I see BHurt has been posting: welcome onto the board! If anyone else would like to post here, just drop a comment and let me know.

I don’t know if people realize it, but David Bowie is incredible. Not just “Rox Your Pop Off” incredible, but really freaking amazing incredible to boot. I’ve been listening to “Space Oddity” (the album, not the song) rather incessantly while I’ve been at home. “God Knows I’m Good” and “Memory of a Free Fesitval” are both amazing pieces of music. The one thing that is a little awkward is that one really should listen to Bowie’s albums and treat them as albums — although each piece of music individually is interesting, he does an excellent job of bringing whole albums, and the synergy between his songs are great. I also highly suggest “Heathen”. I need to start collecting Bowie CDs, just for the sake of having them.

Speaking of music — my brother went to NIN the other day, and KMFDM is playing in Milwaukee right now. It must be a sign of getting old or something, because I don’t really feel any impetus to go see them. What’s wrong with me?

Talked at the Minneapolis PerlMongers group last night. I discussed closures and functional programming, and laid into how underused and underappreciated those concepts are (blame OCaml, and by that, I mean BHurt). In general, it was an okay event — better attended than I expected and came with free pizza. One of the other lightning talks was on scripting looking for deals against the Dell Outlet and NewEgg, and the guy talked about a minor bug he had once that resulted in purchasing 150 modems before he realized he needed to stop the script. That was entertaining, but nothing really drew me to PerlMongers enough to bring me back — I’ll probably just lurk on their mailing list and pop in if there’s a particularly interesting talk or something.

I’ve been meaning to post about Princeton, so I should probably get up to actually doing that. Overall, it was a very good experience, and I’m definitely going to apply come next August/September, although I still want to check out Columbia. Going into the trip to Princeton, it wasn’t the forerunner, but that visit really proved otherwise for me.

The thing that surprised me the most was how welcoming the students are: I expected all the students there to be standoffish, competitive, and generally distant. That’s probably just because I’m from a small midwestern liberal arts school, and that’s the kind of reputation I expect from any kind of Ivy League school, and it was really an unfair assumption. Although all the students talked about how much work went into studies there, but they also talked about how that built a sense of comradery, and everyone I bumped into seemed really open to talk about the seminary, and they seemed very honest.

The thing that didn’t surprise me the least was the focus that Princeton had on academics. Although the students tended to say that Princeton was balanced in both academic learning and ministerial development, if you pushed them to say what particular subject Princeton excelled at, the answer was always an academic discipline, and if you pushed them to say what particular subject Princeton was relatively lacking in, the answer was always ministerial. So it’s not a great school for people who are drawn to care ministries, with the possible exception of youth ministry (which it has a dual MA/MDiv program in). Since I’m looking at heading towards academia, though, that care ministry stuff isn’t critical for what I want to do — and I’m sure that they’re good at Princeton, even if they aren’t the best.

Now I’ve got cleaning and cat litter to deal with. Wish me luck.

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