The university that I applied to that I wanted most to get in to, the University of Washington, where I spent the last year… has denied my application.

Given that they knew me well, liked me and all that jazz, I am both geniunely surprised and very disappointed about this.

This does not bode well for my other applications and am feeling totally bummed.

Well, some things are actually happening, so this blog entry ought to keep the passing interest of the two or three people that actually view it.

First up, this past weekend was Orchid Ball. This was an event put on by Phi Sigma Rho, the Engineering ‘Sorority’ that Anastasia is in. This marked the first formal occasion that Anastasia and I could finally get to attend together. My series of near-misses with her dances, prom, etc was becoming somewhat comical and this was certainly a wonderful thing for us to finally get to do.

I didn’t want to see the dress or the getting ready or anything, I wanted to get to do what I didn’t get to do much earlier on in the piece. Anastasia went shopping with one of her friends and found everything, I made sure my nice clothes were all dry-cleaned and that the tie I was going to wear wasn’t wrinkled or anything silly. On the day in question, I dropped Anastasia off to get her nails done then took her to the hair place later, but after that, her friend came and picked her up and finished getting ready at her place.

I had a bunch of little things to do around the house and some emails to write, so I busied myself doing those for a while. When it was time, I got into my gear – black suit, shimmery dark blue tie, hair in braid, freshly shaved face. I had to re-do my hair three times and re-tie my tie about the same number of times… I kept screwing it up somehow, and I wanted to look just right. After I (finally) got myself sorted, I hopped in the car and head over to pick her up. After a quick phone call to make sure I was in the right place, I got there. Anastasia walked out, all dressed up… absolutely stunning! She was wearing a long blue dress with some dark, thin patterns on the front, her hair was up, but mostly down in lots of curls… all in all, she looked beautiful. I’ll try and see about getting a pictures section to this site or something so you can all see how beautiful she looked. For those of you on Facebook, there are already photos of the event posted up there.

From there we rushed off to the ball, which was a little smaller than I was expecting. An awful lot of girls (it was a sorority event, after all), and the partners of those that had them and/or wanted to bring them. I think there were maybe 10 guys and probably 60-odd girls. I dunno, I’m not very good at judging crowds.

Anyway, the evening started off with dinner and conversation at tables arranged around a dance floor, with a couple of DJs handling the music. After dinner the DJs turned some of the lights down and started playing “dancing” music… some people started dancing, the numbers increasing as time went on the other lights went down. Most of the music they played was music that I’m not particularly fond of, let alone would dance to. My reluctance to dance and sing (to things I would otherwise avoid) is well known, particularly when there is no alcohol involved at the event. Get a few drinks in me and it’s a whole different story. ^_~

After a while however, we did get up to music that was less bad (I never thought I would miss New Zealand hip-hop so much…) and away we went. We danced on and off for the rest of the evening. Anastasia even tried to teach me some dance steps (the salsa and the cha-cha?), which I somewhat got the hang of, but would certainly need a bit more practice with.

A good time was had by all, the food was ok and the company excellent. The DJs certainly had a good sense of humour, if somewhat questionable taste in music. After the ball was over, Anastasia and I drove around for a little while looking for Wendys (that’s what she wanted…), but couldn’t find one and instead went through Taco Bell. Always hilarious (and somewhat of a tradition) to go to fast food places when dressed to the nines.

From there it was back and crash.

In other news! We finally got our bedroom furniture delivered and it’s very nice. We probably don’t have enough drawer space and may need to get some more, but for now it’s very groovy and we like it very much. We’ve got the dresser and end-tables set up, but we held off on setting up the bed, since we heard that the landlord was (finally) going to replace the crappy windows on this place (some of which you couldn’t actually open, anyway). This involved a great deal of shifting everything around, again. Today it also involved a lot more work than the window guys had anticipated, since the frames weren’t square and they had to make them square, or something. Lots more work, noise and so on. They didn’t get nearly as far as they thought they would either, so they’ll be back tomorrow to keep going and we’ll be sleeping in the living room and leaving the bedroom covered up in semi-storage for now.

Tomorrow they’ll be back and hopefully they’ll get everything done, although given the trouble they’ve been having, I don’t know if they will or not. They’re coming pretty early, so I hope so. Anyway, it’ll involve an awful lot of cleaning up.

Tonight the television also fzzt’d out. The screen no longer works… sound is fine, picture is not. Looks like we’ll need to get a TV repair guy out or something tomorrow. Very frustrating, since we only just got the damn thing.

Just to make matters that extra bit more interesting, Anastasia’s mother is due to come stay for a few days starting tomorrow as well, so she’ll be arriving in the midst of the madness, instead of the finished apartment. C’est la vie.

All this, along with doing little bits and pieces around the house, has kept me pretty well occupied over the last several days. Hopefully I’ll be able to get back to work and get some things done (like I have tonight) starting tomorrow. I know there’ll be plenty of cleanup and other stuff, but I should have some time to work as well.

Also also with: my report on Bluetooth Security from when I studied at UW. It’s now approved and up online for the world (ahem) to see!

Anyway, more on events as they unfold! Will the TV be fixed? Will the windows be all shiny and new? Will Anastasia’s mother be able to find a spot to settle amongst the furniture boxes and plaster-dust? Will Leith give up his futile effort at being interesting? Stay tuned until next time, dear reader, stay tuned…

Ok, so last weekend was the last thing to actually happen of note, really. I went to the University of Florida Recruiting Weekend!

This actually started on Thursday night, when there was an informal dinner at The Swamp, which is just around the corner from here. There were a few people from the UF administration, faculty and student population as well as some potential recruits. Not a big affair, but neat nonetheless. The food was on the department and it was just a get-to-know-us kind of thing, with a few conversations about the doctoral program they’re trying to convince us to join. After the dinner we went over to the Harn Museum for a bit of an impromptu tour, which was pretty interesting.

Friday morning started very early, with breakfast at the department then straight into the informational sessions. The group of recruits was about 11, I think… a handful were UF undergrads looking to stick around and the rest were out-of-towners. We had information about the department in general, the PhD program itself and various presentations by some of the faculty on the kinds of research that they were doing. There was also a brief tour around the labs they have and what kind of place we would be working in if we’re accepted into the program. After that we had individual meeting sessions where we went off and met with particular professors. I met up with Professors Peters and Fishwick, both of whom are involved to varying degrees in graphics or the use of graphics. They were both very interesting to talk to about their fields, what kinds of things the future holds, what kind of student they’re looking for and just research in general. After that there was a bit of a break in which I came home and did a bit of email catch-up, then it was off to a semi-formal dinner put on by the College of Engineering. This was for all of the departments in the college, each department having at least a table or two for those who were attending. Dinner was nice, there were some good and some bad speeches, dessert was good and overall the conversation around the table was more of the same from throughout the day and previous night – stuff about the PhD program, what we were interested in, what they were doing and of course just general chit-chat.

On that note, if I have to hear about how UF holds both the football and basketball national titles one more time (this became a running gag that everyone said it), I may start screaming at people. Or hitting them, I haven’t decided yet.

Anyway, after that I went home and tried to do a bit of work and email before crashing.

Next day was less about the CS department and more about UF. Saturday morning I head off to the Museum of Natural History for a look at their Butterfly Rainforest exhibit (which was kinda nifty, although the butterflies were pretty lethargic due to the weather we’ve been having) before jumping in a big car with the others and heading off on a bit of a tour of the UF campus. We stopped at various places, got out, had a look around, got back in the cars and moved on to the next place. After all the touring around, we made tracks to “downtown Gainesville” (almost but not quite indistinguishable from the rest of Gainesville) for lunch at Harry’s. Some pretty good food and more fun conversation about all kinds of things, really. Less PhD stuff and more talk about crap, really. It was good fun, although the UF basketball team lost to Vanderbilt while we were eating (ending their 17-game winning streak), which mildly depressed the UF contingent. That said, they would rather it happen to the team now, rather than later when they’re in the play-offs. After lunch one of the Professors, Pete, was kind enough to drop me home on his way back to his place.

After that I did some work and went back to doing the things I usually do at home.

In other news, I have booked a trip to Seattle for March 20-27, where I shall be visiting my friends up there, hopefully managing to catch up with everyone and grab some UW gear, which I neglected to obtain while I was actually attending UW. Go figure.

I sat down and watched Coming to America with Anastasia on Monday night, which was hilarious. I’d seen bits and pieces of the movie before, but never actually sat down and watched the whole thing. Good Eddie Murphy movie, I would thoroughly recommend it. In other media news, Anastasia and I have also been watching a new show on the SciFi channel, The Dresden Files. Only four episodes so far and I’m already enjoying it immensely. The characters are good and have a lot of potential to explore a lot of different storylines, so I’m very much looking forward to the next ones! Actually, here’s an amusing anecdote about that. We missed the first one’s live showing on TV, so I downloaded it the next day and set it up to run from the laptop through to the TV, right? (As I do.) Well, we watched the whole opening sequence done in black in white about his childhood and we both thought, “Wow, this is really classy starting off a new series like this in black and white, kudos!”… it was only when they switched out of the flashback and it was still in black and white that we realised that the cable running between the laptop and the TV was a little bit loose, which meant the colour information wasn’t going through properly and it just looked like it was in black and white. When we plugged it in more firmly, everything was in glorious technicolour again and we went back and checked – that’s right, it was all in colour to start with. We were both a little disappointed at this, as we felt it worked much better in black and white!

Anyway, what else… for the UF Spring Break, Anastasia and I are probably going to spend at least some of it down in Tampa (the UW Spring Break is the following week, when I’m going up to Seattle). This coming weekend is the Orchid Ball, an event for the Engineering Sorority that Anastasia is in. So finally after more than three years of almost attending formals and not quite being in town for balls, Anastasia and I finally get to dandy ourselves up and attend a dressy event. More news on that after the weekend.

Oh, and we also (finally) got some bedroom furniture. We talked the guy down about $400 off the price, which made us very happy and we’ll be getting it delivered next week, probably on Monday.

Well, for the entirety of my life, I figured that being “Leith Caldwell” would be unique – I mean, come on.

However, in a recent survey of search engine results, I came across another one! One brief blip, and the active site isn’t even there any more, it’s only available through Google’s cache. There is apparently another Leith Caldwell out there that works for a company called Romark and sponsored a pediatric emergency medicine conference in January of this year at a children’s hospital in Nashville, Tennessee! Wow, is that weird or what?

But wait, there’s more.

Ok, get this: the company the other Leith Caldwell works for is most likely this Romark, a medical drugs research laboratory company. The company is based in Tampa, Florida – the place where Anastasia is from and where I have been making trips to and from for the last three years. Wild!

I tracked this other Leith down (isn’t the internet wonderful), and they apparently used to live in Tampa, still work for Romark and currently live in Nashville, which makes sense since that is also where the hospital is!

I know that my full name will be unique, but even my first and last not being unique is truly bizarre. The added geographic coincidence is also just… weird doesn’t even cover it.

Well, since I had a gap in my work, I decided to spend some time re-doing my website. What I had up there previously was sadly lacking in… well, anything remotely good, actually. It’d been up there for about 5 years and when I wrote it, the fact that it was written in a language (PHP) and not just plain old HTML pages was rather novel. The design (if you can call it that) was something I just threw together in the hopes of working on it later… then I got too busy making everyone else’s websites, so it didn’t happen.

Anyway, now I actually spent some time on it. It was a lot of fun, actually, just working on something personal like that… even though it’s the same thing I do for work, it was different because it was purely for the fun of it, and something just for me. Even helping out my friends with their stuff for fun isn’t the same kind of fun.

Well, without further ado, this is my new site!

Speaking of changes, I’ve been thinking about migrating to some different blog software. Might be a bit of a pain in the ass though, so I’m not sure. I’ll think about it if I make some more time to work on this little site of mine.

This is something that I would like to get some feedback on, so for the few people that actually read this thing, please leave a comment, maybe some suggestions about what you’d like to see on the site or things that I could change to make it better.