Yesterday I made an awesome discovery: the campus shuttle service. Actually, I knew that they existed since sophomore year, but while living on campus, taking the shuttle from one place to the other feels like only something people with trouble walking would do. But now that I live off campus and drive in to work, I've found that the shuttle service can be very useful. For example, yesterday morning, I drove in and parked at the visitor lot, which is pretty much at the north east corner of campus. I need to get to center of the west side of campus for registration (Grad Student Sign-in). It would've taken me about half an hour to tackle the up-hill slope between Lot 21 and Chancellor Green; instead, I waited about 3 minutes for the Blue Line (with services every 5 to 10 minutes) along with three Old Guards and another student, and in about 6 minutes we shot up Fritzrandolph Drive and across Western Way/Ivy Lane, and onto Washington Road, where I got off next to Woody-Woo and strolled for about 3 minutes and there I was at Chancellor Green. The shuttle was even more useful in the afternoon, when I found that that it started raining while I was in Friend Center. The Blue Line makes a stop in front of E-Quad, and saved me and my computer from the downpour (and it was kind of funny how every other grad student was taking the green line [which is a full city-bus sized vehicle] to the GC or the Apartments and I was the lone rider on the small MIT-Saferide-sized shuttle of the blue line).

Registration was un-eventful: W4 and I9 forms were filled out so I can get paid. I did find out from Dean Redman that I need to send a copy of my transcript to him: so I went to the registrar and requested a copy be passed from first floor West College to second floor Nassau Hall, a journey of 50 yards total... The GSG was also at Chancellor Green: they were handing out free mugs, which is great, because I am starting to feel guilty about the number of paper cups I go through everyday getting tea from the department. That mug I am leaving in the office to use. Maybe I'll even bring some of my person tea collection over.

Also went to TigerCard Office and got my parking decal. In the e-mail I got from them, they said that grad students need to present PUID, registration for the vehicle, and proof that they live on/off campus, in the form of a housing contract or lease/deed/mortgage. But they only asked me for the first thing. So now I have an official Blue CM sticker that allows me to park in lot 25, which is much closer to the department.

One curious thing happened while getting my transcript: Princeton is going more and more toward the direction of digitizing everything. The registrar no longer has paper forms sitting around. Everything is expected to be done over the internet. And unfortunately for me, it turns out that for an "alumnus" to request a transcript, he would have to have a TigerNet account (TigerNet is the alumni network). I've put off getting a TigerNet account because I figured that my @princeton.edu e-mail address would still work for four more years, and there really isn't any hurry for me to activate my @alumni.princeton.edu account. But anyway, now I have one. The username is wwwong, three Ws instead of my usual two. And also, it seems that a lot of the campus services that used to have their own software are getting integrated into SCORE, the Student Course Online Registration Engine, which is powered by PeopleSoft, and sucks royally. I swear, My Academic Records was a perfect solution for letting the student know how he or she is doing academically. And now the registrar/university integrated that into SCORE, the output is no longer formatted! It becomes a direct database dump. I mean, a second year CS student can write a better interface than a brain-dump. That's just one among the many retarded things SCORE does. Furthermore, it seems that due to some administrative screw-up^*, I wasn't able to log onto SCORE and complete my academic year registration. (It was fixed by this morning.)

Found out today about the presence of a wireless network in Fine Hall. E-mailed compudoc and got my laptop registered for use in Fine Hall... now I can sit and browse the internet at my leisure in the Fine Hall common room. Yum.

Around noon time I went to Frist in search of Elika. We were supposed to meet up to burn OpenCDs for the Student Activities Fair that is coming up tomorrow. I couldn't find her in Frist. There was also a Frist-fest going on, apparently celebrating the 5th anniversary of the opening of the student center, with live-music and everything. After a short while, I decided to check my e-mail again. And there it is, an e-mail from Elika, announcing that she is in position in Friend Center. I was like, d'oh. So I scurried along to Friend and found Elika alone. -sigh- Lack of participation from the PUG in these things... Anyway, the two of us managed to burn 50 CDs over three hours or so. I also had lunch (Gyu Don 牛丼 from Tomo 友 Sushi; I am sad to say I make better ones than they do).

* It seems to me that when I decided to accept Princeton's offer to stay another four years, some guy looked at SCORE, and decided that, "Hey, this guy already has a record here, no need to create a new one. But it looks like he still needs this thing right now, so I'll just leave it as it is and not add him as a new grad student." And then, at the end of the semestre, some other person came along and did a mass-kill on all class of 2005 records. So during the summer, when everyone else could use SCORE, my account didn't even exist in PeopleSoft's consideration. While during the summer I chalked up my inability to log on to SCORE and change my mailing address as normal system-unavailability during the summer (what piece of shitty software needs a 7 hour maintenance mode every day is beyond me), it actually should have been the first sign that someone somewhere screwed up my account.

Woke up a bit late today, since I was on the phone with S til the wee hours. After showering, I had breakfast and checked on my e-mails. Then I spent an hour practicing my Alto. I then spent a bit more time on the internet. It started raining. I didn't want to leave the house because if I go to campus, I will have to park in the parking lot and walk to the department in the rain. So I read a bit and took a nap.

By 4 in the afternoon I was ready to go. The rain stopped.

I got to campus about 4:30, had a bit of late lunch (some Inari Sushi), and went to Woolworth and practiced. I spent some time working on sight-reading by reading through some of the Cannonball transcription I found on the internet. That made me feel sad because Cannonball's playing is so hard to follow, that even sight-reading the transcription was painful. So after a while I switched to Desmond transcriptions, and his playing is more typical of passages you see for the sight-reading portion of auditions.

Then I worked on my scales: focused on major, harmonic minor, bebop, and the altered scale. With that out of the way, I spent some time working on There's no greater love. After about 90 minutes of practicing, I got the chord changes to the tune burned into my mind, though some of the trickier transitions between major and altered scales and the really cool bebop substitution over the first four chords^** were not in what I would call familiar shape. It was 6 pm. So I sat around and waited for my turn. (I signed up for the first slot tonight, which was 6:30pm.)

A necessary digression: Tony got a fellowship to teach Jazz at Estonia this fall. So Ralph Bowen is taking over for a term as director of the ensembles. He also happens to be the saxophone teacher for private lessons at Princeton.

So apparently because of the rain, there was a big accident on Route 1, and Ralph couldn't make it until around 7:10. The bunch of us were just sitting around wondering what is going on: me, Hockfield, a freshman named Rob (what's with all those Robs I know playing sax for PUJE? This one is the fourth Rob I know who plays Alto), Ramsey, Dean, Alec, Ben, and Dillon. Eventually Ralph showed up. I did my thing, and came home.

I played the head of the tune pretty well, though I think I messed up a bit in the solo. There was one ii-V-I resolution that I got carried away when I started it on a tritone sub, which accidentally went, by finger memory, into a completely non-compatible chord. Over all I was mostly satisfied with it, can't do much better. It is about as good a shape when I would be preparing for lessons. The sight-reading was extremely easy. Ralph is also responsible for the Rutgers U. Jazz Band, and also does some work for IAJE, so for sight-reading he just pulled out one of the old IAJE audition sight-reading pieces, which is probably the same one they used for All-State NJ some time back. It was easier than the stuff Tony had us read (I still shudder at my audition freshman year, when he had us read The Way I Feel by Bob Mintzer... the first twelve bars were in C# major...). On the other hand, at least he can guarantee that no one is familiar with the material (last year's sight reading piece was something the band played when I was a freshman, so old fogeys like myself had a rather easy time with it).

Dinner was Chinese roast pork.

** Normally the chord changes to No greater love is in A' A B A form, where A' is

G maj | C 7 | B 7 | E 7 | A 7 | A 7 | A - | D 7

... | A - 7 | D 7 | G maj | G maj

D - G 7 | C#- F# 7 | C- F7 | B- E7