The Last Samurai (c) 2003 Elektra / Warner

Do y'all remember that scene in The Last Samurai where the wounded and delirious Captain Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise), taken back to the village of Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe), is writhing on the floor, screaming for saké? The young warrior, Nobutada (Shin Koyamada), moves to get more for him, laughing "let him drink!", while the mistress of the house, Taka (Koyuki Katou), forbids it. Meanwhile, Algren continues to shout, flailing through a long night of withdrawal nightmares.

Yeah... it's kindasorta like that.

In other news: Today's first mental casualty - I missed a Graduate Council Academic Affairs committee meeting at 08:30 this morning, thinking it was still at 16:00 as it was last semester. That's the second Academic Affairs meeting I've missed this semester, out of only four! At least I made the first main Grad Council meeting of the semester, though I really have no excuse (other than a deficiency of Vitamin C₂).

08:30 to a computer scientist is like 05:30 to non-CS people! How did they even set a meeting time that early with a CS on the committee, you might well wonder? Simple: I didn't get the mail from Dedra Wodzyiak, the administrative assistant to the Associate Dean of the Graduate School. Our department's e-mail was jacked for weeks, including the second week of January, when some important mails went out.

On the way back from a FIBR project meeting in Throckmorton, I went to Ackert, and saw the new K-INBRE bioinformatician, Liangjiang Wang¹. We discussed the bioinformatics faculty search in K-State's CIS department and the new search for a graduate research assistant at KSU's Bioinformatics group.² I then went towards Willard Hall looking for istari_ala's sketch, overshot it, and promptly ran into masaga, who I finally tasked with the collection of Intro AI (CIS 730) materials for our upcoming CSAB accreditation visit. Only 4 months overdue there! Procrastination, thy name is banazir. Then I asked masaga to get my Computer Graphics (CIS 736) and Advanced AI (CIS 830) web pages into istari_ala's cascading style sheets (CSS). Only a month behind there... pretty soon I'll actually be caught up, and then what will I do? Casualty the second of my undernutrified brain: I forgot to give him the $13 I owe him again! masaga promises to make a 30-year running gag out of this (I've forgotten five times already as of today), and he may make it yet, at this rate.

Upon getting into Willard, I searched the first floor for Ala's sketch, then the second, and ran into an old friend and colleague, Dane Webster, whose might in Maya and Wacom tablets is nonpareil in these here parts. After I invited Dane to come on back to the KSU-CIS Visualization Lab some time and talk shop, he sent me to the third floor, where one of the professors (Rachel Melis, a UWM grad whom I mistook for a doctoral student, forgetting that the MFA is the terminal degree in art) who put up the 2-D Design (ART 100) pieces tried to help me find the sketch.<sup>3

1</sup> You have to like a guy whose nickname is "LJ".
² Any good programmers at k_state looking for a job: please contact me.
³ Casualty the third, it is. You'd think I'd remember this fact from knowing jereeza, Dane, and deire for years, but nope. The brain's gone out to lunch, ladies and genterman.

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Banazir