That's Dr. Josh, thank you.

It's been a long time since I've posted anything. I haven't lost the desire to blog, so much as put it off for so long that it isn't the second nature it used to be. I'm going to change that for the new year. (Happy new year, by the way.)

Rough chronological timeline of major events in the past two months:

Dec 1st - My uncle Brian, the youngest of my dad's three brothers, passed away due to complications of cystic fibrosis. It was very, very hard for everyone. My father and his brothers were with him at the hospital at the time, and had been there all day. Personally, it was extremely difficult for me to focus and prepare my presentation for my thesis defense the following Friday.

Dec 2nd - My brother's birthday. I spoke to him on the phone, and he certainly wasn't in the mood to celebrate. I think he sat at home and drank a few beers.

Dec 7th - Pearl Harbor Day. My thesis defense. I went on the 'offense' and Pearl-Harbored my committee (as per Russ's suggestion). It worked. I passed.

Dec 14th - I deposited my thesis, fulfilling all the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Columbia provided me with some letters stating that fact, as my degree isn't actually conferred until Feb 23rd, making me a 2008 graduate, despite the fact that I finished in 2007.

Dec 15th - A memorial service was held for my uncle Brian. My aunt Karen (his wife), my dad, and his three brothers, were all understanding of what I was going through, and believed that Brian would not have wanted me to be unduly stressed at the time of my defense, so the service was postponed until this day. It was emotional, to say the least.

Dec 16th - My dad's birthday. Yilin and I made him breakfast. Again, there wasn't much celebrating going on in our family.

Christmas week - Last year I went to Montreal for Christmas, and this year it was Yilin's turn to spend Christmas in Connecticut. I got to see my family and sit around a lot. It was good.

I'm currently looking for a job. I'll keep everyone updated with how that goes.

On Saturday, Yilin used her $100 store credit from Apple*: she got me an iPod shuffle. It's my first iPod, but not my first mp3 player. I've discovered that I don't like iTunes, because there is no organization outside of playlists. Furthermore, any audio books I had previously downloaded from LibriVox aren't recognized as eBooks by iTunes. So I had to have iTunes convert them to 64 kbit AAC, and then rename the files *.m4a to *.m4b so that iTunes recognizes that they are audiobook files. It took me about an hour to figure out the problem and fix it, even though I used the 'mv' command in Terminal to instantly change all the file names. But the Shuffle is cool.

*Yen-I and I bought Yilin the iPhone for her birthday present the first weekend they were on sale. Shortly after that a new iPhone was announced; all the people who waited in line for hours and hours were pissed, so Apple gave them all a $100 in-store credit.

Not much more to say right now. I am hoping to re-blog regularly. Oh yeah, happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Perhaps you should re-listen to his most famous speech, which I believe to be the greatest public speech ever given.