The Kindness of Strangers

I’m in Soda Hall now, supposedly studying for the practice prelim I’ll be taking tomorrow (administered by some older, wiser grad students) in preparation for the real thing next week. In reality though, I’ve been following three nail-biting games on ESPN GameCast: the Sox won 2-1, the As won 2-0 in the 12th inning, and Seattle pulled off an 11-8 win in the 11th. Baseball is exciting — at least if you’re following three games at once :).

I’ve been realizing how music-starved I’ve become recently. I can’t listen to music when I’m trying to concentrate really hard. So it’s great for coding or writing papers but not good for studying. Unfortunately, all I’ve been doing for the last couple of weeks is studying (or thinking hard about problems for Ras). So the music part of my brain (roughly 70%, it seems) is withering away. I actually find myself longing for CDs these days. So I seize every opportunity I can to listen… in fact I was about to close my laptop so that I could stop reloading ESPN et al. five times a minute, but I decided to update my LJ just so I could keep listening. (And, for the record, the Powderfinger album has ended and I’m currently listening to the Sneaker Pimps’s Becoming X.) Can’t wait till I start coding again!

I want to write a Boggle program that generates and prints out valid boards and all the words you could make from those boards — so that you could play a round and then see how you stacked up against the optimal score. This project is, of course, scheduled for sometime A.P. :).

I managed to play guitar once this weekend, and while recording a song snippet (that I may post later), I started playing around with Cool Edit’s multitrack abilities. They have like 1500 samples available online, so I started poring through them. I made a quick song (40 seconds) from about 10 of the samples: Fun Song. Of course, it’s not mine, as naturally I didn’t write any of the loops, but it’s still pretty cool that you can get a nice sounding song with just some good software and raw materials.

Okay, time to really study (and split infinitives) now.

I’m taking the prelim in just over a week, and it’s been dominating my life: I’m behind in responding to emails and calling people, and I’ve hardly been exercising, reading, or playing any music. The good news is that I think I’m getting a handle on most of the stuff I’m supposed to know; the bad news is that there’s still a lot more stuff to assimilate, and there’s still an entire week of studying left (which, while useful, is very tiring). It’s going to suck if I don’t pass.

What else… NewsDog started off well but I don’t know how long it’s going to last… I had some updates planned for it (of course, to be done after the prelim) but it’s hard to tell if anyone finds the damn thing useful.

It’s amusing — the prelim is such a monumental event that I’ve been scheduling things B.P. and A.P…. The amount of stuff I’m supposed to do After Prelim is pretty funny… get new glasses, order more contacts, start working out again, update ND, work on a paper with Bill, read about 5000 books, write some Friendster testimonials [does anyone ever go to Friendster anymore?], start playing ultimate more than once a week, move my web page to the Berkeley servers, figure out what to do with my (still-growing) hair, be more committed to doing research for Ras, oh yeah and go to three concerts that week. Haha. We’ll see what actually gets done.

The Sox and the As might actually both make the playoffs! Fingers crossed.

Recent shows: Belle and Sebastian (with Bright Eyes opening). Bright Eyes started off slowly but totally sold me by the end. (An aside: how the hell do you refer to what are essentially one-man bands? e.g. Dashboard Confessional, Magnetic Fields, Nine Inch Nails, [Smashing Pumpkins, haha], etc.? You always end up saying something awkward like “I love Bright Eyes. His songs are so energetic.”) B&S were utterly charming, as usual. Their new material sounds terrific, too, so I’m psyched about getting the new CD. Then there was De La Soul. Unfortunately they played for the last hour of a five-hour long show so I was too tired to really appreciate them (also the audio sucked).

GradeBoy is finally going to be de-listed from download.com. They’re implementing this new retarded policy that requires you to pay $79 to list your product. Uh… not happening. GradeBoy has had about 20,000 downloads world-wide. I’m proud :)…. of course download.com has accounted for about 60% of those downloads. So this is pretty much the end of the road for ol’ GB.

Jenny and I went to Pt Reyes, which was really fun. We saw a ton of deer, including some fawns, rabbits, a lizard, a snake, a bunch of cool birds, shrimp, a pesky raccoon, and a friendly sea lion that followed us from about 15 feet from the shore as we walked along the beach!

Speaking of walking (and I may have ranted about this before), I find it funny that our societal rules essentially prohibit two people who don’t know each other from walking next to each other on the sidewalk. That is, if you happen to turn on to a sidewalk just as someone is walking on it, either you or the other person will always speed up or slow down so that the two of you are no longer walking together. It’s really funny. There’s actually a whole bunch of sub-rules, too. (For instance, once the speedier person has been established, the slower person almost never passes, even if he wants to speed up.) Wow I’m feeling major deja vu about this. so I imagine I really have ranted before. Better stop now before it gets too weird.

The news site is finally up! I’m calling it NewsDog for now (although I am also considering the hipper “NewsDogg”)… check it out at

NewsDog
Improvements are in the works but I’d like to see if it’s preliminarily useful before spending more time on it.

Just finished Life of Pi, which I found somewhat entertaining. I think my expectations were too high :).

Upcoming shows: Belle and Sebastian, De La Soul, Radiohead, Martin Sexton, possibly Super Furry Animals/Grandaddy. Oh yeah, so I’m moving out this week. Hopefully this’ll be the last time I’ll have to move for at least a year. I’ve been moving at least once a year, and almost always twice, for the last six years. It’s gonna feel good to settle down, I think. More random thoughts… normally I think about getting my hair cut when it starts to look like it looks now. I just like shorter hair: it’s easier to manage and I think it looks better. But this time I’m going to try to grow it out some more and see what happens. What’s your take?

I’ve had to fly back to California three times in the last month, and each time the flight has been delayed or cancelled. Two times my AmericaWest flight from Vegas ended up landing at SFO at 2:30 am… and American rerouted Umesh and me through Dallas, made us pay for our hotel room, and got us back to Cali a day late. Flying sucks!

… But like any good basketball player, my trips have had tremendous upside. I just got back from Nicole’s wedding this morning. It was so much fun (especially the reception — the music was perfect, the food was delicious, and Nic and Serge were practically glowing) and hanging out with the boyz was great too. And congrats to James and Erin!

Vegas was phenomenally fun, too. I left the place up $70 and several priceless memories. Las Vegas is an exercise in excess. The hotels are huge and spectacularly beautiful, the temperature rarely dips below 100, there are three Cirque du Soleil shows in a half-mile area, slots are everywhere, from the fanciest hotels to convenience stores (!) to the airport (!!), drinks cost next to nothing, billboards advertise “Microsurgical Vasectomy Reversal”, gorgeous rental Testarossas and Vipers are parked along the strip. My god. Our hotel, two blocks off the strip, was going bankrupt, Matt won the jackpot ($125) after four pulls of a quarter slot-machine, I saw a women playing $500-minimum blackjack, the room cost $12.50 per night for each of us, we sat down at a roulette table only to have the dealer tell us that she’d “never thought I’d see a table full of Beavises and Buttheads”, the drinking commenced before noon (with Staff and Will downing about 20 drinks per day), proverbial hilarity ensued. Okay… enough description :).

Time to get back to work!

I’ve been devoting the past several nights to coding up that news site I mentioned in my previous entry. It’s nearly done, and I think it looks pretty good :)… I’m in the process of finding somewhere to host it. I guess it’ll go live sometime next week. Problem is, I’ve been neglecting my usual work. Ras was noticeably annoyed today during our weekly meeting. Oh well.

In the meanwhile, I’m going to Vegas this weekend! Should be awesome. Never been there before, and I figure I can’t get a much better introduction than with some of my best high school friends. I’ll let you know if I survive.

Joel invited Matt and me to go rock climbing last Friday at a climbing gym. It was really awesome — I’d never climbed very seriously before, and I found out just how exhausting — and exhilarating — it could be. And I found out that I have more natural talent for climbing than I do for, say, basketball. Okay, that’s not saying much, but it felt good to be good at something right off the bat, as I’m normally a relatively slow learner.

After that was Vivek’s goodbye party, and then ultimate on Saturday and a viewing of the first Harry Potter movie. with Jenny and Melinda. About as good as the first book (which is to say, only decent)… but then again I think I’ve been spoiled by the later books, which are much better.

Oh yeah, the most important bit: the new site needs a name. (That emphasis was added so you entry-skimmers would take notice.) Due to lack of any creativity, its working name is SplagNews, but I get the feeling that maybe the whole ‘Splag’ thing is a bit played out. Maybe not? I’ve also considered the catchier ‘Splinks’. But I’m just bad at coming up with names — any suggestions? I figure if it’s gonna have any respectability, it’s gotta have a good name :).

Wow, it’s been quite a long time since my last post. I customized the HTML style for this journal a bit, although most people (who read my entries through their Friends pages) won’t notice it.

During my last couple of days at home, I drove up to Boston. It was a ton of fun seeing everyone. Since then I’ve been back here trying to do some research. I’m way behind in prelim studying still.

I’ve decided not to move back to IHouse — as fun as I’m sure it’ll be, I don’t think a second year at IHouse will be quite as revelatory as the first. Also, I need to do work, and I need to make some long-term friends. So instead I’m moving in with Umesh. It’ll be my first taste of life as a high roller. I’m used to living cheaply and not owning lots of stuff. Umesh is the opposite. We’ll see how much of a material boy I am.

I’ve noticed that (at least on my friends page) people are leaving fewer comments on other people’s entries than they used to. I wonder why that might be.

It occurred to me the other day that this journal is fairly useless: it consists of either stories or boring regurgitations of daily activities. And I’m bad at telling stories. Perhaps I should rethink this thing.

I was talking to Kerry a while back and we realized that it would be a good idea (or at least fun) to compile a “book” of dating sense: things that work and don’t work in the world of relationships, qualities to look for in the other person, etc. Of course this has been done a thousand times before but such books always seem way off target (or too generic: “look for a sense of humor” blah blah). We were thinking of things like
– Tit-for-tat is generally the best way to handle meals and outings. Either you’re treating the other person or getting treated — both nice.
– It’s really important that the other person be interested. Not just in you (although that’s certainly nice, or course!) but in things in general that she (or he) may be unfamiliar with now but that she’s willing to eager to explore just because the concepts are interesting. An engaged, open mind is a huge plus!
Stuff like that. I’m too lazy to type out more. If you feel like it, send me others if you know any…

I’ve been toying around with an idea for a new site for a while now. I’m not very good at writing LJ entries, but I am pretty good at reading huge amounts of news every day and selecting good bits for other people to read. I always end up emailing some friends some of the articles, and neither I nor they have a comprehensive list or even a forum on which to discuss the articles.

So I was thinking of creating such a site. I’ve already been recording my favorite articles from the past couple of weeks. I’d like the site to have the following properties:
For each entry:
Title
Abstract/Byline
URL
Date
Sent by
(should be able to add more such fields at a later date!)
Comments *** very important
(voting? “how interesting is this article?”)

Search by Date/Source/Author/Text

LJ is nearly a good venue but unless I can squeeze some of that stuff into header fields (“mood”, “music”), it’ll be hard to have it look good (e.g. formatted in HTML) and also searchable by different fields, unless I simultaneously keep a separate database elsewhere.

Does anyone know of some easy-to-use software that does all of this?

Gosh, this has been one of the all-time most boring entries ever. Here’s a marginally more interesting observation: despite our country’s obsession with violence and guns, as portrayed by video games, the media, movies, and so on, and its constituents’ fairly fanatical devotion to gun-ownership rights, I’ve personally never seen a real civilian gun in my life. Sure I’ve seen the tops of guns sticking out of police holsters, but I’ve never seen a whole gun, certainly not one owned by a normal person. I find that fairly incredible.

I asked my mom to wake me up early today. I’ve been at home for the past week, and before today I don’t think I’d gotten up before noon once. That led to a lot of tossing and turning at night, as I struggled to fall asleep before like 3am. Anyway, my mom obliged and woke me up at 10 this morning… so now my mission is to stay awake all day.

Home has been nice. It’s good for the soul to see the family, eat great food, hang out with family friends, watch lots of Wimbledon. Of course, I promised my advisor that I’d do some work, but it’s been exceedingly hard to sit down and concentrate for more than a dozen minutes at a time. Oh well. And I’m way behind in prelim studying. But thems the breaks.

Things pick up this upcoming weekend: we’re going to a family friend’s wedding in New York, and then as soon as we come back to Connecticut, I’m heading off to Boston for a couple of days. Then on Tuesday Umesh and I fly back to Berkeley.

——-

Oooh, it’s been so long since my last update. Went to a few concerts in the meanwhile: Yo La Tengo at the Fillmore (we were front row, mere feet away from Ira Kaplan! Haha and I had to reach on stage and upright his beer after he knocked it over onto his effects pedals after one particularly violent feedback session. And during the encore he looked at the girl next to me and was like, “What do you want to hear?” I couldn’t resist, so I shouted out “From Black to Blue!” and he looked reproachfully at me and said, “No, I was asking her.” Another wonderful brush with celebrity…. :); Vienna Teng at the Freight and Salvage (she was awesome); and Beck at the Greek Theater. I’d never been to the Greek before and man, those concrete seats really are uncomfortable. It’s so easy to slouch on them, especially when it’s hot — Jenny and I had to keep prodding each other to sit up straight. Luckily Umesh brought some cool water. Anyway the best parts of the show were when Beck played “Debra”, one of the most hilarious, brilliant songs ever, and a terrific cover of The Flaming Lips’s “Do You Realize??”.

——-

Well it would be quite ridiculous to devote a full entry to Beth (especially after all I’ve written in her little book!), although she’s one of the few people who’d deserve one. She’s very funny, loyal, gives extremely good advice, compassionate, an excellent writer, smart, alternately lazy and diligent (how many A+ papers became B+s because they were turned in late?), exceedingly stubborn (especially when it comes to defending Britain!), and gets into more relationship trouble than anyone I’ve ever seen. It’s like a soap opera. Somehow she manages to keep her good cheer throughout. She’s also a great friend.

——-

Since you’re reading this, you probably know James: my (ex-)roommate of five years and one of the smartest, goofiest guys around. Here are two stories about him from last year that you might find amusing.

1. We were playing basketball one day in the court behind 21r. It was a nice day and we were in Umbros and t-shirts. After we had been shooting around for a while, I noticed that I could see the tag on his shorts. From the front. It took me a moment to realize that he had put his shorts on inside-out and backwards and didn’t notice for half an hour! Try to envision a) James standing there with the seams of his shorts clearly visible and the tag sticking out the front and b) the expression on his face when I pointed this out to him. I’m still chuckling about it.

2. For a brief while, 21r had a mouse infestation. They would eat our food and leave droppings everywhere. We soon learned to put our food in bins, and the problem went away. During the infestation, though, one of our next-door neighbors came over to ask us about the mice — seems like they had been having problems too. Anyway, we hardly knew our neighbor so when James and I talked to him, we tried to be as polite as possible. He asked us whether we had seen any trace of the mice. Of course we had — their droppings were all over the place. We just called it “mouse shit” though. As in, “there’s more mouse shit today.” As the guy was explaining their mouse problems, I noticed James struggling really hard to find a synonym for “shit” that wasn’t so vulgar.

Now, James is an exceedingly vulgar guy. He swears all the time, and usually it’s really funny. So you could actually see him concentrating furiously as he tried to find a civilized way to describe the mouse shit. His face was scrunched up and his brow was furrowed. Finally the guy finished his explanation and James attempted to answer him:

(Concentrating hard) “Well, yeah, we do see some mouse poop” (visible sigh of relaxation at this point) “and shit around here.” (Look of absolute horror on face)

He was so relieved to say “poop” that he immediately lapsed back into his old manner of speaking! (I think he meant to say “poop and stuff”.) Of course, our neighbor didn’t even notice, but James was absolutely mortified with himself. Given three minutes’ preparation, he couldn’t say one sentence without swearing! I was dying. I was so close to bursting out laughing at that point that I actually had to leave the room.

Ah, I love that man.

A little tribute to the Outdoor Life Network. My roommate Joel is an insane outdoorsman: he camps, rock climbs, and is an awesome mountain biker. He also loves watching OLN. I had never heard of this channel before, but I’ve gotta say it’s quite entertaining.

Tonight we saw a swimming marathon, in which the athletes swam for 28 miles. Yes, totally insane.

Then there was some crazy downhill mountain biking.

Now we’re watching this supertruck off-road race taking place in Mexico. It is ridiculous. There are like no laws so the fans line the dirt road, mere inches away from these trucks that come screaming along at like 70 miles an hour. It is jaw-dropping to behold. And it gets crazier: parts of the race take place on the highway, a little two-lane affair. But it isn’t blocked off, so there are normal civilian vehicles still driving on it. So the trucks have to zoom at 100+ mph around and between cars going half their speed — in both directions. It’s like a video game. Hoooooly crap.

Umesh and I took a break from work today to go toss disc at Memorial Glade. The clocks on Sather Tower have been undergoing renovation for the past couple of weeks, and today we saw two guys scaling one of the faces, detaching the minute arm. It was really cool to see this massive metal vector slowly drifting down, accompanied by two spider-men.

Anyway, no one else was using the middle of the glade, so we had fun doing some crazy throws (not awu-style, of course :), but ultimate-style ones: inside-outs, runners, floaters and stuff) and running around making melodramatic catches. When we finished throwing, two dudes sitting on the side of the glade asked us if we could keep playing. We were like, “Huh?” and then explained that they were betting on us. “Huh?” we grunted again, and they clarified by displaying their bottles of alcohol and explaining that when I dropped the disc, one guy drank, and when Umesh dropped, the other guy drank. It was pretty funny. We joked that if they had told us about this earlier, we wouldn’t have tried so hard :)….

Still, man, that’s what summer is all about: two guys sitting the grass, drinking at four in the afternoon, betting on whatever is going on. Somehow I feel like even though I’m not doing any work, I’m still working too hard :).

There are three (principle) reasons why I’m not a good grad student. Today, kids, I’ll talk about one of them.

We’ve been meeting twice a week to study for the PL prelim in the fall — a brutal oral exam that pits you against two profs. The reading list is massive, so we’re set up a study schedule that lasts through the summer. We read six papers a week and meet to discuss them.

Anyway, the bad thing is that I forget nearly everything I’ve read. I’m talking about papers that I’ve read slowly and deliberately, making sure I understand them as I go. After like two days, I can’t remember a thing about them. The other guys I’m studying with are amazing: they recall the papers with ease, and even reference papers they read as undergrads! (Of course, this highlights another problem: I never took any PL courses as an undergrad, so I’m already woefully behind).

So I’m pretty concerned about that. How am I going to learn anything? Noooooooo….

It’s possible that later I’ll write about the other two reasons, my lack of motivation and my short attention span, but most likely I won’t be able to concentrate long enough to do so, and even if I could, I wouldn’t want to ;).

I do promise, though, a tribute to the one and only Beth…

One last thing about the Matrix: aren’t the Sentinels a total rip-off of the Ur-Quan from Star Control 2? Anyone who’s played the game has to agree with me.

We had a really nice home-cooked Japanese dinner courtesy of Sarah, Rika, and Izumi. It was awesome. I’ll miss them!

Saw Finding Nemo with Jenny. It was fun! Oh yeah and also saw Coldplay at the Shoreline Amphitheater with (approximately) the usual gang: Umesh, Leland, Koto, Jonathan, Lauren. I was somewhat apprehensive that our lawn seats (about half a mile from the stage, it seemed) would ruin the show, but it still turned out great: they played just about all of my favorite songs, and there was a surprising sense of immediacy that made everything work out.

You can see that I’m too lazy to write much. One of those things where so much stuff has happened that I’m too lazy to write about any of it. Hrmmmmmm….. I went to my first conference, PLDI 2003, in San Diego. It was actually a super-conference, one that happens every three or four years, that brings together many of the major conferences in the various subfields of CS. So pretty much everyone was there. It was a humbling experience: I saw tons of famous people, some profs from college who had no clue who I was, diligent grad students doing real research, etc. At first, I was like, these people are ridiculously good; there’s no way I can ever succeed in this field. But by the last day despair had turned into inspiration. I might as well try, right?

The conference itself was intense: 28 talks in two and a half days. I think I went to about 24 of them. We went into the city a couple of times, which was fun.

I got to know some of the other grad students in my group a lot better. They’re really great guys. Oh yeah, jo mama jokes. Here are some good ones:

Jo mama’s so fat, she’s on both sides of the family!Classic wordplay there. For the more mathematically inclined:
Jo mama’s so fat, she spans R³!Manu told me some good ones:
Jo mama’s so big, when she hauls ass, she has to make two trips!… and a politically-minded one:
Ariel Sharon’s so fat, he doesn’t want peace…. he wants two pieces!We were talking one night about that old trick question, “What weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of lead?” and I came up with this one:
Jo mama’s so heavy, a pound of her weighs more than a pound of lead!
Jenny was unhappy with the R^3 one, since technically you don’t have to be very large to span R^3, so we made up some (occasionally even nerdier) ones…

Dude, so it’s been an insane week so far. Moving out of IHouse and into our new place, saying goodbye to everyone, and participating in various extracurricular activies, including seeing the amusingly-named Greg Proops of Whose Line Is It, Anyway? fame, going to my brother’s Memorial Day barbecue, going out for Izumi’s birthday today, and arranging for the cable modem guy to come next week to bring us the glorious Internet, among other things (long-running research report, anyone? :).

I still haven’t unpacked everything, but I’m getting there. My advisor has given me a lot to do, and I have to attend this three-day Eclipse workshop through the end of the week, which is going to slay me (I don’t think I could possibly survive a 9-5 workday anymore). Anyway, I wasn’t planning on writing an LJ entry tonight, but I was lying on my bed, setting up Eclipse on my new laptop, when it popped up a little message: “Found a wireless network.” Ah, always working diligently for me. I guess someone in a nearby apartment is running an open wireless network. Sweet! So I get free Internet access, no strings attached (har har). I love technology.

Okay, back to work…