So, okay, maybe the whole snow thing turned out to be slightly more than a minor pain in the ass. The subway I ride is elevated in my part of Brooklyn, which means that when it has been running, trains have been stalling and being taken out of service often enough that I’ve spent no less than two hours in transit each time I’ve tried to make the trip between here and Manhattan since Monday. But I hope (oh, how I hope) that with the warmer weather and rather significant melting today, things might be better tomorrow morning.

This month’s Wired has an article on the making of Enter The Matrix, with all the usual impressive technical stats and screenshots that still manage to leave me as unsure about the game as I am about the sequel it’s based on; I guess we’ll see, come May.

My favorite NYU moment of the week: one of my professors was discussing the upcoming (40% of our final grade) paper. He gave the usual plagiarism warnings, but emphasized his point by recounting past students who were caught when he Googled for sentence fragments from the questionable essays and found the exact sources they from which they were lifted.

Gary Kasparov has written a mildly interesting piece for the WSJ on his matches with Deep Blue and Deep Junior, and the ramifications for chess in general: Despite the increasing popularity of the game, chess has long suffered from a lack of sponsorship. IBM exacerbated this situation by creating the impression that the experiment begun by Turing was over, that there was no more to be learned. I believe that this new match has convincingly refuted that argument. There was record interest in this match on its own merits, without a giant PR machine. ESPN provided live coverage, a first in the history of chess.

So today is apparently the heaviest snowfall New York has had in seven years. Alas, poor Tigger: his owner is snowed in here with me, since all train service over the bridge into Manhattan has been suspended for the duration. We’re expecting about two feet total accumulation, but the wind is causing it to heap up in weird ways. The pile outside my door comes to about mid-thigh on me; getting to classes tomorrow should be an adventure.

This is by no means the biggest snowstorm I’ve ever seen, nor is it really that crippling. By my Massachusetts standards, this weighs in at a minor pain-in-the-ass ranking, but it’s rare for snow to accumulate at all within the city itself, so everyone’s flipping out about it.

One of the few decent photos I managed to get at the William Gibson signing the other day, before my batteries died.

The good part is that the morning they’re predicting one to two feet of snow by the end of the day, I don’t have to leave the house because it’s Presidents’ Day. The bad part is that the morning they’re actually predicting enough snow that NYU might have cancelled classes (which, despite these younguns claiming it as an impossibility, happened twice in the winter of 1999), we’ve already got the day off because it’s Presidents’ Day.

But I mean really, it looks like either way today is pretty much earmarked for staying in bed and playing Vice City and drinking serious quantities of tea.

It always sneaks up on me, being the day after Valentine’s Day and whatnot, but it’s that time again: Caoine turns four years old today. Younger than Zeldman, older than Livejournal. Who knew? Not me, anyway. Unfortunately, my archives don’t go back all the way to February 1999 - I didn’t start archiving until Spencer pointed out that it would be easy enough to do in this wacky new PHP thing everyone was starting to use instead of Perl. You can dig around in the nearly four years of old content if you want to see how things have changed, though. Can it really be less than a year since I started capitalizing sentences?

Although I understand and sympathize with the whole Hallmark holiday objection, re: Valentine’s Day, I do admit to a totally unrepentent schoolgirl glee when it comes to making Valentines. I completely and thoroughly dig the arts-and-craftsy homemade card shit. When I say homemade card, though, don’t think Martha Stewart - think crazed former Girl Scout enveloped in a glittery whirlwind of glue sticks and construction paper. Think crayons and heart-shaped hole punchers and mysterious tricks with folded paper. Think elementary school. Remember in fourth grade how you’d spend the morning creating Valentine mailboxes out of big envelopes or shoe boxes or whatever and then in the afternoon you’d eat cupcakes and hand out all your carefully phrased cards to certain classmates and teachers? Yeah, like that.

So I actually had a lot of fun yesterday; I’d mailed or given out my own dweeby Valentines the day before, so on the day itself Chris and Spencer and Viv and I went to see Final Destination 2, and made fun of all the people on the train and in the theater carrying half-dead dozens of roses specially priced for desperate boyfriends, and giant day-glo pink teddy bears, and in one case an ugly balloon large enough that it actually contained several other ugly balloons. The movie was just as bad as the RT reviews indicate - but so was the first one, and we knew what we were getting into. If you liked the convoluted and intensely visceral death scenes of the original and can stomach more of what might just be the worst dialogue ever, you’ll dig the sequel.

Thanks to everyone who sent cards, but the Cutest Valentine Ever award is going to have to go to my parents, who actually managed to find one with a philosophy student theme.

Because one book signing per fortnight isn’t nearly enough, Crispy and I met up with Stray to hear William Gibson reading from and discussing his new book (which is currently 30% off at Amazon, apparently).

Although the event took place at the same B&N at which we saw HST, it had a very different sort of flavor: a smaller, calmer crowd, overall (although I suspect the level of fanatical devotion was approximately equal - it’s just that Gibson’s fans were less drunk). Because Gibson was actually reading and answering questions, there were even chairs for the attendees, instead of the Line Without End. We got there early enough to score front row seats, which meant that not only could we actually see the stage, we were first in line to get our books signed when the time came, and since Gibson was actually on time (not that I can really blame HST for being late - he’s got a reputation to maintain, after all), we were out of the store and eating dinner at Zen Palate by 7:30.

Gibson himself seems remarkably down to earth; he’s funny in a very dry sort of way, and we loved how he dealt with some of the more questionable questions. When one guy asked about his use of the word otaku in PR and whether his readers would understand it, Gibson responded that they probably would (given his demographic), and if they didn’t - they could just Google for it. When I got a chance to talk to him during the signing itself, we discussed (briefly) weblogging, of all things; he told me it’s something he really enjoys but that already he can see it will probably end up taking a backseat to other things, like the book tour (right now) and any other writing he might be doing (later).

In any case, the whole thing was pleasantly less of an ordeal than we’d expected, dinner was great, and I have a couple of my favorite books signed. Today is all about feasting on the spoils of yesterday’s NYU Valentine’s Day Thing (which spoils include some really alarming and nonfeastable glow in the dark condoms and glitter putty stuff along with the massive quantities of candy), and heading to the movies later with the notorious S.T.H.

During yet another of Main’s Silver’s endless faux-fire evacuations (whereby one of the science labs does something naughty and the alarms go off), I ended up discussing with one of my philosophy professors how, exactly, smoking in New York has changed over the past year or so. The general consensus seems to be that since the tax hike (last summer? I forget, already), there’s been a definite increase in the stringency of cigarette etiquette, and that while it doesn’t seem to have caused people to start quitting in droves, a lot of us have sought alternate means of getting lung cancer.

It’s no longer an insignificant thing to bum a smoke off someone: cigarettes have become these precious commodities to be treasured and hoarded, and never discarded with impunity. It’s definitely acceptable to say no if someone asks you for a cigarette, now, but on the other hand it’s a philanthropic gesture to make Mother Theresa proud if you do freely distribute your supply.

And that’s the secret. I’ve been buying my cloves on the web since August, by which I mean I’ve bought my cloves exactly once on the web since August; I picked up a carton for $28.50 (just about $3 a pack with shipping) and I’m just now finishing it up. I’ll probably order another that will last me through till June, or whatever. I resolved to stop buying individual packs the first time I was charged $16 for two; even before the tax increase I was paying $5 or $6 a pack, so esmokes really is a boon. I know other people who prefer to roll their own, which is just about equally inexpensive.

And because I get them so cheaply and smoke so lightly myself, I don’t really have any qualms about passing them out for the asking, and thus earning the eternal love and gratitude of all the gothy Nietzsche-loving NYU students with whom I associate. Hooray, esmokes!

If you miss the whole Ellen Fleiss thing and cry yourself to sleep over the decline in stoner-kid-in-computer-ad humor on the web, comfort can be found in the form of an article about that Dell guy getting in pot-related trouble (before someone puts you out of your misery).

Incidentally, for those of you who started college in the glorious pre-2000 golden era of doing Everything On The Web At All Ever, it looks like Bigwords.com is back, in a slightly mutated reincarnation. They don’t do their own textbook sales and distribution anymore (and I hope they don’t have orange jumpsuited kids throwing Bigwords superballs at people on campus anymore), and it looks like whatever money they might be making comes from an elaborate array of referral and associate accounts. More power to them, I guess - I didn’t check until I’d already bought my books for this term, but I could have saved about $40 if I’d used them, and the free stickers they send out for the asking are pretty darn cute. I wonder if Kozmo will ever be resurrected?

And in the tying-up-loose-ends vein, it looks like Andy Serkis didn’t get a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Gollum after all (surprise surprise), although The Two Towers did get nominated for six other awards, including Best Picture.