Thursday, September 21, 2006
Jury Duty, Double ER, and more GRE
I can't get a hold of Nian on the phone yet tonight so I'm watching the season premier of ER. I've been watching ER since its first episode 12 years ago. It didn't seem strange to watch it alone last season, but this season it is a reminder that Nian and I still aren't together and another year has gone by. Its scary when your favorite shows get so old, I think it makes the years seem to blur by.
Nian just called, I put ER on pause (it's nice to have a DVR). Nian and Aiai are at the hospital. The coincidence is not lost on me. Aiai has a high fever, but it isn't assumed serious. The hospital on Jinan's campus is close by and easy to get into so there is little reason not to go. Nian dragged me to the same hospital when I had some kind of stomach-flu on my first visit to Guangzhou China.
Nian really just called to assure me everything was OK and let me know what was going on. Now I'm back to my solitary life of watching TV and blogging. I think Nian would like ER if she could get past the brief surgical scenes, which I'm not sure she could, because to be honest they are quite graphic.
I'm having trouble getting deep into studying for the GRE subject test. I was scheduled for Jury Duty this week and I had assumed it would involve a lot a waiting during which I could really crack the books. Jury Duty however was a bust. After the orientation on Monday they cut us loose without any cases needing jurors; so back to work for me. Every night I called to see if I'll be needed in the next day, every night the answer was no. Tonight's phone-call no exception. My wife had been mildly impressed that I had this serious responsibility. Not even sitting in on one trial takes a little of the responsibility glow off.
Hopefully I'll be able to really concentrate on studying for the GRE Computer Science Subject Test this weekend. I had bought a book at Borders published by REA on studying for it, but I came across four or five errors on the first 3 pages so I took it back. Seriously, they couldn't even get the math notation correct. They even misspelled input as imput. ETS, the GRE administrators, offer some study materials. I think Borders would have taken the book back without question, but I insisted on showing them the errors against the official ETS source material that I printed out from the website. If REA can't even COPY the notation key correctly (and I assume it was copied, since it had the same definitions and order, just with the symbols mixed up or missing.) then I'm not going to trust the rest of the material in the book. There appear to be only 2 books published on studying for this test, the REA in 2005 and a Princeton one in 1999. So I am forgoing both and will have to self educate. I do have a BS in Computer Science, but the test appears to be a real graduate level torture session and I am way rusty on the theoretical stuff.
