Just coming back from a career fair at CMU’s University Center, where I went to say hi to the people who manned the Mozilla booth. As I hadn’t come to engage in recruiting discussions, I neither carried a resume binder under my arm, nor was I dressed in a black suit like every other person who went there.

Quite amusingly, while the students dressed up in order to show off their seriousness, all of the recruiters were dressed casually in t-shirts or polo shirts and jeans in order to show how relaxed they were. Funny sight.

Lucky as I am, I also got a USB stick from the Cisco booth (thanks Rob for giving me yours, since you got the last one!)… It has 1GB, that’ll make for a great new root drive for my Slug (which currently runs on 512M). By the way, why can OS X’s Disk Util.app format an ext2 partition, but OS X can’t mount or read it? Very odd.

Oh, and just in case anyone was wondering how high the percentage of international students at CMU is:

CMU professor Randy Pausch died last night from pancreatic cancer. Even beyond academia, his inspiring “last lecture” made him famous worldwide.

I recently saw this on the local network at the unversity:

Well, at least the user was honest If he was aware that his iPhone would tell everybody of its existence through Bonjour? That, I don’t know.

Sometimes the news just leave me scratching my head:

Apparently, in 2003, Pennsylvania abolished the “helmet law” forcing motorcycle riders in the state to wear a helmet.

As a result, people are less inclined to wear helmets (first surprise), according to a recent study head injuries needing hospital care due to motorcycle accidents went up 87% compared to before the law fell (second surprise), leading to a rise in the resulting medical care costs for these injuries of 132%.

So, Pennsylvania gets rid of their helmet law, and now they act surprised that people leaving their bikes the direct way are more likely to suffer severe injuries? What the hell?

(Helmet picture CC by-nc-sa licensed by midnightglory on flickr)

At the local dry cleaner’s:

I begin to like this: Today I used the CMU Escort to get home from school. It’s basically a night shuttle bus that takes you from campus (there are bus stops) to any street corner within a 1.5 mile radius from campus. That can be veeery convenient (need I mention it is free for ID card holders).

No, dear night owls, they won’t pick you up at your favorite bar when you’re too drunk to find your way home on your own — but if you happen to remember where campus is, they would probably pick you up there.

All in all, this makes it easy and safe to get home even when the regular buses are done for the night, which happens more or less early, depending on the bus line.

That went quite quick: I looked at two places and the second one was good enough so I took it. It’s a little room in Squirrel Hill, furnished and with air condition (believe me, that is important here). I even have an own bathroom. (And, as I mentioned earlier, I have decent cable TV that allows me to watch Euro 2008 soccer — yay for the landlady!)

At the moment however I live in a different room of the house because the current person to live in my room-to-be will only move out on July 15.

Either way, I am happy to have found a place to stay.

Murray Avenue, Squirrel Hill’s main street (picture off Wikipedia)

By the way, the neighborhood is really nice, there are a lot of families living there, it’s very close to amenities (grocery store, restaurants, post office, even a liquor store) and it’s a really short walk to the bus stop too.

Looks like I’m all set — Now I only need to write my master’s thesis. Peanuts!

There’s no question about it: This is the street I need to move to.

Or at the very least I need to go there and take a photo