Yesterday's piano lesson went pretty well. I've learned most of Burgmüller's Ballade. My teacher gave me a nice compliment on having worked very hard on that and Heller's The Avalanche. (I still credit a lot of my success to having more time to practice due to not working.)

A few days ago, I mentioned that I was reviewing z- and Laplace transforms. I was looking for the residue method of doing partial fraction expansions, and found some very useful notes on MathWorld. The Complex Residue page gives a derivation that actually leads to one of the equations given in Kleinrock's queueing theory textbook! In the past, to conduct such research, I would have had to go to the campus library and search through several textbooks; now I can just look up information on the web from home. I wish the web had been more built out when I was a student; it would have saved me a lot of time. (The web was just starting to come into existence when I started grad school 15 years ago.)