3/7/18: Back to the Hustle

1. 3/7/18
1. Wake up, head to CSE to work on grad hw with Laura. We struggle with notation way longer than necessary :( I don’t wake up fast enough.
2. Head to biophysics, more elasticity theory, this time more on membranes. Interesting!
3. Grab kalua pig and speed-read the paper I’m presenting to the discourse group, on a efficient, greedy discourse tree parser. I’m shocked how quickly I grasp the whole structure of the paper, given that the method is fairly sophisticated and makes liberal use of Conditional Random Fields, a probabilistic model I just learned about.
4. Head to CSE and present the paper with gusto. As usual, I defend the paper’s strategy and approximation against the attacks of the more jaded grad students. It’s pretty entertaining and I’m on point responding to factual queries. Everyone is pretty tired, however.
5. We part, not without some tearful goodbyes. Then I run into Johan and Aishu in the atrium; Aishu, who I haven’t seen in forever, is organizing some crazy cross business / CSE event focusing on agricultural technology, and we talk about that for a bit.
6. Run to Haggett, grab a chocolate milk, and do my tutorials.
7. Return to 2104, start working, then realize it’s Swing Kids pilates night. Run over to Hillel UW, which is pretty awesome. The teacher works with Ben and specializes in pilates for dancers. Pilates, from my basic perspective, is isolation exercises focused on core strength and body awareness. Learned a lot about my back musculature. The thesis is that when walking, sitting, etc, and especially dancing, one needs to be aware that most of one’s structure resides in the back, where the bones and the supporting muscles sit. Seemed reasonable!
8. Hit Som Tam, looked at Pedro’s research. Want to talk to him tomorrow about research opportunities.
9. Return to 2104, keep working. Read biophysics lecture notes, talk a bit with Damir.
10. Chat with Gaya for a bit and hit the hay!

3/6/18: The Happiest of Days

1. 3/6/18
1. Highlights!
2. Gaya brought me flowers after the Glee concert! And met the family :) Both sides enjoyed the encounter a lot.  I got to goof off with Secret in the grass, chat up Izzy about algebra. We hit Full Tilt for a ridiculous amount of delicious ice cream, then back to 2104 to hang out for a bit.
3. Then my folks dropped me off at Chili’s for the Philosophical Physical Society’s 3rd meeting. We had an interesting discussion about Germany--fun fact: Hitler was a decent painter :P And I came up with a topic for next time--a better vocabulary for describing the recursive interactions between self and environment that make me feel less like a decision-making robot than math-major-mental-models predict ;)
4. Afterwards, went to Jacob’s house. We talked philosophy for a bit, then dug into Ohm’s law--turns out a uniformly conducting medium supports EM waves, but they have a damping term! And all sorts of crazy stuff. Really really cool. Jacob and I may Tex it up over break--typeset it into a paper :)
5. Head to Terry and hang out * with Gaya for a while. Recap the fam visit happily.
6. Return to 2104, write the SPS newsletter, crash out

3/5/18: Dinner Party

1. 3/5/18
1. Woke up at noon :)
2. Made Xin an omelet
3. Went to get a haircut with Xin! My favorite place Epic Cuts was closed for a remodel, but we found a nearby place. Barbers were very entertaining, big buff dudes slapping us on the back with rugby on the telly.
4. Went back, hit the gym. Crushed Xin at badminton then played a few going-it-easy games with a few noob girls and a dude who I’d met at DubHacks.
5. 5-minute workout, then shower, towel off in the sauna :)
6. On the way back to 2104, grab some groceries for the curry night
7. Then grab some more stuff from 2104 and hike to West Campus
8. Run into Alex on the way, turns out she just broke up, give her a hug and proceed to pick up Gaya from Terry.
9. Walk over to the Engineers’ Flat, where Curry Night is in full swing. Brandon is mixing ginger * beverages, (the * is not a pointer declaration), Fielder et al. are masterminding two different kinds of curry, a new dude named Anice is chopping chicken. Gaya and I get to work. I start making greek salad and Gaya makes chai.
10. Gaya gets in a good chat with Alex while I catch up with all the engineers.
11. Once the rice is ready, dinner is served. Amazing and very classy. Fielder did a terrific job organizing. I feel like I’m at a homeschool dinner party, a far cry from the omelets and pancakes me and Brandon hacked together in the earliest brunches :D We’ve come a long way.
12. See Gaya out--she’s got to work--then sit down and chat with Julie and Trevor and Alex.
13. End up in a long EE conversation with Max; we argue about capacitors in series and springs and a possible abstraction in graph theory that connect the two :D
14. Bid everyone goodbye, head over to Terry, have a good chat with Gaya, sing some goofy songs :D
15. Return to 2104, hang out a bit with Xin, check email and Facebook, do tutorial pretest, read a math article from Dad, and hit the hay :D

3/1/18

1. 3/1/18
1. Woke up at 10
2. Read through fascinating lecture notes on biophysics, polymer folding and entropic force :)
3. Went to class, we started a discussion of elasticity theory, which relates strain (the forces on an object) and the stress (the resulting deformation) in all its multi-dimensional glory. We derived the lines of zero stretch ;)
4. Lunch culti-date with Gaya! Cultidate <- date at Cultivate, the actually quality HFS-run high-end restaurant that takes student dining money. Sat next to the ASUW president--all the HFS brass eat at Cultivate.
5. Went to Terry to study * with Gaya.
6. Frustrating work on the hotel website for CaC. The feature set of the builder we decided to use (Squarespace is blocked in China) is just too lean. Will have to talk with team.
7. Swing lessons! I was super out of it for some reason and really struggled with swing-out variations. At the end of the two hours (advanced, techniques) I just collapsed on the floor.
8. Team Food at Little Thai. Tasty, good to catch up with Savanna, talk to Nico about math memes, which is a difficult mode of conversation for me.
9. Am not feeling like doing work, so I go to the gym and play some hoops. Check in with my family about the absolutely, wildly insane thing that’s happening with my sis’s instagram account--one of her videos is on track to be in the top 3 most popular videos of the year!
10. Return to 2104, hang out downstairs and read, chat with Gaya for a bit, then hit the hay.

2/29/18

1. 2/29/18
1. One announcement since I haven’t been on the blog for so long: I got accepted to ETH study abroad! Woot woot
2. Woke bright and early at 7:30 and started crunching on biophysics. Context: I had found out I got accepted to Study Abroad the previous night, and told Gaya; then we both got sad that we wouldn’t see each other for 9 months or so after the Spring Quarter ends, and we stayed up late bawling our eyes out.
3. So! Biophysics. Very nifty stuff. We applied a vector calc equation from E&M, plus a Boltzmann-law atmospheric distribution from StatMech, to get a handle on how screening works in ionic solutions. EG, if I drop a big + into the liquid, all the little minuses get attracted to the + and their charge “shields” the +, so that the potential seen outside the screening layer is much smaller than the potential of just the +. With the strategy above we got the thickness of the screening layer.
4. Gaya dropped in for a few minutes then left; I finished biophys and turned my attention to my discourse paper. Then I borrowed a folder from Lisa and holepunched all my paper printouts, showered, and went to biophys, where we mostly went over derivations from the notes.
5. Met Ayush at the Red Pepper (authentic Sichuan restaurant) for lunch. It was tasty. He’s going on an internship binge, first Google then Facebook (cuz why not?) Says he’s giving the engineering life one more shot. Talked about grad school, different types of research.
6. Went to CSE for discourse group meeting. On way in checked with advisers--looks like I’m in for ETH on the solid :)
7. Discourse was a bit thin today, only 4 of us. Good though! Despite having only skimmed the last bit of the paper, I was able to make some contributions (I’m good at clarifying the meaning of the equations :))
8. Went over to Terry, said hi to Gaya and some RA friends and a very cute dog in the RLO. Meanwhile, Secret, is going viral and literally one of the RAs had just watched a Secret video.
9. Gaya and I go for a walk; her heart is heavy but the walk helps and we have some good conversation. By the end we’re singing together :D
10. Head to CSE, review notes on website building. End up working a lot on Alex’s study abroad essay.
11. Damir comes by, we look at the website builder and spec, divvy up responsibility.
12. Head back to 2104 where Xin and Lisa are frying spring rolls. Make myself an omelette, heat up some ridiculously spicy soup from Gaya and my date after the Lavin Gala, grab some spring rolls, and go to town. Very satisfying meal.
13. Head up to room, don’t get a ton of work done. Finish up working on Alex’s essay, get in a good Skype session with parents, put in some laundry, write this entry and hit the hay.

2/2/18: A Short Day for a Long Weekend

1. 2/2/18
1. Slept in until 12:30!
2. Did laundry, washed dishes, ate some instant oatmeal to raise my glucose levels and then
3. Did the Amazon preliminary internship assessment! This was a hour-long challenge that ended up not being very challenging; the debugging portion was trivial, and the logic portion was like a bunch of letter cipher puzzles plus some SAT-like comprehension questions.
4. Chase came over to hang out and we made lunch, then took a walk around some pretty neighborhoods north of 45th. Lots of fun conversation. Sounds like his PGPNA (D&D club) exploits are going awesome.
5. Meet Henry Banks at the Oasis for some bubble tea. Very fun! Catch up on each other’s programming projects; he describes a little memory management hack called “object pools”. We oddly ran out of conversation about an hour and a half in, whereupon he returned to the Academy of Interactive Entertainment and I went to join Gaya’s Singaporean buddies at the Kong Tofu House. Very good food, similar to the Korean Tofu House ;)
6. Go back with Gaya to Terry to work. Find the 8th floor lounge unoccupied and get rolling. After a short interlude *, I settle down to wringing the very essence of the belief propagation algorithm from a paper linked in the homework. 3 hours later, I have a decent sense of what’s going on. BP is complicated!
7. Decide to stay over in the 8th floor lounge. Send some email, write this log, and * hit the hay.

2/2/17: Work and Peace

1. 2/2/17
1. Sleep like a log.
2. Breakfast and work.
3. Grad class! Learn more Markov Networks stuff.
4. Meet Caleb (from my Presentations class way back!) for lunch. Trade stories from classes and trying to do research. Good time.
5. Try to understand my frickin’ homework. The data and starter code are presented with minimal explanation.
6. Run over to the gym to squeeze in some hoops! Get into some good games. I play well, but my technique is off--I’ve already lost the ‘twitch’ :P
7. Skip ENTRE because it’s another one of Alan’s 15 minute lectures + check in. That way, I get to read a bit of my grad class textbook--which is titillating but not relevant to the homework--and examine the provided data to make sure it’s formatted how I think it is.
8. Glee rehearsal!
9. Schultzy’s! Chew the rag with Wesley.
10. Run back home, grab my stuff, off to physics to study with Jacob, Brandon, Eric. Jacob and I spend most of the time talking about quantum stuff not directly relevant to the exam ;) Spend a long time trying to figure out this Hund’s Rules thing. Eventually come up with a nice proof for what it was we were trying to do, connecting z-angular momentum and regular angular momentum.
11. Meet Gaya for just a few moments since I’m close to West Campus :D
12. Run back home, write this log, and crash. Wish me luck on the midterm!