I was thinking just the other day, "What forum is there for me to ask the world at large why matresses have flowery decorations on them?"

Without further ado:
Why do matresses have flowery decorations (or decorations of any sort) on them?

I miss Canadian beer. I don't even like beer. I just miss seeing it in stores, and knowing that it's there for me.

I was discussing with my supervisor yesterday the experimentation booth that is being built as the central feature of the lab that he is putting together (and the reason for the existence of his flock of grad students).

It's a pretty nice setup, including vibration-damping floor, acoustically shielded walls, large-screen rear-projection display, surround-sound (in the sense of speakers all over the place), and a motion tracking system that could, for instance, track the exact location of your ears.

He concluded by mentioning that it will be a great place to watch DVDs.

So I've finally encountered someone called for jury duty (one of the secretaries in the CS department). Today I am truly an American resident.

I've learned that there are worse things than being a foreign student arriving in the US to go to school here. Namely, I could be a foreign student arriving in the US to do a co-op term here.

Richard, a co-op student from Memorial University (pronounced "mun"), has arrived, after being held in immigration at Pearson airport for a whole day (he was allowed onto the last flight to Newark). Since arriving, he has been rejected at the social security office, the payroll office, and the id card office. But hey, he already has a place to live.

We had the inspection walkthrough for the construction plans today. The trades guys were impressed with the job I'd done laying out the proposed walls on the floor with masking tape. I'd really only done it so that we could figure out how we're going to fit 7 people and their computers into the rest of the room.

It's going to be a tight squeeze, but at least we all have flat-panel monitors - hooray! (Except Shin, who specifically requested a CRT for less motion blur when doing graphics stuff - he also hopes to get a bigger desk as a result).

Here, it's called monster.com. They gave me free stuff. On a related note, students here seem to take career fairs more seriously than I'm used to. Everyone was wearing suits.