Monday, June 13, 2005

Pissing myself off...

As you can see in the comments of one of my recent posts, I've managed to piss off another guy named "ted." He doesn't have a profile available. If he did, you would probably eventually be able to find the home page of Theodore Kim (Ted).

Ted is a computer science graduate student. He got his undergrad at Cornell, and he now is doing his graduate work at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in their computer science department. He is an instructor for COMP 121-400: Unix Programming. He has worked a number of places, including Evans and Sutherland.

How did Ted and I meet? I was doing a google search for some Spiderman 2 lines. His webpage was one of the many that came up. It was very random.

Why is this significant? Well, at first I thought it was interesting that he follows his name with "(Ted)". To prevent confusion, at least early in the quarter, I usually use "Theodore (Ted) Pavlic" as my name, and I've gotten harassment from friends for my use of "(Ted)," but not everyone realizes that Ted is short for Theodore. What else is interesting? He is a computer science graduate student going to UNC. When I started undergrad, I was sure that compuers were going to be a part of my career. In fact, I interned in RTP, NC at IBM with a number of UNC grads and interns. Meanwhile, back at school, I taught a number of CS classes, including a UNIX PROGRAMMING class. However, a short time after IBM, despite having a strong CS background, I was convinced that my real future was in ECE. Around this time, EVANS AND SUTHERLAND wanted me to intern with them doing software work. I turned them down and went to National Instruments instead. The rest is basically history.

I'm not saying that Ted Kim is a bizarro version of Ted Pavlic, but I'm saying that it's really funny that I just happen to e-bump into someone with whom I think I share a similar past and an even similar present. This is fascinating to me.

Though I still contend that eigenvalues are unitless, and to say otherwise is to show a fundamental misunderstanding of the connection between linear math and the physical world.

Regardless though, I feel bad for pissing bizarro-Ted off. I never intended to do that. Though, if he's anything like me, he probably deserved it.

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