Oy. Been there, and it's no fun at all. Glad you're feeling better.

P-C, if you're talking to the gathering-at-the-convention crowd, details about the convention can be found here, and the hotel is at 200 W. Big Beaver Road in Troy -- hotel's page is here. It would be mucho excellent to see you both.

PC, also, there is talk of a Buffista-ish breakfast on Saturday morning. When I know more details, I'll e-mail you. Also, I'll e-mail you my cell number so you can get in touch with us.

Pictures are almost uploaded to yahoo. Will share in a moment.

Oh, and I'm really sorry I missed the math talk. I've only recently gotten a grip on the concept of i, and I'm still struggling with the usage -- that is, I get why we need a square root of negative 1, but I'm a little unclear on how the whole a + bi thing works. Guess I could go read up on it.

The thing that finally made the concept click for me (after quite some time of going, "The hell? -1 doesn't have a square root. It's inherent in the nature of squaring!") was reading about the history of numbers and math. Actually getting a feel for how people struggled with the concept and why they needed to come up with something to call it made it make a lot more sense. I really think a little math history could be a lot of help in math classes. Generally, it gets laid down like everything from arithmetic to differential equations would be quite obvious if you were only smart enough, without ever mentioning that the stuff that's hard for the students to understand was probably tough enough for everyone to understand that it was centuries before someone came up with a way to deal with it.

That, and I don't think anyone ever taught me about complex numbers. I kind of had to pick it up through osmosis (or diffusion, since isn't osmosis only for water?).

Pictures of Emily's party are here [link] I'll label them shortly. There are also pictures of me with my new hair.

Karl, you could attempt to explain that stuff to me. I can't promise, though, that by the time you broke it down in bits I could grasp, that you would still be having fun, though. I'm with Tep, though. Skills are The Sexy.(It's why I listen to CG's cycling stories. Daniel, I think cyclists are all a little nuts, and well, sometimes, I understand they get very stoned, ergo your winter wonderland wtf?) Cindy, I hope you feel better soon.

PC, also, there is talk of a Buffista-ish breakfast on Saturday morning.

Ooh. Hm. I'm not certain we could make that, but I'll see.

I kind of had to pick it up through osmosis (or diffusion, since isn't osmosis only for water?).

Yes, and that always bugged me. "I'm learning through osmosis." WELL CLEARLY YOU HAVEN'T EVEN LEARNED WHAT THE FUCK OSMOSIS IS.

Yeah, it always got me too, but it's pretty firmly established in the lexicon now. Nobody says, "learning by diffusion". Well, except me.

Also, I HAVE AN IPOD.

That is all.

Pictures of Emily's party are here [link]. I'll label them shortly. There are also pictures of me with my new hair.

Your new hair looks good! The party looks fun. Is there an inscription on the iPod? It was blurry. Also, who was that with the crazy red-orange hair?

Also, I HAVE AN IPOD.

Hee hee. Everyone has an iPod. I have an iRiver. My brother gave it to me instead of his iPod since the iPod is the actual status symbol.