Today was the reception for first year grads. I woke up earlier than usual (8:30am), showered, dressed, doodled around, had breakfast, and left home at 10:30. Got to school by 11. Spent about half an hour diagnosing a printer problem*. And then I went, a few minutes before noon, to the reception.
Food was okay. An improvement from the "welcome to the math department" reception when I declared my major 2 years ago. That one was a pizza party. Today we had "real" food, though not terribly delicious at that.
After a while we each grabbed some food and sat down at the conference table. On my side of the table, facing the east-side-window, were, from the left, Margaret, Sergiu (DGS), Yu Pin, Po, Po-Lam, Boris, me, Josh (3rd year), Andrei, Ben, Zhong Tau. On the end next to Zhong Tau is Scott Kenney, the department manager. Coming backwards from Scott, across from us, sat: Balin, Kevin, Sucharit, Blair (2nd year), Aaron, Bhargav, Natasa (DGS), Elena, Melanie (2nd year), Brian (2nd year), Wei (2nd year?). On the corner next to Wei is John Vincent, our resident "root". Next to him, on the end of the table, is chair and number-theorist extraordinaire, Andrew Wiles. There are 16 1st-years here (wait a sec, you say, you only counted 15 on the list above? Well, one guy, Philip, didn't make it to the reception): 5.5 of which (including me) wants to do analysis--a wonderful turnout, seeing that none of the admitted students last year wanted to do analysis. A little description of everyone (let's see how well my memory holds up)
Found out that before I stand for generals, I must pass both my foreign language requirements (from Natasa). (Somehow I thought I only needed one before I take my generals. Obviously I was mistaken.) Also learned that they recently changed the rules in the department. The math graduate program is now a 4-year-program: only in special circumstances do students get allowed a 5th year. This means that I will be a PhD by June 2009. W00t.
After the reception, John took all the first year aside and took pictures of us. Apparently the residential computer god is also the residential photographer. I sensed some anguish at the difficulty of fitting all of us in the picture. We also took individual pictures that goes on the department wall of fame.
I went to get my keys to the 1st-year office from Joan. She had the keys out and was fumbling for the building key. So I told her I have one already and she doesn't need to look for them. She stared at me and demanded to know how I got the key. Well, I just conveniently "forgot" to return it last year, when I graduated...
Then I set up my mail delivery so that instead of forwarding my math.princeton.edu address to princeton.edu, it does the other way around. That is because (well, according to John Vincent) the University server provides e-mail to about 30 times more people than the department server, and so is slower, and that our department mail server has better uptime than the university mail server. (note to self: need to set up Tigernet Alum account). (On a note about e-mail: I learned today from OIT helpdesk [I go and check on network outage information regularly] that there is an emergency e-mail outage in the form of "AOL blocking all mail from the Princeton domain. So apparently AOL thinks Princeton sends too much SPAM. According to OIT, the problem is with a security vulnerability in a script called formreply that is embedded in many webpages to send e-mail. By exploiting that vulnerability someone has been able to send SPAM from the Princeton domain, and thus putting the entire domain in AOL's automatic blacklist.)
While doing that, I bumped into Qian. She then went to talk to Klainerman, and thus Klainerman found out that I was in the cluster, and just sort of walked up to me and told me to follow him. So I did. And we talked. He managed to clarify one of the big problems that I have been running into when doing my recent Yang-Mills paper. See, in his paper with Machedon on the well-posedness of finite energy Yang-Mills initial data, they only managed to do it locally, and in the middle of the paper used a funky looking Green's function. I was stuck trying to figure out which Green's function to replace it with since I can do the procedure globally. The problem was that the Green's function's definition was highly inspired by the boundary value property of the data, but for my global case, not only is there no-boundary, the value at infinity is uniformly zero. So it turns out that should have been a cue for me to realize that no Green's function was needed at all! Sergiu made it clear that the Green's function was only there to allow them to solve the boundary value problem. Since I removed the boundary (an improvement), I wouldn't need a Green's function at all (a great improvement). So now I well just work through the Null-Form formulation and will be almost done with it.
Sergiu also planned out the next paper I should read: Tao's large-data wave map. He thinks I should learn the curious heat-flow technique Tao used in that paper and try to apply it to, you guessed, my favorite toy-problem: Yang-Mills.
We also talked a bit about classes to take. Seems like he not only expects me to take his class, he would be willing to reschedule it if there's a conflict with another class. Hum... But no, I am not going to take Fefferman's class on Q-curvature. I have had enough of local conformal geometry last semestre, and I want to take a break from that and learn a bit of Algebraic geometry. (Oh, and a tentative schedule is posted for my fall semestre.) Sergiu also wants me to try and convince other students to take his class. It would be a good thing. I don't want to be the only one doing presentations in the seminar this coming fall.
After the meeting, I came home. Practiced my sax for a bit. Feeling a bit better about my playing now, and am working on scales and sight-reading primarily, because I am not really looking for a small-group placement: I really just wanted to play in the big band for PUJE.
For dinner today, I made Idiot Noodles (傻瓜麵, simply Japanese Somen 壽麵 mixed with soy sauce, Chinese black vinegar 烏醋, and a dash of sesame oil), boiled Shanghai Bok Choy (大陸人叫上海菜、台灣人叫青崗菜), and Sliced Boiled Pork (白切肉). The advantage of this meal is, of course, that all three dishes can be done in the same small pot. First we boil the pork, so the water carries some "essence de porc". Then we add salt, Hondashi (烹大師), and sesame oil to the pot, and boil the vegetable. Last we cook the noodles. Now, boiling pork is easy enough; the following recipe is mostly for the sauce, but the pork is still included for completeness.
* I got an e-mail from the unix-list inquiring about the proper way to set-up printing from PC to cluster printers, so I sent in the two methods that I collected over the past year that worked. But I got a negative response from the original poster. So this morning I decided to spend some time finding what the problem is (after all, now that I live off campus, I can't try to diagnose a university printer problem at home from my computer). Based on the information that OIT upgraded Pharos printserver over the summer (as evidenced by heresy and the fact that OSX and linux computers used to print directly to the printer queue, now the jobs gets intercepted by the printserver and requires a manual release before printing), my hunch is that OIT broke something. If I try to directly send a PostScript job to the Postscript capable printers via lpr -Php_brush_d foo.ps, the printer at hp_brush_d, instead of printing out the file, prints an error page about the command setduplexmode being undefined with TRUE on the top of the stack. My guess is the following: each printer has two queues: a single-sided queue and a double-sided queue, and if we send a job to the double-sided queue, the queue prepends our job with the PostScript command setduplexmode true to enable duplex printing, and likewise the single0sided queue prepends setduplexmode false. But somehow the PostScript command got messed up in the coding and renders the user's files unprintable. I've already e-mailed OIT about it.
** 豉 is pronounced shi4, like 是, not shi3, like 使. I only found that out today when xcin wouldn't take ㄕ-3 for the character. So I looked it up in the dictionary, and much to my surprise, I've been pronouncing that word wrong for all my life (which I learned from my mother, and which almost every 歐巴桑 in the traditional markets would say).