2/28/15

1. And it's been another couple of days!
2. Friday was pretty nuts. Classes, got a haircut, 
3. went to Neural which was really cool. Research prof from the UW talked about hearing, cochlear implants. What's neat is that he's modding the standard cochlear implant to work with the vestibular system--the part of the ear that keeps us balanced and our eyes tracking when our head is rotating/bouncing.
4. GTPT super fun. Hung out with Frank and Jannel for a bit, talked about Jannel's upcoming job in the Navy as a nuclear technician. Then Hira and Jacob showed up and we basically spent an hour tossing around a soft volleyball (thanks Julie) in the SPS lounge, running around the tables in circles. Homeschooler-style good times.
5. Went back to Haggett, off to ACM dance! Except not really a dance--everyone just grabbed the food that Microsoft brought and sat down. Winnie (who's not in CS) was there, and somewhat strangely jumped from the CS group she was with to being invited by me :P We moved from table to table, I introduced her to lots of CS shmids. She was going crazy networking, on her phone gathering facebook contact info the whole time. Very odd experience. Did get to teach her a bit of swing dancing--the music was perfect even though nobody was dancing. The musicians were super happy that we (and some other people from our table) actually danced.
6. From there, off to Aladdin's, where I met with Hira from the SPS, who I was taking to my second dance of the night, the Lavin Gala. We had a philosophical conversation over gyros that took an odd turn, which I'm not going to get into now. Suffice it to say that brain cycles are going to analysis and reflection.
7. We ran frantically to catch the bus, but made it to the boat (yes, the dance was on a yacht, this is the Business school we're talking about) well before boarding.
8. The Gala was pretty raucous. I danced for a while, but Hira was wearing heels and could only keep up for so long. The Lavin people were spontaneously organizing into all sorts of group dances--at one point a circle formed and people stepped inside the circle to show off their moves.
9. I also played camps (believe it or not sisters!) Hira and I made a tacit signal as we sat down and proceeded to mop the floor (3-1-0) with the less savvy competition. 
10. And I got into an argument about libertarianism. Josiah introduced me to this fellow Garett. Garrett was super knowledgeable about international affairs, and it was fun talking about ISIS, fiscal stuff in Greece, but then it came down to libertarianism/utilitarianism. Garett turned out to be a virtue ethicist--interesting perspective, but weird to argue with. 
11. Disembarked and took the bus back to the UW about midnight. Dropped Hira off at Alder--she lives with her family but was meeting another friend. 
12. Ended up playing group games in the lounge with floormates until 1:30 or so, then hit the hay. 
13. Alright, short summary of Saturday and Sunday.
14. Saturday:
1. Brunch with Brandon
2. Run
3. Finished CS lab
4. Wow, that's all I can remember!
15. Sunday:
1. Lunch with Ayush
2. Sign up for Hamlet auditions
3. Visit 2104 house to arrange tour
4. Climbing
5. Really cool math reading
6. Homework and more reading
7. Help Siri with math problem
8. Skype with Grace
9. Log
10. Bed
16. Good night and joy to y'all!

2/24/16

1. It’s been a couple days! Here’s a rough-grained update.
1. Monday I had my math midterm. Pretty insane, but I think I did well.
2. Lunchbox with LIGO leader was awesome. SPS lounge was packed. Our 4 pizzas were gone within seconds.
3. Horrible circuits lab actually went well this time. Ok, we did spend about 45 minutes trying to figure out what the $$^(*&# was wrong with a circuit whose ground lead just wasn’t attached correctly on the breadboard. (Honestly, my partner makes a lot of these little, incredible time consuming mistakes.)
4. Did linux hw for a while, then went climbing for an hour.
5. Did Circuits hw with Brandon, Winnie, Eric late. Brandon and I broke down this really complex circuit and were up until 2am, but it was very satisfying to understand the thing in its entirety.
6. On Tuesday:
7. I took a nap in the afternoon! That was great. Also did a bit of work on CS lab.
8. SPS Career Panel! Frank actually put together a really great panel. First Olmstead dumped a bunch of data on us, then we questioned the panelists. One HS physics teacher was having a great time, he argued that physics teaching is much better than teaching in the other sciences in a couple of regards (first principles, more general questions from students, I generally agree). Also interesting--lots of physics PhD’s (over half!) go into industry and get paid quite a lot.
9. Super long, massed Glee rehearsal with USingers, Women’s Choir, and the Orchestra. My voice was shot :D
10. Took pizza up to the floor tradition, conversed with Ashleigh and Maddie for a while. Heard a lot of Maddie’s background, growing up in a military family and living in a military base in Japan; plus Sarah started arguing about Japanese culture, which was socially awkward but interesting.
11. Again went climbing for like an hour. Very fun, and I’m definitely improving.
12. Went to Odegaard and tutored for ACED for an hour. Turned out I was tutoring this dude from Lavin, Bo, which probably disappoints Justin since he isn’t getting the marketing reach outside Lavin that he wants. But it was fun. Pretty basic (by now!) integral calculus.
13. When I came back, Xin was in a state of moderate panic; he feared failing his math 324 quiz on Green’s Thm the following morning. So we spent about an hour going over Green’s Thm and the sample problems. I got to draw in a diversity of math (from Dr. Webber’s hand-drawn parametrized curves to 335 familiarity with Green’s Thm) so that was fun. Xin said he was impressed with my IQ, which is odd b/c I’ve been studying this stuff hardcore for a while now.
14. Today, Wednesday:
15. Neural was really cool. Prof. Rao basically recapped, with chosen examples, all the emerging uses for brain-computer interface tech that we’d been looking at over the quarter. I think this stuff is going to be really big (Dad, maybe you should take a look at the slide deck, not posted yet, so remind me to send it to you in a few days)
16. Then remade the SPS lunchbox flyer template in Google Slides--much nicer than the arcane thing that the guy before me made in Word. Still needs a few tweaks.
17. By the time I’d finished the template and made Monday’s lunchbox with it, it was time for swing!
18. Swing lesson was great. Just super friendly people, and I was getting the moves. I feel like salsa was frequented by more aggressive extroverts/individualists, which was harder for me to deal with in a difficult learning environment. And we’re moving slower in swing :D
19. Grabbed dinner (ran into Tristan from math and his buddy/girlfriend? Zara at the 8 and ate with them for a bit), then went to Rick’s.
20. I feel like I really connected with the other volunteers this time around. A small win for me on the “networking” scoresheet. Plus an affirmation to contradict my waning faith in humanity--these people turned out to be substantially more interesting than I had thought.
1. Tobias, who I had written off as a Jamie’s Group dude, turned out to have this crazy existentialist/nihilist philosophy bent. Something happened to me in conversation which happened a few quarters ago with Paul from Glee and more recently from Jannel--I realize that somebody is expecting an in-depth, interesting response from me, and everything changes--my demeanor, my style, and especially my vocab. I start whipping out words I haven’t used for months. I’m still not sure what to make of Tobias--he has a sort of ill-formed Galt-ness about him.
2. And Vivian, who seemed a straight-up sorority girl, turned out to be an aspiring CS major, who works (I want this job, and apparently they’re hiring) teaching intro coding to elementary students. $25/hr! We also got into a debate about the validity of the game-theory argument for why all animal species with two sexes have equal sex ratios in their populations.
3. After coming back from Rick’s, I met with Brandon and we planned out physics classes for next year. I’m astonished every time I try to pencil it out that my crazy schedule, double-major/minor, actually works!
4. Sent emails, etcetera, wrote this log. I’m actually going to bed now. I should stop with this 2am business, but if I get productive around 1am…
5. Cheers! Life high five,
6. Spencer

2/20/16

1. 2/20/16
1. Woke up at 12:30 :D. Since I was up for 21 hours, this doesn’t surprise me as much as it might.
2. Check Messenger and see a hailstorm of messages on the Housing Initiative Thread. Apparently people are planning to meet at 1.
3. I don’t feel hungry, so I decide to go for a quick run. I grab Brandon on the way out.
4. We jog around the lake, super pretty, then meet with the group at the 8. I explain my new position--likely to go back to the dorms, because I still want to live with a large group of people--but manage to stay in the conversation about the other options. Our group does have good chemistry, so I want to keep my options open, and I think I have a chance at convincing people to go to the 2104 house, which I will do my very best to follow up on.
5. Walked out of the 8 and hung out for a bit, tossing a frisbee I had brought on the run.
6. Hustled back to Haggett, transferred everything to my new backpack, which was satisfying. Then off to my math review session.
7. Lots of fun--come up with an alternate, more intuitive but longer proof for a problem than the one Thomas produces.
8. Go work out with Brandon. Run into Chase on the way to the gym and sweep him up into our fold.
9. We try new machines; I work on my nemesis the crunch, while Brandon works on his, the pull-up. Finish up on the bench--Chase is still the strongest, but I’m getting a bit better.
10. Grab a slice of pizza, hustle back to Haggett to meet up with people for the Cultural Night. They’ve already left, so I run down to Meany and find them amongst the many colorful booths. Check out a booth on Burma, then take my seat in the audience. Run into Irina, who’s just there by herself for fun--something I would do but which I’m increasingly realizing is not typically done. She joins our group, and we chat for a bit about CS, Adam Blank, growth mindset.
11. Performances begin. What an incredible lineup! Dude who rocks ranchera acappella, several sets of awesome dancers portraying everything from Bosnian folk gatherings to Japanese fisherman work chants. Ends with UW Awaaz, the incredible East Indian acappella group that Sarang from CS is in. They are amazing.
12. The 8 is closed, so I go to the Ave for dinner (again! How will I ever use up my dining account?). Try a new place, Samurai Noodle, and get a hot bowl of spicy ramen. It’s pretty good, broth has this weird bitter, ancho chile type flavor.
13. Return to Haggett, muster Brandon, Donovan and Siri for ping pong. They’re actually pretty good, and we have some good games.
14. Write this log and hit the hay, before 1am for once!

2/18/16

1. 2/18/16
1. Woke at 5:30 to finish math. My mind again had worked on the problems during my 4 hours of sleep, and I solved the remaining ones neatly.
2. Math was neat--Will went on a long tangent about functions that are continuous everywhere but differentiable nowhere.
3. Hardware--very neat stuff about the way the OS, Hardware maintain the illusion of separate processes.
4. Lunch with Rishabh, from way back in Autumn of Freshman year. He had posted on the facebook group for the seminar we were both in that autumn, recommending a Business-Honors class. So we started chatting and decided to meet up at Which Wich. Super great--we talked about Rishabh’s current restaurant-service-automation startup, the classes in the entre minor, etc.
5. Went to Neural. Fairly dry lecture on neural prostheses aimed at disabled people, but lots of good info.
6. Get the Physicists Together was packed today--like 8 people playing Resistance, the core of our community. I kicked *ss in the game, a completely unsuspected spy.
7. After that, my goofy Circuits lab. I swear, that lab is one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve ever subjected myself to. The circuits are super cool… on paper. Then you screw something up on the breadboard, forget to set your probe attenuation, collect random noise from Leroy knows where… and then you realize you’ve completely misunderstood either the circuit or one of the poorly worded questions that Prof. Morales (who is awesome, just not the clearest lab writer) asks. The lab, which should have been short, stretches into its fourth hour; I hang out with the TA and examine a frustrating circuit afterwards.
8. Head down from the lab, exhausted; the physics shmids are still in the lounge playing games :) Bid them all goodnight, grab a burger on the Ave, and return to Haggett.
9. The crazy girl who accosted me when I baked cookies for the floor last quarter is in the lounge, talking to Chloe. She shanghais a bunch of us into playing Catan, something which I go along with--in my exhausted state, I could scarce struggle against such a tempting proposition.
10. Don’t quite finish the game, but Chloe gets hooked and wants to play another one later.
11. Go play a bit of hoops with Xin.
12. Return to Haggett, intending to flop into bed; see Siri and Ricardo in the lounge not quite finishing their Shawarma King leftovers. They offer me some and I, again, can’t refuse. Hang out for half an hour (it’s now 1am) talking. Siri regales me with more tales of his backwards calc class. Apparently, there’s just this one prof who can’t teach at all, grades really harshly (tests not on a curve), and doesn’t teach necessary material on time. Everyone wants to get out of his class, but on the other hand, all the calc sections are full. This seems like a market opportunity--maybe I could teach a parallel lecture, assemble a group of killer TA’s who want to make some extra money. I think students will pay for this, since Siri says over half the class is failing, and it’s been that way for a long time.
13. Ok, now I write the log and finally go to bed.

2/17/16

1. Dentist appt early! Finally got my front teeth cosmetically repaired.
2. Hung out in the SPS for a while talking to people during the Regionals prep meeting time--the meeting never materialized. But what did materialize: the Theory club! This super eloquent prof Chris Talloway gave an explanation of the EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) objections to quantum mechanics and gave us some reading material whilst we showered him with questions. The core issue, in a nutshell (go read the paper):
1. 2 entangled particles separated by large distance
2. By measuring momentum of one, can predict with certainty momentum of the other, without disturbing the other (the particles are "causally disconnected" by speed-of-light); that is, momentum of the other is an "element of physical reality", something real.
3. by measuring position of one, we can predict the position of the other, so position is also "something real" that we can predict with 100% certainty before we actually measure it.
4. However, after measuring the momentum of the "other", no experiment can give you the position of the "other" without affecting the "other"'s state, since we can't know the momentum and the position of the 'other" simultaneously in QM.
5. So QM does not allow us to predict two seemingly equally "real" physical quantities at once. 
6. Einstein objected to this, saying that QM, by failing to predict a "predictable" physical quantity, was incomplete. There must be "hidden variables" that QM was not taking into account.
7. However, and here's what takes this out of the realm of pure philosophy into crazy thought-experiment science: taking Einstein's arguments to their logical conclusions results in predictions about the correlations between different measurements, that have been tested and falsified. So there are no "local hidden variables". See Bell's Thm, Bell's Inequalities :D
8. All this led to a useful definition of a physical theory as an (implicit) giant table of correlations between all possible measurements, which has led to fruitful theoretical endeavors.
3. After Theory, went back to Haggett, talked with Xin for like half an hour while eating an apple. 
4. Then went to Swing! Again, super fun, although I got lost on the last move, the relatively complex but fundamental "swing-out"
5. Went back, worked on math
6. Ate dinner with Brandon, talked about housing. Good long discussion.
7. Filled out housing application, even though I'm thinking about dorming, sent all the applications I'd collected to Brandon. My new printer scanner works great.
8. Got to get to sleep now--one more cleaning appointment tomorrow. Cheers!

2/16/16: Ice Cream Social!

1. Another quick post since I have a dentist appt early tomorrow!
2. The day was basically
1. Prep for ice cream social
2. Ice Cream Social
3. Glee
4. CS hw
3. Breaking these down in more detail:
4. Went to math, then physics. Left my big bag of presliced banana in math in my hurry to get to circuits, so that I could make an announcement for the Social. The banana may still be there tomorrow morning. 
5. Made the announcement, went to SPS meeting, where discussed Social logistics, as well as this quarter's camping trip and the Spring trip to LIGO. 
6. Got post-its, bananas, ate lunch while walking up and down the Ave.
7. Prepared post-its, catchphrase cards, then ran up to Full Tilt. Picked up the ice cream--had a cordial chat with the scooper Grace, who's attempting an apprenticeship for elevator maintenance--then ran back to the SPS. 
8. Took everything up to C-520 to set up. The Biophysics lab meeting got out right before we had to start, so set-up was harried. But soon ppl were trickling in, Hira was putting post-its on their backs, and we had mingling. One professor advertised a tutoring class/practicum and literary club he was running. Everything was going pretty well, although some profs were talking among themselves, not engaging the undergrads.
9. Then I started the Q&A game! The profs and grads split into two teams, Theorists and Experimentalists. Undergrads--quite willingly, I didn't have to use any of my prepared questions--offered up questions to the teams, which huddled, submitted candidates to answer the questions, whose answers were then subjected to grading by show of hands by the undergrads. Things went really well. All the profs were having fun, laughing at their goofy answers to the questions which started out about physics and got goofier as the game went on.
10. The end of the game found Theorists and Experimentalists tied at 28 hands each. So I opened up the Paper Airplane booth. Several profs made airplanes, which was awesome. One goofy experimentalist and neutrino researcher, Detwiler, crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it at the wall for points. The Theorists, already few in number, sublimated back into the woodwork of the physics building; the Experimentalists won the day.
11. Talked to Prof. Detwiler for a while, then we cleaned up stuff. One mistake--left rings on the nice wood table because I didn't use a tablecloth. Frustrating!
12. After the Social, universally deemed a success,
13. hung out in the SPS with some shmids trying to figure out transistors
14. Went to Glee! Rehearsed for 30 minutes in our normal room, then trooped to a room in Meany where we went over the whole frickin' Requiem (went a full 2 hours) with the Women's Choir, U-Singers, and the Orchestra. Madcap. Ran into lots of people I knew. Requiem is hard however--still needs lots of work.
15. Grabbed quick dinner at the 8, went up to Haggett. Caught the end of floor tradition--ppl were playing a slap-happy card game.
16. Did Hardware lab! We're supposed to exploit poorly written C code, using a now outdated library function gets(), which writes a string onto a buffer (array) on the stack. Thing is, you can mess with gets() by passing a larger string than the space you have allocated (gets() doesn't know the size of what you have allocated), which causes gets() to overwrite other data on the stack--in particular, the return address of the function which calls gets(). In essence, you can redirect execution to somewhere else in the program, or, if you're clever, paste your own code on the the stack and execute it! This is known as "stack-smashing". Did the first two phases--have one more for tomorrow.
17. Realized I hadn't registered for next quarter! Freaked out and grabbed all the classes I'd been thinking of--thermal physics, systems programming, complex analysis, a "global trends" class that Rishabh from waay back in Freshman Quarter Educational Change recommended, and accelerated accounting. Will have to prune these later.
18. Wrote this log and hit the hay! 'Night all!

2/15/16

1. Very quick entry:
2. Weekend was great--got to hang out with the sisters and cousins. Also lots of social analysis with parents. Highlight was eating in this dollar-taco Mexican grocery with the folks, watching this goofy animated sitcom that happened to parallel our discussion.
3. Today, ate delicious breakfast, played video games with the sisters for a while, drove back to the UW with Dad, grabbed Ice Cream Social stuff at Safeway, did my Linux Tools assignment + laundry + planning for Ice Cream Social, and hit the hay! Goodbye world--wake me in 8 hours!

2/10/16

1. Highlights of the day:
2. Visited Prof. Gundlach's lab in the morning. Chatted with the graduates and undergrads working there.
3. Put up probably close to 100 posters for the SPS. Lunchboxes, Ice Cream Social posters, Get the Physicists Together updates. Also put up the BIG Ice Cream Social poster outside the lounge. In the process, discovered the physics roof access--pretty sweet.
4. Fighting back exhaustion, headed to my endo appointment. Not the greatest news there, but that's a story for another day. tl;dr: Various things might buy me time, but the fracture got infected and the lower half of the tooth is now fairly certainly dead, so I'll probably need to have the tooth removed and replaced with an implant. :D
5. After a long bout of questioning, left Endo, took a shower, went to the intro swing dance lessons. Lots of fun. Nothing too advanced was happening yet; I think I'll be able to pick everything up.
6. From swing, grabbed quick dinner, did math, then went to Rick's. Fun, but everyone was fairly subdued--middle of the quarter struggles?
7. Hence back to Haggett, where I finished an article on silicon valley, then watched a Strong Bad email before turning in.

2/9/16

1. Another short post:
2. Circuits midterm this morning! Think I 'pwned it, but who knows :)
3. SPS meeting. Felt a bit of pressure to get the Ice Cream Social next week (the first event I'm captaining) right. 
4. In a strange state of fried-ness, sleep-deprived-ness, mild nervousness about the Social, and (probably) pressure towards my long-term goal of getting in the romantic relationship game accentuated by the fact that I have two dances coming up in a few weeks, I wandered out of the SPS, got lunch, went to Linux. Marveled at the extremely syntax-oriented, context-free manner we were being taught, and at the googly-eyed enthusiasm of the noob freshmen, and generally felt disappointed in the world for no substantive reason at all.
5. Took me a while to shake this off. I read math outside, joined some random ppl in the quad for a short frisbee break, got a key to the music practice rooms and practiced for Glee.
6. But during/after Glee my mood bounced back. Good singing, followed by dinner, followed by making the Ice Cream Social poster, which I actually think is pretty boss:
7. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/19QjkOvDrjv_0qQ_uXS9HXJEccDWctRJj2FVpXrJqmb8/edit?usp=sharing
8. Combined to improve my spirits substantially. I hung out with some floormates for a bit, relaxed, got into the flow of the conversation, then went down to the IMA for climbing, which was great. Finished the Ice Cream social poster, made a Lunchbox poster, looked at house stuff on craigslist, wrote this log, went to bed. Cheers y'all! Might be seeing some of you soon during the long weekend back in Bham!

2/8/15

1. Short post due to midterms!
2. Hardware midterm in the morning, thought it went pretty well!
3. Lunchbox seminar, interesting prof on education. Designed more exploration-based lab courses, pretty open-ended--my main question is, how she can get away with not grading her students on the curve that grad school seems to require?
4. Lab! Another very exhausting lab. I think we finished this time. Interesting circuits, but so little chance to ask questions / separate noisy data from bad data.
5. Randomly ran into Cedric from Lavin, did some frisbee. Then hung out in the McMahon music room to relax for a moment. Ate dinner with Xin.
6. Returned to Haggett, did linux hw. Then played some hoops with Xin, looked over practice midterms for circuits and did some reading.
7. Wrote this log and turned myself in!
8. Oh, yesterday summary:
1. brunch with brandon, max, trevor
2. super bowl! Wrote SPS newsletter and took run during 2nd qtr-end of halftime.
3. Went out to Cedars with the brunch boys, Wesley from Glee, and Jacob and his buddy Ryan. Really glad that they're considering joining us. We saw the inside of Wesley's house--such terrible layout, I can't believe he thinks it would be a good place for us all to live next year--then looked at the outside of a too-good-to-be-true place Akshe from CS, Lavin might be able to set us up with, hat tip Trevor.
4. Looked over lab with Brandon, did more studying for HW, hit the hay. Slept fairly poorly, due to sickness and the fact that hardware was taking over my subconscious. I swear, parts of my brain were trying to emulate a CPU and its registers :D

2/6/15

1. A good day was this day, the 6th of February. 
2. It started at 11:30am, when I met Brandon. We allocated our laundry to appropriate cleaning devices with great efficiency, headed down to the gym, and worked out for half an hour at great intensity. First various machines, then on a vertical-jump table, then push-ups.
3. Thence we went to the 8 for breakfast. Super good. We had planned to attend the big basketball game vs. Arizona, but Brandon didn't have Dawg Pack tickets. 
4. I went anyway. It was great. What an amazing game. We lost by 5 after being ahead and behind by no more than 5 the entire game (all I can think of with respect to this fact: epsilon-delta statements about series). The level of play was incredible.
5. After that, I returned to Haggett, talked to my family on my headphones while folding laundry. 
6. Did homework for Hardware--turned out to be much easier than I had thought.
7. Highlight: Went to a big hoedown put on by the UW Swing Kids! Live music and everything--like 150 people in the HUB ballroom. Trevor invited me yesterday, and since Salsa now conflicts with Glee I decided to go! Ended up being really fun. I met more girls in that one evening than I typically do in a week. And it turns out that dancing permits a decent level of conversation. I'm hoping I can attend the Wednesday lessons.
8. Headed back to Haggett before the dancing ended, since I'm feeling a bit sick, and I wanted to get a few more things done. Did more hardware, read some articles Dad sent me. This one on land rights is super interesting if you have time: http://geolib.com/sullivan.dan/commonrights.html
9. Went to Safeway to get ingredients for tomorrow's brunch. Talked to Grace a bit on the way there.
10. Returned home, wrote this log, and hit the hay!

2/5/16: End of Week Update

1. After the math midterm, this week got a bit hectic. 
2. On Tuesday, I basically had classes and worked on my second hardware project--figuring out the right input strings to defuse a "bomb". I also worked on this coding assignment that recruiters for a company (DocuSign) had sent me after the career fair. 
3. Wednesday, I finished the hardware project, went to Neural, then an extra SPS meeting to prep for the regional conference, then sang at the basketball game with Glee. Watched the game--very good game--with my family, ate some ice cream with them and caught up.
4. Thursday: Skipped the entire afternoon of activities to go on a "Venture Capital walk" with some shmids (no Aunt Joan, this is not a physics reference) from Lavin. We visited VC's at Madrona, Maveron, and Second Avenue Partners, heard bios and asked questions. 
5. Some quick takeaways:
1. There are some ridiculous things being funded. There's this company called Booster, run by a really smart entrepreneur, a Caltech rocket scientist. 2/3 VC's extolled the virtues of this shmid. But what is he building? A fueling truck that drives around in corporate parking lots and fuels people's tanks. I mean, WTF? This is a P-roblem? It seems like a p-roblem in a world of PROBLEMs. 
2. Although VC's are swinging for the stars (typically), the things they are funding are often very niche. That is, niches are big enough that companies in them can have valuations attractive to VCs. Some examples: a company that takes waste food from grocery stores and makes organic fertilizer, or a company that does analytics for gamers running Twitch channels. 
3. The VC world is not identical with the startup world. The three VC's I talked to had backgrounds in finance, managing development at Microsoft, and one dude had a background in startups, but even he had a MBA, which it seems like most founders don't (many do, don't get me wrong). 
6. Today: stayed up really late doing math homework. After classes, took a brief nap, which was actually really weird. I was super tired but kind of alert, so I spent a long time in this state between consciousness and unconsciousness. I would be thinking about something in a conscious, logical manner, then I would notice that I was no longer driving the chain of thought--stuff was bubbling up from the subconscious that only made sense in a surreal dreamlike way. 
7. Then I went to Get the Physicists Together. Initially, it was just me, Chris, and Devin. Devin ordered pizza, I played some games with Chris while Devin grabbed the pizza. Then Frank showed up, we played outside for a bit, and after that Daven and Hira showed up. We played a good game of Carcassonne. In the middle of it I left to meet people in my housing group; we ended up walking back to the SPS so that they could meet Devin. Then we ate dinner at Aladdin's. Max, Trevor, Brandon and I went from there to get bubble tea.
8. From thence I went to Ryan's graduate rehearsal. Met Eleanor and Brianna and Brianna's family. It was pretty great. Planned a time to get dinner with those two. 
9. Finally, returned to Haggett, did a bunch of little chores, found a backpack on Amazon to replace my 20 year old hand-me down from Mom whose zipper is badly failing. 
10. Xin came back just as I was about to go to bed, so I hung out with him and Brandon. We ate Xin's leftover food, chatted about sleep and dreams, and played some Super Smash Flash. Very fun, family-group-like interaction.
11. And now I am going to sleep! Good night all!

2/1/16

1. First up today, the first Math 334 Midterm! It was a lot of fun, but I couldn't quite get 2 of the 4 problems. In both cases, I was really, really close, but a bad assumption / strategical mistake up front meant I couldn't quite finish the calculations. Super neat problems though. A series convergence problem about a series made out of another divergent sequence, and a geometric problem bounding the volume of a region in a ball by the region of its surface area, using the Divergence Thm. 
2. After that, 351 lecture, where we talked about arrays in C, not super exciting. But then I went to lunchbox. Neat lecture on neutrinos. Felt like I was understanding a bit of the quantum stuff that was going on. But the SPS lounge was packed--I only got one slice of pizza. 
3. As a consequence, when I got out of my exhausting circuits lab at 4--which was fun, but really hard--I was starving. I grabbed a banana and cookie and met up with Trevor, Max, Brandon. We bussed to the house Brandon and I found for a tour. The house looked really nice, but the landlord surprised us by saying that the current tenants planned to stay for another year :(
4. After that, dinner with Xin, delicious teriyaki. Went back and did the coding challenge that DocuSign had sent me. Almost finished it, but wanted to do a binary search for extra glitz--still need to debug. 
5. And then I did circuits hw with Brandon and Winnie. Pretty straightforward. Was able to finish up Linux hw as well, then look at a few houses that had just come on the market with Brandon. 
6. Heading to sleep now! 'Night, 
7. Spencer

1/31/16

1. Highlight of today: an epic brunch with Brandon and some shmids we're considering living with, Max from physics and his buddy Trevor from aerospace. We headed down to West Campus with bags full of ingredients, cooked omelettes (with loads of veggies) and pancakes. It was actually pretty amazing. The conversation started out slow, but by the end we were all relaxed and having tons of fun. Trevor seems like he wants the same out of a house and group as Brandon and I--very reasonable dude. He might be a --tad-- introverted, so we'll need to counterbalance with someone like Jacob W. from physics, if we can get him to join. 
2. After the brunch, headed to math review session, again a lot of fun. Got dinner with Will (our TA), Natalie, Tim, and Andrew, at the 8. 
3. Then worked with Andrew on some math, wrote up most of my note sheet.
4. Watched Porco Rosso with Maddie from the floor! I had talked with her literally the start of Fall Quarter about Miyazaki movies, we had wanted to watch Porco Rosso, and then it never happened. So yesterday I just knocked on her door :) Man, that movie held up really well. Like an animated Casablanca. So many great lines. You should watch it again if you have a chance (Mom and Dad, I'm looking towards you). 
5. Did a bit more math before turning in. Life high five, 
6. Spencer