Graduate School Applications and GRE:
So, today I did a GRE test because I want to apply for Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences. The results are fairly mixed. My verbal score was a lousy 380 points (on a 200-800 scale), which is not very high. Actually, it’s plain bad. My quantitative score, on the other hand, was the full 800 points (same 200-800 scale), which is pretty darn good. I guess my excuse for doing so bad on the verbal part is that I’m a foreigner. My english really isn’t bad, but I just don’t know most of those exotic words that are being referred to in the test. Sorry guys… I hope this is good enough to be considered for admission, though, I’m not applying to be a translator, am I? I’ll receive my analytical score (on a 0.0-6.0 range) in two weeks from now.

It’s interesting how people try to hide the fact that they’re geeks and blatantly fail because their peer is just as bad as them. Thomas already touched upon that in his latest entry, so let’s take one of my own examples.

So I live in New York City and hang out with people here. I promised, one day, to send pictures of one night out to two girls that had been coming with me. Those pictures are located on the tweakers.net picture gallery. For those who don’t know, tweakers.net is a dutch slashdot-like computer-oriented website (news, forum, …). So I sent them a link to this picture gallery. The day after, one of those girls pointed out to me that her ex-boyfriend, a “complete geek and ass-hole” (what a surprise for an ex ), used to be hanging out on this website for full days and she was worried that I was one of those cracks as well.

Of course, I told her I was not. … That wasn’t even a complete lie, realistically. I barely touch computers here, I barely have time for that…

(Makes me wonder: who’s this ex-boyfriend of hers? :-). I might even know him. Scary shit.)

Pending:
Today, I found that I still have pending patches that are as bad as four months old. I suck. I’ll be back home in four weeks from now and promise to clean up my inbox after that. My apologies to anyone who’s sent me patches and didn’t see them applied yet; they’re in my inbox (I always mark patches as important and those occur at the bottom of my inbox, marked in red). They just take a while. Same goes for assigned bug reports or pending actions. Sorry guys. I’m doig what I can, but my time is limited right now.

Just arrived in Ottawa with Dave for DDC. Will try to show up at the welcome party at 8:00 PM tonight, hope it’ll be interesting.

I’ve been wanting to post this for several weeks now, but advogato kept being down!

Freedom:
So lately, I hear this free software activist talking about some software that I work on. He hates the software. That’s ok. Why? Because he hates me and my opinions. I won’t go into the opinions, since this is not the right place for a political discussion (it’s a typical liberal [me] vs. socialist [he] case), but would just like to mention that this is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life. Free software is only a small piece in the freedom puzzle, which is the ultimate fight that we’re continuously struggling with. Freedom of speach, freedom of ideas and the consequent disagreements are all part of that. A society that allows for all this, requires respect between individuals in order to be liveable. I disagree with you, but I don’t hate you. Why do you hate me for my ideas? Is that freedom?

And in the mean time…:
… I was enjoying fireworks in Manhattan yesterday, as part of the 4th-of-July celebration. Beautiful!