A New Contender Emerges

This week Mike finally bought a new car. :) It's a Subaru Impreza Wagon and I must say it's pretty nice. A good blend of sportiness with practicality and good mileage. It's gotting me thinking about cars again, even though I still have no idea when I'll be buying a car or how much I'll be able to spend on it, and then an ad came on TV the other day that's gotten me really excited. It was for a new car called the Jeep Compass.

We all know how much I love the Cherokee, and I really am planning on getting a small car is for mileage anyway, and now Jeep is releasing a small SUV that gets 26 city, 30 highway for mileage and starts at like 16 thousand, so I am very very interested to see what people think of it over the next months. I configured one to my liking on Jeep's website today and it came to under 19 thousand, even with some nice features like better seats and floor mats and an auxiliary input so I could use an iPod (or any other audio device) with the system without requiring a tape deck or an FM transmitter.

I really hope this thing turns out to be good, because it's pretty much the perfect vehicle I would design for myself.

Stranger Than Fiction

Just saw an ad for a movie that I definitely want to see. It's about an author who's writing a new novel and has writer's block. She's trying to figure out how to kill the main character. The movie seems to follow her as she writes the story, and the twist is that it turns out that her character is a real person, and he can hear her narrating his story. This character is played by Will Ferrel, and the movie also has Dustin Hoffman and Queen Latifah. It looks incredibly funny and very unique; I can't wait for it.

It's still cheating if it's in another language.

In my Master's CS classes we have a lot of Indian grad students. Most of them are just like many of the American grad students in that they are generally unobtrusive and I don't know or care much about them. A fair number of them, however, irritate me to no end by constantly speaking to each other in their native language during class, loudly enough for the whole class to hear them. That's rude when it's done in English, never mind when it's done in a language most of the students (and the professor) don't understand. That's my opinion at least. I think it has something to do with my personal level of parnoia being high enough to think that maybe they're making fun of someone that doesn't know what they are saying.

Today in Automata it reached a level I've never seen before. It's a Hayes class, which means each class starts with a short quiz about the previous classes's material. Sort of a combination attendance/homework policy. At the end of today's quiz, the Indian kid behind me had only answered one of the two questions, and asked me to hang on a minute before he passed his paper up. I saw no problem with that, until he started speaking in not English to an Indian kid next to him. After a short conversation, he started furiously scribbling the answer to the second question. I stared for a few seconds and then yelled "Hey! Yo! Cut the crap and give me the paper," at him. The two of them both looked terrified. I don't plan to make a big stink about it to Hayes, since everybody does somethig stupid once in a while, but if that crap happens again I think I'll re-evaluate my position on the matter. I just can't believe they thought they could get away with it just because I didn't know what they were saying.