10/8/16: Breaking and Entering

1. 10/8/16
1. Today is a homework day. Although I spend little of it on homework, it respects the spirit of homework days. I work on the SPS newsletter, adding “add to your calendar” functionality. I get my textbooks on my phone for easy access. I work on getting the transportation for Physcon down.
2. I get up late enough that breakfast is good enough for lunch, and I don’t have dinner until after I play a good two hours of badminton with Xin (lots of good doubles play, we’re improving). Dinner is eggs and grilled sandwiches with Xin and Brandon, which is great. I rehash my CSE 351 knowledge of processes and threads (and then the memory hierarchy, page tables and caching) to Brandon, managing to prove to myself I did learn something in that class :)
3. After dinner, go out with Brandon to Eric Erkela’s birthday party. Eric’s in quantum and E&M with us. Brianna, Brandon, Spencer Pease, myself, and about 10 people I don’t know cram into Eric’s place. I meet a bunch of people, hang out for a while. Spend a bunch of time with Brianna and Spencer Pease, who, along with Eric, are fairly intoxicated. Eat Brianna’s delicious Nutella chocolate chip cookies. At one point a dude starts singing Bohemian Rhapsody and others join in. Lots of fun. Most people are tone-deaf but enthusiastic. People keep trying to get this one speaker to charge and goofing around about it. Random stuff like that.
4. Then, one guy passes out in the bathroom. Somehow the group decides that we need to get in there, but we can’t unlock it from the outside. So me, and the fairly sober Bohemian Rhapsody dude get a chair. Because of my height and sobriety, I’m volunteered to get up on the edge of the chair. Chaos. Someone hands me a butter knife and I remove the screen. Chaos. I remove the stick holding the window half open and fling the pane wide, as the chair teeters but holds firm beneath me. Chaos. I wriggle into the window, hands from below supporting my feet. But there is nowhere for me to find purchase on the other side. I spend a few wild moments windmilling, exhorting those outside not to shove me through the window down onto the bathtub. Then with great deliberation, I ooze my center of mass down the wall and slide gently into the bathtub.
5. The dude lies in front of me, prone, no head injury or choking vomit to speak of. I fling open the bar binding the door and people rush in. Suddenly, I am a celebrity, receiving congratulations from all sides.
6. More singing, and goofing off. Somehow Eric starts a cogent conversation on politics. Eric and I have a cute dialogue where Eric applauds my generalism and I affirm his considerably-above-average intelligence, each fighting against the doubt of the other in the other’s own abilities.
7. People start drifting away, and though I would leave to sleep, Brandon decides to stay. So I stick around, and end up getting into a deep philosophical conversation with Eric and Brandon about attitudes towards the future. We take it outside, as to not wake up the roommates, and somehow wander all the way back to 2104 House, Eric carrying on a vivid description of Bismarck’s takeover of Germany (didn’t realize he was such a history buff).
8. In 2104, we talk through the night, eating apple pastries and drinking tea. The conversation wanders over to all the big questions, meaningness, biological determinism, etc. At about 6am Eric decides to call it a morning and treks back to his house, which leaves Brandon and I in the predawn darkness, alone with Brandon’s burning questions as to meaningness, weirdness, and human nature. I feel as though I have slightly more experience with these questions than Brandon, who has more success in shrugging them away with a cinnamon roll and a nap than me. So it is that I advise Brandon on meaningness, and describe a picture of human nature in more consonance with observation than any he has before viewed. One of those 7am conversations! It’s really cool since I’ve spent so long recently thinking through the questions which Brandon now is just facing.
9. We hit the hay about 7am.

10/7/16: IdeaGeneration

1. 10/7/16
1. StatMech in the morning, review of thermo.
2. Go to this weird talk linked to on the CSE facebook, called IdeaGen. The speakers were really high-profile (C-suite exec of big consulting company Capgemini, product manager at Google X, head of a Microsoft Research lab, and founder of a New York media company) so I thought I’d check it out.
3. Before the talk starts, as I’m sipping on my free lemon-ginger-apple juice, Akshay comes in! We get to talking, about DubHacks, about Creating a Company, etc.
4. The first talk, Kim Smith of Capgemini, is really weird. Lots of namedropping, weird personal narrative stuff. It seems like the idea is to be inspirational.
5. I have to duck out to go to a Lavin MentorConnect lunch, which is really fun. This dude named Samir, who worked as a dev for 10 years and decided to start a company, ended up making the #1-ranked Slack extension (a polling system), got venture money, but still has no idea how to monetize his product. He’s trying to get big enterprise customers that use chat platforms instead of email.
6. Back to Ideagen, talk to the Google X guy with Akshay. Interesting, seems more like an incubator than like a Bell Labs kinda environment. But it is set up for generalists :)
7. Also talk to the head of the New York media company. She’s got a crazy story about founding a male revue (strip club-esque show) in Japan. Fascinating. We get to talking and she gives me some advice for marketing the SPS :D
8. Play basketball. Man, I am so glad I’m getting back into basketball. If I can get to the gym every day it will improve my mood loads. And I’m getting my old skills back fast!
9. Shower at the gym and book it to the Ave for office hours with Prof. Leong of Creating a Company. Get to use some of my new knowledge of China from the trip in a conversation about a potential company to place Chinese (\Indian\Korean) international students with schools and help them acclimate.
10. Return to 2104, make egg rolls with Xin and Josh. They are super delicious but soak up loads of oil. Then it’s off to Eastside with Diego and the crew. Get in some good dancing, though I’m a little off. Good conversation with a structural engineer gal who undergradded in physics. At the end, drag Alex out on the floor for the last dance, since she was using her meaningless door shift position (nobody shows up for the last song) as a cover for being tired, which is not normally a reason she would allow for not dancing :)
11. Return to U district and crash out.

10/6/16: Teambuilding

1. 10/6/16
1. Slept through E&M, turned out to be a good call, nothing but Gauss’s law and a bad TA lecture. Quantum was very cool though. Re-learned the “derivation” of Schroedinger’s equation and some fun examples of eigenfunction decomposition (linking up nicely with Fourier transforms).
2. Went to SPS lounge, hung out for a bit. Talked to Jacob W. and Kyle about PhysCon travel stuff.
3. Did tutorial hw and turned it in.
4. Talked with Devin a bit, he had broken up with his girlfriend, interesting story.
5. Returned to 2104, had a delicious sandwich for lunch, watched more April.
6. After lunch I cleaned up dishes, sent some emails, and off to Creating a Company.
7. Class was fun. First some logistical stuff, then two guests who’d taken the class previously and who related their struggles and triumphs. Then I got a chance to chat with people and try to nail down my team. Dimir and Zoltan were still down to work together. I walked around the room trying to figure out what everyone else was doing. One team was making little hot chocolate cubes :) Unfortunately they had 5 girls, no gender balance for me :P
8. Finally managed to catch Raustin, the rogue philosophy major who had pitched an interesting idea about aggregating links to TV show merchandise. We had a good chat; he pitched me on another idea, an entertainment packaging company that fit well with his experience obtaining and selling sports/concert tickets; and then I tried out my idea about setting up a parallel lecture for the worst math professor on campus. He actually liked the idea, which my team had not, but thought people would be more likely to pay for well-organized notes and a video documenting the lecture, so that they could skip (people would be too lazy to actually go to another lecture). I agreed and resolved to get Raustin on my team somehow.
9. Off to Glee! Good rehearsal, got into more of the meat of the music, and our conductor Meg taught us some good physical tricks for staying connected (remembering to keep air pressure up by paying attention to the lungs and chest). Xin did not come though :(
10. Returned to 2104, went out for dinner with Xin. Ended up going to Aladdin’s. Poor Xin still has a lot on his mind, his dad hitting him with “business ideas” he should do, etc.
11. Went to the gym. Xin wanted to come, so I waited for him to change, but the badminton courts were full, so I went to play basketball anyway, which worked out great. The gyro beforehand was not smart and I came close to puking, but it was so much fun.
12. Back to 2104, awesome cold shower, wrote this log.

10/5/16: Back into the Swing of things

1. 10/5/16
1. Woke up an hour before class, had delicious Raisin Bran breakfast while watching Your Lie in April, super beautiful.
2. Statmech was interesting, fast-paced and twisty lecture.
3. Hung out in SPS lounge, a bit of frisbee with Isaak, taught Isaak how to make the lunchbox poster. Worked on quantum tutorial.
4. SPS meeting! Stefana from club fair tabling and open house showed up, jumped right into the thick of things. The vibe was really good, everyone was joking around but staying on topic. I’m working on the Thanksgiving Food Drive, which basically means hyping and fostering cordial animosity between students and their profs, and opposing profs, so that people want to donate food so that their prof gets pied. We also talk about the Halloween party, which I coerce Devin into captaining.
5. Try to go home and get lunch. Get into conversation with Johan about trying to get into 390p, which I’m not even sure that I want to do, frustrating.
6. In Red Square sign up for HvZ, starts this Monday!!
7. Back to 2104, make myself a couple of grilled sandwiches (potato bread works really well) and some apples, watch more Your Lie.
8. Start working outside, write an email to Adam Blank.
9. Badminton with Xin, we get into a doubles game and this one dude single-handedly shows us up. Competitive frustration!
10. Return to 2104, take a shower, then
11. Off to swing lessons! First is the advanced lesson, which is mostly working on the subtleties of swing-outs. Guess who’s there: Stefana from SPS! She had mentioned she was interested in dancing and I’d told her about lessons. But guess what happens! My face-name recognition chokes fatally. I see a face I can’t quite place in the rotation, halfway through the lesson; naturally I assume it’s someone I’ve danced with before. So I ask her name again. Whoops! It’s Stefana :0 Whose name I instantly remembered, once I had the connection with SPS. She’s extremely weirded out by the contrast between my SPS competence and social grace vs. my apparent complete inability to remember her face in this different setting, actually asks if I’m high :P (Analogous to the Ritmo Latino dance moment where the dude asks me how I ended up there :)
12. Technique lessons are fun. Much smaller class but John and Cassie do a good job. Sasha from the intro lesson in the IMA is there, she remembers me. Madeleine is her usual goofball self. Afterwards we go to Team Food, meet up with Trevor.
13. Get into a conversation with Savanna and someone I vaguely remember from last quarter named Becci. Turns out Savanna auditioned for Furmata too, also didn’t get in. Becci invites me to audition for her acappella group, a spinoff of Furmata, called Hounds of Music. Sounds interesting :)
14. We all go to Mongolian Grill and chow down. I sit down at the main table and then see Trevor, who hadn’t chutzpah’d his way to one of the tight spaces at the main table. So I get up, grab Alex and Becci who are just sitting down, and sit with Trevor. Good conversation about travels, etc.
15. Return to 2104 with Madeleine and Alex’s friend Julie who are going to North campus. Skype parents, lots of fun.
16. Grab some tea downstairs, quick chat with Lisa, then back to journaling. Xin’s slaving away grading EE homework, guess my TA experience wasn’t enough to scare him away :D

10/4/16: Open House!! And Furmata Audition

1. 10/4/16
1. Today is a crazy day! First up E&M, which is tedious. I open up a big Wikipedia chain on math and zone out.
2. Walk to the Bean and Bagel with Eric, Spencer, Brianna, get myself a cheap bagel, very good.
3. Quantum is exciting. Prof. Cobden gives us a list of postulates which deal directly with wavefunctions, different formulation than Feynman. Cool links to math I’ve seen before, plus some of the stuff I was reading about in E&M.
4. Head to SPS lounge, hang out for a bit, walk up the Ave to get Open House groceries with Frank. On way run into Jasper from 33x, he tries to get me to take 390p, which he’s TAing.
5. Once back, realize Kyle failed to get enough balloons for our balloon stomp game. Think for a minute, where to get balloons; stroke of genius--or so I think--says call the RSO (student club) resources office. They do have balloons; I run over there, turns out I can only get 16 balloons a day :( WTF?! But I get to learn about their awesome poster-printing printer and other resources. the friendly girl recommends the dollar store for balloons, I smack my head and take off running.
6. Get 75 balloons for $3, back to lounge, start frantically writing up name tags with famous physicist names and sci-fi-characters, and blowing up balloons. Go ham delegating both tasks, as the time grows nigh the whole lounge comes together in common purpose.
7. We start the Open House in one of the big auditoriums, I direct people over from the SPS lounge.
8. We must have had 50 people, 10+ freshmen. All 12 of our pizzas are consumed. I get to mingle and introduce people. Brianna and Spencer and Xin show up. Announcements with the officers go really well, for the most part; I’m getting really comfortable onstage. Frank forgets to introduce Hira, our treasurer, though; which really bothers me because she’s the only girl on our officer team.
9. Balloon stomp game is a big hit, people really get into it. Kyle’s demos also draw a crowd.
10. Meanwhile, outside, celebration is occurring for the Nobel Prize awarded to a retired UW prof. I have no time to stick around and help clean, I run to Creating a Company. Catch the tail end of a talk, hang around and have tea with Prof. Leong and some students, then I have to run to Glee.
11. I get to Glee and Xin isn’t there, which bugs me, enough that I call him and tell him to get his sorry rear in the rehearsal room. The first two times I call him he just messes with me, pretends the connection’s bad and he can’t hear me, though I can hear his skeptical “Hello?!” with perfect clarity.
12. But he eventually does show up and seems to have fun :) Gets introduced to Paul J, they chat about China, (Paul is a big traveler).
13. Return from Glee, take a hot shower. Xin helps me pick out clothes for Furmata audition. Walk down to Smith Hall, the weather is beautiful. Forget which of the buildings in the quad is Smith, have to ask someone, turns out they’re also going to the audition.
14. Show up and within 3 minutes, before my official time, get called in. But it’s a lot of fun. Well-prepared, my heat-shield of confidence flakes and shudders, but holds firm. And the auditioneers are extremely friendly. I play my A, take a drink of water, and begin. And other than the high notes, which have been somewhat shaky all day, I sing like a boss! No big mistakes, great tone. Get to chat with auditioneers, end up singing excerpts from three other songs.
15. Return to 2104. On the way back, who should I encounter but Caleb Huffman and a buddy of his (Bradley) leaving orchestra practice. Get into a good discussion about IQ and criminal law; Huffman makes the good point that since white-collar crime is more thought-out and less impulsive than violent crime, it should be punished with at least equal severity for deterrence purposes.
16. Go to dinner with Xin at Som Tam Thai. Xin exhorts me to get some bubble tea from the new bubble tea place next to Som Tam; I oblige. Using the Mandarin for “thank you” while ordering my taro shake with pudding earns me a nod from the franchisee-entrepreneur, a friendly lady with a Chinese master’s in business management. We talk about her motivation for entering the business, why she opened when she did, and so forth. The shake is amazing, hands down the best “bubble tea” I’ve ever had.
17. Have to take the dinner home and enjoy it with Xin, a math article, a cold glass of milk, and the rest of the taro shake.
18. Back at 2104, I go ham on StatMech hw, which is extremely tedious and annoying. Back to intro chemistry and intro mechanics. Fortunately it doesn’t take that long. I go downstairs and watch two episodes of Your Lie in April.

10/3/16: Hoops and Bicycle Maintainence

1. 10/3/16
1. It’s Monday, the day of the 8:30 tutorial sections. Wake up bright and early, make it to my first tutorial (E&M) almost on time. More (!) review of basic calculus concepts. I can see how it would help some people but am about to go postal.
2. Get a T-shirt from SPS lounge, run over to Honors Phys 121 class and make an announcement for the open house. A good full circle feeling after taking that class first quarter at the UW. Leave my notebook to collect mailing list entries and duck out like a ghost, as quickly as I came.
3. Second tutorial also boring as *@&($. Except this time, Winnie is at my table, plus some other friendly gente. And, I get into a discussion with the TA about integrating delta functions, which gets me about 3 days farther into the skipped 228 material I’m missing :)
4. StatMech! Make an announcement (starting to be old hat :). Marcel dives into an interesting derivation of ideal gas relation U = 3/2 PV, which doesn’t rely on particles not colliding.
5. Hang out in SPS lounge as is the norm, working on entering emails for the SPS newsletter. Excitement builds for the first Lunchbox Seminar. It begins, and I eat Xin’s noodles, pizza, and an Asian pear while Martin Z. of MIT regales us with the tale of his conversion to experimentalism, his early work on Bose-Einstein condensate and particle coolers. Afterwards chat with a new dude, very curious transfer student Joss.
6. Return to 2104, grab my bike, and run it down to the ASUW bike shop. I’m hoping for some air and a little oil on my chain; instead, I get the most knowledgeable dude ever to be enthusiastic about teaching me how a bike works. He diagnoses my sticky gears, shows me how a derailleur works and how to adjust the bale, answers all my questions about how bikes actually run, even taking apart a hubcap mechanism to show me the ratchets that couple/decouple the pedals to the back wheel. THEN we oil my chain and I air up the tires. Super great experience.
7. Return to 2104. Decide not to ride to Rising Sun to get some produce. Instead I go play basketball. Best decision ever. Put on the terrifically comfortable and tragically unused basketball shoes my sweet Grandma got me for Christmas, and hit the gyms. Get into a game almost immediately, face off against an older dude who can’t handle my hustle and never gets open :) My offense isn’t great but I set a lot of picks. At the end I can’t imagine abandoning the game ever again.
8. I’m not sure what I do for dinner.
9. Do a little homework.
10. Go to the music building again for another rehearsal. This time not only the practice rooms but the glee room was locked. So I find a random piano in the hallway and get to work. At the end, I go into the stairwell and take a bunch of videos of myself singing to iron out the details. Here’s one:
11. https://goo.gl/photos/6jXoCumpT8Qfj4466

10/2/16: Whatcha Cooking?

1. 10/2/16 Sunday
1. Cook breakfast with Xin and Brandon. We make french toast and omelettes. It is great. Truly. Luxurious to have our own kitchen.
2. I don’t remember most of today but what I do remember: the Family Dinner! So it is a tradition, that the first Sunday of every month, folks volunteer to make dinner for everyone (HFS buys the groceries :) I was making bananas foster for dessert.
3. The dinner was amazing. ⅔ of the house were there. It was carne asada tacos, with ALL the fixings.
4. One of my floormates surreptitiously provides me with rum, while our RA does her best to look the other way. I get up from dinner a bit early to start cooking the bananas; done properly, a batch should only take me 5 minutes.
5. However, on the first attempt, the brown sugar doesn’t dissolve in the butter and the sauce is lost before the rum even enters the picture. The second attempt, hastily thrown together, hangs together a bit longer before failing in the same manner. Then I get the bright idea of adding water. On the third attempt, the brown sugar melts smoothly into the butter. In go the bananas, which caramelize to a rich golden hue; and then the rum, which I burn off with a lighter. Molly helps me while I scramble to ready all the ingredients, she measures the rum, and we hustle to get some bowls with cold ice cream ready to receive bananaic consummation.
6. The second proper batch works as well as its predecessor and the dessert is a big hit. I get to enjoy the last bowl. It is really good :)
7. I think afterwards I get into a game of pool. And then Molly comes and chats with Xin and I in the room a bit, and all three of us watch an episode of an anime called Re: Zero about a guy who finds a fantasy world and assumes he’s in a scripted game of D&D.
8. THEN I go to the music building. All the practice rooms have changed locks, so I go to Glee room. It is quiet as cold space in that room. Finish working on the SPS newsletter (did I tell you I migrated that thing to MailChimp, found a PO box and a bona fide @uw address and everything, and made a badass newsletter template that looks like Venkat’s Breaking Smart newsletter? Yeah…)
9. Then I start practicing Parting Glass for the Furmata audition. I actually sound really good, much better than I expect, and head back to 2104 for sleep with a light step.