1999: Eric graduates Stuyvesant Highschool and begins attending Brown University. At the time, he foolishly assumes that his affiliation with Brown will be limited to a mere four years.

2003: Eric graduates from Brown University with an Bachelor of Science in Applied Math/CS. In a shrewd attempt to avoid joining the workforce, or even pay for a U-Haul, he elects to remain at Brown and begins living with 9 of his yet-to-graduate friends. He also starts working for professor John Savage, securing his status in Brown’s directory as a “Class F Employee”.

2004: Eric is accepted to Brown’s PhD program and elects to continue working under Professor Savage as a computer science graduate student. Upon renewing his Brown Student ID, he immediately remarks on its absurdly distant expiration date: 06/01/10.

2006: Eric fulfills the requirements for a Masters of Computer Science and is admitted to PhD candidacy. Although he is awarded his Masters, he chooses to sleep in and skip the degree ceremony.

2008: Eric boldly relocates to New York City while continuing to work toward his PhD. The majority of his research-related discussions now take place between him and the cat.

2009: Eric’s proposed thesis, “Reliable Computing at the Nanoscale”, is approved! Completion of his third Brown University degree appears imminent.

2010: 9 agonizing months and 150 harrowing pages later, Eric sends out a finalized draft of his thesis to his thesis committee and schedules his defense for March 5th. He also relocates to Providence for his final semester in order to begin work with Professor Michael Black. He is enthusiastic about his new research area and extremely enthusiastic that he will not be re-renewing his student ID.

So there you have it. I’m back in Providence (at least for the semester), and I can now officially assert that my tenure as a Brown student has “spanned three decades”. I’m also looking forward to resumed blog posting (plus, the frickin’ olympics just started up again!)

Our conductor was quick to point out that the police were delaying the trains for an absurdly long time and looking for something “they weren’t going to find”. He was probably right, but what’s with Amtrak not being able to tell if they hit someone? Our conductor was pretty blasé about that aspect of the incident. Still, you’ve got to admire a guy who announced our approach to New York by noting that it’s home to “the greatest baseball team of all time.” Earlier, he’d informed us of a Yankee victory and proclaimed the Red Sox defeat to be “the best news all day.” I don’t think travelers from Boston agreed.

The bike’s small frame is clearly adorable, plus it has a back-pedal brake, so riding it totally makes you feel like a kid again. I was a little concerned about the small wheels and lack of gears, but yesterday’s test run was a complete success, particularly since I was able to keep up on my old rollerblades. As an additional throwback to my youth, we rode past my high school, which literally has 20 more skyscrapers nearby than when I went there.

Afterwards I celebrated our outdoor activity with some amazingly refreshing Pinkberry frozen yogurt. I then celebrated the yogurt’s awesomness with some soft serve ice cream. Seriously though, Pinkberry is excellent, but only available in NYC or LA (PVD coming soon?).

Fortunately fate stepped in and my friend Kerry asked me to help maintain her blog, passive-aggressive notes. I accepted and am happy to say the blog is no less popular than before I started helping (it gets about 20,000 visitors a day). Also I put up some ads.

Now that I’ve learned all things wordpress, I can easily get this bad boy up and running. As an added bonus, I can also type “passive-aggressive” with near 100% accuracy. I hope to one day say the same for “overheard,” which I frequently mistype as “overhead”.

In other news, I received a commendation from the Henrico County Viriginia Police last spring. I’d definitely like to see more of this sort of thing (particularly from other states I’ve never even been to).