I haven’t made enough progress on college essays, and I just got a reminder from Zach that I have to write an End of Month Report. All of this by January 1.

I could go hide and you wouldn’t care, but I feel more obliged to actually stay away if I put it explicitly.

I will not, under any circumstances, post to this blog until after I have completed all of my college and NJCL duties.

Quickly, though, thanks to Catherine for agreeing to host me. Browse around the site and check out the pretty URLs.

Also on the list of new toys, check out the new Photos Page. All tied into Flickr and everything. I’ll put a proper link up when I come back from hiatus.

Oh - and Happy New Year.

So I’m back…and there’s no place like home.

I don’t have a real post yet, but I’m working on it (along with my essays).

It’s good to be back at my computer. More specifically, it’s good to be back to uninterrupted internet access.

Until the real post comes up, go enjoy the photos I took during our longest excursion to the Oregon coastline.

For right now, I’m about to go enjoy a very nice sleep in my bed.

“Intelligent design” cannot be mentioned in biology classes in a Pennsylvania public school district, a federal judge said Tuesday, ruling in one of the biggest courtroom clashes on evolution since the 1925 Scopes trial.

From CNN.com.

There may yet be hope for seperation of church and state.

MIT Deferral Letter,
originally uploaded by thenerdsangle.

After over a week, my letter finally showed up.

It’s actually a rather disappointing letter. Very short. Although I guess that Deferrals/Rejections are by nature.

In other news, I wrote a plugin last night to crosspost entries to LiveJournal. So those of you that use LJ and Xanga are now free to bury your heads in the sand of the special little communities that Xanga and LJ like to form.

You still have to come to my site to post, though.

Old Dishes,
originally uploaded by thenerdsangle.

New Dishes,
originally uploaded by thenerdsangle.

Yes, damnit, I am going to get my money’s worth out of Flickr Pro. And Mom’s Nikon D50 is just fun to use.

To shamelessly copy from the description I wrote on Flickr, they are combination of the $5 sets you buy from McDonald’s and the $5 sets you order off the back of a Kellogg’s box. We’ve been using these since I was like 5. Finally gave up on them after they started cracking in the microwave.

There are also plates with Hercules, Meg, Zeus, Phil, and the Muses, and the bowls included Tony the Tiger and the Corn Flakes chicken, whatever it’s called.

So finally, after they started cracking in the microwave, we upgraded! We now have some spiffy new black dishes (see Figure 2).

Our mason has started rebuilding the wall, as well. Unfortunately they covered it with some towels to dry before I could get a photo.

I would also like to note that I still have not yet gotten an actual letter from MIT.

The problem with having multiple Linux servers:

You spend 15 minutes trying to get something working on one, and all of a sudden you realize that you’ve been remotely accessing the other the whole time.

So I finished my Stanford application around 11:30 CST, submitting it with about 2 hours to spare. I was actually surprisingly satisfied with my essays, but on the whole, I don’t think the application did a good job of talking about computer stuff. The long essay was a gush-fest about JCL, and the short essays talked about peer tutoring, the philosophy of math, and jumping Avram’s car—basically an adaptation of an earlier blog entry (yes, I am rather link happy today :)).

So I now find myself with 3 essays, 2 applications, and 1 supplemental letter between myself and being done with this whole damn processes. To be more specific, I have 2 essays for Caltech, 1 for Carnegie Mellon, write a supplemental letter to MIT begging them to accept me (I’m giving serious consideration to sending some of Mom’s brownies with it). And I’ll go ahead and submit my UTK application too.

I should offer my congratulations for Zach Fenno (accepted to Brown), and for Xue and Christine (Stanford), and my condolences to all of the other people who were deferred or rejected.

The hole in the wall,
originally uploaded by thenerdsangle.

Signs around the wall,
originally uploaded by thenerdsangle.

stones that used to be in the wall,
originally uploaded by thenerdsangle.

In other news, I have new plugin that automatically copies any posts on my site to Xanga, so those of you that have had subscriptions to my Xanga for a year and a half will now actually see some action.

Still trying to find a functional LiveJournal crossposter.

Next order of business: feeds. I’ve getting an awful lot of hits to the Atom and RSS feeds on the site. I don’t know if they’re from Technorati-type services, search engines, or what, but I’m trying to track them down. If you use the one of the feeds to read my blog, please leave a comment and let me know.

In other news, part of our wall fell down. This actually happened a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve decided that I should put some photos up just for fun.

Thank you everyone for all of your comforting words. I really am glad for everyone’s support. I know that my last post came off as very…depressed.

The truth of the matter is that I’m hardly in a bad mood at all.

After hearing about the mail fiasco yesterday, I realized that it was highly likely that I had been deferred. For a couple of hours, I sat around, accomplishing very little, trying to come to terms with that.

By this morning, when I actually found out, it wasn’t a surprise, and most of the pain had gone away. And while I haven’t been unusually talkative, I’ve pretty much accepted it as something that’s happened, and that’s more or less out of my control.

At this very moment, I remain completely satisfied in the application I sent in November 2nd. And no matter how I choose to revise things before the regular review, I’m not sure I would have done anything differently for the first attempt.

What matters now is crossing bridges when I come to them. That is, my focus right now is finishing the Stanford essays that are due tonight at 12:00, Pacific Standard Time.

Well, I promised I’d tell you, so I might as well start dealing with it myself.

What most people haven’t heard is that there was a fiasco in the MIT mail system that we didn’t find out about until yesterday.

Turns out that, while the tubes were mailed on Friday, the letters were sent to another agency that handles MIT’s bulk mail. Because of that, they weren’t sent out until Monday or Tuesday.

So basically, not having received anything by Tuesday or yesterday meant that deferral/rejection was very likely.

To compensate for this, MIT admissions decided to allow people to call for their decisions today.

I set my alarm for 7:00, and would have sworn it said 6:00 when it went off, so I went back to sleep and woke up at 8:10 or so.

Took a couple of tries to get through to a person instead of voicemail, but once I did, the guy told me that I was deferred.

2005-2006 NJCL Officers,
originally uploaded by thenerdsangle.

Another photo post.

This picture (and the others from Fall Planning) always make me feel better. I honestly think that FPM was one of the best things I’ve done all year, and I really miss spending time with the other officers.

I swear that readers of my blog will be one of the first to hear of any decision from MIT.

I’m with Zach (different Zach from the picture, by the way) on the longer it takes, the higher the probability of good news.

However, our mailman said today that, during this season, even a ordinary envelope could take this long.

For those I haven’t informed, rejections and deferrals come in normal #10 envelopes. Acceptances come in a tube (that apparently has confetti).

Or, as Connie put it, “good things don’t come in small packages.”