Mike got a raise. :-)

Mike got a raise! In particular, a big fat raise. When I start my new job, there will only be a couple thousand dollars between us, instead of the comfortable $12,000 I had been gloating about. Mike's review (which he got on Tuesday) went okay, not great. So, the big fat raise was a nice surprise!

Many of you have asked how my thesis is going. Let's just say, we'll talk about it when I'm ready to talk about it. Right now, I have spent the past several (4, 5?) weeks getting the user input system working properly. So, you have the tiles, and you have the balls. You hold up a ball, and the tiles talk amongst themselves about who should have the cursor. Then, a cursor appears on one of the tiles, and as you move around, the cursor passes from tile to tile. And, when you do things, like make gestures, all of the tiles know, even when only one tile saw what happened. This all sounds so simple when I summarize, and it even seemed kinda simple when I was writing it. Yeah, a huge big mess of lots of simple problems with competing solutions. That sounds like distributed computing in a nutshell!

I realize that this was my goal for the week two weeks ago. Last week, Monday, I had meant to just tie up some loose ends and be done with this. But, one small problem led to another small problem, and I could probably go on for months fixing all the small problems with the system. But, i have declared today the cutoff day. No more problems are going to get solved, unless they are emergencies. Period. Now, on to the simulator.....

After the wedding last weekend, Barbie and Jason came down to Boston to leave from Logan. They needed to do some laundry before they left, so they did it at our house, so we could visit. Jason said that our apartment was cool. :-) I don't remember exactly what he said, something about our apartment taking his apartment to school. I think. Anyway, I don't remember what he said, but it was very funny. We went to get dinner at the Cheesecake factory, and we invited our crazy friend Nuno. Mike and I were slightly concerned that they might clash, but it was great! They were soooo funny.

Nuno is moving to Providence this Saturday. He is going to do a PhD at Brown University. He likes hardware-ish embedded devices and that sort of thing. This is kinda sad, because I won't be able to summon him to Harvard at the drop of a hat (or find him already at Harvard, as the case may be), but I am sure we will still see him.

My friend Ben Waber from Boston University is getting married soon. I've known about this for some time now, and for some reason, I thought he was getting married in Boston, and I was excited to go to his wedding (I've never been to a Jewish wedding before). But, alas, it is in Philadelphia, and so I will not be able to go. So, he and Rebecca are having a dinner party on Sunday for people who can't go to the wedding in Philadelphia.

Finally, for those of you who I didn't tell, or who were wondering what the "almost engaged" business was at the wedding... A thousand apologies for not putting it on sooner. Easter weekend, Mike and I went to Barmakian jewelers in Framingham, and he bought the ring. :-D I was thinking I was gonna be all cool about it, and just put up a picture of my hand, wearing the ring, when I finally got it or something. But no. So, that's what all this is about.

The Barmakian jewelers store in Framingham is HUGE!! It is like two stories tall, and maybe the floor size of a good-sized CVS. It was HUGE! When I told my advisor about the ring shopping adventure the weekend before, he said "Oh, have you gone to the Jewelry Exchange?" and I said "What is that?" It is an agglomeration of jewelry stores in downtown Boston. I found a little, dinky Barmakian jewelers in the Jewelry Exchange, and they made me feel comfortable. And when I saw they had a location in Framingham, I figured that would be more convenient for Mike.

Oh, and finally (this time for real), my vegetables are coming up! I planted vegetables in the little plot next to the house a couple weeks ago, and now, the onions and garlic are surely poking their little heads up (which is exciting because I've never planted onions or garlic before) and now, the peas are starting to come up. I hope the tomatoes come up and the cold weather didn't kill them. If it did, then I will buy tomato plants and put them in. I planted 3 kinds of tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, jalepeno peppers, onions, garlic, and peas. I will see about doing the flower bed this weekend. I am going to do zinnias and larkspur with alyssum and lobelia. So excited!