I urge you again to read the articles I mentioned in my (otherwise boring, self-absorbed) previous entry:
An amazingly moving speech: “Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy, Buy One Get One Free”.
A Sherpa destroys the Everest speed record.
And here is more awesome Sherpa news: 15-year-old girl becomes youngest person to scale Everest.
Numbers:
43: Hours I was in Soda in a 50 hour period this weekend, working on our 265 project. We wrote and debugged 4500 lines of code in 5 days. Perhaps I’ll post the paper later when I switch back to Linux.
6: Hours I slept in a 60 hour period during the same debacle. It turned out pretty well, actually, but I’m still recovering.
0: Conversely, the number of times I had to stay up while doing my CS270 project with Bill. It was a lot of fun, and we got some good results. It concerns a problem that occurred to me one day while we were brainstorming. Here’s the opening paragraph of the paper:
You are a poor graduate student. For spring break, you plan to drive down to L.A. on Route 1. Unfortunately, you can’t bring your massive CD collection on the road because your 1984 Plymouth Reliant has only a tape player. So, you would like to convert your music library to mix tapes. Since you like variety in your mix tapes, no two songs from the same CD should be copied to the same mix tape. Tapes cost money, and considering your measly stipend, you want to use as few as possible. What should you do?
It turns out that solving this problem is NP-Complete, meaning that as far as we know it’s basically just too difficult to do for any serious number of songs. We go much further in the paper and analyze some approximation algorithms (and make up some of our own). Read it if you’re interested. Bill is an awesome partner, by the way.
T40: The model number of my new IBM laptop. I love it! Best laptop ever.
0%: Chance the Lakers have of winning the championship this year. Hoooooo!
3: Concerts I attended since my last update: Kenny Garrett (not Kenny G) at Yoshi’s, Dar Williams at the Fillmore, Richard Shindell at the Freight and Salvage. All with jcliao, actually (and assorted other friends: yayu, Marianne). Dude Kenny’s drummer was just sick. Sooo good. I seriously couldn’t take my eyes off of him. I don’t think I looked at any of the other band members until halfway through the set. Dar and Richard were, of course, quality. The only problem with growing up with the same artists is that every new time you see them live, their sets seem shorter, since they have even more good songs to play.
too many: Good-byes I have to say this weekend as everyone leaves IHouse :(.
too much: Drunken revelry on the Love Boat, IHouse’s spring cruise on the bay. Still fun though!
2267 Hearst #6: Address of my new place. Moving tomorrow morning. Still have to pack, of course.
1: Number of times I’ve played any kind of sport in the last month. And that was soccer yesterday. Ouch. That means I haven’t done anything: no footy, ultimate, volleyball, not even ping pong. My touch wasn’t so bad (I scored a brace in our 2-1 victory, heh) but I was terribly out of shape. That will have to change this summer.
14.5: Consecutive hours spent administering and grading the CS172 final on Wednesday. No more TAing for a couple of years. The students in my sections kicked total ass though: their median was 14 points (out of 120) above the rest of the class! And 6 of the top 11 students for the semester were mine (even though I only have 16 of 64 students). Yay! Yes, obviously I am proud :).
2: Articles you should read right now. The first is a great speech by Arundhati Roy, entitled “Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy, Buy One Get One Free”, that my mom sent me. Also read about awesome Sherpas. I love Sherpas!
Sorry for the lack of entries. I’ve been really busy and will continue to be really busy for the next ten days or so. Eek. I promise a full disclosure sometime next week.
In the meanwhile, here’s something you should read:
School district sued over evangelistic crusade
And to counteract that, here’s my desktop picture:
Today is an errands day: I’ve gotta go to a make-up class, Radio Shack, a music store, my bank. Then the fun begins: dinner with jcliao and yayu at the Cheeseboard and then we’re going to Yoshi’s. Yay!
In my last entry I hinted at how bad The Whirlwind Heat, the opening band for the White Stripes, were. I’m going to be more explicit this time around.
The band was made up of three guys: a drummer, a bassist, and a singer. The bassist never played two successive notes (what we like to call a “melody”). He was content to make his bass sound like someone repeatedly clearing his throat into a megaphone. Naturally (and this goes without saying for most indie bands) the singer couldn’t sing; instead he used this half-barking, stentorian delivery voice that was Cake-esque but nowhere near as cool.
So we got to the show about 15 minutes late and they were playing a song. By that I mean the drummer was laying down a straightforward beat, the bassist was making sounds like a dump truck shifting into first gear, and the singer dude was literally repeating the phrase “decal on my sticker” over and over.
The singer had this Moog keyboard that he finally turned on halfway through the song. Of course, he didn’t play a melody on it. What happened was this: he turned it on, and immediately started having a seizure. At least, that’s exactly what it looked like was happening. His entire body was convulsing, torso twisting, legs flailing. Somehow he managed to brace himself against the synthesizer stand and at the same time smash the keys and turn the knobs at random. It’s really impossible to describe what this sounds like — describing what it looks like is hard enough. It just sounded terrible. Random bass, and absolutely insane keyboard blips for which the best metaphor is “aural tornado”.
That was bad enough. Luckily the song finally ended. I figured that his keyboard performance was some kind of gimmick for that song. Nope — turns out that he did that on every song. Convulsed, beat the crap out of the keyboard. Now I’ve seen some weird avant-garde music, including one piano piece that involved clobbering the keys with stuffed animals — yes, this is true — but nothing sounded this bad. It was so bad that it was funny. I was laughing out loud for most of the performance.
Two noteworthy occurrences: once, the singer lifted up the Moog with one hand, the better to pulverize it with his other hand, one presumes. This was an admirable feat, as at the time it looked like his legs were trying to move in two different directions, and his torso a third. When he lifted it up, though, the cable came unplugged. This was just too funny: guy looks like he’s having a seizure, cable falls out, suddenly he stops moving, calmly bends over to plug the cable back in, and immediate resumes his demonic dance. You had to be there, I guess.
Then on one particularly spastic song (and that is saying a lot) the singer ran over to the bassist and jumped on him, piggy-back style. The bassist somehow managed to play with the singer on his back, but not for long — the singer wrested the bass away from him and started banging on it with greater abandon, if that is even within the realm of possibility, than he did the Moog. The funny part was that the song sounded exactly the same. There was no appreciable difference in sound between the beginning of the song, which one would imagine was composed in some fashion and performed by musicians (at least nominally), and the end, which involved a guy who doesn’t know how to play bass playing bass while riding piggy-back.
I just realized that the first letters of each paragraph of this entry spell “TITSTTTTI”. Or, backwards, “Itttt’s tit”. Not sure if this is Freudian or what, but I take it as a sign that I need to eat lunch.
Went to the White Stripes show tonight at the Warfield. The opening band, Whirlwind Heat, was absolutely terrible. The Stripes didn’t quite justify the $38 (!!) or whatever I had shelled out for the show, but it was solid nonetheless. I had to skip dinner because my Decal class went until 7 and I had to take the 7:05 F bus, so instead I had two doughnuts, seven cookies and then a $2 7-11 burrito. Yummy.
What I didn’t mention in my previous post is that while I did break a drumstick, that forced me to switch to guitar, and I wrote the bulk of a new song. Minus lyrics, of course, but still good :).
(from Alex) Total crap quote:
“It’s not free, but it’s 99 cents a song, pretty doggone close,” Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said [of Apple’s new online music initiative].
And, right, gas is not free, but at $2/gallon, it’s pretty doggone close. I’m sure commuters everywhere would agree.
I’m supposed to give half a lecture tomorrow morning (prof is out of town) in addition to my usual discussion section duties, but I am procrastinating like crazy trying to avoid preparing for it. Hence, second LJ entry in one day :).
Oh yeah, someone bugged me about pics I promised to post…
Mt. Tam Photos courtesy of the lovely Rosa
Spring Break Photos courtesy of the lovely James
Was going to go to some co-op party tonight with some friends, but they charged $7 and it looked lame from the outside. So instead we headed down to Shattuck and ended up at Blake’s, where we saw this totally fun reggae/ska/pop/whatever band The View From Here for two hours. $6 goes a long way if you know how to spend it…
The basement at Blake’s has these black lights, the ones that make everything look fluorescent and bright. I noticed that when I looked at one at the right angle, the entire room would turn blue. And then if I looked slightly away, everything turned normal again. And then one of my friends pointed out that when I looked at that angle, my eyes glowed blue (which would explain everything else turning blue for me). I guess it had something to do with the refraction index of my contact lenses, or something. Anyway, it was pretty cool.
Happy birthday to my dad and Wing!
In no particular order:
I love the Timberwolves. I was going to go to some party thing tonight but instead stayed back to watch the game. Beautiful.
Jamming, Better Luck Tomorrow, three sets of tennis, a play improbably titled Calculus: Newton’s Whores, Appleseed Cast and Cursive live at Bottom of the Hill, birthday dinner for Marianne, working on projects, playing Rat Screw and Spades during office hours.
Gossip Guy is the king (click for vulgar, offensive hilarity).
kejordan made the insightful observation that it’s strange that we find nature beautiful. Many of our likes and dislikes can be explained from an evolutionary perspective: sweet things, ‘beautiful’ people, and so on. But nature, like music and art, really has no “reason” for being liked. It’s strange. I actually have some more thoughts on this but I would rather try to prod Kerry into writing about it as a) she needs to write in her LJ more and b) she is a much better writer than I.
While I’m regurgitating other people’s ideas, my brother has a great theory with which I agree completely. It’s this:
What do you think? Evidence for or against? If it’s really true then it provides some practical advice for living, certainly…
I went downstairs to the vending machine to get some pretzels. The big, chunky kind that come in an oversized bag that make you think they’re a good deal for seventy-five cents, at least compared to the other junk food fare.
I scrounged up $.75, dumped it into the machine, and selected A2; something whirred, coils turned, and my bag of pretzels stood hanging by its edges from the A2 row.
I briefly considered trying to tilt the machine (even though it’s huge) but then remembered that its defense mechanism against such an attack is to have all of the food-display rows slide forward to the glass, which would mean that I wouldn’t get any pretzels at all.
So, sighing, I reached into my pocket for another three quarters. Of course, all I had was a ten-dollar bill — and the change machine doesn’t accept anything larger than fives.
I made a mad dash back upstairs (someone might get my pretzels, after all!) and charged into Alex’s room, demanding that he, too, wanted some pretzels, that in fact he wanted them right now, and that conveniently I would be a really nice guy and get them for him. Luckily, he’s as big a sucker for pretzels as I am, and a nice guy, so he acquiesced. Too bad he had no change either, just a five.
Back downstairs. Ran the five through the change machine and grabbed the score of quarters. 1-2-3 into the vending machine, A2, something whirred, coils turned, my bag of pretzels fell down gracefully, and his hung, suspended by its edges, from the A2 row.
I actually started laughing out loud. At first, I considered cutting my losses, especially since my new patron wouldn’t appreciate it if I squandered more than the allotted amount of his money. But logic struck: n bags of pretzels for the price of n+1 becomes a reasonable deal as n gets large (but is pretty crappy when n is just 1). Alex wouldn’t mind, would he? Pretzels are good. So, armed with a fistful of quarters, and fully intending to eat delightful Synder’s of Hanover Old Tyme Pretzels all night long, I put the first three in and hit the magical buttons.
The second bag, just hanging by a millimeter, fell down, and the third slipped forward, caught in the last moment by the coils…
… and then, anti-climactically, slipped free and fell down as well. Triumph! Three for the price of three. Giggling, I sauntered upstairs (trust me, it’s hard to giggle and saunter at the same time, but I think I pulled it off), casually announced to Alex that I was feeling generous and had bought him two bags of pretzels with his money, and deposited the rest of the quarters into his hand.
He called me a “whore” but deep down inside I know that he loves me :).
A busy day today: gone from 9:45am till 10pm. Went to another wonderful birthday dinner (Wanping) at — yes — a Thai restaurant. I love listening to Singaporeans talk!
And, oh yeah, we had free Thai food for the OSQ lunch today.
So that makes three of my last five meals fully Thai. At first, I was thinking, crazy — how often does that happen? Then I realized that for 60 million Thai people, it happens every day.
I really want to see Better Luck Tomorrow but it’s always sold out! (Perhaps I’ll have better luck tomorrow, goes my idiotic running joke.) Maybe I’ll try again next weekend.
Speaking of films, the new (100mb, 2min) trailer for Matrix Reloaded is one of the sickest pieces of eye candy I’ve ever seen. Like, that trailer outperforms entire movies. I’ve watched it probably ten times in the last three days :). Check it out!
Celebrated two birthdays (Rika, Matt) in the last week, both at Thai House. Different groups of people, but both were a ton of fun. Makes me appreciate the insane number of ridiculously nice people in IHouse… I think living here another year is a good idea.
Found a place for this summer with Matt and Joel. The location is sweet, right on Hearst, a few blocks west of the CS building. Also comes with a pool table, and a rooftop patio with grill… and costs a lot less than IHouse in the summer. Score! Space is a little tight but we’ll manage.
Slight bit of bad news: I reaggravated last week’s soccer injury while playing on Friday. So I’m out of commission again. Hopefully it’ll be better next week! Good news: I’ve somehow managed to set up these fellowships so that I have funding for the next five years. So that’s one less thing to worry about.
Hung out last night with Umesh and the gang. We stayed up way too late but had a great time as usual. For some reason I woke up at 10am this morning, after having slept for only five hours. Now it’s work time. Going to Soda in a bit to work on my 270 project with Bill. Yay!
Jeez, these last few entries have been mundane. Seems like I’ve fallen back to my old habits. But I do have interesting things to talk about, I swear! It’s just a matter of working up the willpower to make them cohesive, sensible statements…
