Slept quite early. Woke up early, refreshed; ate some delicious oatmeal and chatted with a Culmanner whose name I’d forgotten. She showed me some cool German indie music. Showered, and went to print some handouts to take to the (open-note) exam. I was successful in printing them, but of course didn’t use them for the exam. I barely referred to my 2-page course condensation.
The first part of the 6 problem, 3 hour exam (whoa, exactly like 1 section of the Putnam) was a bit of torture–everything looked difficult, some sum in the first problem looked difficult to bound. But then I came to the 2nd problem again and broke through. Chernoff, union bound, bam! I went back to 1, cleaned up the sum. Back to the prowl. It took me a second, but then I figured out a clever way to do problem 4 that made the proof like 5 lines. Then I was on a spree. I solved two more problems before the time ended, which, if I did everything correctly, means I exceeded the threshold for the maximal 6.0 grade by nearly 1 whole question.
Got pizza with some buddies from the exam; a bunch had gotten stuck like I had in the beginning. Especially problem 4–if they hadn’t seen the trick that I’d seen, woe betide! But the mood was still cheery. I invited them to Culmann for the pizza. It was very tasty, and we played a little foosball. Sara invited me to a concert.
I left to play basketball, played OK, lots of great takes with bad finishes :/ But after that I had a lovely evening. I made myself a bowl of cereal and watched the first episode of Mad Men. Then I wrote some emails and made myself some eggs for dinner (nearly there! I have almost nothing left in my fridge). I had the first half of a bowl of incredibly spicy ramen that Yeomin gave me. Damn, that was spicy. I could only finish the first half, which brought an incredible rush of endorphins, before the concert.
The concert was in the CAB, big-band jazz, a really incredible student group. Their vocalist was freaking amazing. Reminded me of swing dancing. Hung out with Sara and her buddy Seljuk (like the Seljuk Turks!) over the break, got beer in the CAB lounge and played foosball.
Then back to Culmann. Ate the rest of the ramen and some ice cream. Had a good conversation with Vincenzo. Mia et al. were about to go out; played some foosball with Mia (just left hand, made for a really good game, she won!). I walked down the stairs with them as they were going out, then ran back up, watched another episode of Mad Men, which is really interesting and actually focuses less on advertising than the weird position of women in that world, and the different types of interactions (read, misogyny).
Then I wrote this log and hit the hay!