My body is SOOO tired... if I succumb for a second to my head's urging pleading to lay back on my airport waiting seat, I fall asleep. I just tried it - almost didn't get back up. Man... can't wait to get back........................
See, those weird characters I just accidentally typed (I think they're periods) were typed in another one of my nap attacks. Man......
Several things have changed since my last entry. To be honest, right now I can't even remember what my last blog entry was.
Man, but I got a lot of things to look forward in Austin now. My passport with the Taiwan visa hsa arrived at my apartment, I'm expecting my car's engine to be completely replaced with a new one by today afternoon. I still have to write my recommendation letter for CMU. I'm waiting to see a special person today. Emails... Yes... catching up with lots of things to do.
Falling asleep again at the Manchester regional airpot. I better go... cya soon blog!
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Thursday, September 18, 2008
QuickBlog (On life and toilets)
I'm just about to get on my way to Em's now, so I'll be very brief. I just want to perpetuate a couple of thoughts upon which I will extend later.
*****
All right, I'm back. More than 24 hours later...
So about #1...
You know how, when kids are kids and go to school and play and learn and do school-stuff, you have a group of classmates? Classmates are those others who share the class with you. You know your classmates, you make friends with some of them, some you do not like, etc... And then you grow up and leave school, and you're no longer in class. But you still have people all around you, and the same patterns arise. You know some of them, you make some friends, some people you don't like, etc...
I know I'm just comparing social groups of a different magnitude, so it's logical that patterns are similar. However, if you look at classmates, it's easy for them to identify themselves as a group. They share something, the circumstance of having been assigned to that particular class. You live with them for a long time, and you get to know them somewhat closely, and etc... This pattern is not exactly replicated when you leave the classroom and go into the larger world context. There are so many more people in the world than there were in your class - how can you identify yourself as part of such a large group? It may be desirable, but it's just not... plausible. Even in a class, there are times when you feel alienated from the rest of the class, how can it not happen in a full-blown world?
But wouldn't it be nice? I mean, we all share a world. An enormous ball full of life, full of beauty, full of people... aren't we all here? We all share it, we're in the same context. Being that as it is, shouldn't we all try to help each other live on/survive/be happy? I mean, that's sort of what society already does for us. I don't ever need to grow my own food or carry my own water - I give out my services in return for a little part of every other person's services. Economics, you know. But I just think... sometimes people focus so much on themselves that they forget what the broad perspective of it all is. That we all share this life, this world, this amazing context. We're all worldmates. So we should all help each other out while we're around! Yup, worldmates! That's the spirit.
So about #2 (Si vous plait do not read if you are easily disgusted and do not want to be disgusted):
My toilet got clogged a couple of days ago. After many failed plunger plunges and many hours of olfactory uneasiness, it is now unclogged and clean. But looking at the little toilet hole through which water and waste are flushed away, I got to thinking about the little journey of a piece of feces, all the way since its conception inside the intestine, down through the lower digestive tract, out of the body, into the toilet, and *FLUSH* through the toilet pipe. I am assuming that a piece of feces' girth is pretty much determined by the cross-section area of the intestine. So if the toilet pipe's cross-section area is considerably smaller than the intestine's, it could get stuck.
I know the real scenario takes into account other variables, including the piece's rigidity, the pipe's inner wall's friction coefficient, the pipe's downward incline, and the amount and rate of water flow used to flush the toilet. Nevertheless, the toilet pipe's aperture remains an important factor to be considered.
I imagine toilet pipe sizes must be fairly standard. I wonder if people actually got to measure and perform statistical calculations on a varied and well-distributed assortment of fecal pieces before determining an appropriate toilet pipe standard size. Would've measuring the actual intestines been helpful on determining an appropriate toilet pipe size? I don't think so... being organic tissue and everything, I'd guess their elastic coefficient would very much disrupt any static measurements upon them.
So those were my two thoughts, full blog version. Nothing urgent, just wanted to finish them off.
And now for my actual events, I'll post another blog entry. This I do for the sake of contextual hygiene, just to isolate my thoughts (especially thought #2) from particular social and worldly events.
- We're all lifemates. Worldmates. (I wonder if I'm coining the term right now)
- Toilet pipes should be wider than our intestines.
*****
All right, I'm back. More than 24 hours later...
So about #1...
You know how, when kids are kids and go to school and play and learn and do school-stuff, you have a group of classmates? Classmates are those others who share the class with you. You know your classmates, you make friends with some of them, some you do not like, etc... And then you grow up and leave school, and you're no longer in class. But you still have people all around you, and the same patterns arise. You know some of them, you make some friends, some people you don't like, etc...
I know I'm just comparing social groups of a different magnitude, so it's logical that patterns are similar. However, if you look at classmates, it's easy for them to identify themselves as a group. They share something, the circumstance of having been assigned to that particular class. You live with them for a long time, and you get to know them somewhat closely, and etc... This pattern is not exactly replicated when you leave the classroom and go into the larger world context. There are so many more people in the world than there were in your class - how can you identify yourself as part of such a large group? It may be desirable, but it's just not... plausible. Even in a class, there are times when you feel alienated from the rest of the class, how can it not happen in a full-blown world?
But wouldn't it be nice? I mean, we all share a world. An enormous ball full of life, full of beauty, full of people... aren't we all here? We all share it, we're in the same context. Being that as it is, shouldn't we all try to help each other live on/survive/be happy? I mean, that's sort of what society already does for us. I don't ever need to grow my own food or carry my own water - I give out my services in return for a little part of every other person's services. Economics, you know. But I just think... sometimes people focus so much on themselves that they forget what the broad perspective of it all is. That we all share this life, this world, this amazing context. We're all worldmates. So we should all help each other out while we're around! Yup, worldmates! That's the spirit.
So about #2 (Si vous plait do not read if you are easily disgusted and do not want to be disgusted):
My toilet got clogged a couple of days ago. After many failed plunger plunges and many hours of olfactory uneasiness, it is now unclogged and clean. But looking at the little toilet hole through which water and waste are flushed away, I got to thinking about the little journey of a piece of feces, all the way since its conception inside the intestine, down through the lower digestive tract, out of the body, into the toilet, and *FLUSH* through the toilet pipe. I am assuming that a piece of feces' girth is pretty much determined by the cross-section area of the intestine. So if the toilet pipe's cross-section area is considerably smaller than the intestine's, it could get stuck.
I know the real scenario takes into account other variables, including the piece's rigidity, the pipe's inner wall's friction coefficient, the pipe's downward incline, and the amount and rate of water flow used to flush the toilet. Nevertheless, the toilet pipe's aperture remains an important factor to be considered.
I imagine toilet pipe sizes must be fairly standard. I wonder if people actually got to measure and perform statistical calculations on a varied and well-distributed assortment of fecal pieces before determining an appropriate toilet pipe standard size. Would've measuring the actual intestines been helpful on determining an appropriate toilet pipe size? I don't think so... being organic tissue and everything, I'd guess their elastic coefficient would very much disrupt any static measurements upon them.
So those were my two thoughts, full blog version. Nothing urgent, just wanted to finish them off.
And now for my actual events, I'll post another blog entry. This I do for the sake of contextual hygiene, just to isolate my thoughts (especially thought #2) from particular social and worldly events.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
The Malaysian Magician's Money
So I woke up at 5AM this morning because my brother kicked me in his sleep. Being the hard-working (*coughs* net-holic) person I am, I turned on my computer and began to submit expense reports from the last WS deployment, check on JIRA issues, check my job email, check my other emails, send some pics to a friend, wonder about about one of the picures, image-google it to try to find it on the net, become distracted with the picture of a hot girl, click on it, find a Malaysian's magician blog on Friendster (http://davidlaimag.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog/2007/07/some_of_the_bet.html), read one of his entries from last year talking about courtship, like it, wonder what his latest entries were, read them, and decide to comment on one entry about money.
My comment turned out longer than expected, but I liked it because it turned out almost as a blog entry. So then I decided to post my comment on my own blog, just for kicks.
So here is David's (the Malaysian magician's) blog entry:
http://davidlai.tv/2008/08/27/money-is-almost-everything/
Ugh... my comment is longer than his entry! Symptom of a blogger #27...
I like when I can just copy-paste stuff to put on my blog. OK, I'm done. So again...
Cheers!
My comment turned out longer than expected, but I liked it because it turned out almost as a blog entry. So then I decided to post my comment on my own blog, just for kicks.
So here is David's (the Malaysian magician's) blog entry:
http://davidlai.tv/2008/08/27/money-is-almost-everything/
And my comment was:MONEY is almost EVERYTHING
I believe at my age , money is `almost’ everything . Those who say it isn’t are living in a world of denial . If you had’t notice I said ` I believe ‘ , you don’t have to agree .
The old saying goes , ` Love is all you need ‘ . I say it’s bullshit . Without money , do you realise how many arguments takes place in a relatiosnhip due to the lack of monetery funds ? A LOT ! I also resent the statement of ` GOD IS ALL YOU NEED ‘ . I’ve been to the Phillipines a couple of times . In the Phillipines , 95 % of the population are Roman Catholics ….unfortunately , the poverty & crime rate there is one of the highest in the world …What happened ? Same goes for Brazil . They all pray , I have no doubt on that , yet …… I never said I din’t believe there was a GOD . Don’t quote me .
Earning money does have it’s price . Yes , what a way to put it . Earning money has it’s `price’ .
I haven’t been updating this poor old blog for quite some time now . Not because I’m lazy . I promise I’m not and I don’t plan to be . It’s not because I don ‘t have anything exiting to write on .. because I do ! Lots and lots of things to write and rant about ! It’s just that I’m so busy finding new ways to earn money . Hopefully , lots and lots of it . I guess it all depends on how much you want it .
I said money is `almost’ everything , so whats your drive ?
Make sure it’s the right one …
Hey David! Nice blog!! Nice profession, too! I like the way you write: clear, direct, and honest.
Anyway, I thought I'd add my own from-the-other-side-of-the-world (I'm originally from Guatemala, now live in Texas) opinion to the money discussion going on here.
Stating the obvious... Of course money matters! We use it all the time! We use it to eat, we use it to drink, we use it to dress, we use it to get shelter, we use it... A LOT! People spend 40 hours a week, many times much more than that, working, serving, spending their time for someone else, losing the majority of their daylight hours, losing a big portion of their LIFETIME to get MONEY. Many people stress over it, plan around it, live and die around it, revolve their whole lives and priorities around the "irreplaceable" chore of "getting money". So yes, it matters.
And by the current society's system, it figures. It's the way we've changed into. Did we always need money? No. People did survive without it for quite a while. So why do we need it now? Because for us, it's the only way we KNOW how to live.
Would you be willing to grow/hunt your own food? Find your own drink? Build your own house? Make your own clothes? Manufacture your own car? Dig up and refine your own fuel? You would? Oh well then, you could probably live without money.
I bet you 10 bucks + RM50 (what the heck is that currency? Oh, Ringgit Malaysia, thank you Google) you would answer no to most of these questions. I would too. We're useless for most of the above tasks, so getting people to DO all that stuff for us is the only way we know how to live. And the way we MEASURE how much are we helping out one another to live is money. Hence the need for money.
So what about the "Love is all you need", "God is all you need" sayings? Depends. Like you say... what's your drive? What do you "need"? Do you "need" to eat? Do you "need" to survive? Do you "need" to not-live-in-crime-and-poverty? Oh well then, you probably also need money too.
So now suppose you have TONS of money. I mean TONS. I mean riding-a-different-private-jet-for-every-day-of-the-week rich. Do you "need" something else? Love? God? That's not really for me or anyone else to tell you. As the question says: Do YOU need something else?
This is where discussion and arguing always end up inconclusive - we can't TELL people what they need! As you said: "what's your drive?". I think yours is pretty good.
Cheers!
Ugh... my comment is longer than his entry! Symptom of a blogger #27...
I like when I can just copy-paste stuff to put on my blog. OK, I'm done. So again...
Cheers!
Monday, September 8, 2008
Post-Pittsburgh
My head is down, my eyes are shut,
I need to wake up early but
my mind is on, my fingers itch,
I want to tell what happened which
made me the person I'm today
and altered me in such a way
to want to tell this to the world:
My Life - if but for me, untold.
So the "Holy Pittsburgh" entry ended when Tuesday did. Tuesday September the 2nd. Enough remarkable events happened that day to deserve the main focus of another blog entry.
Wednesday September the 3rd, I woke up at 8AM and turned off the alarm, which made me stay in bed until 9AM. At that time, I realized this was my last day in Pittsburgh, so I hurried. Took a shower, put on clothes, got my camera, and ran to the Heinz Chapel, of whose interior I had taken no pictures of. So I fast-walked/ran to the Chapel, about 2 blocks away from the hotel, and stepped in quickly. I took pictures of the windows, main altar in the front, and the ceiling. Once I thought it was late enough, I made use of already being inside the chapel and thanked him for everything that was happening to me during these days, and for the sight of that beautiful beautiful chapel. And then I fast-walked/ran out of the Chapel back to the hotel, got a call from Luis saying he'd be there in 10 minutes, ran to my room, brushed my teeth, packed what little was left to pack, brought my suitcase and backpack downstairs, bought a to-go yogurt in the hotel's breakfast area, saw Luis enter the lobby looking for me, checked out of the hotel, and fast-walked/ran to Luis' car.
He drove me to the SCS building as the other days, and I went to room 5409 to listen to yet another IC conference whose topic I cannot recall right now. At 10:30AM I went back to Luis' office, but he told me was in a conference and told me to wait in the Lounge beside his office. So I did, and decided to check into my afternoon flight back to Austin. After calling AA twice and going through their very friendly voice-recognizing interface, I found out that my flight had actually been CANCELLED. Why was it cancelled? Because I did not take the Austin - Pittsburgh leg of the flight, and didn't call AA to notify them of my absence. And now I couldn't even take the back flight. Unreasonable, right? Of course I was not happy to hear this, but the lady on the other side of the phone had a nice voice and managed to convince me that it was the company's policy and that there was nothing she could do about it. I took the least-effort, pretty-costly approach: I bought another one-way ticket myself. "$200, oh well, at least I won't miss another day at the office", I thought. I had been away long enough, people were asking for me already... I didn't want to stretch or risk anything. I don't know why, but I tried to make funny, flirty conversation with the girl at the other end of the line. I sort of managed to, but of course it would serve me no purpose. Other than conversational experience, that is. All I got from her was that she was situated in Dallas at that time.
Maybe about 10 seconds after I managed to clear my flight back to Austin for that afternoon, Luis came into the room and told me I should go talk to Manuel Blum again. I HEARTILY agreed, and so we walked to Manuel's office and I shyly entered and greeted him again. Oh, we talked. We talked and we talked and we talked. And I was so happy about being able to talk to him. I'd read one of his poems - his ideology was very sound, very natural, very similar to mine. He'd won a Turing award - so he was one of the world's most recognized computer scientists. A true master in the CS field, before me, talking to me, listening to me, exchanging ideas with me. It produced in me quite a proud sense of excitement.
We talked about a complexity problem his son told him and that he had been working on. We talked about it, we discussed it on the board, and we didn't reach any concrete solutions, but I think we enjoyed it. I most positively did. Then we went on to talk about my family a little bit. Then we talked about Machine Learning. And then he showed me some of the work a japanese CMU professor (Takeo something) had been doing with face recognition algorithms. It was pretty good - it recognized almost every face looking forward, sometimes excepting people with glasses. I became excited and began to tell him what I thought could be done with Machine Learning. What the current approaches are like, how are they oriented towards specific applications instead of the general machine learning problem, etc... I enjoyed it very much. A little later, Susan (Luis' secretary) brought me a cheese pizza Luis had sent me for me to have lunch (that was so nice of him!), and Manuel seemed to want to go to lunch by himself, but he decided to take me with him, so we went to lunch. I kept on telling him how I thought Machine Learning should be implemented in the ideal way, and how we could realistically start with small steps to make a machine truly learn - logically, relationally, epistemically (I call it epistemologically)... to really KNOW, UNDERSTAND, in a way. As I talked, he ate, so when he finished his pizza, I was left with a whole pizza to eat while he waited, drinking his soda. I hurried to finish my own pizza, and then we went back to his office. On the way back, I told him I liked his poem about "skunk must stink, man must think", and how I had put it on my blog, and how I hoped that didn't violate any copyright laws. Then he went into the bathroom and said goodbye, so I replied in kind. Happy day - it was really exciting to talk to him.
Oh, and at the place we had lunch, I saw this (notice where the exit leads to):
After that, I just went to Luis' office, then went again to 5409 to listen to a couple more conferences, listened to two half-conferences, went back to Luis' office, and then he told me my limo (yeah, limo) was already around, so he walked me out to it. He asked me if I was going to apply and I said "YESSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" (but in Spanish). We talked a little about the details of the application, and then I entered the limo and left. The limo driver was a nice man. Interesting, too... we talked on the way to the airport, and he told me how CMU had offered him a full scholarship to study there. He said he refused because he was in love, and he went to get married in El Paso, Texas. He was a knowledgeable and seemingly-righteous man, not the average stereotypical taxi driver. He told me about how specific currents in the USA caused several hurricane patterns to form, how he had learned a little Spanish while near Mexico, and how in France, human excrement is used as fertilizer. He also told me that he liked English food a LOT more than French food, despite their respective reputations.
So he took me to the Pittsburgh airport, and while waiting in front of the gate to go back to Austin, a black guy with an afro asked me what I was doing in Pittsburgh, and I told him about CMU and everything. I told him what the history of Pittsburgh was (from what Luis had told me), and how there were lots of nice buildings, and he told me how he was on vacation with a friend who lived there. I told him how Guatemala and Belize were excellent places to go on vacation in case he wanted to go on another one. He then told me he's a one-man IT support company-guy who lives in London, originally from Nigeria, and how he was looking to expand his company without actually doing so much more work. IT Support, it got me thinking... how to automatize IT Support? Make it more efficient? Anyway, he gave me his business card, I gave him mine, and then my plane left for Dallas and his for Chicago. I got back to Austin, Marcos picked me up at the airport, I got back to the apartment, and, just like tonight, stayed up quite a few hours chatting on the net. I found DD, who I asked about contacting Dorval. DD mistook this question for an intention on my part of contacting him immediately, so Dorval added me as his GTalk contact and we started chatting. Not that I didn't want to talk to him, but I still wasn't ready to ask him what I needed. I didn't have the exact details yet. But I talked to him and told him, and asked him to hold it off a little until I knew exactly what I wanted him to say about me. He agreed, and heartily offered his help on whatever way he could. I was very happy to hear from him. After that, I did go to bed.
And these last few days have been pretty good. I didn't do much coding back in Austin this last Thursday and Friday, but Emily called me on Friday afternoon and we talked about our trips!! She told me about Burning Man, I told her about Pittsburgh! She told me about Utah, I told her about Chicago! Completely different experiences, hers quite a bit more exotic, but we both enjoyed it very much. I was also very happy when she invited me to eat at an Indian restaurant called Clay Pit on saturday with her boyfriend and her boyfriend's sister. It was a REALLY good restaurant, and very cost-effective, too! Only $8 for the buffet... not a great variety of foods, but awesome taste.
Also, Oscar got to Austin on Friday and we went to hang out in downtown on Friday night. We entered a couple of bars/discos, had a couple of drinks, talked about girls, talked about Reddwerks, and then went back home. I'll be seeing him again on Wednesday, I guess.
And just yesterday on Sunday morning, I flew to Little Rock and rode a Chevy Impala driven by Marco to Memphis, TN and Southaven, MS. Kind of a long ride, not too bad. We checked in at the hotel, spent a couple of hours in our rooms resting, ate dinner at Fazoli's, drove to the facility, met with Austin, Marco did backups, SQL statements, DB restores and system upgrades on our software, and I tried to do the RF installation. I had quite a few problems with it. I had 16 devices to upgrade, and it took me about... 3 hours to figure out how to upgrade ONE. I even emailed Cam in desperation - the process was supposed to be simple and bump-free, but my Symbol (Motorola) DLLs were different from the ones in the previous RF version, so it just wasn't working. DLL hell, they call it. Well, I finally managed to figure out what the heck was going on, and made it work. Now I know how to make it work, and it seems to work pretty much fine. I upgraded 2 other devices in less than 5 minutes, and now I have 13 more devices to upgrade tomorrow... shouldn't take much more than 20 minutes.
And now it's 2:30AM and I'm still blogging. Shame on me? I don't know... But it seems prudent to go to sleep now.
I need to wake up early but
my mind is on, my fingers itch,
I want to tell what happened which
made me the person I'm today
and altered me in such a way
to want to tell this to the world:
My Life - if but for me, untold.
So the "Holy Pittsburgh" entry ended when Tuesday did. Tuesday September the 2nd. Enough remarkable events happened that day to deserve the main focus of another blog entry.
Wednesday September the 3rd, I woke up at 8AM and turned off the alarm, which made me stay in bed until 9AM. At that time, I realized this was my last day in Pittsburgh, so I hurried. Took a shower, put on clothes, got my camera, and ran to the Heinz Chapel, of whose interior I had taken no pictures of. So I fast-walked/ran to the Chapel, about 2 blocks away from the hotel, and stepped in quickly. I took pictures of the windows, main altar in the front, and the ceiling. Once I thought it was late enough, I made use of already being inside the chapel and thanked him for everything that was happening to me during these days, and for the sight of that beautiful beautiful chapel. And then I fast-walked/ran out of the Chapel back to the hotel, got a call from Luis saying he'd be there in 10 minutes, ran to my room, brushed my teeth, packed what little was left to pack, brought my suitcase and backpack downstairs, bought a to-go yogurt in the hotel's breakfast area, saw Luis enter the lobby looking for me, checked out of the hotel, and fast-walked/ran to Luis' car.
He drove me to the SCS building as the other days, and I went to room 5409 to listen to yet another IC conference whose topic I cannot recall right now. At 10:30AM I went back to Luis' office, but he told me was in a conference and told me to wait in the Lounge beside his office. So I did, and decided to check into my afternoon flight back to Austin. After calling AA twice and going through their very friendly voice-recognizing interface, I found out that my flight had actually been CANCELLED. Why was it cancelled? Because I did not take the Austin - Pittsburgh leg of the flight, and didn't call AA to notify them of my absence. And now I couldn't even take the back flight. Unreasonable, right? Of course I was not happy to hear this, but the lady on the other side of the phone had a nice voice and managed to convince me that it was the company's policy and that there was nothing she could do about it. I took the least-effort, pretty-costly approach: I bought another one-way ticket myself. "$200, oh well, at least I won't miss another day at the office", I thought. I had been away long enough, people were asking for me already... I didn't want to stretch or risk anything. I don't know why, but I tried to make funny, flirty conversation with the girl at the other end of the line. I sort of managed to, but of course it would serve me no purpose. Other than conversational experience, that is. All I got from her was that she was situated in Dallas at that time.
Maybe about 10 seconds after I managed to clear my flight back to Austin for that afternoon, Luis came into the room and told me I should go talk to Manuel Blum again. I HEARTILY agreed, and so we walked to Manuel's office and I shyly entered and greeted him again. Oh, we talked. We talked and we talked and we talked. And I was so happy about being able to talk to him. I'd read one of his poems - his ideology was very sound, very natural, very similar to mine. He'd won a Turing award - so he was one of the world's most recognized computer scientists. A true master in the CS field, before me, talking to me, listening to me, exchanging ideas with me. It produced in me quite a proud sense of excitement.
We talked about a complexity problem his son told him and that he had been working on. We talked about it, we discussed it on the board, and we didn't reach any concrete solutions, but I think we enjoyed it. I most positively did. Then we went on to talk about my family a little bit. Then we talked about Machine Learning. And then he showed me some of the work a japanese CMU professor (Takeo something) had been doing with face recognition algorithms. It was pretty good - it recognized almost every face looking forward, sometimes excepting people with glasses. I became excited and began to tell him what I thought could be done with Machine Learning. What the current approaches are like, how are they oriented towards specific applications instead of the general machine learning problem, etc... I enjoyed it very much. A little later, Susan (Luis' secretary) brought me a cheese pizza Luis had sent me for me to have lunch (that was so nice of him!), and Manuel seemed to want to go to lunch by himself, but he decided to take me with him, so we went to lunch. I kept on telling him how I thought Machine Learning should be implemented in the ideal way, and how we could realistically start with small steps to make a machine truly learn - logically, relationally, epistemically (I call it epistemologically)... to really KNOW, UNDERSTAND, in a way. As I talked, he ate, so when he finished his pizza, I was left with a whole pizza to eat while he waited, drinking his soda. I hurried to finish my own pizza, and then we went back to his office. On the way back, I told him I liked his poem about "skunk must stink, man must think", and how I had put it on my blog, and how I hoped that didn't violate any copyright laws. Then he went into the bathroom and said goodbye, so I replied in kind. Happy day - it was really exciting to talk to him.
Oh, and at the place we had lunch, I saw this (notice where the exit leads to):
After that, I just went to Luis' office, then went again to 5409 to listen to a couple more conferences, listened to two half-conferences, went back to Luis' office, and then he told me my limo (yeah, limo) was already around, so he walked me out to it. He asked me if I was going to apply and I said "YESSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" (but in Spanish). We talked a little about the details of the application, and then I entered the limo and left. The limo driver was a nice man. Interesting, too... we talked on the way to the airport, and he told me how CMU had offered him a full scholarship to study there. He said he refused because he was in love, and he went to get married in El Paso, Texas. He was a knowledgeable and seemingly-righteous man, not the average stereotypical taxi driver. He told me about how specific currents in the USA caused several hurricane patterns to form, how he had learned a little Spanish while near Mexico, and how in France, human excrement is used as fertilizer. He also told me that he liked English food a LOT more than French food, despite their respective reputations.
So he took me to the Pittsburgh airport, and while waiting in front of the gate to go back to Austin, a black guy with an afro asked me what I was doing in Pittsburgh, and I told him about CMU and everything. I told him what the history of Pittsburgh was (from what Luis had told me), and how there were lots of nice buildings, and he told me how he was on vacation with a friend who lived there. I told him how Guatemala and Belize were excellent places to go on vacation in case he wanted to go on another one. He then told me he's a one-man IT support company-guy who lives in London, originally from Nigeria, and how he was looking to expand his company without actually doing so much more work. IT Support, it got me thinking... how to automatize IT Support? Make it more efficient? Anyway, he gave me his business card, I gave him mine, and then my plane left for Dallas and his for Chicago. I got back to Austin, Marcos picked me up at the airport, I got back to the apartment, and, just like tonight, stayed up quite a few hours chatting on the net. I found DD, who I asked about contacting Dorval. DD mistook this question for an intention on my part of contacting him immediately, so Dorval added me as his GTalk contact and we started chatting. Not that I didn't want to talk to him, but I still wasn't ready to ask him what I needed. I didn't have the exact details yet. But I talked to him and told him, and asked him to hold it off a little until I knew exactly what I wanted him to say about me. He agreed, and heartily offered his help on whatever way he could. I was very happy to hear from him. After that, I did go to bed.
And these last few days have been pretty good. I didn't do much coding back in Austin this last Thursday and Friday, but Emily called me on Friday afternoon and we talked about our trips!! She told me about Burning Man, I told her about Pittsburgh! She told me about Utah, I told her about Chicago! Completely different experiences, hers quite a bit more exotic, but we both enjoyed it very much. I was also very happy when she invited me to eat at an Indian restaurant called Clay Pit on saturday with her boyfriend and her boyfriend's sister. It was a REALLY good restaurant, and very cost-effective, too! Only $8 for the buffet... not a great variety of foods, but awesome taste.
Also, Oscar got to Austin on Friday and we went to hang out in downtown on Friday night. We entered a couple of bars/discos, had a couple of drinks, talked about girls, talked about Reddwerks, and then went back home. I'll be seeing him again on Wednesday, I guess.
And just yesterday on Sunday morning, I flew to Little Rock and rode a Chevy Impala driven by Marco to Memphis, TN and Southaven, MS. Kind of a long ride, not too bad. We checked in at the hotel, spent a couple of hours in our rooms resting, ate dinner at Fazoli's, drove to the facility, met with Austin, Marco did backups, SQL statements, DB restores and system upgrades on our software, and I tried to do the RF installation. I had quite a few problems with it. I had 16 devices to upgrade, and it took me about... 3 hours to figure out how to upgrade ONE. I even emailed Cam in desperation - the process was supposed to be simple and bump-free, but my Symbol (Motorola) DLLs were different from the ones in the previous RF version, so it just wasn't working. DLL hell, they call it. Well, I finally managed to figure out what the heck was going on, and made it work. Now I know how to make it work, and it seems to work pretty much fine. I upgraded 2 other devices in less than 5 minutes, and now I have 13 more devices to upgrade tomorrow... shouldn't take much more than 20 minutes.
And now it's 2:30AM and I'm still blogging. Shame on me? I don't know... But it seems prudent to go to sleep now.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Blog on a plane
Random blog entry. I'm sitting on seat 13F on an AA flight from Dallas to Austin. I've never published a blog entry from a plane before - thought I'd make a first. It's 8:44PM and the plane leaves at 8:50PM. To my right is a window through which I see the night sky and an AA plane. To my left is a lady reading "Critical" by Robin Cook. That's all. Bye.
Monday, September 1, 2008
Holy Pittsburgh!
It's not every day you get pleasant surprises. But yesterday I got quite a few. August 31st 2008, the day I first came to Pittsburgh.
I don't have much time to blog before Luis gets here, so I'll be brief. Hmmm, no, you know what... it's hard to describe so many little things in a brief manner. I have like 14 minutes before Luis gets here, so I'd better pack up, brush my teeth, try to shave, and go down to the lobby. Finish you laterz...
OK here's the deal: I've now spent 2 days and a half in Pittsburgh, and I would not be surprised, if I decided to write all of it in complete detail, that I came up with a small book. It's been QUITE a ride, and I'm LOVING it.
My last entry left off as I waited for Luis von Ahn to pick me up at the Pittsburgh International Airport. At that time, I was thinking whether to call him yet or not. You see, he got me a ticket from Austin through Dallas that would arrive at Pittsburgh at 6:00, but instead of using that ticket, I bought a ticket from Chicago, since that's where I planned to be the day before my trip to Pittsburgh, and arrived at the airport at 2:00 instead of 6:00, so my plan was to wait 4 hours in the airport and just pretend that I had arrived with the Dallas flight (so as to not make him think I rejected his ticket or anything). But then when I looked at my cellphone and saw 5:10PM, I decided "what the heck, I'll just tell him the truth", and called to tell him I had just arrived. I would then tell him that I really got a flight from Chicago, and maybe it wouldn't be so bad. But then as I walked around the airport, I saw the passengers coming from the Dallas flight all waiting for their baggage. I wondered "how can this be?". And I checked my cellphone - and then I realized "I'M ON A DIFFERENT TIME ZONE NOW!!", so it actually was 6:10PM instead of 5:10PM, so I had involuntarily called him at the exact time I should've! When he came to pick me up, I already had my baggage with me, of course, but no baggage from the Dallas flight had yet fallen on the conveyor - everyone was still waiting around it. I thought it was funny that Luis didn't realize that it didn't make sense for me to have my baggage if no baggage from Dallas was yet on the conveyor, but of course, he wasn't thinking about that at all.
You know what? Photoblog! Yes, that's what I need! A JPEG is worth 2^10 words, so that saves me quite a lot of typing! OK, next slide please:
I don't have much time to blog before Luis gets here, so I'll be brief. Hmmm, no, you know what... it's hard to describe so many little things in a brief manner. I have like 14 minutes before Luis gets here, so I'd better pack up, brush my teeth, try to shave, and go down to the lobby. Finish you laterz...
OK here's the deal: I've now spent 2 days and a half in Pittsburgh, and I would not be surprised, if I decided to write all of it in complete detail, that I came up with a small book. It's been QUITE a ride, and I'm LOVING it.
My last entry left off as I waited for Luis von Ahn to pick me up at the Pittsburgh International Airport. At that time, I was thinking whether to call him yet or not. You see, he got me a ticket from Austin through Dallas that would arrive at Pittsburgh at 6:00, but instead of using that ticket, I bought a ticket from Chicago, since that's where I planned to be the day before my trip to Pittsburgh, and arrived at the airport at 2:00 instead of 6:00, so my plan was to wait 4 hours in the airport and just pretend that I had arrived with the Dallas flight (so as to not make him think I rejected his ticket or anything). But then when I looked at my cellphone and saw 5:10PM, I decided "what the heck, I'll just tell him the truth", and called to tell him I had just arrived. I would then tell him that I really got a flight from Chicago, and maybe it wouldn't be so bad. But then as I walked around the airport, I saw the passengers coming from the Dallas flight all waiting for their baggage. I wondered "how can this be?". And I checked my cellphone - and then I realized "I'M ON A DIFFERENT TIME ZONE NOW!!", so it actually was 6:10PM instead of 5:10PM, so I had involuntarily called him at the exact time I should've! When he came to pick me up, I already had my baggage with me, of course, but no baggage from the Dallas flight had yet fallen on the conveyor - everyone was still waiting around it. I thought it was funny that Luis didn't realize that it didn't make sense for me to have my baggage if no baggage from Dallas was yet on the conveyor, but of course, he wasn't thinking about that at all.
You know what? Photoblog! Yes, that's what I need! A JPEG is worth 2^10 words, so that saves me quite a lot of typing! OK, next slide please:
So when I saw him I politely greeted him, and he did likewise. We talked a little about the airlines charging extra money for food and baggage on the way out of the airport, where the topic turned into the weather in Pittsburgh being hot, but not as hot as in Austin, TX. He had kind of forgotten where his car was, but when we got to it, I saw the following:
Nice one, huh? Even I could tell this was a really nice car.
So then we went to eat at Pizzaiolo's, of which I do not have a picture of. We ate pizza and we talked about research topics at the CS Ph.D. program at CMU, and then he explained what his purpose of inviting over to CMU was: get me admitted into the CMU CS Ph.D. program. My mind and heart leapt with joy at the sound of this metaphorical, beautiful music. To be honest, I sort of knew he had an intention of the sort - it was the most obvious reason for him inviting me over to Pittsburgh for a couple of days. But I also didn't expect it to be so direct, as in "yeah, I want you to get admitted into the program", especially coming from a professor. I was like WOOOOOOOOOOW. HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY!!! Surprise and happiness came onto my face and I thanked him, and then the topic changed to his own current research. But now I was sure - I had a direct support, a very much recognized member of CMU CS faculty honestly encouraging my admittance into the program. If I were a girl I would've cried.
Then we finished eating, and he took me to the Holiday Inn hotel in which I would be staying for these 3 nights (and in whose room 310's bed I now lay face down). There was a particular part of the scenery which I simply MUST describe. Have you heard of Fort Pitt? Well, we crossed that tunnel during the nighttime it was a LONG tunnel. I had never been inside such a long tunnel before. It is a hole punched directly into the mountain - it took about a minute at average driving speed to emerge at the other side. When we did, we emerged at one of the bridges over one of the rivers that cross through Pittsburgh. And then I was blessed with a STUPENDOUS view of downtown Pittsburgh during the nighttime. It is truly impressive. If you EVER visit Pittsburgh, be sure to take that route during the nighttime. Your surprise and awe levels will increase at least three-fold. (Sorry, no pictures. I do have a Youtube link, tho: http://mx.youtube.com/watch?v=aTGYTjxrPX4)
And then we drove to the University of Pittsburgh (not CMU), where the hotel was located. As we entered, Luis told me this university was known as a "urban university", where commerces and university buildings were intermixed in the streets. I didn't really understand what that meant until I later walked out and saw a bar, a seven-eleven store, and a clothing store just across from the main university library. But so we reached my hotel, he waited for me to check in, and the lady from the counter told us that the hotel had been recently upgraded, and that the logo behind the counter was a new one - only about 20 Holiday Inn hotels in the whole world displayed that logo:
I thought that was interesting. By that time it was about 9:30PM, and since I had forgotten my camera batteries back in Austin, I decided to go outside, buy some batteries, and explore the surroundings a little.
Just one block away from my hotel was a very great University-of-Pittsburgh plaza. I was kind of lost, just walking around, and when I entered the plaza, I found myself next to a church-like building with a neat classical architecture style (see Disney castle below):
The side door had a sign that said that the church (or Heinz Memorial Chapel, as it said on the sign (http://www.heinzchapel.pitt.edu/) ) closed at 5PM, so I was pretty sure it was closed. I went around the building, admiring all its niceties, and then I reached the front door. Just for kicks, I tried pushing it to see if it opened. It did. Uncertain about whether I was allowed to go inside, I let it close and slowly walked away. It wasn't 10 seconds before a talkative man with a moustache came out of the front door, invited me inside, and offered to tour me around. He turned the lights and WOW! it was the most beautiful church I remembered ever seeing. I don't too much about church decorations, so I can't describe it too well, but the columns, all made of stone in classical style, looked gray-smooth and perfect. The windows were narrow but gigantically tall, and there was also an organ. He started to show me how he could push and pull knobs out of the organ to make certain pipes active, and so, to change the sound ever so slightly to create different effects. I think he was just showing off when he played the Toccata y Fugue with all the organ pipes turned on, but when we were exiting the chapel, a lot of students were standing in the front, saying they were walking around the church and had gotten scared when the dark, empty-looking church began to emit a classic scary, dracula-like tune at full volume. The man also invited THEM into the church, and gave them the whole tour again. I stayed with them and learned that the organ had 4,272 pipes all hidden inside the chapel, and heard him play a couple more songs on the organ. Unfortunately, I had not bought any batteries for my camera at that time, so I did not take any pictures of the chapel's insides. I hope to still have a chance to capture some inside chapel images in the morning (if I wake up early enough).
After the second tour I left, asked the students where could I get some batteries, and they guided me up to the Seven Eleven on Forbes Avenue. So I got the batteries and started taking some pictures:
Statue situated on one of the many university's plazas.
Nice one, huh? Even I could tell this was a really nice car.
So then we went to eat at Pizzaiolo's, of which I do not have a picture of. We ate pizza and we talked about research topics at the CS Ph.D. program at CMU, and then he explained what his purpose of inviting over to CMU was: get me admitted into the CMU CS Ph.D. program. My mind and heart leapt with joy at the sound of this metaphorical, beautiful music. To be honest, I sort of knew he had an intention of the sort - it was the most obvious reason for him inviting me over to Pittsburgh for a couple of days. But I also didn't expect it to be so direct, as in "yeah, I want you to get admitted into the program", especially coming from a professor. I was like WOOOOOOOOOOW. HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY!!! Surprise and happiness came onto my face and I thanked him, and then the topic changed to his own current research. But now I was sure - I had a direct support, a very much recognized member of CMU CS faculty honestly encouraging my admittance into the program. If I were a girl I would've cried.
Then we finished eating, and he took me to the Holiday Inn hotel in which I would be staying for these 3 nights (and in whose room 310's bed I now lay face down). There was a particular part of the scenery which I simply MUST describe. Have you heard of Fort Pitt? Well, we crossed that tunnel during the nighttime it was a LONG tunnel. I had never been inside such a long tunnel before. It is a hole punched directly into the mountain - it took about a minute at average driving speed to emerge at the other side. When we did, we emerged at one of the bridges over one of the rivers that cross through Pittsburgh. And then I was blessed with a STUPENDOUS view of downtown Pittsburgh during the nighttime. It is truly impressive. If you EVER visit Pittsburgh, be sure to take that route during the nighttime. Your surprise and awe levels will increase at least three-fold. (Sorry, no pictures. I do have a Youtube link, tho: http://mx.youtube.com/watch?v=aTGYTjxrPX4)
And then we drove to the University of Pittsburgh (not CMU), where the hotel was located. As we entered, Luis told me this university was known as a "urban university", where commerces and university buildings were intermixed in the streets. I didn't really understand what that meant until I later walked out and saw a bar, a seven-eleven store, and a clothing store just across from the main university library. But so we reached my hotel, he waited for me to check in, and the lady from the counter told us that the hotel had been recently upgraded, and that the logo behind the counter was a new one - only about 20 Holiday Inn hotels in the whole world displayed that logo:
I thought that was interesting. By that time it was about 9:30PM, and since I had forgotten my camera batteries back in Austin, I decided to go outside, buy some batteries, and explore the surroundings a little.
Just one block away from my hotel was a very great University-of-Pittsburgh plaza. I was kind of lost, just walking around, and when I entered the plaza, I found myself next to a church-like building with a neat classical architecture style (see Disney castle below):
The side door had a sign that said that the church (or Heinz Memorial Chapel, as it said on the sign (http://www.heinzchapel.pitt.edu/) ) closed at 5PM, so I was pretty sure it was closed. I went around the building, admiring all its niceties, and then I reached the front door. Just for kicks, I tried pushing it to see if it opened. It did. Uncertain about whether I was allowed to go inside, I let it close and slowly walked away. It wasn't 10 seconds before a talkative man with a moustache came out of the front door, invited me inside, and offered to tour me around. He turned the lights and WOW! it was the most beautiful church I remembered ever seeing. I don't too much about church decorations, so I can't describe it too well, but the columns, all made of stone in classical style, looked gray-smooth and perfect. The windows were narrow but gigantically tall, and there was also an organ. He started to show me how he could push and pull knobs out of the organ to make certain pipes active, and so, to change the sound ever so slightly to create different effects. I think he was just showing off when he played the Toccata y Fugue with all the organ pipes turned on, but when we were exiting the chapel, a lot of students were standing in the front, saying they were walking around the church and had gotten scared when the dark, empty-looking church began to emit a classic scary, dracula-like tune at full volume. The man also invited THEM into the church, and gave them the whole tour again. I stayed with them and learned that the organ had 4,272 pipes all hidden inside the chapel, and heard him play a couple more songs on the organ. Unfortunately, I had not bought any batteries for my camera at that time, so I did not take any pictures of the chapel's insides. I hope to still have a chance to capture some inside chapel images in the morning (if I wake up early enough).
After the second tour I left, asked the students where could I get some batteries, and they guided me up to the Seven Eleven on Forbes Avenue. So I got the batteries and started taking some pictures:
Statue situated on one of the many university's plazas.
Afterwards, I went on to explore a building that was directly in front of the chapel, about 200m away:
42 stories tall, the Cathedral of Learning is the tallest university tower in the USA, topped worldwide only by a certain tower in St. Petersburg or something
42 stories tall, the Cathedral of Learning is the tallest university tower in the USA, topped worldwide only by a certain tower in St. Petersburg or something
Inside, it was AMAZING. It would just take too much to describe it. Let's just say I felt I was in a Harry Potter story, inside Hogwarts:
The Cathedral of Learning's architecture was amazingly astounding. Excepting the Heinz Memorial Chapel, I had never admired a building's architecture so much.
That night I came back to the hotel, wrote the first two paragraphs of this blog entry, and went to sleep.
Monday, September 1st, 2008:
I amazingly wake up before my 9AM alarm clock sounds. I take a nice warm shower, I take the elevator downstairs, I buy a Yogurt parfait and a hot chocolate at the hotel restaurant, I get called by Luis to be ready when he arrives, I wait for him, I get another call from him, I go outside, I enter his car, and then we drive to the CMU SCS building. The first thing he said about the building was that it was "the UGLIEST building". I looked at it and, yes, it did look very non-ornamental. Its style would more appropriately befit a nuclear bunker. But anyway, we went up through a service-kind-looking flight of stairs, reached his office, and since it was Labor Day and there were very few other people there, we were mostly free to do whatever we wanted to. His office had several peculiar objects, of which I'd like to show a couple:
And there was also this blue, SFX equipped plastic light saber.
We had lunch with one of Luis's Ph.D. students, Severin from Switzerland, and we talked about some of the research he's been doing with GWAP. The rest of the afternoon, until 3:30PM, I just wrote several emails, did some usual web-browsing, etc. Oh, and I also helped Luis create his next assignment for his class, "Science of the Web". Then at 5:30PM we had a BBQ! at one of the faculty member's house, so we left to get ready. We bought dog food, beer, lemons, and soda for the BBQ, picked up a meat thermometer at Luis's place, and then drove to the BBQ.
The BBQ was SO AWESOME!!!!! It's too bad I don't have any pictures of it except for this one:
which doesn't show anything interesting. But I met A LOT of professors. And their girlfriends/wives, too! They were all REALLY nice, some of them very funny, and all of them very talkative. One thing that amazed me a LOT was that I actively participated in a significant part of the conversation! It was because I really felt an opinion about what they were talking. Sometimes they talked about politics and I just kinda listened, but then they talked about statistics, college education, Reddwerks, research projects, food, or funny anecdotes, I could TRULY RELATE!! It was SUCH a good feeling! And we ate this DELICIOUS, DELICIOUS cheesecake and Chocolate Cream Pie. But OMG, I had NEVER tried such a juicy, delicious cheesecake. It's apparently homemade by one of the professors, but he's not giving out the recipe. The point is, it was DELICIOUS.
So the BBQ was a complete success, and then I came back to the hotel and went to sleep. Woke up next morning, bought scrambled eggs and orange juice at the breakfast area, brushed my teeth, was picked up by Luis and Laura in their 1-week-old Honda Civic Hybrid, reached the first IC (Immigration Course) conference of the day (they're like brief abstracts of what each professor is currently doing as their own research, to help the students decide which project would they most like to collaborate in). I sat down and began listening to a professor talk about Software Research, of which most things made sense, although it seemed pretty much like a management course. While I was listening to this conference, Manuel Blum (who had arrived and sat down just next to me) said he would like to speak with me in his office at 2:30PM, just after Ryan's (another professor) IC conference. This was another moment at which both my mind and my heart leapt with joy and excitement. I think my face and voice were pretty successful in accepting his offer through a proper, happy, and positive response. (If all my excitement at that time had been transmitted out unfiltered, I would've caused quite a racket in the classroom.
So then I listened to Anupam's conference, where I learned about http://www.wordle.net, and about how the maximum number of points in N dimensions where all pairs of points have an "approximate" distance of 1 between them increases exponentially with N. And also, that for any problem on N dimensions, this problem can be APPROXIMATED to a calculable factor by reducing the number of dimensions to logN/eps^2, where eps is the factor of "approximation" to which we want the solution to approximate to. He proved this by using some kind of matrix random boolean mapper. I didn't quite understand EVERYTHING, but it was cool.
Then a guy talked about something I don't remember too well. Then another guy talked about some research project he's working on sponsored by DARPA to help military forces on real-time operations and let them be guided by personal assistants instead of communication manually, as with radio.
Then lunchtime came, and Luis, Venkat Guruswami, Anupam, and me went to eat Indian food at one of CMU's "trucks":
I did see some "unusual" stuff on CMU's central plaza area:
Afterwards I went on to some other IC conferences. One of them was about speeding up computer systems through better queuing strategies, and the other was about P and NP-complete problems. It was partly interesting, but not particularly exciting.
Then I walked with Manuel Blum to his office. Oh, we talked a lot. About my family, about my english, about my research interests, about last year's automated-car competition which CMU won, about how MIT's system possessed only two cameras, so its image processing algorithms should be very good too. Then I was telling him about my research interests, and Luis showed up. I showed up at his "Science of the Web" class, he talked about some graph theorems, he showed me as being the "target" everyone in the class is looking for in Facebook (in front of the whole class), and then there was another IC conference - a robotics one. I will only say the name of the project: "Claytronics". I'd like to explain it, but it'd take longer than I want to spend on it, so I won't. It is a very exciting thing to think about and create, but it does seem like a pretty far away idea. Anyway, after the conference we went on and visited Intel:
It was really cool! Afterwards, I got lost, two asian girls helped me get unlost, I went to Luis's office and had nothing else to do, so I went out to the CMU central plaza and started to take a bunch of pictures:
Then we left the office, picked up Ben at his dorm (Ben is the tech lead on Luis's Captcha project), and went to eat at whole foods. The food was really good. We then dropped off Ben at his place and Luis dropped me off at my hotel. I then decided to get some more batteries for my camera because my first pair was already running out. I went out on a picture tour around University of Pittsburgh tonight. See for yourself:
And that brings me back here, laying on my bed with my laptop, writing a larger-than-average blog entry to tell about my experiences and photographs in Pittsburgh, and dropping my eyelids at 4:14AM. I better go to sleep now. All images aren't up yet, but what the heck, it's not being published yet.
And now all images are finally up! Almost a month later, this entry is being published!
The Cathedral of Learning's architecture was amazingly astounding. Excepting the Heinz Memorial Chapel, I had never admired a building's architecture so much.
That night I came back to the hotel, wrote the first two paragraphs of this blog entry, and went to sleep.
Monday, September 1st, 2008:
I amazingly wake up before my 9AM alarm clock sounds. I take a nice warm shower, I take the elevator downstairs, I buy a Yogurt parfait and a hot chocolate at the hotel restaurant, I get called by Luis to be ready when he arrives, I wait for him, I get another call from him, I go outside, I enter his car, and then we drive to the CMU SCS building. The first thing he said about the building was that it was "the UGLIEST building". I looked at it and, yes, it did look very non-ornamental. Its style would more appropriately befit a nuclear bunker. But anyway, we went up through a service-kind-looking flight of stairs, reached his office, and since it was Labor Day and there were very few other people there, we were mostly free to do whatever we wanted to. His office had several peculiar objects, of which I'd like to show a couple:
And there was also this blue, SFX equipped plastic light saber.
We had lunch with one of Luis's Ph.D. students, Severin from Switzerland, and we talked about some of the research he's been doing with GWAP. The rest of the afternoon, until 3:30PM, I just wrote several emails, did some usual web-browsing, etc. Oh, and I also helped Luis create his next assignment for his class, "Science of the Web". Then at 5:30PM we had a BBQ! at one of the faculty member's house, so we left to get ready. We bought dog food, beer, lemons, and soda for the BBQ, picked up a meat thermometer at Luis's place, and then drove to the BBQ.
The BBQ was SO AWESOME!!!!! It's too bad I don't have any pictures of it except for this one:
which doesn't show anything interesting. But I met A LOT of professors. And their girlfriends/wives, too! They were all REALLY nice, some of them very funny, and all of them very talkative. One thing that amazed me a LOT was that I actively participated in a significant part of the conversation! It was because I really felt an opinion about what they were talking. Sometimes they talked about politics and I just kinda listened, but then they talked about statistics, college education, Reddwerks, research projects, food, or funny anecdotes, I could TRULY RELATE!! It was SUCH a good feeling! And we ate this DELICIOUS, DELICIOUS cheesecake and Chocolate Cream Pie. But OMG, I had NEVER tried such a juicy, delicious cheesecake. It's apparently homemade by one of the professors, but he's not giving out the recipe. The point is, it was DELICIOUS.
So the BBQ was a complete success, and then I came back to the hotel and went to sleep. Woke up next morning, bought scrambled eggs and orange juice at the breakfast area, brushed my teeth, was picked up by Luis and Laura in their 1-week-old Honda Civic Hybrid, reached the first IC (Immigration Course) conference of the day (they're like brief abstracts of what each professor is currently doing as their own research, to help the students decide which project would they most like to collaborate in). I sat down and began listening to a professor talk about Software Research, of which most things made sense, although it seemed pretty much like a management course. While I was listening to this conference, Manuel Blum (who had arrived and sat down just next to me) said he would like to speak with me in his office at 2:30PM, just after Ryan's (another professor) IC conference. This was another moment at which both my mind and my heart leapt with joy and excitement. I think my face and voice were pretty successful in accepting his offer through a proper, happy, and positive response. (If all my excitement at that time had been transmitted out unfiltered, I would've caused quite a racket in the classroom.
So then I listened to Anupam's conference, where I learned about http://www.wordle.net, and about how the maximum number of points in N dimensions where all pairs of points have an "approximate" distance of 1 between them increases exponentially with N. And also, that for any problem on N dimensions, this problem can be APPROXIMATED to a calculable factor by reducing the number of dimensions to logN/eps^2, where eps is the factor of "approximation" to which we want the solution to approximate to. He proved this by using some kind of matrix random boolean mapper. I didn't quite understand EVERYTHING, but it was cool.
Then a guy talked about something I don't remember too well. Then another guy talked about some research project he's working on sponsored by DARPA to help military forces on real-time operations and let them be guided by personal assistants instead of communication manually, as with radio.
Then lunchtime came, and Luis, Venkat Guruswami, Anupam, and me went to eat Indian food at one of CMU's "trucks":
I did see some "unusual" stuff on CMU's central plaza area:
Afterwards I went on to some other IC conferences. One of them was about speeding up computer systems through better queuing strategies, and the other was about P and NP-complete problems. It was partly interesting, but not particularly exciting.
Then I walked with Manuel Blum to his office. Oh, we talked a lot. About my family, about my english, about my research interests, about last year's automated-car competition which CMU won, about how MIT's system possessed only two cameras, so its image processing algorithms should be very good too. Then I was telling him about my research interests, and Luis showed up. I showed up at his "Science of the Web" class, he talked about some graph theorems, he showed me as being the "target" everyone in the class is looking for in Facebook (in front of the whole class), and then there was another IC conference - a robotics one. I will only say the name of the project: "Claytronics". I'd like to explain it, but it'd take longer than I want to spend on it, so I won't. It is a very exciting thing to think about and create, but it does seem like a pretty far away idea. Anyway, after the conference we went on and visited Intel:
It was really cool! Afterwards, I got lost, two asian girls helped me get unlost, I went to Luis's office and had nothing else to do, so I went out to the CMU central plaza and started to take a bunch of pictures:
Then we left the office, picked up Ben at his dorm (Ben is the tech lead on Luis's Captcha project), and went to eat at whole foods. The food was really good. We then dropped off Ben at his place and Luis dropped me off at my hotel. I then decided to get some more batteries for my camera because my first pair was already running out. I went out on a picture tour around University of Pittsburgh tonight. See for yourself:
And that brings me back here, laying on my bed with my laptop, writing a larger-than-average blog entry to tell about my experiences and photographs in Pittsburgh, and dropping my eyelids at 4:14AM. I better go to sleep now. All images aren't up yet, but what the heck, it's not being published yet.
And now all images are finally up! Almost a month later, this entry is being published!
Sunday, August 31, 2008
@PIT
Wow. Things happen.
I wanted to go to CMU. I SO wanted it. Ranked 1st in the country, leading research in machine learning, object recognition in images, web spidering, genomical computer science... I didn't even understand many of the topics completely! But it was all so exciting, so marvellous - I knew I could help this research! I'd thought about many of them before... if I could develop the idea by myself, I could surely collaborate on its actual R&D, right?
So I made it my goal to get into CMU. Stanford and UIUC were also excellent options with excellent research topics, but they were silver and bronze medals. What I really wanted was the gold. So I learned about the requirements - all the paperwork, recommendation letters, test to take, application forms to fill, money to pay, everything. The whole process. I hoarded books, organized my study scope, and studied for weeks and months to nail that GRE CS-specific test. GRE general and TOEFL I didn't really even study for, except for some last-day vocabulary-cramming for the verbal part of the GRE. The results - 800/800 math, 660/800 verbal in the GRE, 102/120 in the TOEFL, and 850/900 in the GRE CS - top 5th percentile. It felt good to get that score - "Oh man", I thought, "Now I got a chance to get in!".
But nope, rejected. No gold for me. Later, rejected by Stanford. And rejected by UIUC. No gold, no silver, no bronze for me. "Oh well... whatever", I thought. That was 20 months ago.
And now I'm sitting at the Pittsburgh International Airport, waiting to be picked up by one of CMU's most distinguished CS professors, Luis von Ahn, who shares his Guatemalan country of origin with me. And it came almost out of nowhere, just suddenly, in an oh-look-what-happened sort of way. Life's such a joker.
I'm not saying I'm already enrolling at CMU - I'm saying I'm GOING to CMU. I'm going to visit the campus, meet professors, meet my main contact on this search of mine - Luis von Ahn (thank you Luis!!!!).
The other thing on my mind right now is the intense EM radiation my laptop and my cellphone are emitting, both of them at a contact distance with my body. I'm SO worried about that. It's kind of mandatory to have my cellphone on, ready, and with me at all times, and it's nice to be connected to the internet while waiting for several hours in an airport. But I SWEAR (do you ever feel this too?): my testicles, a single foot away from my laptop, hurt. I don't know if it's only psychological or what, but they really hurt. It's that pain that sort of extends to your inner hip and core muscles, sort of a stomach-ache, but in a lower part of the body. It's not nice to know I'm severely exposing myself to testicle cancer in the long, even medium run. To be online or to develop cancer - hmmm, what to choose?
Better turn my laptop's wireless radio switch off. There we go. Now only warmth and gentle humming are transmitted to my lap. And my testicles stopped hurting - awesome. Now I don't have this strong urge to finish off my blog quickly. What I do feel, however, is hunger. I haven't eaten since breakfast and it's 3:20PM. My stomach is feeling that constant, slightly burning sensation you get when you're moderately hungry. But I think I'll let it be. I've been eating too much food lately - starting with the full average-sized, meat-including meals at the TN deployment, and then I ate those family-sized meals my mom gently coerced me to ingest, and then the outing at Panera and the BBQ party at Aunt Gladys'... yeah, too much food for one week. I'll let my stomach linger today.
And now, I'd better get on with reading the paper "Using Reinforcement Learning to Spider the Web Efficiently", by Jason Rennie and Andrew Kachites McCallum. Yay! It's not only me who unnecessarily capitalizes verbs and adverbs without any semantical or grammatical reason. This paper coming from CMU, I'd like to shove it into my former thesis "style corrector"'s sight, and tell him "SEE??? SEE???? Capitalizing words in the thesis title only to accentuate words' meanings is practiced even in a most prestigious university in the USA! So what if it's a grammatical misuse?? It's more effective!"
All right, enough blog jibber jabber. Speaking of Jabber, is that the protocol they use for GTalk? Never mind. Turning wireless radio on, saving entry as draft, turning wireless radio off for my testicles' sake, and reading the rest of the paper.
I wanted to go to CMU. I SO wanted it. Ranked 1st in the country, leading research in machine learning, object recognition in images, web spidering, genomical computer science... I didn't even understand many of the topics completely! But it was all so exciting, so marvellous - I knew I could help this research! I'd thought about many of them before... if I could develop the idea by myself, I could surely collaborate on its actual R&D, right?
So I made it my goal to get into CMU. Stanford and UIUC were also excellent options with excellent research topics, but they were silver and bronze medals. What I really wanted was the gold. So I learned about the requirements - all the paperwork, recommendation letters, test to take, application forms to fill, money to pay, everything. The whole process. I hoarded books, organized my study scope, and studied for weeks and months to nail that GRE CS-specific test. GRE general and TOEFL I didn't really even study for, except for some last-day vocabulary-cramming for the verbal part of the GRE. The results - 800/800 math, 660/800 verbal in the GRE, 102/120 in the TOEFL, and 850/900 in the GRE CS - top 5th percentile. It felt good to get that score - "Oh man", I thought, "Now I got a chance to get in!".
But nope, rejected. No gold for me. Later, rejected by Stanford. And rejected by UIUC. No gold, no silver, no bronze for me. "Oh well... whatever", I thought. That was 20 months ago.
And now I'm sitting at the Pittsburgh International Airport, waiting to be picked up by one of CMU's most distinguished CS professors, Luis von Ahn, who shares his Guatemalan country of origin with me. And it came almost out of nowhere, just suddenly, in an oh-look-what-happened sort of way. Life's such a joker.
I'm not saying I'm already enrolling at CMU - I'm saying I'm GOING to CMU. I'm going to visit the campus, meet professors, meet my main contact on this search of mine - Luis von Ahn (thank you Luis!!!!).
The other thing on my mind right now is the intense EM radiation my laptop and my cellphone are emitting, both of them at a contact distance with my body. I'm SO worried about that. It's kind of mandatory to have my cellphone on, ready, and with me at all times, and it's nice to be connected to the internet while waiting for several hours in an airport. But I SWEAR (do you ever feel this too?): my testicles, a single foot away from my laptop, hurt. I don't know if it's only psychological or what, but they really hurt. It's that pain that sort of extends to your inner hip and core muscles, sort of a stomach-ache, but in a lower part of the body. It's not nice to know I'm severely exposing myself to testicle cancer in the long, even medium run. To be online or to develop cancer - hmmm, what to choose?
Better turn my laptop's wireless radio switch off. There we go. Now only warmth and gentle humming are transmitted to my lap. And my testicles stopped hurting - awesome. Now I don't have this strong urge to finish off my blog quickly. What I do feel, however, is hunger. I haven't eaten since breakfast and it's 3:20PM. My stomach is feeling that constant, slightly burning sensation you get when you're moderately hungry. But I think I'll let it be. I've been eating too much food lately - starting with the full average-sized, meat-including meals at the TN deployment, and then I ate those family-sized meals my mom gently coerced me to ingest, and then the outing at Panera and the BBQ party at Aunt Gladys'... yeah, too much food for one week. I'll let my stomach linger today.
And now, I'd better get on with reading the paper "Using Reinforcement Learning to Spider the Web Efficiently", by Jason Rennie and Andrew Kachites McCallum. Yay! It's not only me who unnecessarily capitalizes verbs and adverbs without any semantical or grammatical reason. This paper coming from CMU, I'd like to shove it into my former thesis "style corrector"'s sight, and tell him "SEE??? SEE???? Capitalizing words in the thesis title only to accentuate words' meanings is practiced even in a most prestigious university in the USA! So what if it's a grammatical misuse?? It's more effective!"
All right, enough blog jibber jabber. Speaking of Jabber, is that the protocol they use for GTalk? Never mind. Turning wireless radio on, saving entry as draft, turning wireless radio off for my testicles' sake, and reading the rest of the paper.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Cardinal flying
There was once a time when packing up my bags the night before a flight would make me all jittery, and the excitement of it would keep me up for several hours and make my stomach would stir and tumble. Frequent flying this year has gradually lowered this excitement, but today I feel pretty much the same. My excitement comes from me going to Chicago to visit my parents and youngest siblings again, and my jitteriness and stomach uneasiness derives from the reckless, unusually large, and even unusuallerly carnivorous dinner I ate last night.
But WHAT A MEAL! I DO declare that it was THE meal of the HIGHEST quality I remember having EVER perceived. Either on TV or on real-life or in my imagination... it was simply THE best meal I remember EVER seeing/having heard about, not to mention actually eating it.
I usually don't care too much for food quality - I keep it simple. If I'm hungry, I find something to eat. When I find something to eat it, I eat it. Simple as pie. But last night was a night of celebration. A successful and unexpectedly shorter deployment than that that was planned caused the whole team to either smile and or/state "I am very happy".
So the team asked permission to celebrate it grandiosely at a fancy downtown restaurant. Not only that - the customer company gifted us 4 tickets and top-level access to a local baseball game :). Just like that. The assumed facility manager came to us and just gave us the tickets - four tickets: for John, Gabo, Layne, and me. (Oh yes, and Layne is our company's new hire. He is expected to take on the position of a PM. We just met him yesterday morning on his second day on the job (and already onsite with a customer!). Seems like a great guy and someone who could take on the position really well).
So that evening we drove to downtown and entered the Autopark Stadium. I slept through most of the way, but I remember waking up, getting out of our H3 rental, and being inside a very dirty-looking, low-ceilinged parking lot. I think I'd seen worse, but some fallen ceiling lying around, some metal beams protruding from the ceiling, and a very abandoned, unused look made it especially remarkable.
As we walked out the stadium, we were met with scalpers trying to sell us tickets for the game. Gabo skillfully talked them off, and we went into the stadium. We went up to the second floor, got some food and drink, saw Gabo get a picture taken of him with a group of Redbirds cheerleaders by John, and went out to watch the game. It was funny to listen to the game announcer speak about the "Redbirds" team and have all of us Reddwerks people just look up wondering why had our company name had been called at the game. We cheered for the Redbirds team until we left, at which point they were losing 4-3 to the Iowa... Cubs, I think?
So then we headed out to search for the restaurant. "Texas de Brazil" was the name of the place Gabo had found on the web. It was a meat-eating place, so I decided to shed off my repulsion to meat for that night and expose my body and my soul to the cruel, controversial food that is meat.
A pregnant-looking waitress told us about how the Churrascaria served us food. We each had a little red-and-green button on the table, with the red face on top. If we decided we wanted meat, we had only to turn the button so the green side was visible, and Waiters with sticks full of meat would come by and offer us a piece/slice.
There was quite a lot of variety. I started with grilled cheese (not the sandwich kind, but actual grilled pieces of cheese) and lettuce from the salad bar, mashed potatoes, and little round pieces of bread available from our table. Then as the waiters passed by, I started eating. First Chicken breast covered in bacon. Parmesan chicken afterwards. Then another kind of chicken. Then Filet Mignon. Then some piece of some kind of lamb. And so on... I don't remember the other names. The point is - I ate meat like a very carnivorous and hungry human being.
I have to say WOW. I had never ever felt so masterfully, exquisitely food-served by complete strangers. I except of course the cases where the food-maker/server is a family member, a friend, or someone dear to me, for then the meal's value and quality is augmented in a manner unrivalable by any kind of restaurant. But yeah, the food was awesome. AWESOME. It was just totally AWESOME. Not a flaw, not a remark, not a single suggestion on improvement from my or my last night party's part. And if it had been my opinion alone, I would probably not have made such a big deal out of it. But everyone in the group expressed the same sentiment. Everyone tried, but no one mentioned another place superior, or even equivalent in quality to Texas de Brazil.
So then today I woke up, took a hot bath in the tub, almost fell asleep in it (being 4am and all), got dressed, brushed my teeth, put together the little packing details that were still missing, and lay down on the bed again. I woke up again and looked at the clock - 6:27AM. Good thing, because we were supposed to meet at 6:30 in the lobby. So I went out and sat with the others, who were already having breakfast. I then thought about breakfast, and my stomach churned. And then it churned more. And more. And it made all these squishy, stomach-like noises inside me, and I started to feel a strong stomach-ache. Of course, it was only my stomach coming back at me: "What the hell??? You don't eat meat for years on end, and then you suddenly drop me like 2 pounds of heavy, greasy, unhealthy blocks of dead chickens, cows, pigs, and sheep? I got rules, you know?? I can't just start processing pounds of meat when I'm only trained for milk and rice and stuff! FU!"
So after I decided not to have breakfast, Layne dropped me off at the airport and I checked in for my 8:30 flight to Chicago on Northwest airlines (which was weird, because my itinerary said Continental). And then I thought "hmmm, so I flew from Austin through Dallas to Arkansas on Southwest, and I'm flying from Memphis through Cleveland to Chicago on Northwest. It's my first time flying on both these airlines. Sweet - appropriate airline names for my flights for my little trip." (Please get a map to find out why if you're not familiar with these cities). The "west" suffix only makes sense if we say we're on the western hemisphere, but I don't think there are "North" or "South" airlines anyway.
But yeah, so my airline names turned out appropriate. Cardinal flying.
And now my flight to Chicago is leaving like... NOW... so I gotta run. Bye!!
Oh, it seems like the flight boarding was somewhat delayed. Now I'm sitting right beside the gate, but they've just started boarding the elite passengers and so. I think I still have time to actually post this on Blogger, turn my laptop off, and even get a Frapuccino or something at the nearby Starbucks store.
Oh, I also found now that my flight to Chicago is on Continental, not on Northwest. Only my Memphis-Cleveland flight was on Northwest, oh darn. Ruined a big part of my trip's airline cardinality. Oh well, the title's settled. So I guess this blog wasn't too much about cardinal flying or airline naming geodirectionality at all, was it? It was more about how good food can be bad to your health. Or to my health. Yeah.
OK, posting on blogger. And buying and drinking my Frapuccino and boarding the plane. Bye (2)!
But WHAT A MEAL! I DO declare that it was THE meal of the HIGHEST quality I remember having EVER perceived. Either on TV or on real-life or in my imagination... it was simply THE best meal I remember EVER seeing/having heard about, not to mention actually eating it.
I usually don't care too much for food quality - I keep it simple. If I'm hungry, I find something to eat. When I find something to eat it, I eat it. Simple as pie. But last night was a night of celebration. A successful and unexpectedly shorter deployment than that that was planned caused the whole team to either smile and or/state "I am very happy".
So the team asked permission to celebrate it grandiosely at a fancy downtown restaurant. Not only that - the customer company gifted us 4 tickets and top-level access to a local baseball game :). Just like that. The assumed facility manager came to us and just gave us the tickets - four tickets: for John, Gabo, Layne, and me. (Oh yes, and Layne is our company's new hire. He is expected to take on the position of a PM. We just met him yesterday morning on his second day on the job (and already onsite with a customer!). Seems like a great guy and someone who could take on the position really well).
So that evening we drove to downtown and entered the Autopark Stadium. I slept through most of the way, but I remember waking up, getting out of our H3 rental, and being inside a very dirty-looking, low-ceilinged parking lot. I think I'd seen worse, but some fallen ceiling lying around, some metal beams protruding from the ceiling, and a very abandoned, unused look made it especially remarkable.
As we walked out the stadium, we were met with scalpers trying to sell us tickets for the game. Gabo skillfully talked them off, and we went into the stadium. We went up to the second floor, got some food and drink, saw Gabo get a picture taken of him with a group of Redbirds cheerleaders by John, and went out to watch the game. It was funny to listen to the game announcer speak about the "Redbirds" team and have all of us Reddwerks people just look up wondering why had our company name had been called at the game. We cheered for the Redbirds team until we left, at which point they were losing 4-3 to the Iowa... Cubs, I think?
So then we headed out to search for the restaurant. "Texas de Brazil" was the name of the place Gabo had found on the web. It was a meat-eating place, so I decided to shed off my repulsion to meat for that night and expose my body and my soul to the cruel, controversial food that is meat.
A pregnant-looking waitress told us about how the Churrascaria served us food. We each had a little red-and-green button on the table, with the red face on top. If we decided we wanted meat, we had only to turn the button so the green side was visible, and Waiters with sticks full of meat would come by and offer us a piece/slice.
There was quite a lot of variety. I started with grilled cheese (not the sandwich kind, but actual grilled pieces of cheese) and lettuce from the salad bar, mashed potatoes, and little round pieces of bread available from our table. Then as the waiters passed by, I started eating. First Chicken breast covered in bacon. Parmesan chicken afterwards. Then another kind of chicken. Then Filet Mignon. Then some piece of some kind of lamb. And so on... I don't remember the other names. The point is - I ate meat like a very carnivorous and hungry human being.
I have to say WOW. I had never ever felt so masterfully, exquisitely food-served by complete strangers. I except of course the cases where the food-maker/server is a family member, a friend, or someone dear to me, for then the meal's value and quality is augmented in a manner unrivalable by any kind of restaurant. But yeah, the food was awesome. AWESOME. It was just totally AWESOME. Not a flaw, not a remark, not a single suggestion on improvement from my or my last night party's part. And if it had been my opinion alone, I would probably not have made such a big deal out of it. But everyone in the group expressed the same sentiment. Everyone tried, but no one mentioned another place superior, or even equivalent in quality to Texas de Brazil.
So then today I woke up, took a hot bath in the tub, almost fell asleep in it (being 4am and all), got dressed, brushed my teeth, put together the little packing details that were still missing, and lay down on the bed again. I woke up again and looked at the clock - 6:27AM. Good thing, because we were supposed to meet at 6:30 in the lobby. So I went out and sat with the others, who were already having breakfast. I then thought about breakfast, and my stomach churned. And then it churned more. And more. And it made all these squishy, stomach-like noises inside me, and I started to feel a strong stomach-ache. Of course, it was only my stomach coming back at me: "What the hell??? You don't eat meat for years on end, and then you suddenly drop me like 2 pounds of heavy, greasy, unhealthy blocks of dead chickens, cows, pigs, and sheep? I got rules, you know?? I can't just start processing pounds of meat when I'm only trained for milk and rice and stuff! FU!"
So after I decided not to have breakfast, Layne dropped me off at the airport and I checked in for my 8:30 flight to Chicago on Northwest airlines (which was weird, because my itinerary said Continental). And then I thought "hmmm, so I flew from Austin through Dallas to Arkansas on Southwest, and I'm flying from Memphis through Cleveland to Chicago on Northwest. It's my first time flying on both these airlines. Sweet - appropriate airline names for my flights for my little trip." (Please get a map to find out why if you're not familiar with these cities). The "west" suffix only makes sense if we say we're on the western hemisphere, but I don't think there are "North" or "South" airlines anyway.
But yeah, so my airline names turned out appropriate. Cardinal flying.
And now my flight to Chicago is leaving like... NOW... so I gotta run. Bye!!
Oh, it seems like the flight boarding was somewhat delayed. Now I'm sitting right beside the gate, but they've just started boarding the elite passengers and so. I think I still have time to actually post this on Blogger, turn my laptop off, and even get a Frapuccino or something at the nearby Starbucks store.
Oh, I also found now that my flight to Chicago is on Continental, not on Northwest. Only my Memphis-Cleveland flight was on Northwest, oh darn. Ruined a big part of my trip's airline cardinality. Oh well, the title's settled. So I guess this blog wasn't too much about cardinal flying or airline naming geodirectionality at all, was it? It was more about how good food can be bad to your health. Or to my health. Yeah.
OK, posting on blogger. And buying and drinking my Frapuccino and boarding the plane. Bye (2)!
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Texas Roadhouse@MS
So I'm in the hotel right now and I'm using up precious sleep time to write this blog, so I'll be brief.
I'm in Mississippi right now, quite close to the state's northern border with Tennessee. I was just returning to the hotel after a moderately-long day of work, and our work group decided to stop by to eat somewhere. I voted Applebee's, all other three people in the car voted Texas Roadhouse, so we went to Texas Roadhouse. Its inside boasts a reddish hue all around, there were lots of peanut skins just lying on the ground, and there was a wooden barrel of peanuts just placed at a corner of the restaurant. So we sat down at a booth and started eating peanuts from a nicely-sized bucket on the center of the table.
One of the waitresses approached our table and welcomed us very warmly to Texas Roadhouse, gave us a long introduction to the restaurant, and asked for our orders. She was cute-looking, wore a pair of glasses, and was quite particularly friendly. My coworkers had been asking me about me "being on the market" (I just learned what that means!), so they started joking with me about hitting on our waitress. They came up with a couple of possible plans. I could tell all the details, but time is running short, so I'll be brief. I ended up handing her the bill with a credit card with a little card with my phone number and a smiley face written on it. According to a trusted source, she smiled when she saw the little card, which was good because she had also been friendly to me while she waited on us at our table, and even made some friendly conversation with me while she did.
Not much of a narrative, but enough to set a record for the log.
2008-08-25 21:30:07: [MississippiTexasRoadhouse] [INFO] Antonio.slip(Antonio.getContact(ContactMethod.PhoneNumber), cuteWaitressWithGlasses) method call successful. Awaiting response...
Night, y'all.
(1 month later: And no, the cute waitress with glasses never contacted me again. Oh well, it was fun)
(Exactly 6 months later: And nope, not yet)
I'm in Mississippi right now, quite close to the state's northern border with Tennessee. I was just returning to the hotel after a moderately-long day of work, and our work group decided to stop by to eat somewhere. I voted Applebee's, all other three people in the car voted Texas Roadhouse, so we went to Texas Roadhouse. Its inside boasts a reddish hue all around, there were lots of peanut skins just lying on the ground, and there was a wooden barrel of peanuts just placed at a corner of the restaurant. So we sat down at a booth and started eating peanuts from a nicely-sized bucket on the center of the table.
One of the waitresses approached our table and welcomed us very warmly to Texas Roadhouse, gave us a long introduction to the restaurant, and asked for our orders. She was cute-looking, wore a pair of glasses, and was quite particularly friendly. My coworkers had been asking me about me "being on the market" (I just learned what that means!), so they started joking with me about hitting on our waitress. They came up with a couple of possible plans. I could tell all the details, but time is running short, so I'll be brief. I ended up handing her the bill with a credit card with a little card with my phone number and a smiley face written on it. According to a trusted source, she smiled when she saw the little card, which was good because she had also been friendly to me while she waited on us at our table, and even made some friendly conversation with me while she did.
Not much of a narrative, but enough to set a record for the log.
2008-08-25 21:30:07: [MississippiTexasRoadhouse] [INFO] Antonio.slip(Antonio.getContact(ContactMethod.PhoneNumber), cuteWaitressWithGlasses) method call successful. Awaiting response...
Night, y'all.
(1 month later: And no, the cute waitress with glasses never contacted me again. Oh well, it was fun)
(Exactly 6 months later: And nope, not yet)
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Imprudent
Not prudent: http://encarta.msn.com/thesaurus_561584766/prudent.html
Imprudent: http://encarta.msn.com/thesaurus_561590899/thoughtless.html
Negligent. Foolish. Heedless. Careless. Stupid. My actions last night are thus truthfully described. Awful, awful thinking!! (Or LACK thereof).
So picture this: imagine it's saturday night (live), 9PM ,you're at your apartment, you have a hamper full of dirty clothes waiting to be laundered, you have a 10:30AM business-related flight tomorrow morning from which you plan to return a week and a half later, and you've booked a friendly SuperShuttle van to pick you up at 7AM. But you don't want to do laundry just yet - oh no, YOU want to go out clubbing tonight! And why not? It's saturday night!! (live) And you're going to dance your sweat off tonight while showing off your favorite gray shirt, and you just CAN'T go on your trip without your favorite shirt, oh no... Gotta take your shirt with you. So yeah, laundry must be done AFTER the clubbing.
So you go clubbing. You reach downtown by 11:30, find a parking space on the roof level of a 5-story building, and start hounding for a dancefloor surrounded by a loud bass beat and pretty dancing girls. Your favorite local disco-bar is sadly pounding with your non-favorite rap-style music, and your second-favorite bar Prague has a rather long line of people waiting to get in. So you reach Qua - fancier, more expensive, but with better disco/reggaeton music in the air. You step onto the dancefloor, get in touch with the music, and then you dance. You dance your DONKEY off. You step, you skip, you flail, you bend, you swing, you hump, you jump, you scream. For about an hour. Sweaty and footsore, you then walk off to a much-emptier Prague and repeat, but with a dancing pole.
You reach your high-up car in the high-up parking lot with no elevator OR stair access. You back up your car while turning the wheel and WHAM! you feel/listen a loud collision: your car hitting a very useless-looking concrete bar in the middle of the parking lot. You woefully imagine your car's bent chassis, your now-unopenable door, and the 4-digit amount it'll take to fix it. You step out, check your car, and miraculously find out that your car has not a dent in it! (Not more than it already had, anyway). You stare, you wonder, and then you notice the front left wheel sharply angled toward the concrete culprit, lightly smeared in gray, and a big rubbery-looking black smudge on the concrete bar. A smile of relief on your face is followed by a grateful laugh and a sincere thank you to the front left wheel for taking one for the team.
Then at 2:30AM you're back at your apartment. You dutifully gather all of your clothes, you add your sweat-dripping dancing attire to it, and you put it all in the washer. You wonder what to do while your clothes get washed. You eat some apple sauce, wait a bit, and then you lay on the rug to check your email.
And then suddenly your phone rings a familiar ringtone - a call! Unknown number! Who could it be? You answer: "Hello. This is an automated message from Super Shuttle. We are calling to remind you that your shuttle driver will be arriving at your stop in 10 minutes...". You look at the time on your cellphone - it's 6:50AM. The shuttle would be here at 7AM.
So picture that. What would you do? I don't what'd you do, but I'll tell you what I did. First, my body jumped to standing position in a heartbeat. Then my mind raced. "OK, I'm not ready for my trip. My bags are not packed, most of my clothes are wet in the washer, and I still need to shower."
Boy, did I hurry! Possibilities flew: "Maybe my clothes are not that wet and I can put some on." I checked, nope... very wet indeed. "OK, how about I ignore the shuttle, dry my clothes, fold them, pack my bags, and then hurriedly drive to the airport?" I did some zap arithmetic: 3.5 hours for my flight, 1 hour for the dryer to dry my clothes, 20 minutes to fold them, 30 minutes to drive to the airport, only about 1.5 hours early on the airport... hmmm... risky... and I'd already paid for the shuttle... and I didn't want to ALSO pay parking - so I passed. "OK then... I'll just take whatever's NOT wet!" I checked... only a couple of non-plain-white-cotton-t-shirts laying around, and I was going on a week-and-a-half trip. Nope, not viable. "OK so... I'll just take my wet clothes and dry them when I get to the hotel." Now that was a plan. I got two empty Walmart plastic bags, stuffed them with the nicest-looking and most-easily-available clothes I could yank out of the washer, tied them up, and threw them into my suitcase.
Then I thought "OK, I still smell". So I showered as fast and completely as I could, dried as best as I could, and then I thought "I have NO dry pants to wear!". Darn, oh well, it's a good thing I have a brother, I thought. I grabbed a pair of jeans from his closet and put them on. I looked at the time on the microwave. 6:59AM. "Oh no!", I thought. Hmmm, well... even SuperShuttle drivers are usually late. Yeah, I still have time. So, breakfast. Apple sauce! I poured half a cup of apple sauce into my cup and devoured it in what seemed like 2 seconds. And then I filled it with water so the residues wouldn't dry up and smell bad later. Brushed my teeth, found a shirt to put on, found some dry socks, found my glasses, unplugged my cellphone charger, packed my power outlet, grabbed my bags, put my shoes on, turned the lights off, walked outside, and locked the door at 7:17.
The concept of synergy crossed my mind when, 20 seconds after leaving the apartment, I saw the shuttle drive up close. My mind was still fast reeling with the moment's excitement - I wasn't sure if I was dreaming. But I'd made it. With barely any dry clothes in my bags, but I made it.
I started this entry in the airport lobby, but now I'm at the hotel, near the north border of the Mississippi state. And the hotel did have a laundry room, and I did put my clothes in the dryer, and they didn't get any mildew as I was told, and everything turned out all right.
But the point is - my decisions last night were imprudent. Reckless. Careless. Negligent. Stupid. I should've done my laundry at 9PM, finished folding clothes and packing bags at midnight, went to sleep, spent 7 full hours resting, had time for a complete and healthy breakfast, cut out my anxiety about wet clothes in my bags during the whole trip here, had a much less tired body today, and saved my car's front left wheel from a harsh bump into some senseless concrete bar on a rooftop parking lot last night.
It is to be noted, however, that I'm extracting good out of this risky experience. A moderately entertaining anecdote for a blog entry, plus a couple of lessons to be learned:
Imprudent: http://encarta.msn.com/thesaurus_561590899/thoughtless.html
Negligent. Foolish. Heedless. Careless. Stupid. My actions last night are thus truthfully described. Awful, awful thinking!! (Or LACK thereof).
So picture this: imagine it's saturday night (live), 9PM ,you're at your apartment, you have a hamper full of dirty clothes waiting to be laundered, you have a 10:30AM business-related flight tomorrow morning from which you plan to return a week and a half later, and you've booked a friendly SuperShuttle van to pick you up at 7AM. But you don't want to do laundry just yet - oh no, YOU want to go out clubbing tonight! And why not? It's saturday night!! (live) And you're going to dance your sweat off tonight while showing off your favorite gray shirt, and you just CAN'T go on your trip without your favorite shirt, oh no... Gotta take your shirt with you. So yeah, laundry must be done AFTER the clubbing.
So you go clubbing. You reach downtown by 11:30, find a parking space on the roof level of a 5-story building, and start hounding for a dancefloor surrounded by a loud bass beat and pretty dancing girls. Your favorite local disco-bar is sadly pounding with your non-favorite rap-style music, and your second-favorite bar Prague has a rather long line of people waiting to get in. So you reach Qua - fancier, more expensive, but with better disco/reggaeton music in the air. You step onto the dancefloor, get in touch with the music, and then you dance. You dance your DONKEY off. You step, you skip, you flail, you bend, you swing, you hump, you jump, you scream. For about an hour. Sweaty and footsore, you then walk off to a much-emptier Prague and repeat, but with a dancing pole.
You reach your high-up car in the high-up parking lot with no elevator OR stair access. You back up your car while turning the wheel and WHAM! you feel/listen a loud collision: your car hitting a very useless-looking concrete bar in the middle of the parking lot. You woefully imagine your car's bent chassis, your now-unopenable door, and the 4-digit amount it'll take to fix it. You step out, check your car, and miraculously find out that your car has not a dent in it! (Not more than it already had, anyway). You stare, you wonder, and then you notice the front left wheel sharply angled toward the concrete culprit, lightly smeared in gray, and a big rubbery-looking black smudge on the concrete bar. A smile of relief on your face is followed by a grateful laugh and a sincere thank you to the front left wheel for taking one for the team.
Then at 2:30AM you're back at your apartment. You dutifully gather all of your clothes, you add your sweat-dripping dancing attire to it, and you put it all in the washer. You wonder what to do while your clothes get washed. You eat some apple sauce, wait a bit, and then you lay on the rug to check your email.
And then suddenly your phone rings a familiar ringtone - a call! Unknown number! Who could it be? You answer: "Hello. This is an automated message from Super Shuttle. We are calling to remind you that your shuttle driver will be arriving at your stop in 10 minutes...". You look at the time on your cellphone - it's 6:50AM. The shuttle would be here at 7AM.
So picture that. What would you do? I don't what'd you do, but I'll tell you what I did. First, my body jumped to standing position in a heartbeat. Then my mind raced. "OK, I'm not ready for my trip. My bags are not packed, most of my clothes are wet in the washer, and I still need to shower."
Boy, did I hurry! Possibilities flew: "Maybe my clothes are not that wet and I can put some on." I checked, nope... very wet indeed. "OK, how about I ignore the shuttle, dry my clothes, fold them, pack my bags, and then hurriedly drive to the airport?" I did some zap arithmetic: 3.5 hours for my flight, 1 hour for the dryer to dry my clothes, 20 minutes to fold them, 30 minutes to drive to the airport, only about 1.5 hours early on the airport... hmmm... risky... and I'd already paid for the shuttle... and I didn't want to ALSO pay parking - so I passed. "OK then... I'll just take whatever's NOT wet!" I checked... only a couple of non-plain-white-cotton-t-shirts laying around, and I was going on a week-and-a-half trip. Nope, not viable. "OK so... I'll just take my wet clothes and dry them when I get to the hotel." Now that was a plan. I got two empty Walmart plastic bags, stuffed them with the nicest-looking and most-easily-available clothes I could yank out of the washer, tied them up, and threw them into my suitcase.
Then I thought "OK, I still smell". So I showered as fast and completely as I could, dried as best as I could, and then I thought "I have NO dry pants to wear!". Darn, oh well, it's a good thing I have a brother, I thought. I grabbed a pair of jeans from his closet and put them on. I looked at the time on the microwave. 6:59AM. "Oh no!", I thought. Hmmm, well... even SuperShuttle drivers are usually late. Yeah, I still have time. So, breakfast. Apple sauce! I poured half a cup of apple sauce into my cup and devoured it in what seemed like 2 seconds. And then I filled it with water so the residues wouldn't dry up and smell bad later. Brushed my teeth, found a shirt to put on, found some dry socks, found my glasses, unplugged my cellphone charger, packed my power outlet, grabbed my bags, put my shoes on, turned the lights off, walked outside, and locked the door at 7:17.
The concept of synergy crossed my mind when, 20 seconds after leaving the apartment, I saw the shuttle drive up close. My mind was still fast reeling with the moment's excitement - I wasn't sure if I was dreaming. But I'd made it. With barely any dry clothes in my bags, but I made it.
I started this entry in the airport lobby, but now I'm at the hotel, near the north border of the Mississippi state. And the hotel did have a laundry room, and I did put my clothes in the dryer, and they didn't get any mildew as I was told, and everything turned out all right.
But the point is - my decisions last night were imprudent. Reckless. Careless. Negligent. Stupid. I should've done my laundry at 9PM, finished folding clothes and packing bags at midnight, went to sleep, spent 7 full hours resting, had time for a complete and healthy breakfast, cut out my anxiety about wet clothes in my bags during the whole trip here, had a much less tired body today, and saved my car's front left wheel from a harsh bump into some senseless concrete bar on a rooftop parking lot last night.
It is to be noted, however, that I'm extracting good out of this risky experience. A moderately entertaining anecdote for a blog entry, plus a couple of lessons to be learned:
- Be very careful when backing up your car on an unlit rooftop parking lot.
- If you plan on going clubbing the night before an important trip, make sure your laundry and bags are ready before you do so. And don't worry about your favorite shirt getting dirty - you can still take it with you and wash it during the trip.
- Wake up on time.
- Practice prudence lest you don't mind risk and stress.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Attempts at expression
I want to write, but I don't know what to write about. When my blog caught the attention of a group of readers beside myself, several people advised me to block its contents to the public - my writing possibilites here are not what they used to be. Now I may have to exclude some of my intended entry thoughts from future postings. Belgian bummer :(. I mean, I don't mind people reading all kinds of stuff about myself - that affects no one but myself. But sometimes I do post out stuff about OTHER people... like what I think/feel about them, parts of their own stories, and I can see how would those people NOT like that. Sigh. I guess it's time to start filtering my blog content (until my social life again diminishes into virtual nothingness, or until I stop caring about them caring). I believe these filters will do for now:
Content type intended not to be posted in this blog's entries in the near future:
So... I guess I should actually update my blog now.
I just read some of my last year's blog entries, published back when I used my old Live Spaces account (http://ajlsnook.spaces.live.com/default.aspx) instead of this fine Blogger site (http://www.blogger.com). I was impressed by some of them - they really do manage to convey non-trivial thougts in an easy-to-read fashion (as judged by my own certainly-biased opinion).
And now it's already 7:29PM, and I'm still sitting down in my apartment in my shorts, sweating with the room's 88F temperature as indicated by the apartment's thermostat, doing my laundry and packing my bags for tomorrow's trip still a distant thought (I was even thinking of titling this blog "Saturday Sloth" or "What a waste of weekend"). Today I:
Content type intended not to be posted in this blog's entries in the near future:
- My sex life.
- My sex thoughts.
- My thoughts and feelings about people with a reasonable chance of either reading this blog or of being told about this blog's entries by another person. (Reasonable being defined as a more-or-less 10% combined with my gut feeling at that moment).
- XHTML 1.0 Strict.
- The following "vulgar words" (their intended replacements are listed alongside them) Fuck (fornication/coitus/...), Shit (excrement), and Ass (donkey). (Not that I ever used them anyway (except the first one, only in one entry). THIS is my most "vulgar" entry ever.)
- MIME types.
So... I guess I should actually update my blog now.
I just read some of my last year's blog entries, published back when I used my old Live Spaces account (http://ajlsnook.spaces.live.com/default.aspx) instead of this fine Blogger site (http://www.blogger.com). I was impressed by some of them - they really do manage to convey non-trivial thougts in an easy-to-read fashion (as judged by my own certainly-biased opinion).
And now it's already 7:29PM, and I'm still sitting down in my apartment in my shorts, sweating with the room's 88F temperature as indicated by the apartment's thermostat, doing my laundry and packing my bags for tomorrow's trip still a distant thought (I was even thinking of titling this blog "Saturday Sloth" or "What a waste of weekend"). Today I:
- Danced and flirted at Karma on 8th and Colorado until 4AM.
- Played a couple of rounds of Super Smash Bros before going to sleep, still trying to beat Boss Battles in Intense Mode.
- Went to sleep at about 5AM.
- Woke up at my phone's alarm at 9AM, turned it off, and continued sleeping on the rug.
- Struggled with the thought of getting up for 3 hours.
- Managed to get up from the rug.
- Ate a bowl of Fiber One + Milk.
- Played another couple of rounds of Super Smash Bros, and failed to accomplish my goal again.
- Noticed I was sweating a lot and took a cold shower, washing off the dry sports gel I still had on my hair from last night.
- Wondered if the local gravitational field had been somehow altered, for the scale told me I weighed 5 pounds less than I did yesterday (prolly cuz of all the dancing last night).
- Checked my bank account online.
- Chatted a while with Khris from CR (he did one of his university admission exams today, says it was really easy, and his birthday's tomorrow).
- Read some of my blogs from Live Spaces (http://ajlsnook.spaces.live.com/default.aspx), and remembered that I had another photo site where I used to upload all my photo albums before finding out about Google Picasa Web Albums.
- Moved yesterday's pictures from my camera's SD card onto my portable hard drive, and uploaded them to my Picasa web albums (http://picasaweb.google.com/antoniojl/SunsetSession). That sunset was ASTOUNDINGLY beautiful. The pictures couldn't capture its greatness at all.
- Decided to write this blog entry.
- Put the laptop on my desk, connected my USB mouse and keyboard, and noticed that my mouse was not being recognized.
- Found a Phillips screwdriver in a drawer and disassembled my USB mouse.
- Fumbled with the cables inside the mouse a little, reconnected it to the laptop, and saw it light up red again.
- Had a hard time putting my mouse back together again.
- Felt a strange, numbing sensation in my eyes after fixing the mouse, very probably caused by looking at the strong, red LED inside the mouse for 10 minutes (I REAAAAAAAAAAALLY hope I don't go blind(er)).
- Ate another bowl of Fiber One + Milk.
- Washed the pot and cooked (is cooking the right term?) 4 hard-boiled eggs.
- Cracked, peeled, and ate the 4 hard-boiled eggs with salt.
- Ate another bowl of Fiber One + Milk (and put the milk plastic container in the apartment's recycling area.
- Changed my flight reservation tomorrow - instead of flying out at 1600, now I'll fly out at 1030.
- Saw my USB mouse fail repeatedly again, and decided to replace it for my other Ativa mouse, whose right button sometimes sticks but that has never failed me otherwise and that looks much cooler with a blue light on the top instead of red.
- Booked a Super Shuttle reservation to pick me up tomorrow morning at about 0700.
- Transferred $500 to my credit card from my checkings account to have credit available for my trip(s).
- Will finish this blog entry.
- Will put my clothes together to do laundry.
- Will take all the recyclable trash to the recycling bins in my apartment complex.
- Will come back and get dressed for tonight.
- Will drive to the office and print my boarding pass for tomorrow.
- Will drive downtown and go to Sky Lounge for several hours.
- Will drive back home.
- Will do my laundry and pack my bags.
- Will find out if I still have time to sleep some before the Super Shuttle gets here tomorrow.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Low-energy orbit (Unfinished and retaken)
As a being allegedly conformed by many homogeneous particles, it is not easy for me to understand how can I seem to be such a complex and singular being, separate from the rest of the physical world as if by magic or by a powerful will (aren't they the same thing?)
But just as the moon's nature (internal composition and external interactions, some would say) keeps it at a periodically far distance from our planet, so do my own inner and outer forces
...
(I was tired and sleepy when I was writing this, so this is where I left off. I'd like to continue the ideas I left unfinished at that time, just to avoid abandoning it).
so do my own inner and outer forces (a universally gigantic amount of them) push and pull CONSTANTLY to keep my body stable. And individual, and separate. I'm made of the same fundamental particles, just like the clothes around me, the chair under me, the laptop on top of my lap. And we push against each other as we touch. And yet we remain separate entities. How is that?
Chemists and physicists say they know the answer of course: molecular structures can be are far more powerful than what puny gravity and muscles can dare to ever be, so our interactions with structured matter effectively result in what we perceive: being separate entities made of a different kind of matter than other separate entities existing in our environment. But we're all made of the same stuff...
I'm sorry, I know this entry sucked sucked sucked. But I wasn't really expecting to retain the same idea and sentiment I had almost nine days ago. At that time I was walking sockless under a beautiful waning moon sky, staring at the stars over me and at the clouds breezing under them, wet after a happy swim at my apartament complex pool. That's how I thought about the moon and the entry's theme. Ohhhh, that's right!! I remember the intention of my entry now! It's called "Low-energy orbit"... yeah... what I tried to say was that everything seems to exist and behave in cycles. The Moon circles the Earth, its phases regularly come and go, the sun rises and sets, and just so the elemental particles that physicists have discovered also rotate and twirl around each other. And then I thought about the electrons rotating in orbits with different energy levels, and high energy levels made them go faster and more unstable. An electron with a high-energy level could eventually give off its energy by radiation and return to a low-energy orbit, or it could continue getting more energy until it was enough to break the atom's force on it, and the jumpy electron would spin off its orbit and be free to roam the rest of the universe without its original atom's influence upon it. Liberation, yeah.
But at the time I began to write this entry, I was feeling in a low-energy orbit. My cycles around my routine were getting slower, weaker, driven by remaining momentum instead of by my own initiative. I clearly remembered my orbit being much higher a couple of days before, but at that time it had lowered, and I was doing everything sluggishly. So you can see how it was reasonable for me to stop writing this entry midway - I kind of didn't really care too much about anything.
Yeah, the entry still sucked. But at least I said what I wanted to say. Now I'm in a different place, at a different time, on a different mindset, and I plan to make another entry out of that. Not too long, though, for I still have to read some papers. Bye!
But just as the moon's nature (internal composition and external interactions, some would say) keeps it at a periodically far distance from our planet, so do my own inner and outer forces
...
(I was tired and sleepy when I was writing this, so this is where I left off. I'd like to continue the ideas I left unfinished at that time, just to avoid abandoning it).
so do my own inner and outer forces (a universally gigantic amount of them) push and pull CONSTANTLY to keep my body stable. And individual, and separate. I'm made of the same fundamental particles, just like the clothes around me, the chair under me, the laptop on top of my lap. And we push against each other as we touch. And yet we remain separate entities. How is that?
Chemists and physicists say they know the answer of course: molecular structures can be are far more powerful than what puny gravity and muscles can dare to ever be, so our interactions with structured matter effectively result in what we perceive: being separate entities made of a different kind of matter than other separate entities existing in our environment. But we're all made of the same stuff...
I'm sorry, I know this entry sucked sucked sucked. But I wasn't really expecting to retain the same idea and sentiment I had almost nine days ago. At that time I was walking sockless under a beautiful waning moon sky, staring at the stars over me and at the clouds breezing under them, wet after a happy swim at my apartament complex pool. That's how I thought about the moon and the entry's theme. Ohhhh, that's right!! I remember the intention of my entry now! It's called "Low-energy orbit"... yeah... what I tried to say was that everything seems to exist and behave in cycles. The Moon circles the Earth, its phases regularly come and go, the sun rises and sets, and just so the elemental particles that physicists have discovered also rotate and twirl around each other. And then I thought about the electrons rotating in orbits with different energy levels, and high energy levels made them go faster and more unstable. An electron with a high-energy level could eventually give off its energy by radiation and return to a low-energy orbit, or it could continue getting more energy until it was enough to break the atom's force on it, and the jumpy electron would spin off its orbit and be free to roam the rest of the universe without its original atom's influence upon it. Liberation, yeah.
But at the time I began to write this entry, I was feeling in a low-energy orbit. My cycles around my routine were getting slower, weaker, driven by remaining momentum instead of by my own initiative. I clearly remembered my orbit being much higher a couple of days before, but at that time it had lowered, and I was doing everything sluggishly. So you can see how it was reasonable for me to stop writing this entry midway - I kind of didn't really care too much about anything.
Yeah, the entry still sucked. But at least I said what I wanted to say. Now I'm in a different place, at a different time, on a different mindset, and I plan to make another entry out of that. Not too long, though, for I still have to read some papers. Bye!
Monday, August 18, 2008
Minority
The wish of writing has vanished. I feel too low-energy now. I feel somehow guilty for feeling negatively about myself. Haven't I said this beore? I believe I have. Anyway, I'm feeling down again. I was just thinking... what part of the population is virgin by the age of 24? I know it's not a race but... I don't think it's normal, is it? I mean, there's people who don't want to have sex until they get married, so that's cool - they're waiting. But what about a person who's NOT waiting - who's on the lookout but simply never gets anything? What's wrong with that kind of person? Well, I don't know. Actually, I kinda know - I'm just too idiotic to solve it.
I just feel sorry about myself. Such great luck, such great powers, and I just don't find a way to exploit them all. I feel like such a loser.
Which part of the population... no, you know what? What's the purpose of whining any more? I've whined quite a bit. I've analyzed my problems - not thoroughly, but thoroughness will not help in this case. I've seen love get created in less than minutes, and I take years to figure out what the trick is. Something is clearly amiss in my strategy.
You kno, I want a teacher - a female teacher, preferably, that can show me what's the proper way to treat a lady. I don't know what that really means. I've never known anything about that - I've even refused to learn it because it sounds so common, so frivolous, so "dumb". Now I yearn for it, if only to be appeased with the feeling of female company and care. I yearn for it so badly.
So why don't I go ask someone directly? Yeah, right. Excuse me, miss? Would you like to teach me how to treat ladies? I'm not good company and am not really funny, but I've been wanting a girlfriend pretty badly for some time now, and I think that the only way I'm getting one is if I somehow learn how to properly entertain ladies the way men are usually supposed to entertain ladies. You know - making them laugh, scaring them sometimes, giving them little but meaningful gifts like flowers and chocolates, smiling, looking at them to the eye while I'm talking to them... I don't really know how to do any of those. You probably won't like me at first because of this very reason, but you'll find I'm an eager and fast learner, so I'll probably be chatting you up before you know it. What do you say? Hmmm, that sounds almost OK to tell a girl. Well, maybe I will.
And if I don't do something similar, I risk real danger of staying single for years without end. I don't think I'm really scared about that - it's just really depressing to want something so much and not have it. Just natural to want some opposite-sex company for a mutual show-tell-and-use session, I think.
This darn entry ended up being just another depressing whine. What a bummer. You know, on Friday I was so close to getting intimate with a very attractive blonde girl. I have no idea - what did I do wrong? Not having kissed her? Having rubbed her waist the wrong way? She moved away - can I chase her without me looking like a loser? That's a real problem with never having had a real group of friends while in high school - NO social awareness whatsoever. Being a loner inside your own morally-confused family doesn't help either.
Maybe taking up drinking (alcohol) could help. That sure loosens up my tongue sometimes. Should I try that next weekend? Get a girl a drink, offer to spend the night with her (drinking at the bar), get tongue-loose with the self-intoxication, make her laugh several times, offer to spend the night with her (at her bed-containing place), lovingly kiss her gorgeous lips, fondle her body with lusty passion, slowly strip her of... (oops, getting too graphical)..........., and wake up right there the next morning, wrapped around her in a protective embrace, kiss her good morning and schedule the next meet-up? That sounds about right. Yeah, that's the plan for next weekend then. It's settled.
But before that, I will save this entry, close this blog, shut down my computer, and go to bed, for I should go to work tomorrow, and it's almost 2AM. And it is work which provides the money which allows for driving downtown and getting girls (and myself) drinks.
I just feel sorry about myself. Such great luck, such great powers, and I just don't find a way to exploit them all. I feel like such a loser.
Which part of the population... no, you know what? What's the purpose of whining any more? I've whined quite a bit. I've analyzed my problems - not thoroughly, but thoroughness will not help in this case. I've seen love get created in less than minutes, and I take years to figure out what the trick is. Something is clearly amiss in my strategy.
You kno, I want a teacher - a female teacher, preferably, that can show me what's the proper way to treat a lady. I don't know what that really means. I've never known anything about that - I've even refused to learn it because it sounds so common, so frivolous, so "dumb". Now I yearn for it, if only to be appeased with the feeling of female company and care. I yearn for it so badly.
So why don't I go ask someone directly? Yeah, right. Excuse me, miss? Would you like to teach me how to treat ladies? I'm not good company and am not really funny, but I've been wanting a girlfriend pretty badly for some time now, and I think that the only way I'm getting one is if I somehow learn how to properly entertain ladies the way men are usually supposed to entertain ladies. You know - making them laugh, scaring them sometimes, giving them little but meaningful gifts like flowers and chocolates, smiling, looking at them to the eye while I'm talking to them... I don't really know how to do any of those. You probably won't like me at first because of this very reason, but you'll find I'm an eager and fast learner, so I'll probably be chatting you up before you know it. What do you say? Hmmm, that sounds almost OK to tell a girl. Well, maybe I will.
And if I don't do something similar, I risk real danger of staying single for years without end. I don't think I'm really scared about that - it's just really depressing to want something so much and not have it. Just natural to want some opposite-sex company for a mutual show-tell-and-use session, I think.
This darn entry ended up being just another depressing whine. What a bummer. You know, on Friday I was so close to getting intimate with a very attractive blonde girl. I have no idea - what did I do wrong? Not having kissed her? Having rubbed her waist the wrong way? She moved away - can I chase her without me looking like a loser? That's a real problem with never having had a real group of friends while in high school - NO social awareness whatsoever. Being a loner inside your own morally-confused family doesn't help either.
Maybe taking up drinking (alcohol) could help. That sure loosens up my tongue sometimes. Should I try that next weekend? Get a girl a drink, offer to spend the night with her (drinking at the bar), get tongue-loose with the self-intoxication, make her laugh several times, offer to spend the night with her (at her bed-containing place), lovingly kiss her gorgeous lips, fondle her body with lusty passion, slowly strip her of... (oops, getting too graphical)..........., and wake up right there the next morning, wrapped around her in a protective embrace, kiss her good morning and schedule the next meet-up? That sounds about right. Yeah, that's the plan for next weekend then. It's settled.
But before that, I will save this entry, close this blog, shut down my computer, and go to bed, for I should go to work tomorrow, and it's almost 2AM. And it is work which provides the money which allows for driving downtown and getting girls (and myself) drinks.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Excitement stirring
:) :) :D :D :D. That is how I feel now.
Various events are occurring, and I like ALL of them!
Current highlights:
I'll keep you posted, Blog.
Evening!!
Various events are occurring, and I like ALL of them!
Current highlights:
- Luis von Ahn invited me over to CMU to visit him, to meet other professors, to listen to some inauguration lectures!!! And I'm so happy because I'll be able to MEET the university, MEET the people, LEARN what everything is REALLY about!!!! I'm so happy about that!
- Scarleth is graduating!! YES!!!! I'm really happy about her - I was able to help her by lending her the money she needed to pay off her debt FAST! And now she paid it off, and now she can simply graduate... and get a degree... get paid more... do what she wants to... I'm really happy for her :) She was a bit anguished about that.
- I invited Emily and her boyfriend Andy to dinner at Macaroni Grill last night, and it was pretty nice. We talked about some of my stuff, we talked about some of their stuff, they told me some highlights about their trips to Europe - Spain and Italy - and I was so happy to pay for the meal. I'm not sure why - maybe it's because I can afford it now, or maybe it's because I really really like Emily, but in any case, I was honestly happy to pay - no sense of frugality pinched me at any time. And besides, I was doing it of my own initiative - it's one of the few things I've done of my own initiative - I wanted to spend some time with them, so I invited them over, and I took full responsibility for it. And I enjoyed it. Nice. It was just about us eating together, and nice conversation between nice company. For some reason I don't yet precisely understand, it was a breakthrough for me.
- I've been doing EXERCISE! :D Yup, I finally decided to make my body into a stronger, healthier, attractiver, faster, harder, effectiver one, trading energy, time, and a little pain for it. I think the purchase is worth it now - I'm in the early middle of my twenties, for my sake!
- Sometime either before or after I go to CMU, I plan on going to Chicago to visit my family. It's going to be quite a rush, especially with already-booked tickets to CMU and the WSI Go-Live week just before it, but I trust I can make it. I can make it! I can make it!
- My remote light-controller project does what I wanted it to do now (or most of it), but no one's paid much attention to it. I didn't much like that, so now I just kinda stopped working on it. I was going to show Anup some of it before he left, but he had to leave early and he said we'll go through it tomorrow. Oh well... That's when I started to write the bulky part of this blog.
- Mosko is here in Austin!! He just came today - he rented a car and is staying here in Austin for a couple of days - he's going to Houston on Saturday to the NIN (Nine Inch Nails) concert with his friend Tico. We plan on doing a fair amount of stuff while he's here - kayaking, partying, and bar-hopping are on the list. What else could we do? And since Emily also invited me to go to a party tonight, maybe we can all get together so we can all know each other! (I mean Mosko, Tico, Emily, and me). That'd be nice. We'll see what happens.
- Pedro wanted to go to Guatemala today, but he didn't have the money to buy the ticket yesterday, so I bought it for him. (I haven't checked my bank accounts lately, but I"m sure they're looking leaner that they have been during this year - let's see... Scarleth $6090, Pedro $857, Bidkar $100, Henry $220, and I gave my mom $500. That adds up to $7767. Wow. That's quite a lot. Only getting back $7267, though... hmmm... that's enough money to go on my own AWESOME WORLD-ROUND TRIP!!!! Including Europe, of course :D :D :D I just have to get it back to be able to spend it, though...
- Oh, and about Jerol!! Well, we went for that hike in the Greenbelt and it was REALLY nice! We walked up to where the very very nice view of the whole greenbelt is exposed, and we just stared at it for some time... then we went all the way down to the river and watched some turtles and BABY TURTLES! eat fish food and swim around. Walking further down the trail, we found an AWESOME rock bench!!!!! We just sat down there, and talked, and talked, and talked... for hours... it was almost 1PM when we left the Greenbelt - I like her personality a lot. She is very open and honest about everything, and has this calm temperament, with which I can very easily get along with. I like her - I think the little hike created a nice, close friendship bond between us. And then yesterday I ripped six of her CDs' music into her new pink iPod that Bryan gave her. She was SO grateful and happy about it! She even invited me over to dinner! But I couldn't... I already had plans with Emily. But we said we would go next week, so that's good :) I like Jerol. Such a nice person.
I'll keep you posted, Blog.
Evening!!
Saturday, August 9, 2008
0.125 = 08/08/08 != 08-08-08 = -8
Happy 08/08/08!!!!
That's what I told several people yesterday. What a day!!!!! It was VERY singular in at least two or three ways.
It's hard to describe such turmoiling thoughts and feelings in a linear, grammatical fashion. But anyway, here goes:
I'll only describe the highlights of the day, since the description of my whole day could very well strip me of any and all sleeping time I still have available tonight.
So I guess I'll fall asleep now. I have to make sure to have my cellphone near my ears so that I wake up at exactly the time my alarm is set to ring at. To be woken up so suddenly that I won't have time to snooze it while resnoozing back myself. Anyway...
NIGHT!!
That's what I told several people yesterday. What a day!!!!! It was VERY singular in at least two or three ways.
It's hard to describe such turmoiling thoughts and feelings in a linear, grammatical fashion. But anyway, here goes:
I'll only describe the highlights of the day, since the description of my whole day could very well strip me of any and all sleeping time I still have available tonight.
- I invited a coworker over to a hike to Barton Creek Greenbelt in the morning (in about 6 hours actually, so I BETTER get some sleep!!) I'm happy she's excited to go - I am too! We're becoming nice friends - I like that :) (She's also double-jointed and has these WOW-ishly long, flexible fingers!)
- I finished the first part of a web UI interface for a light picker! This will only make sense to those who have somehow interacted with the Reddwerks lights, but the point is that now, to test the lights, people don't have to actually push the buttons when they're testing - now they can simply click their mouse on graphically on the screen, and BLINK, it's as if the light was pushed. I honestly can't believe no one in the company did this before - it was relatively simple. Anyway, I'm thinking of making changes and improving this interface to make it as accurate and as helpful as possible, and these incoming thoughts are so many and so strong that they're preventing me from falling asleep. Which comes into conflict with my previous highlight, since I have to get up early!!!!!
- Luis v. A. contacted me!!! Yes, he did!!!! And he... and he... and he's invited me over to CMU to meet professors and to listen to inauguration lectures and to meet him and everything! It's REALLY COOL!!!!!!! OHHHHH IT'S SOME AWESOME NEWS!!!!!!!! It was stressing to answer his emails - I was SO EXCITED!!! I even called Pedro and told him all about it and was laughing and laughing and telling him out in the parking lot... it was SO COOL!!!! :D I'm going to be there from the 27th to the 30th, it seems. HOW COOL IS THAT??!?!?!?!?
So I guess I'll fall asleep now. I have to make sure to have my cellphone near my ears so that I wake up at exactly the time my alarm is set to ring at. To be woken up so suddenly that I won't have time to snooze it while resnoozing back myself. Anyway...
I'M SO EXCITED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AND I JUST CAN'T HIDE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I DON'T WANNA LOSE CONTROL BUT I THINK I LIKE IT!!!!!!!!
NIGHT!!
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Likes of a developer
This blog entry is about me. Why? Well, because I called dibs on it. That's right - today I won't write in an unpresuming manner, as I usually presume to write. This blog entry initiates its existence with an Antonio-centric mindset - there will be no second thoughts over other points of reference or relative differences. Taking myself as a reference, my goal is to generate a complete self-centered absolutist perspective. If I can accomplish this, it will mean that I am able to identify myself as a consistent self.
But my battery runs low - the mark says 7% now, and it won't be long before it reaches the dreaded 5% limit, after which I am afraid my laptop will go into stand-by mode. It may not, but even if it doesn't, it will start beeping very loudly, alerting me that it is almost out of power. 6% now - I guess there's not enough battery for me to write a self-centered absolutist perspective. 5% now. Wow, the battery downs fast. I'm sorry I couldn't write you completely, blog entry. I am physically able to connect you to your power supply and continue writing, but it is already past 1AM and I'd like to dream for a couple of hours tonight. I wonder if I'll dream at all tonight... it's very nice to dream nice dreams, and to wake up with that feeling of satisfaction of having just been in your own happy place. I don't think I can remember any recent dreams - maybe the last one was the one I wrote somewhere. I'm able to remember it because I'm sure I would if I read it, but I don't remember it right now.
Wow, it still is at 5%. I would never say that this battery charge diminishes linearly over time - it was on 5% as much time as it took to go from about 15% to 8%. Well, now it's at 4%, and there's a little dialogue balloon saying "Critical Battery", "You should change your battery or switch to outlet power immediately to keep from losing your work." 3% now. OK, it's time now. till next time.
Sorry for having unkept you, blog. I'll use you a little in the near future. Really.
P.S: One night later, for the record, I was quite surprised about the dream I had last night. I don't remember almost any of it except for the image of two summer-dressed people, a guy and a girl talking somewhere. Then suddenly, the girl pusher her upper thigh against the guy's crotch, and they began rubbing on each other (sexually, of course). Then another girl joined in and started to rub with the guy from the back, or from the side, I can't exactly remember - but the thing is, strange as it seems, the only image I remember from my dream is some kind of a clothed rubbing-threesome between 2 hot girls and a guy.
But my battery runs low - the mark says 7% now, and it won't be long before it reaches the dreaded 5% limit, after which I am afraid my laptop will go into stand-by mode. It may not, but even if it doesn't, it will start beeping very loudly, alerting me that it is almost out of power. 6% now - I guess there's not enough battery for me to write a self-centered absolutist perspective. 5% now. Wow, the battery downs fast. I'm sorry I couldn't write you completely, blog entry. I am physically able to connect you to your power supply and continue writing, but it is already past 1AM and I'd like to dream for a couple of hours tonight. I wonder if I'll dream at all tonight... it's very nice to dream nice dreams, and to wake up with that feeling of satisfaction of having just been in your own happy place. I don't think I can remember any recent dreams - maybe the last one was the one I wrote somewhere. I'm able to remember it because I'm sure I would if I read it, but I don't remember it right now.
Wow, it still is at 5%. I would never say that this battery charge diminishes linearly over time - it was on 5% as much time as it took to go from about 15% to 8%. Well, now it's at 4%, and there's a little dialogue balloon saying "Critical Battery", "You should change your battery or switch to outlet power immediately to keep from losing your work." 3% now. OK, it's time now. till next time.
Sorry for having unkept you, blog. I'll use you a little in the near future. Really.
P.S: One night later, for the record, I was quite surprised about the dream I had last night. I don't remember almost any of it except for the image of two summer-dressed people, a guy and a girl talking somewhere. Then suddenly, the girl pusher her upper thigh against the guy's crotch, and they began rubbing on each other (sexually, of course). Then another girl joined in and started to rub with the guy from the back, or from the side, I can't exactly remember - but the thing is, strange as it seems, the only image I remember from my dream is some kind of a clothed rubbing-threesome between 2 hot girls and a guy.
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