Tonights post will have to be a quick one, since I have my hellish 441 exam tomorrow morning bright and early at 9 AM, a time when I can't think coherently about what clothes to wear, never mind how to prove a greedy algorithm.

I went an astonishingly-bad 6-8 in NFL picks last week, dropping me to 43-31 on the season. Lucas fared slightly better, going 9-5 to move up to 54-20. That means I'm 11 games behind. That's bad.

Speaking of Lucas, he forwarded me an email today that promises that I can grow taller. In fact, according to growthmiracle.com, by growing just 2-4 more inches I can make more money and look more attractive to the opposite sex. Sign me up! Although in addition to this, the site also makes specious claims like "...mental...factors have been proven to play a significant role in 'deciding' how tall you'll be!". So in other words, if I think that I will grow taller, then I will? So why should I pay for their supplements and spinal adjustments when all I really need is to wish a few extra inches onto my height? So many questions, so much money...

I've made some changes to the top bar as you can see, adding Ben Brodie's lengthily-named blog and removing the defunct creation of James Brodman.

And finally, haikus:

Full professor Ron Cytron contributed quite a few entries:

Recursion is that
Which is self referential.
So, see "Recursion"

Garbage collection
Means never say you're sorry
For trashing the heap.

Lincoln freed the slaves:
He discovered grad students
Were better than slaves.

He even wrote one in honor of my cs441 exam:

Amortization
And dynamic programming
Hurt my feeble brian

And the WashU bunny has now been immortalized in haiku by the full professor as well:

Why is a rabbit
Adorning our precious grounds?
Someone should steal it.

Finally, all the way from Boston, Massachusetts, Nick Haddad penned this piece of poetry about some assistance we received during our work on the WUGrade entry to the Microsoft contest:

MCA,
The SQL programming God,
Let us pray.

Unfortunately, Nick forgot that haiku's have a 5-7-5 syllabic form, not 3-7-3. Better luck next time, Nick.