideas. In the Artificial Immunity paper, I describe a system that I devised to use artificial immunity to find anomalous traffic in a stream of intercepts. In the Information Assurance paper, I describe my own idea for producing secure S-boxes.
That night we had chicken parm for dinner. Chicken parm was my favorite meal in that cafeteria. Lincoln and I were sitting and eating. We couldn't stay too long, because class started at six. I doubted that I would see Shawna as she usually got to the cafeteria fairly late. Lincoln and I were just picking up our trays to leave when Shawna came in. I waved to her and she came by.
"Hi Shawna. We were just getting ready to go to our class. Here, I have something for you." I gave her a peppermint patty.
"Thank you. What class do you have?"
"Artificial Immunity. It is actually pretty interesting."
"Okay."
"Okay, we have to go. Talk to you later."
"Sure."
We headed out to class. The weather was nice, not too hot, not too cold. The leaves were turning and the trees were magnificent. Fall is my favorite time of year. We got to class and took our usual seats.
##
After class we walked home through the cool night. I was a little chilly, not having thought to pack a sweatshirt. When we got back, I got some Sam Adams out of the refrigerator and opened it with the bottle opener I kept on top of the fridge. I gave one to Lincoln. "Have you noticed how he lectures with his eyes closed?" I asked.
"Yeah. He hasn't done that in other classes I took with him."
"The problem is that when I raise my hand, he can't see me."
"I think that he is tired."
"What type of grades do you think we will get?"
"Everyone will get an A." I doubted that. SUNY IT had clearly done a good job of resisting the pressures for grade inflation.
"I would feel better if there was an exam or something."
"Don't worry about it. You write good term papers."
"I guess so."
The next day I went to breakfast at seven o'clock sharp. I had to wait around for a few minutes until they opened the door. I ate some bacon, coffee and orange juice. After breakfast I took a mid-morning nap. I got up in time for Information Assurance. He took us to a computer lab to watch another "webinar." In this video, the speaker claimed that factoring was NP-complete. I knew this to be false. In fact, if someone could come up with an NP-complete cipher, he would become rich and famous. This really bugged me and when we got back to the classroom I raised my hand. The professor called on me. I said, "Factoring is not NP-complete as the webinar claimed." He didn't dispute that, but he didn't seem to like me challenging the video. Actually there were many factual errors in the cryptography parts of the videos. That one just happened to be particularly egregious.
On Thursday I got up, ate breakfast and got in my car. It was a three and a half hour drive up to Clarkson. I took route 12 to Watertown and then route 11 from there. Routes eleven and twelve are ordinary highways. Not split highways and not Interstates. They have many speed zones on them, mostly thirty zones. They are very hilly. When I was a student at Clarkson I drove on them frequently and in snow storms. I always encountered logging trucks. Going down the hill, the logging trucks tailgate you and want to go a hundred miles an hour. They pass you, whether it is safe or not, and then you are stuck behind them as they crawl up the next hill. Being stuck behind a logging truck is aggravating but being in front of one is terrifying. Fortunately I didn't encounter any logging trucks on this trip. It certainly wasn't for a lack of trees. The counties I drove through, including Hamilton and St. Lawrence, are the poorest counties in New York State. The only sources of jobs for the residents of Hamilton County are logging and highway maintenance. St. Lawrence was better as it had some universities and prisons to employ people. I went past farms with giant boulders in the fields. I am not an expert on agriculture, but I don't think crops grow on rocks. I went past shotgun shacks with the insulation on the outside and house trailers. That is a rough way to go through the hard winters the region is known for.
When I got to Canton, I checked into the hotel which was next to St. Lawrence University. They said that they had wireless Internet but I couldn't get on. I was already wearing my suit, so I left my stuff in my room and drove to Potsdam, ten miles away. I went onto the Clarkson campus only to discover so many new huge buildings that I didn't recognize it. I drove to the parking lot in front of the Educational Resources Center, which had the library and computing centers. The sign said that I needed a parking sticker, but I just parked. I was betting that they weren't patrolling the lot. I went in the science center and found Professor Searleman's office. It was the same office she had when I was an undergraduate. The sign on her door showed that she had office hours in an hour. I decided to get something to eat.
I followed a path to the new student center. I had been at the student center once before, when I had visited Clarkson to work on a paper with Professor Benaloh. There was a giant food court. I bought some chili and took a seat. While I was eating my chili, a couple of cute coeds came and sat at the next table. One of them checked me out and said, "Love is in the air." I pretended that I couldn't hear and they started talking.
"You can't just lock yourself in your room and study for a week."
"I have to study for my classes."
"You have to get out of there once in a while."
I didn't catch anymore as I got chili on my pants and stained them.
This was a conversation that I would not expect to hear at SUNY IT. For me, it really pointed out the different attitudes toward studying at Clarkson and SUNY IT. Clarkson students were serious students while SUNY IT students were not. It is not just a matter of SAT scores, although those are important, it is also a matter of attitude that separated Clarkson from SUNY IT.
After I ate I went in the ERC to use the computer lab, but found a closed door where the computer lab used to be. I went in a new building that was connected to the science center with enclosed walkways. I found some huge computer labs, which I couldn't use because I didn't have an account, and saw the new student consultant area through glass. They had a giant plasma monitor and a lot of computers, like a military command center. It wasn't like this when I worked as a student consultant in the eighties. Back then, I sat in the lab in the ERC and helped students use the mainframe computers. I also got to track hackers. It paid minimum wage, but I was glad to have the money. Times sure had changed.
I went back to the science center and Professor Searleman was there, helping a student. I talked to her. We agreed to meet before the talk at seven. I went back to the hotel and watched Fox News Channel while attempting to clean my pants. The phone rang.
"Hello, Michael de Mare?"
"Yes, speaking."
"Hi. I am the president of the ACM club."
"How did you find me?"
"Easy. There are only two hotels and if you weren't in one, you would be in the other."
"Very smart. Where am I supposed to go tonight?"
It was a lecture hall in the new building that I had just been exploring. I told him that I could find it. I assumed that he had talked to Professor Searleman, so I didn't worry about going to her office.
When the time came, I drove back to Clarkson. I found the room and started setting up my laptop. A student who was also wearing a tie set up a very expensive video camera. I asked him to send a copy of the video to me and we exchanged email addresses. I found that if I stood behind the podium it hid the stain in my pants. I talked to the student.
"I see that there are ethernet ports at all the seats."
"We don't use those anymore. Everything is wireless."
"It seems to me that you wouldn't want students to use their laptops in class."
"It is up to them but you want to pay attention. It is a lot of money. Why waste it?"
Professor Searleman came in. She said, "There you are."
"A student called me and told me to come here," I said.
"Oh, good. I have to go to a seminar so you can start without me. I will try to catch as much of your talk as possible."
"Okay. Thank you."
Soon the audience had settled in and the student with the video camera started taping. I read my talk off of my laptop. The letters were big and it was easy to read. I tried to look at the students as much as possible, just glancing down to check my computer. I talked about my experiences in the Silicon Valley and highlighted some lessons I learned. The most important one was to use career services to get your first job. I talked for half an hour. During the last ten minutes, Professor Searleman came in. I did question and answer for another fifteen or twenty minutes. Then the talk was over. I chatted to Professor Searleman for a while. I gave her Professor Benaloh's new email address at Microsoft. Then I tore down my laptop and drove back to the hotel. There was a restaurant attached to the hotel so I had some salmon and Sam Adams for dinner.
\chapter{} chapter 26
The next morning I checked out and drove through the Adirondacks back down to Utica. I was reminded of some incidents that occurred when I was an undergraduate. Once I was driving up route twelve in the winter and hit a patch of black ice. I slid off the highway into the snowbank at fifty-five miles per hour. My car was unhurt. I got out and asked some people working at the farm there if I needed to provide information in case there was damage to the fence. They advised me to just go and called their boss an unprintable name. So I put the Bronco II in four wheel drive and got back on the road.
Another time back in the eighties, I crested a hill and a B-52 bomber was coming at me so low that I thought we were going to have a head on collision. Back in the eighties there were strategic Air Force bases like Griffiss and Plattsburg in the region. When I had been in Air Force ROTC at Clarkson, I had gone for a ride on a KC-135 refueler flying out of Plattsburg.
I arrived at SUNY IT in the early afternoon. I caught a late lunch in the cafeteria and took a nap. Soon it was time for dinner. I knew that dinner would be disappointment after having salmon the previous night. We had chicken tenders, which were okay. Lincoln loved the chicken tenders and always looked forward to them being served.
Lincoln and I sat in the cafeteria eating our chicken tenders. I wasn't bothering with a fork, I was just holding the chicken tender in my hand and taking bites out of it.
"How did your talk at Clarkson go?"
"It went well except that I got chili on my pants before the talk."
"That sucks."
"I stood behind the podium and it hid the stain."
"How did they like the talk?"
"The students seemed to like it. They asked a lot of questions."
"That is good."
"The students at Clarkson seem a lot more studious than the students here."
"So it is the way you remember it."
"They have a whole bunch of giant new buildings. At least five. Now I know what they are doing with their alumni contributions."
"Do you contribute?"
"Sure, I contributed by giving a talk."
"Where did you stay?"
"At a hotel in Canton, about ten miles from Clarkson."
"That sounds nice."
"I couldn't get my laptop to work with their wireless."
"That's too bad."
"So I watched Fox News."
"Well, at least you were able to get that."
"The drive up was pretty with the leaves turning. Like our trip to Lake George."
"That was nice."
"Here is Shawna. I can't wait to tell her about my talk at Clarkson."
Shawna was taking a seat at another table. I waved to her and walked over there.
"Hi, Shawna. Here is some candy."
"Hello. How are you?"
"I just got back from giving a talk at Clarkson."
"How did that go?"
"It went well. The scenery on the way up was nice."
"That is good. What did you talk about?"
"Life after Clarkson."
"That sounds interesting."
"Next week I have to go to New Jersey to interview for the PhD program at Stevens."
"Good luck with that."
"It seems like I am traveling a lot this semester."
"Traveling is good."
##
The next Thursday I drove down to my mother's house in New Jersey. Jorge was going to be on business in New York at the same time, so he was going to come over to have dinner on Saturday night. I also invited Mike S. and his wife Luba. I thought a dinner party would be just the thing to relax after a day spent interviewing.
I didn't know how to get to Stevens, but I was warned that I would get caught up in traffic for the Lincoln Tunnel. I used MapQuest to print directions. I was to be at the Lieb building at two in the afternoon. Professor Wright said that she probably wouldn't be in her office until just before two. Although it was only a half hour drive, I was concerned about traffic and left before one. I understood that the parking situation in Hoboken was desperate and that I would need a visitor's parking permit to park in a Stevens lot.
I followed the directions into the heart of Hoboken. Then I made a wrong turn and got lost. Fortunately, there were signs for Stevens. Also Hoboken is laid out as a grid with numbered east-west streets. It is difficult to get lost in Hoboken. I found the Lieb building and there was an empty metered parking space on the next block. I parked there. Fortunately I had a lot of quarters and the meter wasn't too expensive. The meter had a two hour time limit. I expected to need more than that but I figured that I could run out and put another quarter in it when the time came.
I went in the Lieb building. I was supposed to go to the second floor. I climbed the staircase but found the second floor door locked. There was a proximity key sensor by the door and a button for a doorbell. I rang the doorbell. There was no answer. I rang it again. Eventually a graduate student came and opened the door for me. I went in. It only took me a minute to find Professor Wright's office. She wasn't in, yet. Our meeting wasn't for half an hour. I waited in the room her office was off of. There was a laser printer and a table in there along with doors to a number of faculty offices.
I went back out in the hallway. There were doors to labs, an office suite and a little kitchen. In the little kitchen was a water cooler. I got myself a drink of water. I went outside to wait.
I kept track of the time, and at two I went back in and rang the doorbell again. It took a few minutes to gain entrance to the second floor. Professor Wright was in her office. We shook hands and she thanked me for coming. She asked me if I had been to Stevens before. I replied that I hadn't. She said that she would show me the campus. I gave her a DVD of my masters thesis presentation and left my briefcase in her office.
We walked toward the Hudson River. Just before we went through the gate onto the main campus, we stopped and looked at the magnificent view of Manhattan on the other side of the river. Then we walked up a little road on campus lined with dorms. Some of the dorms overlooked Manhattan. Some people pay a lot of money to get the sort of views that these dormitories have.
After the tour, we went back to her office. She asked me why I wanted to join the doctoral program at Stevens. I replied that I wanted to do research in cryptography and Stevens has cryptography research going on. I told her about the paper that Josh Benaloh and I had at Eurocrypt '93. She asked me about my masters thesis. I explained my masters thesis with the help of the white board. When I was finished she said, "That is very impressive for a masters thesis."
My mouth was dry and I asked if I could get a drink of water. She took me to the kitchen and I filled up a little plastic cup with water and drank it. Then she took me up to the third floor to interview with the chairman of the PhD committee.
Professor Duchamp was affable. We discussed the program, my expectations and what would be expected of me in it. He asked me when I hoped to graduate and I said in 2008. He said that was short but that people writing more mathematical theses tend to graduate faster than people doing theses that involve a lot of hacking. He was impressed with my background in mathematics. Then he got to his real concern.
"Will you be able to complete the program?"
"Yes."
"Because you are older. We are worried that you will have a wife or girlfriend saying, `You have to go out and make some money.' "
"I am unattached."
"Okay."
After I finished interviewing with Professor Duchamp, he took me back to Professor Wright's office. She then took me to the Professor Bloom's office. Professor Bloom is the department director. Professor Bloom didn't really have any questions for me. I explained one-way accumulators to him and he thought that they sounded useful. Then he wanted to discuss the upcoming election. I found this uncomfortable as he was a partisan democrat.
After my interview with Professor Bloom, I returned to Professor Wright's office. Then she introduced me to her graduate student, Yang, and left me at his cubicle on the first floor. I described my research to him and he talked a little about his research. When I asked for details, he seemed reluctant to explain them to me. We talked for half an hour and then he brought me back up to the second floor, using his proximity key to open the door.
I talked to Professor Wright a little more and then the interview was over. I stopped at the kitchen and got myself a cup of water, but I spilled it. I drank what wasn't on the floor and left.
Driving out of Hoboken was more difficult than driving into Hoboken because I got stuck in rush hour traffic. It took me an hour to get to my mother's office in Hackensack. That was only about ten miles. I didn't have any trouble finding my way, though. The next night we were having Jorge and Mike and Luba over for dinner.
On Saturday I went to the supermarket and bought a leg of lamb and some broccoli. My mother started dinner cooking and I got ready for dinner. I put on the suit I had worn to the interview with a fresh shirt. Soon Mike and Luba arrived. We talked and I showed Mike my mother's network. I didn't know where Jorge was. It got later and later and still no word from Jorge. Just as we were about to give up and sit down and eat, the phone rang. I answered it. It was Jorge and his sister. They were lost and needed directions from the George Washington Bridge. I told him how to get to my mother's house. We waited for another half an hour and he rang the bell. Then we had dinner. Dinner was lamb and rice and broccoli. The rice was sauteed in butter and cooked with bouillon. The broccoli was covered with almonds sauteed in butter.
At dinner we had a wide ranging discussion. Mike and Jorge hit it off pretty well. I mentioned that Luba had a doctorate in music and that I had worked with Mike in the nineties. Jorge found that interesting. After we were finished eating, Jorge asked me if he could use my mother's computer to get a map to the next place that he was supposed to be. I said sure and mentioned that Mom had a color laser printer.
At that, Mike said he had something that he wanted to copy using it and pulled a twenty dollar bill out of his wallet. Jorge said he had something, too, and pulled a hundred dollar bill out of his. We laughed. When dinner was over we went upstairs and I showed him the Linux server. He gave me the address and I put it into MapQuest. It came up with a map and directions, which I printed. Soon everyone left and we went to bed. Overall, it was a good day.
I stayed at my mother's until Sunday. On Sunday, I packed up and drove back to SUNY IT. I got there in time for dinner on Sunday night. I ate with Lincoln.
"How was the interview?"
"The interview was good. It helps to have some experience under your belt so that you don't get too nervous."
"What did you talk about?"
"I explained my masters thesis and we talked about the program."
"What else did they ask?"
"The head of the PhD program noted that I was older and wanted to know if I could finish the program."
"What else?"
"The department director wanted to know if I thought Kerry was going to win the election."
"What did you say?"
"I dodged the question."
"Did you get in?"
"I don't know. I hope to find out soon, though, as I want to start in the spring."
"What did they say about funding?"
"They said that they can't get a research assistantship online for me in time for the spring semester, so I will have to work as a TA the first semester if I join. Also, I told them that Stevens is my first choice and that if I am accepted, I will show up."
"They like to hear that?"
"Oh, yeah."
On Monday I got an email from Professor Wright saying that she had told the department that she would like me as a student and that I would almost certainly get an acceptance letter soon. I called Josh Benaloh and told him the good news. He seemed surprised and said that it was too early to tell.
"I am going to start in January," I said. "They have to accept me soon."
"Oh, I didn't know that it was that soon. I was thinking that it would be for the fall. Well, congratulations, then."
"Thank you for introducing me to Professor Wright and for writing the letter of recommendation."
"It was strongly worded but I think it was warranted."
"Thank you again."
I didn't want to tell everybody the good news until I got the acceptance letter. I am conservative that way. I did tell my family, though. I also mentioned it to Lincoln at dinner.
"I got an email from Professor Wright today."
"What did she say?"
"She said that she asked them to admit me and that I should be getting an acceptance letter soon."
"That is great news! When you get there, don't argue with them the way you argue with the professors here."
"Okay."
"And don't give her candy."
"Of course not. Except on Halloween. Then I give everyone candy."
"What did she say about funding?"
"I will have to work as a TA my first semester and then some funding should come on line. She wants me to write some software. She also thinks that I should apply for a Cyber Corps scholarship."
"What is Cyber Corps?"
"It is like ROTC for the NSA."
"Very nice."
"Stevens students are eligible because Stevens is an NSA Center of Academic Excellence."
"So they offer scholarships."
"Yes, for up to two years. For every year of scholarship there is a year required of government service. You are also supposed to work there over the summer. They pay full tuition and a stipend."
"What did you say?"
"I agreed in principle that I should apply. Since it is intended for the last two years of study, it seems too far in the future to really know what the funding situation is going to be."
"It sounds like a good opportunity."
"I think it is really intended to pay for bachelors and masters degrees, not doctoral study. I think I would prefer to work on research grants."
"So what other funding is available?"
"She has some NSF money to implement the research that she and her graduate student, Yang, did. There is already a student working on that and I would probably join him. It helps to have a software engineering background."
\chapter{} chapter 27
At dinner one night, Shawna came to our table to talk to Lincoln and I.
"We are having a food committee meeting tonight," she said.
"That is nice," I replied.
"I know that you think that it is cool not to get involved but it isn't."
"Okay."
"So I want you to come. It will only take half an hour."
I thought about it. I didn't want to sit through any sort of meeting that had the word committee in the title, but Shawna had come to my thesis defense. "Okay. I'll come."
"Lincoln?"
"I'll come, too." Lincoln said.
"Okay. It will be at seven in the cafeteria. Thanks, guys."
At seven o'clock it was time for the food committee meeting. Shawna, Lincoln, the manager of the cafeteria and I all sat at a round table in the cafeteria. The manager asked us if we had any comments. There were some comments. I said, "I really like the chicken parm."
"Okay. We will keep that on the menu." He made a note.
"They haven't been making the pizza on weekends."
"They are supposed to." He made another note.
Shawna said, "The food at the Cat's Den seems a little too expensive."
Everyone agreed except for the manager. He said, "That just shows that you are a hick from Central New York. If you went downstate that same food would cost two or three times as much."
This went on for a while. Then we started getting his complaints.
"It is impossible to serve food correctly in a seventies era cafeteria. SUNY needs to invest in a better physical plant."
"And the roof leaks," Lincoln pointed out.
"Exactly. They say that when they build the new building we will get a new cafeteria, but we need to make changes, now."
"What sort of changes?"
"We have eight thousand new menu items to choose from." He pulled out a glossy booklet. I looked at it and noticed salmon.
"I think we should have the salmon."
"You wouldn't like it. It is farm raised, not wild."
"I like it either way."
"We have fish once a week."
"Well, lets get rid of the cod and serve some salmon."
"We need to reduce the amount of food that goes back with the trays. When I see the tray returns, it breaks my heart. Of all of our cafeterias in upstate New York, this one costs the most per person and it is because of the returns."
"Okay. I don't think people should take food that they aren't going to eat."
"We need portion control. It will also make the students healthier. And we will post the calories by the entrees."
"How depressing."
The meeting didn't get out until almost eight-thirty. I was glad that I had the opportunity to tell him that I wanted salmon but I wasn't expecting a lot of action on that. At UCSB they serve salmon to the undergrads in the dining commons. They also have portion control.
##
In Information Assurance, we were supposed to give a presentation on three applications of cryptography. Most of the students talked about crap that they found on the web. When it was time for my talk, I got up and put up my slides. I first described one way accumulators, which Josh Benaloh and I introduced in a paper at Eurocrypt '93. I explained how they worked and what problem they were supposed to solve. I explained the associative property that they are abstractly based on and how to implement them with exponentiation. Then I explained the group membership problem and how they could be applied to that. I explained group signatures and how they could be applied to that. Finally, for my third application I described digital timestamping. When I was done talking about my research, the professor said, "That was a good talk." The next student showed some pretty pictures that he found on the web. Half of the undergraduates didn't even have presentations prepared when they were called on. Undergrads are so irresponsible.
After class a group of undergraduates came up to me. The leader said to me, "It is obvious that you are bored in this class. Why don't you drop it?"
"Why would I drop it? I expect to get an A in it."
"Yes, we know."
That night we had herb baked chicken for dinner. Lincoln and I demolished miniature drumsticks and breasts while we talked.
"So the undergrads in the Information Assurance class want me to drop it."
"Why?"
"Because I am making them all look bad. On the last exam I got a 95 and the average was 66. It was the highest grade in the class."
"Hmmm."
"Maybe I should get a tee-shirt that says Curve Assassin."
"That will make you popular."
"Anyway, my mother's sixtieth birthday is on December 6. She is having a party. I want you to come."
"Okay. That is just before finals."
"You are only taking one class that has a final."
"This is true. I will come."
"Cool. I want to get her a high definition television for her combination birthday/Christmas present."
"That sounds nice."
"We will have to go to Walmart to get it."
"Very good."
"We should buy it just before we go to New Jersey for the party."
"Of course."
Shawna came in and greeted us. I gave her a piece of candy. I was thinking about inviting her to my mother's party, but I hadn't made up my mind yet so I didn't say anything. I thought it would be fun to have a bunch of kids with me. I did want to tell her the good news about Stevens, though.
"I got email from a professor at Stevens. She said that she asked the department to admit me into the doctoral program."
"Does that mean you will get a PhD?"
"Barring any unforeseen obstacles, yes."
"Congratulations."
"Thanks."
"How long will that take."
"Oh maybe another four years."
"Wow."
"Yeah. It is a lot of effort."
"What will you do then?"
"I will probably be a professor."
"Very nice."
Shawna went to get her dinner and I told Lincoln that I needed a plan if I get the NSA scholarship since people aren't supposed to talk about it. "I guess I will tell everybody that I am in the greeting card business."
"Greeting cards?"
"Yeah. Like on Get Smart. I will say that my job is coming up with greeting cards. I already thought some up."
"Like what?"
"Roses are red,
violets are blue,
I can see,
your email too."
"That is good."
"Wait, I've got more:
Roses are red,
violets are blue,
I have a satellite,
pointed at you."
"Okay, that is enough."
"I am worried about housing."
"Why is that?"
"The deadline for housing applications is October 31, which I obviously missed."
"You will get housing. The question is who you will have to share it with."
"I don't know. I heard that they don't have enough graduate student housing. It is probably good that I will be starting in the spring semester because there is usually some attrition then but not many new students."
"I guess."
"Did I mention that I resigned my work-study job?"
"No. Did you write the scripts he needed?"
"Yes I did. I got everything I was tasked with working and then I resigned. I told him that I just didn't have enough time this semester with all of my traveling."
"What did he say?"
"He said that he understood."
I worked on my term papers. I had one for Artificial Immunity on pattern matching. I developed my own artificial immunity system for it. I had another one on symmetric ciphers for Information Assurance. I developed my own cipher for it. I did a careful literature search for each term paper. I found it easier to search the literature on ciphers because I had all the papers published at all the Crypto, Eurocrypt and Asiacrypt conferences since 1984 on my computer. Consequently I had a somewhat bigger bibliography for my information assurance paper. That bibliography was three single spaced pages long. It was my intention to prevent any other students from getting an A on the paper.
I sent email to Shawna asking her to come to New Jersey with me to my mother's birthday party. She didn't respond. Shawna never answered my emails. Some girls just don't answer emails. At dinner that night we had London Broil. It was overcooked, as usual. At the Food Committee meeting, the cafeteria manager had said that it was pink when they took it out of the oven, but continued cooking while it was on the serving line. He had also cited some state law about the internal temperature of roast beef.
I sat there nibbling on my London Broil until Shawna came in. I waved Shawna over and she came. I gave her a piece of candy.
"I am going down to my mother's in New Jersey for her birthday December 6. I would like you to come. We would have separate rooms and stuff."
"I'm sorry. I would like to but we are going to New York that weekend. My mother is taking me to a Broadway show."
"Okay. What show are you going to see?"
"I don't know, yet."
"You should see The Producers. It is funny and convenient to the subway. You can usually get tickets at the box office on the day of the show."
I guessed that her mother decided to take her to a Broadway show after she heard that a thirty-five year old man was inviting her nineteen year old daughter to go to New Jersey with him. Mother's can be like that. At least I had asked and I was sure that Shawna liked that.
I got my acceptance letter from Stevens and registered for classes. I registered for CS510 Theory of Programming Languages, CS520 Operating Systems, and CS765A Special Topics: Privacy in a Networked World. Professor Wright had suggested that I sign up for Privacy. She was teaching it and if it worked out, it would get its own number and become a regular class.
I applied online for housing. I indicated that I wanted a single at 1036 Park Ave, the cheapest graduate housing, but that I would take a triple as a second choice. I figured that I would live where they told me that they had room. There was another graduate building that was set up as suites like the housing at SUNY IT. I put that down as my third and fourth choices. It cost a thousand dollars a semester more than 1036 Park.
Since I was past the housing deadline, I wrote to Residence Life at Stevens to tell them that I was applying late. I asked them if I would be able to get into housing. They wrote back to say that they would assign rooms in January and would notify me as soon as I was assigned to a room. I wrote to Professor Wetzel to ask if I could have the CS503 Discrete Math for Cryptography requirement for the cryptography class that I expected to take in the fall waived. I told her about my extensive math background. I mentioned that I had been one class short of a second major in math and had taken Number Theory. I also mentioned that I would probably sit in on CS503 to make sure that I wasn't missing anything. She agreed.
Professor Wright wrote to me to tell me that she understood that I was to be the teaching assistant for CS434 Theory of Computation. That would be taught Monday and Wednesday mornings. CS765A would be taught Tuesday and Thursday mornings. CS510 would be Tuesday nights and CS520 would be Thursday nights. CS503 would be taught Monday nights and I would audit that. With all of this, I would only need CS601 Algorithmic Complexity to have all the classes for the qualifying exams. I had the text for that class, which was also on the quals reading list, and had even cited it in my thesis. I planned to take the quals in April even though CS601 wouldn't be offered until the fall.
\chapter{} chapter 28
That week I had to give presentations in both Information Assurance and Artificial Immunity. Information Assurance was easy. Most of the students gave inarticulate ramblings on various commercial web pages they had found with Google. I gave a professional talk which outlined different ciphers, the designs, the attacks and introduced my own cipher. I thought that some of the undergrads were going to die. Some of the students that were called on on Monday were not ready and were rescheduled until Wednesday. That seemed unforgivably irresponsible to me.
In Artificial Immunity, I gave my presentation. It went along pretty smoothly until I got to the system that I designed. The professor asked some questions which I fielded and expressed some concerns. Some of the students made faces at me. I don't think that I was popular at that moment. After I was done, a Indian student got up to give his presentation. He was rattled. I smiled because I enjoy being envied. I was the only one in the class who had his own work to present.
On Friday after Lincoln taught lab we got in my car to drive down to New Jersey for my mother's sixtieth birthday party. We drove east on the Thruway, which was I-90 at that point, until we got to Albany. There there was a fork and I followed I-87.
"We just got off I-90," Lincoln said.
"That is because the Thruway follows I-87 after Albany."
"I didn't know that."
"Well, how did you think it did the north-south thing?"
"I didn't know that there was a north-south part of the Thruway."
We drove for a couple more hours and then went through the Woodbury Toll Barrier. This surprised Lincoln, too. Then we were in the heavy traffic south of exit 16. I took exit fifteen to Route 17 south. This took us into New Jersey. As we were going down the big hill on route seventeen, I pointed out the Empire State Building in the distance. When we got to my mother's house, Lincoln said that he thought the neighborhood was very nice. Soon it was time to go out to dinner with Uncle Robbie. Uncle Robbie has a masters degree in civil engineering from Cornell. He is a devout Baptist and my grandmother refers to him as her "frustrated preacher son." We all went to a nice restaurant in Tenafly.
"Uncle Robbie, this is my friend Lincoln."
"Nice to meet you."
"Lincoln is with Campus Crusade for Christ."
"I was with Campus Crusade for Christ at Cornell. My daughter is active with them at Princeton."
This got them talking. I was glad that Lincoln and Uncle Robbie hit it off. Soon Lincoln came and sat down next to me. The waiter took our drink orders and gave us menus. I ordered a Sam Adams. I saw what I wanted on the menu, a stuffed fish, and planned to order it. There was some discussion about who was ordering what but they soon got that all resolved. When the food came, Uncle Robbie said grace. Then it was time to eat. I couldn't help but laugh about the kids who had to eat in the cafeteria that night.
After dinner, Uncle Robbie and his family went back to the hotel. We went back to my mother's house. We put Lincoln up in the room at the top of the stairs. The next morning I thought that we should go into Manhattan as Lincoln had never been there. Lincoln, however, wasn't interested. So we wasted the whole day. That night it was time for my mother's party. The restaurant where it was to take place had just been rebuilt and this was their first party.
The party was upstairs in the reception hall. The open bar had already started when we got there and I got a vodka and cranberry juice. Soon my sister arrived with her four kids. Within an hour the reception hall was full of people. Lincoln said, "This is as nice as many people's weddings." Waiters brought trays of appetizers around.
I introduced Lincoln to Mike and Luba. Soon it was time to sit down. I was talking to Mike when I heard Grandma calling me. She had saved me a place to sit next to Lincoln. I sat down. There were not enough seats and some people were standing. There was a buffet line with salmon and some other food. I got some salmon and sat down to eat it.
After we ate, my mother's five brothers and sisters got up and sang to her. The song was written by Uncle Robbie and was about life when they were kids. They were mostly out of tune. A good time was had by all.
The next morning there was a catered brunch at my mother's house. Pastries and mimosa were served. I just drank orange juice because I had to drive back to Utica. The brunch was mostly attended by people from my mother's church. After brunch, Lincoln and I drove back to SUNY IT.
##
On Monday night, Shawna came to our table while we were eating. I gave her a piece of candy.
"How was your party?" she asked.
"It was nice. Did you see The Producers?"
"No I wanted to see a new show that none of my friends had seen."
"What did you see?"
"Brooklyn."
"That sounds nice. I was born in Brooklyn."
"We had fun."
"That is good."
It was finals week. I only had one final exam. That was for Information Assurance. I had turned in term papers for both Artificial Immunity and Information Assurance the previous week. The grade for Artificial Immunity would be completely based on term papers and presentations. I had a final for Information Assurance late in the week. I didn't really need to study for Information Assurance so I was all done except for that one final.
Shawna was taking classes that emphasized projects so I didn't know how many finals she might be taking. I didn't see her around after Wednesday, so I assumed that she left without saying goodbye. My Artificial Immunity grade was posted. I got an A. That was my only real grade because Information Assurance wouldn't count toward my GPA. That brought my final GPA to 3.58. Then I took the Information Assurance final.
I went into the room where the final was being given. The Professor checked our student IDs, as if he didn't know who we are. The final was passed out. It was all multiple choice. I couldn't believe it. That was like some sort of high school class for illiterates. I quickly went through and marked the answers. It only took me half an hour of the three hours allowed. I was the first one done and turned in my exam. I had no doubt that I had earned an A in that class.
When I left the classroom, I went to the end of the hallway where the Basement Bistro was offering food. Among the limited selections was chili, which was being kept hot in a crockpot. I got a bowl of chili. I had almost used up all of my SUNYbucks, or whatever the meal plan money was called, for the semester. That was separate from the meals which I had nineteen of each week.
I sat down and ate my chili. One of the amazing things about chili is that the longer it sits in the crockpot, the better it gets. The chili at Basement Bistro and Kunsela Cafe was superb. After eating my chili I went back to my room. The campus was getting pretty deserted. I called Lincoln.
"I just got out of my Information Assurance exam."
"How was it?"
"It was easy. High school stuff."
"That is good. I hope you didn't tell the professor that."
"Nah. I definitely earned an A in that class."
"I got my grade for Artificial Immunity."
"So did I."
"What did you get?"
"A"
"Me, too."
"I guess you were right."
"About what?"
"You said that everyone gets an A." I knew better. Lincoln and I were the top students in the department.
"Yeah."
"Do you want to go to dinner?"
"Sure. When?"
"Now."
Lincoln and I met in the cafeteria. The cafeteria was basically cleaning out its remaining food. Graduation was on Sunday. The only people left on campus were those of us who were graduating and a handful of people who had finals on Friday. Lincoln and I sat in the empty cafeteria and nibbled on the odds and ends that were being served.
"Are you excited about graduation?" I asked.
"Sure am."
"My final GPA is 3.58." I said.
"Very good. Mine is about the same. Getting a B in Automata didn't help." Lincoln said.
"I told you that you needed to do the problems."
"It's over now."
"Tomorrow we should go to Applebees for dinner to celebrate graduation."
"That sounds like an excellent idea. Did you get a grade for Information Assurance?"
"Yeah. I got an A-. I deserved an A. What a ripoff. It doesn't matter because it doesn't affect my GPA."
"If you didn't get an A, I can't see how any of the students could have gotten an A."
"That is the truth. God save us from young professors."
"He was probably afraid that you would graduate with a 4.0 average."
"Yeah, I got that from Cavallo, too."
The next day Lincoln and I hung out, messing around on our computers. We were all done, except for graduation. The campus was deserted as the students had all gone home for Christmas break. Rohit and his Indian friends were still around as they didn't celebrate Christmas and they found it cheaper to stay at SUNY IT over Christmas break than to fly to India and back.
"About the bottles in the closet..." Rohit said.
"Nate will return them when he gets back."
"I would like you to get rid of them when you move out."
I agreed in principle, but didn't take any action. The one thing undergrads were good for was removing empty bottles. What I considered garbage, they considered a gold mine. It wasn't like Rohit would pursue me to Stevens if I didn't get rid of them. I talked with my sister by instant message. I dealt with emails. I went to lunch. Eventually it was late afternoon and I wanted to eat dinner. I saw Andy hugging Jen out on the quad. I opened the window and yelled, "Get a room." I called Lincoln and he came over. We walked to the parking lot where there were three or four kids including Andy and Jen.
"I saw you and Jen hugging on the quad so I yelled something." I said.
"That was you? We looked at the window and all we saw was this giant penguin." I had a penguin on my t-shirt.
"Yep."
Lincoln and I got in my Jeep and we backed out. The Jeep was handling funny but I thought it was because we were driving through snow. We started down the road. The Jeep was really not right. Finally I pulled over. I got out and examined the car. The back tire was flat. I hadn't brought my cellphone.
We loosened the lug nuts and jacked up the Jeep. Then we took off the lug nuts but we couldn't get the wheel off. It was set up on the bolts. Lincoln went in the woods and came out with a big tree limb. He swung at the tire and hit it from the inside. The tire didn't budge but the tree limb broke in half.
"I forgot my cellphone, so I can't call for help." I said.
"We could walk back and get it."
"The UP will be by shortly."
We stood in the snow and waited for the University Police to see us. Finally a UP SUV pulled up behind us and put its lights on. I went to the drivers side and talked with the officer.
"I have a flat."
"Can you change it?"
"No. We can't get the wheel off."
"I can call someone to help, but they will charge you forty dollars."
"That is fine, call them."
It took an hour for the wrecker to arrive and it was dark. He took a big four by four and smacked the tire a couple of times. It came off. Then he put the donut on and advised me to get the tire fixed soon.
"Thanks, how much do I owe you?"
"It would be forty, but since you guys had most of it done I will only charge you thirty."
"Do you take credit cards?"
"Yeah, but if we use a credit card then it will be more and I have to charge you tax."
I looked in my wallet. I had two twenties that I had planned to use for dinner. I decided that I would buy dinner with a credit card. I gave him the forty dollars and said, "Keep the change."
"Thanks!" he said.
We drove slowly to Applebees. When we got there, we got seated. For an appetizer, we ordered the coconut shrimp. We both ordered the surf and turf take two with steak and salmon. We each had a Sam Adams.
"To graduation, we did our part, now it is up to the pencil pushers," I said, raising my glass.
"To graduation." We each took a gulp of our beer.
They brought the coconut shrimp and we nibbled at it. Lincoln said, "I bet that if you had invited Shawna here she would have come."
I knew this to be true, but I am uncomfortable with the idea of dating a girl who is not old enough to drink.
"Probably," I said.
After we finished the shrimp, they brought our dinners. We talked about our plans for after graduation.
"So you still haven't lined up a job?" I asked.
"Yeah."
"What about that insurance company that you have been working summers for?"
"They offered me a job but I turned it down."
"Why did you do that?"
"They want someone to make a career and I don't want to do that so far away from home."
"You have to go where the jobs are. There aren't any high tech jobs in Pavilion, New York. If you want to be an engineer, you have to go to the Silicon Valley."
"I don't want to be an engineer," he said.
"I know, but I am an engineer so that is what I know. Still, to be a systems administrator, you have to go somewhere where there are data centers. Western New York is not good for your career."
"I will look for something after I graduate."
"Maybe you can get a job at Rome Labs."
"No. I don't want security clearance."
"See you have to have stuff lined up. If I hadn't been accepted to Stevens, I already had an application in to teach at MVCC until I got accepted into a program for the fall."
"I am sure I will find something when I get home."
"One thing that you can do with a masters degree is teach at community college. There is one in every county so you can pretty much do that where ever you want."
\chapter{} chapter 29
On Sunday morning I got up at seven. The cafeteria wouldn't be open so I drove through the Dunkin Donuts drive through for some coffee. I had already started packing and even put some boxes in my car. I needed to finish packing as I was going to move out immediately after graduation. My mother, my father and my grandmother would be arriving in a few hours. They would help me load my stuff into the car.
Soon I had everything boxed up. I put my computer in a padded case which was designed to carry it. My mother, my grandmother, my father and my cousin Jessie arrived. My parents and Jessie helped me pack the car. I showed them where the student center was and went to the staging area for graduation. They would drive my grandmother there.
I went into the athletic area of the student center wearing my cap and gown. I was instructed to carry my hood draped over my right arm. I found the sign for graduate students in ISET and stood under it. Soon Lincoln turned up and stood by me. A female professor wearing a colorful cap and gown with a fancy hood and three black velvet stripes talked to us.
"So we are going to go in the gym?"
"No. We will give you your diplomas in here," she said.
"Oh. Okay." I was relieved because that made everything easier.
"Of course we go in the gym. If you get a masters degree here you get to walk across the stage. At some universities you don't get to walk across the stage. They just tell you to stand up and you are masters."
A reporter for the local Utica newspaper came in the area.
"Can I interview you?" she asked.
"Sure."
"What is your name?"
"Michael de Mare." I spelled it out for her and she wrote it down.
"What are you getting your degree in?"
"I am getting a masters degree in computer science."
"What are your plans for after graduation?"
"I will go to Stevens Institute of Technology to study for a PhD."
"Great, thanks." She had written all of the information down.
Soon the commencement march was playing and we filed into the gym. As we took our seats, I noticed Wen was graduating, as well. Soon we sat down. There were some speeches and then they started awarding the degrees. I watched the procedures for the first students so that I would know what to expect. The undergraduates were first. They just walked across the stage, handed over a card, had their name read and were handed a diploma. Then the graduate students were called up. Each graduate student was handed a diploma and had his name read. Then his hood was taken from his arm and put on him. I figured that I could handle that. When it was my turn, I received my diploma and was hooded. My name was read. When I got back to my seat I opened the diploma. It said that it was fake and my real diploma would be mailed to me after they verified my grades.
There were some more speeches and then we all filed out, led by the faculty. The ceremony hadn't taken too long. Not that many students graduate in December.
There was a reception in the cafeteria. I met Lincoln's parents. We all sat together and ate the provided snacks. We drank the punch. This was it. We had masters degrees. I tried to find Wen but it was too crowded. I realized that I left my fake diploma in the gym and went to look for it. It was gone. I figured that it didn't matter as I would get a real diploma soon enough.
Mom, Grandma and Jessie left in my mother's Lincoln Navigator. My father and I walked back to my room. I went to the Adirondack office and found my RA. I said that I needed to check out. He got some forms and we went back to my room. He commented that it needed to be cleaned some more. I said, "Bill me." I signed a form and gave him my key. Then my father and I left in my Jeep.
I had MapQuest directions to a Walmart that would fix my tire. We drove slowly due to the donut. When we got to Walmart, they said that it would be ready in an hour. They would page us.
Dad and I walked around Walmart. We had already done most of our Christmas shopping so we didn't buy anything. One hour turned into two hours and still the tire wasn't fixed.
Eventually they brought my Jeep in the garage. We watched them through the glass wall in the waiting room. Once they had it in, it went pretty quickly. They patched the tire and put it on the car. I called my grandmother's house to let them know that the tire was fixed. We were instructed to go to a restaurant called the Mohawk Station on the Mohawk-Herkimer border.
I paid for the tire repair and collected my keys. I drove to the restaurant. We were having a big dinner to celebrate my graduation. We got there ahead of everyone else so we ordered drinks and appetizers. There was a big table reserved for us.
Soon my other relatives began arriving and we ordered dinner. A toast was proposed to my graduation. I was happy, but somewhat subdued. I was going to miss SUNY IT. Christmas was coming up and then I would start at Stevens. I listened to everybody talk while I ate my food.
I was now a master of science. This was just a way point, though, not an end. I still had at least another three and a half years of school to go to get my doctorate. I wondered about Lincoln and Wen. Neither of them had anything lined up for after graduation. Lincoln had turned down at least one good job offer because he wanted to stay in the boondocks of western New York. I wasn't sure what the deal with Wen was.
\chapter{Epilogue} Chapter 30
In January my mother and I arrived at Stevens during a cold rain storm. We parked in front of 1036 Park Avenue and walked to campus. There was a strong wind off of the Hudson which blew the rain under my mother's umbrella. Gusts of wind turned her umbrella inside out. In the Howe Center I got the key to my room and my student ID. I didn't have any money so I bought $500 Ducks Bills with my financial aid. Ducks Bills are like SUNYBucks except that they can be used at a dozen off-campus businesses including a pizzeria, supermarkets and an Indian restaurant. I moved into a triple in 1036 Park Avenue, which is several blocks from campus. My roommates were a Thai electrical engineer who didn't speak any English and an Americanized Japanese mechanical engineer. There was a restaurant with a fern bar across the street known as Ted and Jo's.
My first semester at Stevens was very busy. I was teaching assistant for CS434 which meant that I had to attend the lectures on Monday and Wednesday mornings. I had CS765A Privacy in a Networked World on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. The mandatory computer science department seminar was Monday afternoons and the Laboratory for Secure Systems meeting was Tuesday afternoons. The rest of the classes were at night from 6:15PM to 8:45PM. On Monday nights I audited CS503 Discrete Math for Cryptography. On Tuesday nights I took CS510 Theory of Programming Languages where I learned Scheme. On Thursday nights I had CS520 Operating Systems. I dropped CS520 but continued attending the lectures to prepare for the operating systems qualifier. I also read a hundred pages of an operating systems textbook every Sunday. I registered for three credits of CS960 Doctoral Research in Computer Science. I met with Professor Wright for an hour every week and developed a cryptosystem that I would present for my oral qualifying exam. It will also form an integral part of my doctoral dissertation.
During the spring semester I received an email from University of Nebraska at Lincoln offering to fly me out to their campus to talk with professors at the Software Engineering Laboratory about funding. I declined as I was already in a program. This made me wonder what Buffalo would have said if I hadn't withdrawn my application when I was accepted at Stevens.
I passed all three written qualifying exams in April. This is in spite of not having taken CS601 Algorithmic Complexity, which I would take the next semester. I received summer support to continue my research over the summer and passed the oral qualifying exam in July. I was now a PhD candidate. Stevens sent me to Crypto. I also moved into a single that summer where I am to live until graduation.
The Algebraic Cryptography Center was formed as an interdisciplinary project between the math and computer science departments. I started receiving funding through that and worked as a research assistant after my first semester. I started doing research in post-quantum cryptography toward my thesis. I stopped taking out student loans and started depending completely on my research assistantship.
Lincoln continued to live in Pavilion, New York, and eventually got a job writing sendmail configuration files. I imagine that he found a local system administration job. Wen stayed in Utica for a year taking undergraduate classes and working with career services. She learned Oracle administration and got a job in New Jersey as an Oracle administrator.
I took two more classes after my first semester. I maintained a 4.0 average until my third semester when I earned a B in CS625 Foundations of Distributed Computing. This brought my GPA at Stevens down to 3.75. After that I stopped taking classes, preferring instead to concentrate on my research.