5/26/15

1. 5/26/15
1. Another solid breakfast, and a less confusing math :) Go to systems programming, then decide to get a haircut before lunch.
2. Meet Sam from last quarter’s Neural Engineering in the HUB getting cash, chat for a bit.
3. Haircut run! Get some exercise getting out to Epic Cuts, get a sweet cut, usual banter with the friendly haircutting entrepreneur, a mother of 4 and avid conspiracy theorist.
4. Back to the HUB, get a delicious sub, sit down and study thermal and accounting--much more efficient and rewarding than going to either class. As I’m sitting there, Jacob W. from thermal comes up, and we discuss the various thermodynamic potentials.
5. Go to the music building, practice my solo for Loch Lomond. Tricky business--it’s a low baritone solo. But I make decent headway.
6. Off to SPS meeting, catch up with Winnie a bit, chill with the crew. Frank swears us new officers in, and I swear him in, feeling a bit goofy :)
7. Then tutoring--meet Gashia in the engr library. Man, she’s so cheerful! Very strong growth mindset.
8. Swing intermediate lessons! Finally work on swing-outs. Then team food--go to Little Thai.
9. Back to the Hag, work on math paper, go back to music building but I’m tired so I end up playing other random songs in addition to Loch Lomond.
10. Return to Hag one more time, work on math HW, not as bad as I expected. Write this log and hit the hay.

5/24/16 + lastFewDaysRecap

1. 5/24/16
1. Well, gosh, it’s been another eventful few days. Hopefully I can flesh this out later.
2. Friday: SPS officer elections. Lots of shenanigans--decided not to run for president, lost VP by a thin margin, but who wants to do that anyway? Will be community builder again. Swing at Eastside. An occurrence to expand on later--Alex breaks up with me. Still working on sifting emotions / figuring this out. But makes more sense (in a surprising sort of way) than you might think, as I learn talking with Alex Sunday.. Crazy System 1 stuff :) It seems like, very rough picture, a) system 1 attraction overrides everything else despite Alex’s best efforts to make our on-paper, System 2 perfect relationship work, and b) Alex isn’t feeling the system 1 attraction (for whatever reason, might be partly because I don’t know what I’m doing, might be because of stresses in her life, etc.)
3. Saturday: Trip to LIGO! Lots of driving. Meet Brianna and Brandon’s parents on the way back.
4. Sunday: Brunch is amazing. Make North African poached eggs with Brandon, plus cheesy potatoes and french toast. Then meeting with Alex, learning and sensible denouement, actually pretty enjoyable (waiting forever to use that word in a sensible context). Then lots of work.
5. Monday: Basically work all day, catching up on systems programming. Group tutoring session is fun. Prof. Wilkes jumps in on our tutoring session, but I’m not sure I agree with his tutoring style--very diffusive through the whole body of knowledge, rather than helping the student focus on the most effective way of thinking of the problem (which is the heart of physics IMO). Meet a Chinese freshman Alan whom I’d met at LIGO and got dinner with him. Then go to Monday night dance, which is great.
6. Today: Relaxing breakfast, manage to make oatmeal. Then go to math, which is a bit confusing, very out of sync with readings and hw.
7. Hence to a tutoring meeting. Then get lunch with Ayush, which is fun. The shmid is crazy busy, among lots of stuff, he’s helping plan DubHacks for next year.
8. Meet Ronaldo to talk about what I should be doing to wrap up my research efforts for this quarter. Basically decide I should keep fiddling around with Comsol, make another simulation and another bunch of measurements to check the methodology we’re already using (which is yielding slightly flawed results). Email Garcia and the dude is OK with me working mostly on classes for the rest of the quarter, which I need to do.
9. Go back to Haggett, drive myself crazy trying to learn the linear algebra I need to understand this section in my random walks on graphs paper from random online sources. Decide to hit the gym and go climbing, for an hour before Glee, which is very satisfying.
10. Glee is fun. Learn I get one of the solos for Loch Lomond :) Lots of practicing to do :D
11. Back to Haggett, dinner, read more of my math paper, restore a bit of sanity reading more interesting, less technically detailed parts of it. Then floor tradition, Pictionary! Our team gets its donkey hindquarters handed to itself, but Xin plays, which is great.
12. Skype with Mom and Dad (going back this Memorial Weekend :)
13. Get Rick’s, read more math, write this log, and go to bed.

5/19/16

1. 5/19/16
1. Wake, head to the 8 for a quick breakfast, do some reading and debugging, then math.
2. Skip Garcia’s group meeting :) More debugging. Getting closer.
3. Also prepare questions for discussion Global Trends class. Get lunch and take it to the business school. Good discussion this time, I manage to pick some provocative questions, and I’m in a good, alert, not totally dead mood.
4. After that, hang out in the business school room coding; rishabh’s team, who are running this startup called BellHapp that automates a lot of server-customer communication. Got to hear their pitch, it was actually really good (well, the presentation quality wasn’t that great, but the traction they’d already obtained with restaurants (they have a bunch of preorders with some chain) and the mentors that had helped them impressed me. Rishabh said he might have work I could do remote over the summer--we’ll have to talk about that.
5. Finish Systems project, breathe a deep sigh of relief. Manage to code the last two sections almost flawlessly and debugging is easy.
6. Go to music building, hit up the practice rooms. Have one of the most fun 20 minutes of practice I’ve ever had on my own. Figure out a bunch of notes and rhythm.
7. Glee practice is amazing. We’re killing stuff, plus after about 8 other people sing the Loch Lomond solo, I decide to try it just for fun (since I’m always humming Irish tunes). I’m unpracticed and a bit shaky, but my tone quality I thought was pretty awesome.
8. Grab some dinner and return to Haggett, where I run into Bran in the lounge. Hang out with her for a bit, Xin comes in and we all eat dinner/chat.
9. At this point, I’m out of energy and still have math hw to do. I have a bunch of tedious residue integrals to do. What a weird life.
10. Work for about an hour, but motivation is eluding me. So I pull out the paper I’m supposed to be researching and try to figure out spectral matrix theory. Which I actually make headway on--it’s pretty neat. Linear algebra is amazing. Also, I’m listening to a spotify radio spun off from a song Alex linked me way back, Arrival of the Birds by Prague Philharmonic Orchestra--super beautiful and accentuates the beauty of math like nobody’s business.
11. Go out to Denny field for half an hour, work out some energy.
12. Return and keep plugging away on math. Then write this log and hit the hay. Good night! And see you soon ‘hamsters. I’m smiling your way.

5/18/16

1. 5/18/16
1. Alright, here we go, another day in the life!
2. Slept in like a total log, one of the best 30 minute alarm extensions ever.
3. Breakfast, reading, math. More crazy stuff about complex functions--I’ll have a lot to parse and integrate over this summer if I’m in a mathy mood :D
4. Met with Christian for tutoring, sat outside. Think I did a pretty good job despite my fraying sanity.
5. Debugging! Keep on fixing stuff. (I think I might be improving just a bit!).
6. Ran into Chase, dude from my floor last year and seminar with Barash quarters past who invited me to D&D. Hadn’t seen him in forever, so we got lunch. Fun to catch up! He might be doing physics.
7. Another solid couple hours of debugging. (I finally give up on trying to get vim to work as a hex editor, screw configuration, and use hexdump, it works fine.) My eyes are tired and my mind is weary as I return to Haggett. Turns out there’s a final floor event, so I grab some ice cream, chat with floormates, and play first couple of rounds of global trivia before Glee.
8. After Glee, keep working, then get dinner at Mee Sum (yum!).
9. Back to Haggett, badminton with Xin. The shmid beats me in game one and then folds once I hit my stride xD
10. Study for thermal physics, write this log and hit the hay.

5/17/16

1. 5/17/16
1. The past couple of days deserve more time than I have. This Saturday was the swing quarter dance--I went shopping with Alex for a fedora and badass button-up, danced for several hours, and then there was the afterparty! Felt almost like a homeschool event--potluck style, lots of people I knew, Eleanor and Brianna from physics / honors floor were there.
2. Sunday I made brunch with Trevor and Alex (we made lots of stuff!) then thermal hw and math study.
3. Today, math midterm in the morning. I thought I was really solid, but when the test started I was pretty jittery. Eventually managed to make most of my arguments work, but we’ll see :P
4. Then systems programming (what up?? A lecture that’s not syntax??) The lecture was on networks; I sat there enjoying the lecture for once in the quarter, actually listening to Perkins’ voice vs. trying to read ahead on the slides so I could think about something else.
5. Thermal physics was pretty boring--probably should have gone to the supernova core collapse modeling lunchbox instead, but there’s a midterm Wednesday. And actually, I had fun trying to recall the structure of a Carnot engine before Cobden could draw it up.
6. Then accounting. I decided to go to lecture. Was pretty meh, and here I started to feel disconnected and discombobulated. Was hardcore multitasking, working through old worksheets, reading articles from Dad, etc. because the lecture was so darn slow. But hey! A good lunch.
7. Went back to Haggett and worked on CS for a few hours. Then went to physics, thought there was a tutoring group meeting, there wasn’t but it was cool, did more CS. Ran into Amiel and Chris, SPS regulars.
8. Worked under uncertainty and struggle, just blindly filling out more code, since I couldn’t debug at any level of granularity and everything was interdependent. But debugging my write-it-all-at-once blob wasn’t as horrible as I thought--managed to pass about half the tests, and excitedly decided to end on a high note and switch to math.
9. But I hadn’t brought my math to physics, so I went back to north campus, got dinner at McMahon, ran into dude from accounting who said hi to me in class today named Tern(?). Ate dinner with him and his buddies. Seems like a bright dude trying to figure out what to do with himself in the weird business / frat world.
10. Returned to Haggett, read for math, then actually got a decent way through math hw. Crazy!
11. Went to Monday dance. Pretty fun, learned some new moves. But I think Alex is in a bit of a struggly state wrt school (and, as I know from experience, struggle tends to spread from its cause to other, seemingly isolated parts of one’s existence.) Meditated on the complexity and insanity of human life on the walk back to haggett--my brain kept turning over bad math analogies, relating analyzing the complex confusion of multi-motivated and infinite-game-level aware individuals to the behavior of complex functions around essential singularities (where the function approaches every possible value on some sequence tending to the singular point).
12. Exchanged a few pleasant messages with Brandon re the boss physics schedule we’re going to have next year (Yeah! Get excited!). Wrote this log and turned in. Night voyageurs, all you insane, essentially singular even if mostly analytic, human shmids!

5/13/16

1. 5/13/16
1. Early morning math! Felt very proud of myself for finishing this week’s exhausting hw. Also finished an annoying Systems exercise.
2. After math, systems class, intro to networks, interesting. Then Thermal. I’ve been getting increasingly impatient with the pacing of lectures and spent most of my time reading and catching up on email :/
3. Went to quad, grabbing a cup of lemonade on the way to support the Geology club, and talked to the shmids tabling for startup showcase. Justin was there; after folding ACED, he’s right back on the game with a new startup about exploring career directions with a catalog of hands-on projects. Interesting, though I’m not sure how much of the day-to-day of an occupation can be captured by a project, abstracted away from work environment. Also, there were some neat dudes selling electric bikes after a few years of tinkering.
4. Grabbed lunch and to SPS meeting. Talked a bit with the guys, then read the paper I’m doing for math.
5. Science Cafe! Super interesting speaker, works at HP labs, makes all sorts of neat optical components to replace electrical components in integrated circuits. (Still all silicon, who knew you could leverage the high refractive index of silicon to trap light?) Some of them are pretty wild. For example, the dude (Ray Beausoleil) has a signal combiner that takes in two optical signals from two input channels, and depending on the relative phase of the signals, outputs their superposition to one of two output signals. This isn’t going to work with electrons :) He made the device by running a device that split one input signal evenly among two channels with the right phase, backwards. Very cool. Felt like I learned a lot. Will post the slides once I have them.
6. Back to Haggett, worked on CS for an hour.
7. Met Brandon and Jacob for dinner. Went to Noodle Nation, where I haven’t been. Underwhelming compared to Som Tam :D We talked about various physics things. Jacob’s an interesting shmid--his conversational style is super cheerful, with social discretion, but without quite the epistemological discretion that Brandon exercises (hard to describe what I mean by this). Jacob is a careful thinker, but he tends to be less crisp up front and count on further muddling and debate to impart clarity, while Brandon (and Issa) will signal either clarity or the complete lack of it up front.
8. Met up with some people from math in our old classroom, plus Kolya, who many of them know as a TA from an earlier math sequence, currently a Yale grad student on break. Issa was there(!) I thought I wouldn’t see him for a long time. We didn’t get to talk much--Issa’s goofy, nihilistic, (Juan Perez-like for those who knew him, guy I used to play chess with at a coffeehouse), roomie Ethan told the story of his strange academic year, how he got a 0.7 grade in a math class. I brought my birthday cake. When Emily showed up, she instantly recognized it as Pure Bliss :D
9. Ate cake and talked for a while, then Emily brought out Life of Brian (which I still hadn’t seen) and put it on the overhead projector. Lots of fun.
10. Back to Haggett, worked on CS, then wrote this log and went to bed.

5/10/16

1. 5/10/16
1. Quick summary:
2. Endo appt. Everything seems to be healing up fine. Front splint coming off, to be replaced by smaller back splint.
3. Math
4. Met for tutoring.
5. Realized I hadn’t registered! Freaked out and sent a bunch of emails to profs for physics classes I technically don’t have the prereqs for. Let’s do this!
6. Ran into Jasdeep while working, got some lunch at the HUB.
7. To the ENGR library, hacked away at math for a while. Decent progress.
8. Back to Haggett, dropped off my pack, and headed to West Campus. Met Alex at a bus stop and went downtown to see Diego’s concert in Capitol Hill.
9. Interesting small venue. Diego’s band was pretty cool, he did a great job on the drums.
10. While the other cover bands were playing, got ice cream with the other Swing Kids. Then took a walk with Eleonore and Alex around the streets. Crazy vibrant Capitol Hill park, people playing polo on bikes :D
11. Went back to watch the main band. They were pretty great. Lots of people in the audience knew them. Alex got really into the dancing, I just tried to pick up random stuff. The beat was really clear and there were fun audience singing / clapping / hats-off arm swinging traditions.
12. Went to Dick’s with Alex, Eleonore, Cassie, Eric. Then back on the light rail. Walked Alex back to Mercer and then back to Haggett. Wrote this log and to bed!

5/3/16

1. 5/3/16
1. Quick recap for today:
2. Tutoring! Met in research commons, another person who was really roughly on top of their stuff, but struggled with concepts.
3. Met physics advisor for traditional spring advising, worked to thrash out a schedule. Looks like everything is actually going to work (!). Still hard to believe. The dude--really nice older fellow, Prof. Van Dyck--told me somewhat jocularly I’d overconstrained the problem, so my solution was unstable. But right now it holds :D
4. Took more magnetic field measurements with Ronaldo, discussed simulation and data fitting. Our simulation matches experiment along one axis, but along another there seems to be systematic offset, so we took more careful measurements.
5. Got a bit of exercise in McMahon courts, then to Haggett, did Systems exercise.
6. Glee! Great rehearsal--really felt like I was singing well. I was in this strange confident, buoyant mood for some reason.
7. Carried over to dinner in Haggett lounge + floor tradition Pictionary. Helped some floormates with physics.
8. Did accting homework and practice exam.
9. Started working on a presentation about a small piece of Prof. Garcia’s experiment, the Multi-Wire Proportional Chamber, to give at the group meeting Thursday. Decided to have fun with it, made a goofy overview slide, then got down to real work and started reading the thesis.

5/2/16

1. 5/2/16
1. Woke up bright and early, did thermal work.
2. Off to math, got my exam back. Perfect score! I gotta instagram this :D
3. Systems programming, smart pointers, kinda interesting. Talked a bit with some CS shmids afterwards--Matthew really likes the class, says C’s intensity turns him on xD
4. Went to lunchbox! Interesting talk on bose-einstein condensate circuits. You know what, I don’t think you’ve ever seen a lunchbox poster--I make them every week. So check out the link :D
5. Skipped accounting--spent 40 minutes reading the slides outside, which at the pace that class goes, is roughly equivalent to 2 hours spent in class.
6. Tried to do some rudimentary data analysis on our magnetic field values in Mathematica--didn’t work too well.
7. Got a bit of exercise in the McMahon courts, cold shower, then went to tutor for my physics peer tutoring class. Met G. in the research commons, but there was no tables so we went to the engineering library, which worked great. G, a responsible and successful bioe major, had none of the psychological issues we’d discussed in our group meetings. But she had no facility with algebra! Crazy. We spent most of the time on a few problems, I was relaxed and had time to explain stuff and elicit/engage in productive argumentation.
8. Went to peer tutoring group meeting, all of us talked about our tutoring experiences. Got some good ideas.
9. Hung out in the physics courtyard reading a neat paper about random walks on graphs--a topic for my math paper? Then Alex walked over to do some math. We worked outside for a while, took a frisbee break, had some dinner outside. The calc workload she has to deal with is pretty severe. I think if she were a tiny bit more confident, we could get a virtuous cycle of motivation and self-actualization going on :) but at the moment, it’s hard for her to put energy into Webassign and trust her logic enough to rigorously debug her algebra (usually it’s a sign error!) whenever Webassign rejects something.
10. Went to the Monday dance--almost nobody was there. Read more paper, danced a bit, tried to pick up a few solo jazz moves.
11. Returned to Haggett, email, more paper reading, and sleep. Night all!

5/1/15 (plus backlog)

1. 5/1/15 (plus backlog)
1. A couple days behind! A quick recap.
2. Friday
1. was a day of Leroy debugging. From 8:30 in the morning to 7pm, with brief interludes for classes, helping Alex with calc (which was great--I was able to communicate the intuition behind the chain rule via a numerical, experimental example of related quantities) and SPS board gaming (which I had to bail on to work halfway through)--I wrestled my file indexer into shape. As exhaustion crept over the horizon, I killed the last bug and the tests passed. But alas! I had forgotten I had written a little command line interface, and it was giving me weird results.
2. I grabbed my laptop cord and some pizza, and off to Eastside with Diego and some swingy company. Spent the first hour at Eastside cleaning up code, then tried to debug my interface. The stupid thing wouldn’t resolve, so I said, “s***w it, let’s dance and take another late day.” and I did. Dancing was fun, but I was so brain-fried I danced with the same person twice and didn’t realize I’d met them before the second time :D
3. Well rested, I set to work the next morning
1. and realized I hadn’t delimited out a freakin’ newline on the last token. Removed that, then encountered a bug in the rest of the code. Break, lunch with Brandon at the india buffet. We discussed several interesting problems, including a neat thermodynamics model i’ve been thinking about :D Then we grabbed the whiteboard from my room and went outside to do math. Worked out the details of how convoluting (a type of integrating) the response of a system to a short impulse, with a whole input function, gives the response of the system to the whole input function. Very legit.
2. Went back to work on code, found my bug, it was very simple. Everything worked. I was so excited. Cleaned up my files, removed all the printfs and cursing comments I’d inserted, and submitted.
3. Skyped with parents over dinner. Decided to go home for my actual birthday and hold the party at school some other day.
4. Went to Lavin “kickback” at Henry’s house (dude from Google Games team). Turned out Jade and August from last year’s Honors floor were there. Not many people from lavin though. Did a bit of dancing, got into some weird conversations--met a dude that works as a tester/designer at Wizards of the Coast, the Magic company. Fun, but a bit awkward since I didn’t know most of the people.
5. Long bus ride/ walk back to Haggett, crashed (although not before finishing the arrangement of a morning meetup with Alex!)
4. Sunday morning I woke bright and early
1. and made my way to a French bakery south of West Campus, across the bridge to Eastlake. Had coffee and croissants with Alex, then we walked to the Arboretum. It was an incredibly beautiful day, and we walked through a lot of cool neighborhoods, talked about architecture and landscaping and houses, plus Alex’s upcoming trip to France.
2. Wandered through the Arboretum for a long while, discovering new paths, lakes, pipelines, crossing roads and cutting through meadows. Eventually we came to rest on a sunny hillside and lay in the sun for a while. Not something I do often enough by myself :) We talked of the uncertain future (Alex can’t decide between trying to do vet school, going for environmental science, or following up on her writing interests and majoring in comparative literature), listened to music, made up metaphoric poetry and song lyrics, and just let the breeze roll across the hillside. At one point, we started holding hands again :D
3. Walked around a bit longer before I had to catch a bus back to campus and Alex had to catch a bus to meet her mom for a few hours. Brought up the prospect of teaching swing classes as part of the Homeschool Summer Classes project--Alex sounded really interested, thought it would be fun to teach. Would also be neat to see her weekly over the summer :) Parted ways at the bus stop.
4. Met Xin in West Campus with his friend Yaoming from EE, made crepes from a recipe he found. (Brandon was off playing Pokemon). They were actually really good.
5. Returned to North Campus, went to the IMA. Xin kept challenging me to catch him in sprints before he reached X obstacle on the way over, which I did. Unfortunately I got a bit carried away and accidentally pushed him on the last leg and poor Xin wiped out :( We went to the first aid section of the IMA for a bandaid. By the time we got around to badminton, both of us were a little wiped out by the heat and the sprinting, but Xin more than me--possibly due to the wipeout. Still, played a few games.
6. Back to Haggett, did laundry, did systems programming exercise (worked the first time!!) Dinner with Xin outside McMahon.
7. Looked at bolt buses for the weekend. Maybe really early Saturday morning, or saturday at 10am. Gotta make a decision. Also, looked at weekends for birthday party--it’s looking like 3 weeks out on the 20th-22nd will be ideal.
8. Skyped with Monica outside for a long time. Swapped relationship stories and talked about her plans for Western, trying to get housing together. Good to catch up!
9. Got Rick’s, split with Xin. Did thermal hw. Also, encountered this very inspirational cartoon…
10. http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=2722
11. … which I’ll leave you with for the night! Fare thee well!