After three months, I pulled out the ol' saxophone again. I was a bit rusty and playing with some of the up-tempo tunes was difficult for me. I should spend some time to work on my scales again. In general, though, I felt quite creative today, so I had more fun playing with some of the modal tunes of Herbie Hancock than with the traditional bebop tunes. The modal compositions allows me to experiment with interesting patterns over scales/modes without taxing too much on my ability to transfer from chord to chord. Though this can also be taken as evidence that I am sucking.

I finally succumbed to the pressure of love today. At Suki's insistence I got myself an account at LiveJournal. Part of the reason I finally relented is the knowledge that LiveJournal is taking part in the effort known as OpenID. It is a distributed identification system: the idea is that by proving you have ownership over a certain webpage, you can assert you are a certain someone. The details are of course more complicated, and I haven't really gone through the design documents in detail. But from what I have read, I quite like it.

Anyway, my LiveJournal username is ploamphed. The majority of my postings will still be here (unlike Pengus, I don't plan to move my blogging activities completely over to a third-party maintained website). I will, however, take advantage of LiveJournal's wonderful system in which I can mark certain entries as hidden from the general public while allowing them for consumption by my closer circle of friends.

Lastly, I unveiled the new Princeton Unix FAQ Wiki today. It will be a collaborative effort by the P-ug to keep a database of short HOWTOs on running (basically) Linux on the Princeton campus.

Also, just read from Suki's blog that Paul Gilligan, one of our classmates at the 2000 New Jersey Governor's School of Science, passed away in an unfortunate accident. I actually knew Paul quite well when I was in GSS, so this came quite as a shock to me. Even though we didn't keep in touch post GSS (many of us didn't), we still hear occasionally from his many endeavors: including one possible involvement in the theft of a paw from the MIT Beaver. During Governor School, we were assigned to the same "discussion session", a small meeting held on Wednesday mornings to discuss the talk given on the prior evening. During the first session, to break the ice, the counselor paired up the students randomly ans asked us to find out as much about the other person as possible. I always remember how he introduced him self:

Hi, I am Paul Gilligan. Paul just like that counselor dude with the beard, and Gilligan as in the Island.

Well, his introduction would have brought a smile to the face of any Hometown American Boy, but it fell on deaf ears for Mr. Made in Taiwan:

What island?

So Paul proceeded to spend the rest of the introduction section telling me about the premise of Gilligan's Island, and, though the ice was broken, we hardly found out anything about each other! To be honest, that is about as much as I remember about Paul Gilligan. We knew each other, and were good friends, but he in general like to hang out with a more rowdy crowd (from what I remember), and during the second half of GSS, my team and I spent most of our time buried in the lab and we hardly ever see the face of anyone not in our project. So we drifted apart. Who would have thought such a tragedy would fall on such a successful young man.