the final submission

Today I finally submitted the final, approved, (did I say final?) version of my dissertation! There was missing signature somewhere on the paperwork that finally showed up, and it was a go. I didn't have full confirmation that I could do it, but I just showed up at the Graduate Studies office on campus and it turned out I could. So I turned in the copies, one for the University library, one for the Department library, gave one to my advisor and kept one for myself (with the nice binding and all that).

There's one more thing that has to happen though (of course! always something else!), when "The Council" gets together and gives a final seal of approval to the theses that were finally submitted in the previous month. Or something like that. Plus I have to register for the ceremony, etc.

The whole thing has taken quite a bit longer than normal, but now it's really, really done. Next step, as I said, will be to post the full dissertation and continue talking about the algorithms, etc. I'm definitely thinking about creating a site for that to put all this stuff, including code, etc. More later.

the great playlist meme of '04

Here are the instructions:

1. Open up the music player on your computer.
2. Set it to play your entire music collection.
3. Hit the "shuffle" command.
4. Tell us the title of the next ten songs that show up (with their musicians), no matter how embarrassing. That's right, no skipping that Carpenters tune that will totally destroy your hip credibility. It's time for total musical honesty. Write it up in your blog or journal and link back to at least a couple of the other sites where you saw this.
5. If you get the same artist twice, you may skip the second (or third, or etc.) occurances. You don't have to, but since randomness could mean you end up with a list of ten song with five artists, you can if you'd like.

Here's my list:

1. Light My Fire - The Doors
   
2. Can't Not - Alanis Morissette
   
3. Help! - The Beatles
   
4. Great Escape (Acoustic) - Guster
   
5. Pride (In The Name Of Love) (ZooTV Live Transmission, Houston 14/10/1992) - U2
   
6. Como un Bolu - Bersuit
   
7. High Voltage (Hybrid Theory EP) - Linkin Park
   
8. Shattered - The Rolling Stones
   
9. Symphony #5 in C Minor (3rd movement) - Beethoven
   
10. Learning To Fly (Live) - Pink Floyd

PS: for the record :), I did skip "duplicate artists." I think it definitely makes sense, considering that for some artists I have hundreds of tracks and others rate only a few, or a few dozen (There I go, trying to "make sense" out of something like this. The bane of logic). I'm surprised to discover that skipping randomly through my entire music collection is oddly addictive...