Life, the University, and Everything

2009-01-14T14:46:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I heard an astronomer talk at Google about genetic algorithms to process satellite image data to detect planets around other stars. Whadda workplace.

Then I played classic Settlers of Catan with Kat and Bateman. It was very casual, we all got ports early on, the game moved quickly, and everyone was close to winning at the end. (I was farthest.) I hope for more Bateman and more Settlers in the coming months.

QotD: Lawrence Krauss

2008-06-03T20:25:00.000-07:00

Lawrence Krauss, from the Q&A (YouTube) at this year's Aurora Forum at Stanford (with Richard Dawkins):

The thing is, at some basic level, what always amazes me is, no matter what people say, they ultimately realize that science is the way to go when it comes to [our concerns?].

For example, President Bush said, "We should teach both intelligent design and evolution, because we should teach students what the debate is all about." Now, that is not an intrinsically stupid statement, surprisingly. (Laughter.) It's actually quite rational. What it represents is ignorance. And not ignorance in a pejorative sense; ignorance to the fact that there is no debate.

But the interesting thing is, when it comes -- when the avian flu became a big issue in this country, what you heard was the President say, "We have to quickly determine how fast it's mutating from birds to humans." You never heard one person in his administration say, "You know, it's been designed to kill us. You know, just, forget about it." (Laughter.)

So, at some point, people understand that when really it comes to the crises, no matter what they say to pollsters, it's amazing to me, that we're so bimodal or whatever, that we can just sort of say, okay, we really need the science, because it's the only thing that's going to save us.

My first earthquake

2007-10-30T20:16:00.000-07:00

I just lost my earthquake virginity!

I was in the bathroom (heh). Eric was downstairs. Some shaking and rattling ensued. He yelled "what was that?" and I said "I think it was an earthquake." We waited a few more seconds, looked around at the lack of property damage, and then said, "awesome!" (Also, Eric started shaking the banister, which is metallic and quite rattling, to try to make me think there were aftershocks, but I wasn't fooled.)

(I'd heard of two earthquakes that I would have been able to feel at Stanford since September 2007, but both occurred during holidays.)

Apparently the US Geological Survey is awesome, because within minutes they had auto-generated information on the quake online. Within 12 minutes it had been "reviewed by a seismologist."

Stanford vs. USC football: Campus celebration

2007-10-07T15:40:00.001-07:00

I was there.

Uptime

2007-09-10T02:20:00.001-07:00

Ah, my reliable Sunday night sleeplessness. ("Insomnia" is too strong.) Once I'm 9-5ing for real I'll have to stop sleeping so late on the weekends -- all that stuff sleep experts say about routine seems accurate.

My latest thought keeping me up was marveling at how much better I've got at talking to people about life and career decisions. I've done an A+ job at this at Microsoft this summer. It's so easy. People love to talk about themselves and to explain what they did to get where they are. (At least, people who feel that they have been successful.) And it's so informative. All the excitements and anxieties I'm experiencing on the cusp of the college years -- other people have had it. And I can learn from them. Fish for knowledge. Soak it all in like a sponge. (Ew, stinky mixed metaphors.)

I've always tried to do this, but for some reason I've never been so active about it. I talked to people during my internships at IBM and APL too, but fewer, and less frequently, and in less depth. Maybe there's something about the environment at Microsoft conducive to naive inquiry -- their intern program is a huge deal, and that probably predispose the employees to chat with the interns like it's on their job description.

But I can't just credit external factors. I bet I didn't ask as many questions when I was 19 and 20 because I was afraid of admitting how much I didn't know. With a bit of experience under my belt, a bit more perspective, and a solid grasp on what it is I like to do, I have no problem admitting to a work acquaintance that I'm not sure how to choose a job or a life after college.

Maybe I give self-growth too much credit. After all, these future planning things just didn't matter as much back then because they were off in the distance. I was more worried about sophomoric friendships. (I tried to make a pun about freshman-year friends and the adjective sophomoric, but it's very late and my cleverness is -- well, not defunct, but inefficient.)

Oh, and a fulfilling romantic relationship has been pretty good for the ego, too. :-)

But I can't ask good questions through unstiflable yawns. I'll try sleep again.

Programming pitfals 2

2007-08-31T15:38:00.000-07:00

This is an easy one from intro C++ class, but I hit it a few days ago and again today. Good habits take time, I guess.

When a method returns a nested type, remember the namespace/parent class name.

Say you have in your .h:
class MyShapeCollection { public: enum ShapeType { Circle, Square, Line }; ShapeType getRoundestShape(); };

And in your .cpp:
ShapeType MyShapeCollection::getRoundestShape() { return Circle; }

You'll get a compiler error like "missing type specifier -- int assumed. Note: C++ does not support default-int." You need MyShapeCollection::ShapeType in the .cpp.

QotD: FotC

2007-08-27T10:28:00.001-07:00

My first QotD that's a comment on YouTube:

Bret and Jemaine are not a band. They are a machine that turns air into comedy. Please have my babies!!!

Buffalo -- for the win!

2007-08-08T16:27:00.001-07:00

The lions could not carry more than 100 lbs of meat back to the wagon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8DDYz68kM

QotD: The Daily Show on Cheney

2007-08-03T00:13:00.000-07:00

I wish I blogged about other things, but this show is on fire.

The scene: Larry King interviewed the Vice President, and Jon Stewart is mocking Cheney's seeming optimism...

Dick Cheney, to Larry King: Remember, success for a politician is fifty percent plus one. You don't have to have everybody on board.

Jon Stewart: Oh my god. The White House is taking the United States pass-fail.

QotD: The Daily Show on Iraq

2007-07-31T16:01:00.000-07:00

The scene: Jon Stewart is checking in with "Baghdad correspondent" John Oliver to discuss the heartwarming story of a win by the Iraq national soccer team. John Oliver was not impressed, arguing that the 1-0 victory was more due to their opponent's poor play. Jon Stewart counters...

Jon Stewart:

No matter what you thought, the Iraqi people were jubilant -- people celebrating in the streets.

John Oliver:

Oh that's right, they were firing guns in the air. In fact, did you know seven people were killed in the celebration. And, I grant you, that was great news for Iraq. It's very rare for a thing to happen here causing so few deaths.

However, I would point out that in the celebration celebrating the single-digit death toll, eleven more were killed.

That, I think wisely, was marked with a moment of quiet contemplation.

Five were killed.

It's meeting time

2007-07-09T11:41:00.000-07:00

My ninth day of work, I have five (yes, five) meetings. I feel like a real employee!

Surrealism

2007-06-18T05:03:00.000-07:00

I'm not usually much for surrealist art, but at the start of my junior year a certain poster caught my eye and quickly enchanted me. I've had it up in my last two Roble rooms to rave reviews from visitors. After two years of wear and tear, this poor paper needs to be retired. So I'm planning to buy a new copy for next year. It's called "Entre Les Trous de La Memoire" by Dominique Appia, and you can see it here.

Wacky Walk, Take One

2007-06-17T02:04:00.001-07:00

I'll be doing the Stanford senior tradition of the Wacky Walk with S at commencement tomorrow. We'll both be carrying guitars on straps. (Our original idea, dressing like characters from the video game Halo, was nixed due to technical limitations. The rules forbid, among many things, "water toys," and we suspect that something like paintball guns would over-qualify.) The funny thing is that, although we're both members of the class of 2007, neither of us is receiving our bachelors degrees quite yet. (But that's okay. Stanford reports its six-year graduation rate, not four-year.)

I'll have pictures of that, of course, but in the meantime, here's one of us three Roble-four-timers at Roble's end-of-year Uberque:

If I look a bit disheveled, it's because I was thrown into an inflatable pool not long before. :-)

The Onion: Evolution

2007-05-31T00:43:00.001-07:00

This isn't the most brilliant piece ever, but I'm posting it because no amount of mockery is sufficient for the anti-evolution forces of ignorance.

I Believe In Evolution, Except For The Whole Triassic Period

Roble wear

2007-05-30T04:36:00.001-07:00

Just finished folding laundry. I found that have I eight Roble T-shirts: the black "Robleatles" shirt we got for all residents; the light blue "Robleatles" shirt for staff only; two of the "Roblevation" shirts the staff wore at the May 06 in-house draw; the "sexiling quadmates since 1918" shirt from 05-06; the "Roble Love" shirt from 04-05; and the two long-sleeved snow trip shirts from this year and last year.

That's almost enough to wear a different one for each of my remaining days in Roble. Suddenly every remaining day as an undergraduate seems overly precious.

Actually I think I might find an appropriate end-of-year occasion to wear all eight shirts as an ensemble outfit. It's no exotic erotic costume, but it would be appropriate considering all of my time here.

Flight of the Conchords

2007-05-24T01:03:00.001-07:00

Today Kat discovered, and then shared with me and blew my mind with, a hilarious New Zealand music/comedy duo called "Flight of the Conchords." This is my favorite, "Business Time." Also see the one posted on Kat's blog.

Sarah Silverman at Stanford

2007-05-23T01:54:00.000-07:00

Sarah Silverman performed at Stanford on Sunday. It was free for students (or rather, paid for by the Speakers Bureau to which we pay annual fees).

As I wrote here last year, I'm a huge fan of Sarah Silverman: her brilliantly written "taboo" material, her confident, disarming voice and facial expressions (which make you think, "is she innocent or insane?"), her spot-on timing and delivery, and her Jewishness.

So, the live performance? I thought it was pretty good. The problem for me was that I'd already seen a lot of her material online. I'd say only about 6 of the 40 minutes were new to me. I don't blame her for having a routine; I know that's how it works in the stand-up trade. And it was still fun to hear the lines delivered in an auditorium of people (even better, Stanford students) reacting loudly -- definitely more fun than watching them on Youtube alone in my room.

My favorite (new) joke of the night was one of Sarah's tests for when she hosts the "MTV Movie Awards" in June:

“You know that movie, 300? Turns out how they got that title was they measured how gay it was. On a scale of 1 to 10.”

The post-performance audience Q&A was very disappointing. Lots of questions like, "So how small is [Sarah's boyfriend and popular late-night show host] Jimmy Kimmel's dick?" Sarah probably thinks Stanford students are all smart-alecky assholes.

However, one question brought out up two very interesting answers from Sarah. The student asked, "You do a lot of material based on topics that are normally considered 'offensive'. My question is, are there any topics that you find offensive?"

The first part of Sarah's answer was that she can't really find any comedy offensive -- she might only think that it's not funny, and therefore bad or not worth it. ("See: Carlos Mencia," I would add.) She went further and suggested a direct relationship between how funny something is and how offensive it can be. I was thrilled to hear her say that, because that exact formulation has been a pet idea/concept/theory of life, the universe, and everything of mine for years. In that vein, Sarah admitted that different people will have different senses of humor, and so will often disagree about what is "offensive".

The second part of Sarah's answer was that she was offended by jokes about women being fat, e.g., making fun of a particular female celebrity for gaining weight. These jokes in particular bother Sarah because, according to her, our society dictates that "fat women don't deserve love." (What a sad idea and a blunt way to put it.) I found that very interesting, not only on a celebrity-trivia level, and also on a thought-provoking social-sciences level.

You can read the Stanford Daily's article on the performance here. Also, a funny writer named Chris Holt had an email interview with Sarah.

In other news... I shaved my goatee. Whee! I had it for about a year. I liked it. I just decided that I wanted some variety this spring/summer. Also, as long ast I don't recognize myself in the mirror, I want to get a haircut now too. (Picture coming.)

Insomnia: when it rains, it pours

2007-05-17T03:31:00.000-07:00

I tried to go to sleep early, a bit before 1am. (Yes, "early": Stanford sleep guru Dr. Dement says the Stanford students on average go to sleep at 2am.) I have an 11:00am meeting and need to prepare, a Spanish assignment I might get around to doing, and I want to pick up tickets to see Sarah Silverman when she's performing on campus next week. Not long after I lie down, thoughts of robot dialog systems dancing in my all-to-active cranium, some people started hooting and hollering outside (maybe chanting?) for some unclear reason. I got up around 1:30am, did some emailing and reading initially to pass the noisy time, then just getting into the work. Finally at 3:20am I wrap up the note-taking and climb in bed. Then at 3:30am a distant but determined BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! ... BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! ... permeates my earplug-and-fan-producing-whitenoise defense. Is that a fire alarm? Or just my somewhat deaf neighbor directly below me with one of his absurd alarm clocks? (Why do they always go off after midnight, anyway? Is he always trying to pull semi-all-nighters? Does he just fail at setting alarm clocks? He certainly fails at waking up to them.) No, yes, it is a fire alarm blaring in Ujamaa Dorm, just a few yards away from my all-too-permeable window. I watched some people evacuate. It's still going 15 minutes later. Too bad for them. And for me.

Programming pitfalls

2007-05-09T18:04:00.000-07:00

This is random, but I've been thinking about the different snags that hamper a CS students' software development. In particular, after the same problem caused me a week of deadlock last fall and again this winter, I thought it would be good to write some of these perennial problems down. I thought of a second on the way home; I'll add more over the weeks as I come across them.

When linking C and C++, remember to use extern.

This has to do with how the compiler annotates function names when compiling C and C++. When you try to link C functions in a C++ program, it will fail unless you mark the C library with the extern keyword. (Instructions here). Most linkers (such as g++) give very cryptic error messages if you don't do this, making it a difficult problem to solve unless you think of this.

Be careful working on one program with multiple computers. If they have different architectures, make sure to recompile everything.

Different operating systems and processors require their own low-level libraries, and your previously-compiled binary executable files probably won't work. This comes up when working on Stanford's file system (AFS), which can be accessed from a wide variety of machines (e.g., i686 Linux, x84_64, Solaris). If I forget which type I was using when I worked before, my program won't run. If you do switch machines, you might need to make clean (i.e., delete all your old compiled object files and recompile them) before compiling the one(s) you actually modified.

The Onion: Something Happening in Haiti

2007-05-01T22:44:00.000-07:00

I think I'm smitten with The Onion's new fake video news coverage:

Breaking News: Something Happening In Haiti

Barenaked Ladies - Crazy Technique (Bathroom Sessions)

2007-04-21T13:43:00.001-07:00

Now lead guitarist Ed Robertson is giving guitar techniques on YouTube. Could I love Barenaked Ladies any more?

NanoPHarm

2007-04-13T01:38:00.000-07:00

The Game: a Stanford tradition of the awesomest sort. The NanoPHarm Roble Game 2007.

The Hives

2007-03-20T13:54:00.000-07:00

I just learned that the stage names of The Hives are Howlin' Pelle Almqvist, Nicholaus Arson, Vigilante Carlstroem, Dr. Matt Destruction, and Chris Dangerous. What awesomely corny clichés! I mean, Doctor Matt Destruction.

The Hives attack the English language with the zeal of non-native speakers who picked it up from punk rock albums and sci fi movies.

Wikipedia has a rumor (rumors in an encyclopedia? *shrug*) that their next album will be titled The World's First Perfect Album.

I love it.

International relations

2007-03-11T18:24:00.000-07:00

Imagine a world where more people asked about which countries have a negative influence on the world are more likely to malign North Korea or Iran than the United States.

You better imagine it, because it's not this world. Israel, Iran, the US, and North Korea are about tied, according to a
world BBC poll.

The Fratellis 'Flathead' (music video)

2007-03-08T14:55:00.000-08:00

The newest addition to my guitar repertoire, this new song by The Fratellis appears in a great new iPod commercial.

For the last week, it's been the reason for me to get out of bed in the morning.

Supreme Court Gives Gore's Oscar to Bush

2007-02-28T15:32:00.000-08:00

Supreme Court Gives Gore's Oscar to Bush
"In a stunning reversal for the former vice president, the Supreme Court ordered that Al Gore’s Academy Award be given to President Bush."

Bush the Scientist

2007-02-23T14:51:00.000-08:00

Sources: New York Times, Feb 23, 2007; Homestarrunner.com, Strong Bad Email #98

Depreciation

2007-02-22T02:45:00.000-08:00

Out of interest, I browsed Dell to compare the current offerings with my Dimension desktop, purchased for over $2,000 right before I went to Stanford in September 2003. With the same 1 GB memory memory, same 17" monitor, same Microsoft Office, slightly more modern processor and graphics card, and Vista instead of XP, a comparable new Dimension would cost $1,385.

If I were buying my desktop now, not counting the 24" monitor I already have, and going a bit nuts on speed and addons like a TV tuner, it would cost about $2100.

I think this computer's still got plenty of life in it (I resist the temptation to use "her" like a car or ship). I've added the 24" monitor (HUGE improvement), but other than that nothing's changed. I wonder when I'll get Vista though. Will I add memory to this computer or get a new one first? Time will tell.

Edit: I just noticed the unintended pun in the first sentence between "interest" and "depreciation." Groan.

Microsoft!

2007-02-21T00:20:00.000-08:00

Made the decision! I'm going to Microsoft! Specifically, I'll be a Software Design Engineer (SDE) Intern in the Windows Live Search group. In Redmond! With hundreds/thousands of interns! And Kat is going to find a job so she can come too! We'll explore Seattle together!

Awesome!!

But first I gotta get through those midterms.

ible before able

2007-02-20T01:56:00.000-08:00

From the folks who brought you "i before e"...

The suffix "-able" goes on roots that are complete words: fashionable, livable, kissable.

The suffix "-ible" goes on roots that are not complete words: edible, terrible, audible.

You're welcome.

(Of course there are exceptions: accessible, tenable. I'll leave figuring out a more general rule as an exercise for the reader, which is another way of saying that I don't feel like doing it.)

QotD: Tetris

2007-02-12T14:07:00.000-08:00

The Stanford Daily's weekly inset, Intermission, interviewing their former editor, current humor columnist, Joel Stein:

INT: What was your favorite way to procrastinate when you were here?

JS: We had Tetris.

INT: Did you play on the computer or with the video game?

JS: We had to use actual blocks back then. One guy dropped them.

Emotional math

2007-02-07T15:39:00.000-08:00

After several pages of matrix multiplications and partial derivatives, I re-discovered my old childhood habit of feeling slightly triumphant when an answer comes out to be positive and a little sad when an answer comes out to be negative (or at least, has that danging minus sign in front of the series of terms). Does anyone else get this? I feel like Ralph Wiggum playing with the mailbox.

One day. One room. Two midterms.

2007-02-05T16:54:00.000-08:00

I just realized that I have an 11:00am in-class midterm in 223A (robotics) and then a 2:15pm in-class midterm in 223B (vision). You'd think two classes with a common course number (223) that meet in the same room (Gates B1) wouldn't do that, but, oh well, what's the expression, "when it rains, it pours"? More like, "when it rains, the robot can't recognize any objects, then it slips and falls."

PS: Learning how to ski was awesome. I am still sore though. I jotted some handwritten notes about my lesson, etc. that I might type up and post.

QotD: Sam Harris

2007-01-29T13:02:00.000-08:00

"There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable."

Microsoft: accepted!

2007-01-27T16:30:00.000-08:00

Microsoft just offered me a Software Design Engineer internship with the web search group. Awesome!

I didn't finish typing up my notes of the interview trip, but now that I know I did OK, I'm more eager to finish and share the details.

I'll talk soon with my recruiter about the details. For instance, how to accommodate me and Kat. (I had told him on Monday that my girlfriend Kat and I were really hoping to stay together this summer after being apart for 5-6 months in 2006, and he was on top of his game enough to mention Kat by name in his email today.)

I'll have about three weeks to make my decision. I got through the screening with Oracle and SAP Labs; they have specific internship offers forthcoming. I'm still phone-interviewing with Amazon data mining in two days. No word yet from Google or Yahoo!.

Stanford Computer Forum Career Fair 2007

2007-01-17T02:39:00.000-08:00

I am ready to rock this career fair. The resume is shinier than ever after mock-interviewing and consulting with recruiters. High school has just about fallen off the horizon, which is kind of sad. (Wait, is "fallen off the horizon" even an expression? Survey says... about 11 results for Googling "fallen off the horizon". (Wow I really overuse, misuse, and abuse parentheses on this blog.) Anyway...)

I've heard that confidence is essential; mine should be boosted by the fact that Microsoft's flying me up to Seattle to interview in Redmond next Monday, and the fact that Oracle already made me an internship offer that I didn't even deign to notice sitting in my inbox over winter break! Heh. Cockiness.

PS: Firefox's spellchecker dictionary doesn't have the word "inbox"?!

PPS: Or "spellchecker"?!?

¿Cómo se dice, coup?

2007-01-16T16:54:00.000-08:00

An unexpected coup on the Spanish front. This just in: I actually placed into third-quarter first year Spanish, not the first quarter of the accelerated two-quarter first year track. So I only actually have to take one quarter of Spanish to satisfy the language requirement. I could switch classes now, but I'm almost definitely better off waiting for Spring quarter, when there are many sections of third-quarter Spanish to choose from, while Winter only has a few offerings.

Lo siento, mi profesora. ¡No hasta mañana!

PS: I finally switched to the new Google-connected blogger dashboard. Time-wasting experimentation ensues.

Winter quarter

2007-01-16T01:07:00.000-08:00

After a week, my shopping list has gone from a whopping nine classes to a respectable five:

CS 140 Operating Systems
Mendel Rosenblum
3-4 units
MWF 10-10:50 (SCPD)

CS 223A Intro Robotics
Oussama Khatib
3 units
MW 2:15-3:30 (SCPD)

CS 223B Intro Computer Vision
Sebastian Thrun
3 units
MW 11-12:15 (SCPD)

SPANLANG 1A Accelerated First-Year Spanish
5 units
MTWThF 11-11:50

MS&E 246 Game Theory with Engineering Applications
Ramesh Johari
3 units
TTh 2:15-3:45

SCPD means the lectures are available on scpd.stanford.edu. (In case you're curious, the fallen four were CS 224M Multi-Agent Systems; CS 262 Computational Genomics; STATS 315B Modern Applied Statistics: Data Mining; and EE 364B Convex Optimization II.)

CS 140 is well-renowned Death By Programming^TM, but I can't be a fully qualified computer scientist without knowing operating systems. CS 223A and 223B are both interesting and relevant; their difficulty is hard to evaluate. (I wish Thrun were offering 226 Statistical Robotics instead of 223B this year, but hey, that's the advantage of having a fifth year after this one. And I'm going to take whatever he's offering; he's director of the Stanford AI Lab and leader of Stanford's 1st-place DARPA Grand Challenge team.) Three CS classes is considered the threshold of sanity^*; with some reservations, I say, bring it on!

In non-CS news, Spanish is a requirement that is probably no longer profitable to postpone; it's superfluous to me but hopefully will be minorly gratifying without costing too much time or sleep. MS&E 246 seems like an interesting class (and not too much work) about multi-agent engineering problems, which is somewhat relevant to AI. I might even audit it if I decide to drop it.

^*Of course it depends on which CS courses. You have to go by reputation, not unit count -- it's a well-known fact that units do not correlate with difficulty at the advanced/graduate level. It's almost laughable that Introductory Spanish is about as many units as CS 223A and CS 223B combined.

QotD: Nonprofits

2007-01-15T02:49:00.000-08:00

In an observation that ought to qualify as "profound" in the context of the sleepy brunch table:

Dan: "I'm trying to start a non-profit... Hopefully I can get it set up in time for the summer."
Me: "Hmm. It's probably a lot easier to start a non-profit organization than a for-profit one."

Haiku of the Day

2007-01-12T18:14:00.000-08:00

hippopotamus
antihippopotamus
annihilation

Song o. t. Day: High School Never Ends

2007-01-03T22:39:00.000-08:00

For weeks now, I've caught a catchy song snippet on the radio and in TV ads. The snippet goes, "wha-oh, uh-oh, ah-oh" over and over (with the occasional "hey!"). This is not easy to Google. I mentioned to Kat that I just heard it in an ad for reality TV show "Beauty and the Geek" (I assume the show is terrible). A minute later she had found it: "High School Never Ends" by Bowling for Soup. Web-savvy girlfriend for the win! I was delighted to find that I like the real-word lyrics of the song as much as the "ah oh" parts. Bowling for Soup sounds like the latest of the Good Charlotte and Wheatus type of unpopular-kid-in-school pop, except good lord is their guitarist huge.

Extroverted introspection

2007-01-03T15:01:00.000-08:00

I'm learning more about myself every day.

iPod observations

2006-12-27T12:10:00.000-08:00

So glad Apple got iTunes and iPod to not stutter between tracks that are supposed to transition seamlessly. That was my biggest pet peeve with them before, especially since my favorite band Green Day has a lot of transitional songs:

Chump -> Longview
Brain Stew -> Jaded
Uptight -> Last Ride In
Jinx -> Haushinka (still my favorite "unknown" Green Day song)
Holiday -> Boulevard of Broken Dreams (including the music videos)
Are We The Waiting -> Saint Jimmy
Give Me Novacaine -> She's a Rebel
Extraordinary Girl -> Letterbomb (debatable)

Also off the top of my head is Modest Mouse's The World At Large -> Float On and Arcade Fire's Haiti -> Rebellion (Lies)

So that's good. The bad news I just discovered is that my cellphone can wreak havoc on my iPod if they are in the same pocket. When I got a call, my iPod volume fluctuated and then jacked to the max and blasted my ears. I screamed and swatted out my earphones like bees.

Kat!

2006-12-16T20:23:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow!

Homecoming

2006-12-15T05:02:00.000-08:00

Or more like, New-York-going. But I'll be sickly-sweet and maintain that home is wherever Kat and I both are.

I have never smiled wider writing HTML code than when I typed the <strike> tag around ~~in absentia~~. :-D

Not unrelatedly, I have learned a tremendous amount about myself in the last year or two. Possibly more than I ever have in any other period in my life. I don't think I've changed so much as gained self-awareness, which can only be a good thing. I can't describe it easily, but if you wanna play shrink sometime, ask me about it.

The telltale pipes

2006-12-09T08:41:00.000-08:00

Ah, I now have a theory for why I've been spontaneously waking up around 7-10am even when going to sleep after 3am (it's seemed to happen surprisingly often for the past few weeks). The heating pipes here, despite any supposed renovation improvements, do tend to make clanging noises when someone increases the flow of steam to their room. (Fortunately my "tower" room has an advantage of thick cement walls that supposedly absorb some noise.) People who wake up at these normal hours probably discover their room to be too cold and turn on their heat. I happened to already be awake to hear it happen this time, but when I'm just slightly disturbed in my sleep I don't remember ever hearing the telltale pipes. Interesting... kinda...

Barenaked Ladies Are Me

2006-12-07T18:50:00.000-08:00

If for some reason you're interested in my opinion of the album Barenaked Ladies Are Me, I found a review that pretty much speaks for me:

Few bands make their best albums when they enter the second decade of their career. BNL have entered that comfortable place where they can make comfortable music to please themselves and the fans they have attracted along the way. ... Barenaked Ladies Are Me is better than Everything but it is not their best- and it does not have to be. ... At this point in their career there is nothing wrong with turning in a solid album of simple pleasures and solid craft. That defines Barenaked Ladies Are Me.

(I disagree about Everything to Everyone, though. It has a lot more songs than Barenaked Ladies Are Me that I would end up singing in the shower or looking up the guitar tabs for.)

Concept of the Day: Cognitive dissonance

2006-12-06T03:53:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure why, but ever since I learned about it psychology class, I have loved the concept of cognitive dissonance. Conflicting thoughts. Beliefs and actions. Reconciliation, rationalization, and attitude change. "A mind divided against itself cannot stand."

I think I tend to use the term more generally than the textbook definition. Maybe there's a better term for the phenomenon. I wish I were an amazing writer so I could put into words how moved I am by it.

Big Game Week insomnia continues

2006-11-30T03:20:00.000-08:00

ARGH some bastards who I can only assume are the Cal band is playing loud trumpets outside. At 3:15AM. Of course I was up anyway (Advantage: night owl!), but still, obnoxious.

Haha, last year the Cal band got their faces rocked when Stanford students on the row mobbed their car. The Cal students had to call the cops to escape. Maybe they're back for more punishment...

Dubious Stanford Tradition Haiku

2006-11-28T04:00:00.000-08:00

Big Game horn each hour
Mocks me through the silent night
I am still working

It's the 109th Cal-Stanford Big Game this Saturday at 12pm, so for the 109 hours before then, the Axe Committee blows a ridiculously loud horn in White Plaza, once every hour on the hour. It's audible through my closed window in my room on the far side of Roble. Thanks again to earplugs for keeping small yet persistent noises like that from disturbing my sleep. (Although the first one I heard was at 2 or 3am, so they started late this year, by my calculation of repeatedly subtracting 24 from 109.) I think this is my favorite example of a ridiculous and somewhat masochistic Stanford tradition. It annoys us without really exciting us. If anything, we should blow horns at Cal students, not ourselves.

It's silly to be up this late, especially because I need my rest to see BARENAKED LADIES in SF to(morrow)night. I almost went to sleep early enough to allow me to attend my 9:30am class in person instead of watching it online later in the day. But instead I decided to bear down on the speech recognizer training/testing code. I hit paydirt: some fantastically low error rates.

Oh, and one of the people I gave a ticket to is the alarmingly-coincidentally-named Kat Hoffman. No, not that Kat. Really.

(And to avoid diminishing their importance by not mentioning them: winter break, Kat and family all over the place, so good!)

Fourth Thanksgiving

2006-11-17T04:37:00.000-08:00

I'm going home for Thanksgiving for the first time since freshman year, which was my first trip home from Stanford. I've been through a heck of a lot since then. I know more computer science than I even knew existed. I found a girl who incessantly makes me giddy with happiness. I've gone from shaving once or twice a week, to shaving every other day, to a goatee. My older cousins have kinda started treating me like an equal, and I've kinda started to like being treated like a little brother. I can drink and gamble and feel smugly responsible when I refrain from doing so. I've gotten way better at guitar (practice practice practice).

Among many other things, I've also learned how to pull all-nighters. Heh.

Blogging for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

2006-11-10T16:59:00.000-08:00

In anticipation of seeing Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, I'm going to label I do that way.

Going to the gym for make benefit glorious nation of Kazakhstan.

Rumsfeld resignation summarized in Mac OSX screenshot

2006-11-08T19:42:00.000-08:00

Boing Boing: Rumsfeld resignation summarized in Mac OSX screenshot

Democrats take House, very close in Senate

2006-11-08T00:57:00.000-08:00

CNN.com - America Votes 2006 - Midterm Elections

Going into the midterm election, a friend of a friend commented, "If the Democrats don't make any gains, I'm quitting my registration with the party. I just don't want to be associated with such losers." Fortunately, he won't have to.

The Bush administration's free ride has come to an end. Here's to a more balanced government with checks on the power of the executive branch.

Everyday People

2006-11-06T03:15:00.000-08:00

Tonight was the Fall Show of Everyday People. I think I have grown to like them more and more every year. My evidence for this is that I was really disappointed when the show ended. ("Aw, that's it?!")

I just hope Shane, the director of the group, keeps his promise to arrange and perform Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy". That song is so amazing, as everyone should know. I think it has the potential to be one of the greatest R&B a capella songs ever, and Everyday People is just the group to do it.

Also, I filled out my Maryland absentee ballot today. I only got it Friday and I'm mailing it Monday -- the last day it can be postmarked and still be counted. (Got it right under the wire there, Maryland Board of Elections!) I know that it's pretty true that one vote can't make a difference, but this is only the second (even-numbered-year) election I've been able to vote in, so it still feels new and exciting. And we have had a few major elections decided by under a thousand votes. I'd hate to feel like a chump if I hadn't voted in one of those.

QotD Twofer: Paul Krugman

2006-11-04T04:45:00.000-08:00

Reading the OpEds in ~~today's~~ ~~yesterday's~~ Friday's New York Times, I was delighted to see heroic economic Paul Krugman use a rhetorical technique that I've only ever seen online: the strike-out.

As Bechtel goes, so goes the whole reconstruction effort. Whatever our leaders may say about their determination to ~~stay the course~~ complete the mission, when it comes to rebuilding Iraq they’ve already cut and run.

The whole article is available here, along with other Krugman columns, which raises my eyebrow because his column is only available on nytimes.com to paying subscribers.

I'm also delighted to see that Krugman was interviewed on the Colbert Report, although it wasn't really that interesting because Colbert steered the conversation to discussing some lies used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Anyone could do that. I'd rather hear Krugman's shrewd analysis of something more interesting.

Finally, I'm delighted that Comedy Central, after their parent company Viacom hasseled YouTube, remains committed to keeping videos of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report freely available online. Delighted, despite their dangerous tendency to contribute to my procrastination.

(Bonus delight: I got to use the phrase "forthcoming forthwith" in an online conversation. And it was so apt -- Kat asked me to send her lots of pictures. If it's wrong to giggle about that, I don't want to be right.)

QotD: Ask A Ninja

2006-11-04T04:21:00.000-08:00

From http://www.askaninja.com/node/2069:

"Pandemics and their prevention"?
I think we need to be more concerned about pandas and their prevention!
Those things are just going to keep getting giant-er unless we stop them!
Give those oreo cookies some gastric bypass!
Isn't there a Jared version of a panda?!
They're gonna eat us out of house and home, if we live in bamboo houses!
People in bamboo houses should NOT -- THROW -- PANDAS!!
Jesus said that!

QotD: George W. Bush

2006-11-03T02:36:00.000-08:00

"The Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: the terrorists win and America loses."

A person who is capable of saying things like that can't be out of the White House soon enough. I just hope that at some point in my life, the American public/media/culture has changed in such a way that a President could NEVER get away with saying something so simplistic, so slanderous, so idiotic, and so contrary to the fundamental values of discourse and deliberation.

QotD: Ohio Elections

2006-11-02T16:57:00.000-08:00

Discussing Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, who happens to be black, and whose controversial election policies could prevent people from voting:

Jon Stewart: "How are minority voters responding to these new restrictions from Blackwell?"
Correspondent Aasif Mandvi: "Well Jon, they're exicted and they're proud. I mean, it's a milestone. For the first time in our history, a black man has a chance to disenfranchise everyone else."
Jon: "I see. Interesting."
Aasif: "I mean, as Marten Luther King Jr. himself would have said, 'payback's a bitch.'"
Jon: "But Aasif, (I don't know that Marten Luther King might have put it like that, but...) Blackwell is also himself running for Governor. Now doesn't that give the appearance of conflict of interest?"
Aasif: "No Jon. It's the definition of conflict of interest."

Start-of-day inhibitor

2006-10-30T13:10:00.000-08:00

No wonder I can never get anything done at the start of the day. In the eight hours I was asleep, I received about 50 emails. Some are simple bounce notifications for the Roble email lists, which are easily ignored; a few are spam; many are widely-broadcast announcements. But at least six merited near-immediate response.

The tranquil summer seems so far away...

Guster? I don't even know'er

2006-10-25T15:38:00.000-07:00

Listening to a randomly generated playlist when Guster's "Red Oyster Cult" blasted in. It was kinda refreshing. I might really like Guster. I know that I sometimes overhear other people playing Guster and like what I'm hearing. So I'm renewing my pledge to give them a full listen-to.

QotD: Myspace

2006-10-24T22:23:00.000-07:00

QFT (which from now on I'll consider to stand for "Quoted for Truthiness"):

"It's like they got together and said 'what do we miss most from the internet in 1998? that's right, embedded MIDI!'"

Oh xkcd, for your unpronouncable name, absurdist and often math-based humor, and tendency to remind me of Kat, you are soon to be sidebarred.

Oh, explanation for the above comic. (Like many of the jokes on xkcd, either you get it immediately or you have no idea what it's about.) Many Myspace pages are set up so that a song begins playing as soon as a page is loaded. For instance, Green Day's Myspace page immediately starts playing a preview/ad for their DVD, Bullet in a Bible; Kat's plays Tullycraft. This behavior is often unexpected and unwanted, and if it happens to take place in a public area like a computer lab, cafe, or classroom, highly embarassing. It usually takes about five seconds to either lower your computer's volume or to find the song/video on the page and hit the pause button. And if you don't remember embedded MIDIs on Geocities pages, consider yourself lucky.

North Korea claims nuclear test

2006-10-09T01:22:00.000-07:00

CNN.com - North Korea claims nuclear test - Oct 9, 2006

Wow this seems pretty bad. As I understand it, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il is legitimately unstable and about the last person in the world that we'd want controlling nukes.

To help myself sleep tonight, I'm rewatching that funny "End of the World" flash animation that went viral a few years back.

Follow-up: Now I read that Republican Representative Mark Foley had sex with an ex-Page who was 21. I find it ironic that Republicans are now desperately trying to push the nation's focus off of this scandal and back onto "the issues," since their one-party government has actually done a pretty poor job on the issues: Iraq is a quagmire that is worsening the terrorist threat; the Geneva Conventions are being supplanted by police-state tactics; the real threats to our security (see above) are hardly being addressed; and while the government runs up the largest budget deficit in history, they repeatedly find room to cut taxes for the richest of the rich. It would be kind of sad if the only way for the Republicans to lose control of one or both houses of Congress is that one of them happens to be a pedophile.

QotD: Rep. Foley scandal

2006-10-03T18:53:00.000-07:00

Official Web site: Foley=vacancy | News.blog | CNET News.com

"Looking for the old Foley official Web site? Too late. The Yahoo and Google caches now have the updated site for the vacant seat. But a Foley search on Congress' Web site brings back 20 pages full. Ah, that's 'pages' as in text."

(That's a reference to current events in US politics, Muscovitya. Fortunately, by the time you get back the midterm elections will be over, for better or for worse.)

My Alma Mater

2006-10-01T22:55:00.000-07:00

I was just checking out Stanford University's homepage.

(Random aside: On campus, all URLs of the form "http://cs.stanford.edu" can be accessed by typing only "http://cs"; the domain "stanford.edu" is implicitly appended. So to get to "www.stanford.edu", I type "http://www". Hehe.)

The page is headed by a banner that contains three images that are randomly chosen each visit. Here's what I just rolled:

The first shows the famous Leland Stanford Junior (pause) Univeristy Marching Band, which is currently on "indefinite provisional status" (kinda like "double secret probation") after tens of thousands of dollars of damage was inflicted on the old Band Shak this summer.

The second shows a bike parked in the arcades of the Main Quad. This year, the Stanford Department of Public Safety chose safety over convenience and tradition by banning bikes from the Main Quad. I actually agree with this move: the quad has way too many blind corners. What if a brilliant X-egenarian professor, walking through the quad, formulating a theory that might win a Nobel prize, gets clobbered by a student flying to get to class on time?

The third is just an aerial view of Stanford. Nothing illegal there... maybe blimps are banned from flying over campus? Still, two out of three is pretty highly ironic in my book.

Classes starting!

2006-09-25T02:08:00.000-07:00

We survived opening week in Roble! It's been a crazy busy week. I've been feeling fatigued from helping so many people with their computers, but the problems are starting to die down so it should be downhill from here.

We staff just wrote "Go Roble! Rock those classes!" type messages all over the greater quad area to encourage the freshmen/transfers.

Fall quarter classes start in seven hours. I am now officially a Stanford grad student -- I went to a student orientation and everything! (But I'm still an undergraduate too.)

Moscow... so hot right now? ... I missed a call from Kat today because I was in the first Roble Staff meeting. How could I know it was her? Still, :-(. I hope to hear from her soon.

Estimated Time of Freshmen: five hours

2006-09-19T03:19:00.000-07:00

Roble 0607 will be a case study that residential staff really needs more than 16 hours to get a dorm ready for over 150 new student arrivals.

So tired...

I wish Kat were here... she would have loved decorating...

End Of Summer

2006-09-18T01:44:00.000-07:00

Kat's gone... Moving into Roble at 11am...

Uj Report

2006-09-13T12:51:00.000-07:00

Halfway through RCC training. Some good stuff, some boring stuff. It feels like highschool because I'm getting about 6.5 hours of sleep a night and listening to speakers all morning and afternoon. Roble's theme is decided: Rob-la-di, Rob-la-da, Life goes on bra -- The Robleatles. Overall mood of the dorm staff is very excited. Mood about Russia is bleh.

Moving

2006-09-05T20:28:00.000-07:00

Tonight and tomorrow I move out of my summer housing -- the Castaño two-room double -- and into my temporary housing in Ujamaa, where I'll live for ten days for dorm staff training before moving into my actual dorm, Roble, which won't open until 9/15 due to the Capital Improvement Program renovations.

In lieu of my own interesting content, I refer my readers to the blog of my friend Stuart Coleman. He covers a lot of topics that I wish I could find the time and motivation to write about.

Snakes on a Plane opening night

2006-08-18T14:39:00.000-07:00

The audience was the best part of the movie. Highlights:

Any time any locale was shown, including during the previews, people suggested that there be snakes there, e.g., "Snakes on a surfboard!" "Snakes in a barn!"

As the opening credits rolled, a guy screamed, "I'M BLOGGING THIS!"

Any time a character asked a question, we answered "Snakes!", e.g.,

Stewardess Snakefood: "I can't believe you're retiring after this flight."
Stewardess Protagonist: "Yea, and you know what I want?" [going to say something like "passengers to not be assholes" or "meet a cute boy"]
Audience: "SNAKES!"

"Paris Hilton" Passenger: "We have to sit in coach? Is it... safe?!"
Stewardess Protagonist: "Sigh...Yes it is safe."
Audience: "No; there are SNAKES!"

[Two young boys are flying without parents for the first time. Stewardess Protagonist goes to comfort them by telling them about a celebrity passenger.]
Stewardess Protagonist: "Hey, I've got something to cheer you up. Do you know who else is on the plane?"
Audience: "SNAAAAAKES!!!"

Every time anyone on the plane went anywhere, people would start spontaneously hissing throughout the theater. Ssssurround sssound! People also made snake shapes and gestures with their arms (a curved palm makes a good biting cobra).

As a boy winced at the pain as a women tried to treat his snakebite, somebody yelled, "Oh here comes the WAAAAH-mbulance."*

During every slow plot- or character-development scene, somebody derisively yelled "BLA, BLA, BLA." (Fortunately there were not many such scenes.)

(More later, maybe.)

Kat!

2006-08-17T13:40:00.000-07:00

Kat is done with Russian school for the summer, and we see each other this weekend after ten long weeks apart!!

What else...

I'm enjoying my work, but it looks like the goals I laid out at the start summer were too ambitious. It takes much more work than my professor or I thought to get a speech recognition system off the ground, precluding my experimenting with more exciting AI aspects of the project. But things are going well and there's still time for more.

I'm seeing the long-awaited Snakes on a Plane at the first screening tonight. I'm so pumped from the giddy internet-fanboy hype that I think it's almost impossible for me to not enjoy the movie.

In nonpersonal news, astronomers are debating the definition of "planet." It's an arbitrary definition -- a rose by any other name and all that -- but the debate touches on a lot of interesting aspects of astronomy. Basically what it comes down to is that Pluto should have just been called an asteroid when overeager astronomers called it a planet in the 1930s. Since then we've discovered at least one body in the solar system that really ought to be a planet if Pluto is: the ridiculously nicknamed "Xena," with tiny satellite "Gabrielle" (good show though).

The new proposed definition of "planet": a body orbiting a star (and not another planet) that is large enough that its own gravity forces it into a nearly round shape. Another good standard to use might involve the solar system's formation, distinguishing the congealing clouds of dust that formed along with the system's star from bodies that formed later. Ideally, the criteria we apply to our solar system should be equally suited to categorize bodies in other solar systems as we discover them.

Whatever consensus forms (the "Elite Eight", or "Pluto and Friends", or a two-tiered "major"/"minor" definition), I hope that it successfully replaces the nine-planet definition. We shouldn't keep the nine-planet system out of tradition or nostalgia. It might ruin our grade-school -- damn I can never remember how to spell this -- mnemonics (e.g., My Very Excellent Mother Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas). But what better message to send about science than this: as new evidence comes to light, scientists reexamine old beliefs and come up with even better ones.

OK Go on treadmills

2006-08-07T14:11:00.000-07:00

OK Go had already delighted me with "A Million Ways," an amazingly catchy song, when I saw their $25 homemade music video, OK Go in the backyard dancing (titled as literallty as the upcoming Snakes on a Plane).

Now they've released the video for their new song, "Here It Goes Again," OK Go on treadmills.

Speechless with glee.

The name "OK Go" is too ambivalent. They should be "HELL YEA Go".

(Thanks to Kat for introducing me to HELL YEA Go and alerting me to the new video.)

A whole wonderful year!

2006-07-31T01:53:00.000-07:00

Happy anniversary sweetheart.

Local Weather Forecast for Palo Alto, CA

2006-07-23T12:23:00.000-07:00

Weather.com says today's high is 102 degrees. Low is a nice 65, so we attempt to blow in lots of cold air during the night, but it's not going to be enough. And I have to move furniture today. Ugh. Worst of all, my awesome new 24" monitor generates a LOT of heat. I mean, the weather is nice and dry here, which means we don't need air conditioning to survive (but that hasn't stopped some students from starting a pointless pro-AC online petition).

I'm gonna get brunch and then migrate over to the showers for the next few hours.

Edit: Things aren't really that bad. The forecast for the rest of this week has highs in the 80s and low 90s. Horaay.

(Sorry it's only a) QotD: Mitch Hedberg

2006-07-23T00:47:00.000-07:00

Mitch: I was at a restaurant. I ordered a chicken sandwich, but I don't think the waitress understood me, because she said, "How would you like your eggs?" So I tried to answer her anyhow. I said, "Incubated. And then raised. And then beheaded. And then plucked. And then cut up. And then put onto a grill. And then put on a bun. Damn! It's gonna take a while. I don't have time! Scrambled!"

Summertime and the bloggin's intermittent

2006-07-19T02:34:00.000-07:00

(Yea, no title would have been better than a trite song reference, right?)

Last summer, living on campus in Mirrielees, working at IBM Silicon Valley Lab in San Jose, cathing two one-hour-long bus rides (7:30am-8:30am and 5:30pm-6:30pm), and courting Kat long-distance, I blogged effusively. My naïve theory at the time was that the simple requirement of sitting at a computer in a quiet office for forty hours a week made it inevitable. I'm spending a huge amount of time in front of computers, just like last summer, so that can't be the reason I'm blogging less now.

At the very start of the summer, I postulated that I blog inversely to the amount of interesting stuff in my life, and maybe my day-to-day was unremarkable. My time here has similarly walked the line between pleasant and dull, so that can't be it.

More likely, the two hours on the bus every day gave me an inordinate amount of time alone in my head to think of and jot down blog post ideas in my spiral notebook. (Although I found ways to fill the time: sleeping through most of the morning ride, listening to The Shins on huge ear-covering headphones borrowed from Shane -- until I dropped my old iPod mini -- and for a few days slavishly reading Catch-22 and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.)

But the most significant factor must absolutely have been Kat, who still writes better on her blog every week than most people do in their entire lives, which surely motivated me to try to do the same while we had few things to go on between us. Now I don't feel that same pressure. I mean, I think about her way more this summer than I did last summer. It's just that we communicate directly now, and not roundabout e-flirty-like.

==change of subject==

Tomorrow will be a busy and exciting work day. I finally have the microphone on the robot computer working, meaning I get to start taking hundreds of audio samples from people saying such things as "Robot, go to my office" and "Where are you going, STAIR? Stop!"

Oh, and my work on STAIR (the STanford AI Robot) is now officially Legit, having been featured in a New York Times technology article (that was also on the front page of nytimes.com yesterday): Brainy Robots Start Stepping Into Daily Life. Not that I needed vindication, but still, I almost can't express how awesome it is that my CS Faculty Advisor, Prof. Andrew Ng, is not only cited in the New York Times as a major player in restoring the United States competitiveness with Japan and Korea in the field of household robotics, but also is pictured teaching a robot how to load a dishwasher! I mean, it's just a staged photo, but still -- awesome!

My two-room-double roommate returns this Thursday. I have to move some of my random stuff out of his room before he gets back, and psychologically prepare myself for not having a single for the next eight weeks.

Oh, and thanks to the motivation from my grad student friend, I've been exercising regularly for two weeks now. Which makes me very tired and occasionally sore but hopefully sleeping better. I think I'm seeing improvement in my stamina already -- I won't hold my breath for the muscle mass.

Sheesh, now I remember how long blogging takes me. Maybe it's a habit worth keeping in check. Or to be more precise, keeping proportional to one's writing abilities. (Yes sweetheart, I'm referring to you.)

QotD: I'm an e-smartass

2006-07-04T02:04:00.000-07:00

A random AIM conversation from months ago that I randomly came across:

[20:12] tlow: can you have 0 ball?
[20:13] JeremyHoffman03: i'm really not sure, tlow
[20:13] tlow: you're a linguist, no?
[20:13] tlow: WHAT AM I PAYING YOU FOR THEN!!!!????
[20:13] JeremyHoffman03: you're paying me for my linguist girlfriend
[20:13] tlow: oh.
[20:13] tlow: 0 balls?
[20:13] tlow: or 0 ball?
[20:14] JeremyHoffman03: i think there are sentences where "zero ball" or "no ball" might be correct, but generally, we're talking zero balls
[20:14] JeremyHoffman03: if you're playing some weird kind of pool where instead of 1-15 you do in fact have a 0 ball
[20:15] JeremyHoffman03: or, if your parents, Mr and Mrs Ball, named you Zero
[20:16] JeremyHoffman03: or, if someone asked you "do you have any kind of ball?" and you said "i have no ball!" (a la "i have NO HAND!" from seinfeld)
[20:16] JeremyHoffman03: or if you were attending a party celebrating the new millenium, and it was the two zero zero zero ball
[20:17] tlow: thank you.

(Sticklers, feel free to replace "new millenium" with "end of the 1900s" -- I was working fast to deluge him with inanity -- and to dislodge your thumbs.)

7000 clicks later

2006-06-29T22:53:00.000-07:00

At some point in Castaño's past, some imbecile thought it would be a good idea to install a "Fire Alarm Equipment" control box in a student room instead of a closet, just because the room would be reserved for deaf students and thus had extra fire alarms. When I (not deaf) moved in this week, I found the box eminating a loud clicking noise approximately every sixty seconds. Just a quick little "tick-tock"; 2880 clicks a day. After a couple days of frantic complaining, technicians came in and replaced the black control box on the wall by the ceiling with an even bigger red control box. But it's silent as, um, a charm.

Kat's in Vermont

2006-06-17T14:44:00.000-07:00

Kat landed in Burlington. (Vermont has an international airport? Who knew?) The Middlebury language pledge doesn't kick in until tomorrow, so we're still in touch. I've changed the description of the link to her blog. I think it's cute, but I'll change it to something else if she doesn't like it.

She'll be posting videoblog (or "vlog", as the a-little-too-web-savvy call it) entries in Russian throughout the summer. I'm hoping to find someone willing to do freelance translation and captioning, but otherwise I'll have to rely on nonverbal cues.

I'm sad that she's gone, but I'm not too worried. She's going to be awesome at Russian and, in the fall, Russia.

Done with all work

2006-06-12T20:26:00.000-07:00

Now it's just packing and saying not goodbye but goodnight to K. Home Thursday night.

T-minus 2 hours

2006-06-09T15:28:00.000-07:00

I just finished another complete problem. This morning I was only able to solve part of another problem. That brings the total to (out of 8 problems) 4 solved completely and 2 solved partially. That's gotta be within passing range, but I'll see if I can finish one of the two false starts or, if I'm very lucky, solve one of the other two.

Update: T-minus 11 hours

2006-06-09T06:09:00.000-07:00

Another 150 minutes, another problem solved. This one had a kinda funny graph full of blue and green lines and red circles as its punchline. Also, after I finally finished coding the program and waited for it to execute, I looked up and realized that the sun was already up. Birds are chirping. Garbage trucks are rumbling faintly through the earth, occasionally puncturing across the distance by dropping something large. Students lie unconscious and unready mere feet away from the alarm clocks that will prematurely evacuate them from their beds and send them to the first exams of Spring quarter, 8:30am Friday morning.

Also, Shane has fantastic taste in music. Gnarles Barkley's "Crazy" is a great song and a great music video (directed by the same guy who did my beloved Jet's "Are You Gonna Be My Girl?" video). No, really, everyone must see the surreal music video. Tell me, am I wrong? (That's a throwback to Shane's musical tastes, by the way. He hooked me on Keb Mo's "Am I Wrong" last summer. My brain works really weird after 6am. Good for blog posts, bad for mathematical proofs and computer programming.)

Last thought before I work/sleep. For the first time in so long that I can't even remember how long, I have a celebrity crush: comedian Sarah Silverman. (Kat's words; and K says she supports the SS adoration.) She's a comic genius, and, although I'm not particularly interested in what she does in music, she's a pretty amazing singer. Thanks to her I have now seen the best and only stand-up comic joke involving vocal harmonies. Stop me if I'm wrong, stop me if I'm wrong. (Shane also tried to introduce me to The Streets, but I'm sorry to say it didn't take until my dad pointed me to "Don't Mug Yourself".)

[Edited at 6pm for a few typos.]

Update: T-minus 13.5 hours

2006-06-09T03:32:00.000-07:00

Things don't look too good. These problems are hard. Heh. Who knew?

I've got 2.5 out of 8 so far. On the last one, I knew what I needed to do but not how to do it; curling up with the textbook on my bed, bouncing back and forth from the index, table of contents, and the text, following links and references, I finally found what I needed.

The following takes place between 5pm and 5pm

2006-06-08T19:45:00.000-07:00

I'm 2.5 hours into my 24-hour take-home final for EE 364 (Convex Optimization). I'm optimistic so far that I'll do well enough to receive credit, but it's not clear yet how much time I'll have for sleep and/or my CS 224N (Natural Language Processing) final project (due Saturday, also at 5pm).

I'm "going dark" until the mission is completed. I'll try to check back into the world briefly Friday evening.

Jeremy's plan for foreign languages

2006-06-05T01:06:00.000-07:00

As inspired by 8-bit Theatre, I want to learn how to say "Sorry, I don't speak $language" and "I wish I could explain, but I can't, because as I said, I don't speak $language" in as many languages as possible. In a global world economy, it pays to be a polyglot smartass.

Many things are awesome

2006-06-01T14:48:00.000-07:00

Stanford CS is awesome -- awesome enough to take an extra year to do more of it. I just got accepted to get a coterminal Master of Science degree in Computer Science. As of this September, I'll be a grad student! Whoah!

Roble 06-07 is awesome. The staff is a terrific group and really fun to be a part of. The dorm is going to be ni-i-ice after this summer's renovation. The one ":-(" in the proceedings is the six singles that are being used as doubles next year in Roble's center wing. (They needed to fit more upperclassmen here to compensate for the doubles-made-into-singles in construction-surrounded Serra and Zapata, and for the Roble rooms that won't be ready in the fall.) Sadly that meant that some unhappy juniors are in doubles and some unhappy sophomores are in mini-doubles. Still, Roble radiates awesomeness and they'll all be happy about it soon enough.

My girlfriend is awesome. She's learning how to write and speak a language with some weird letters and some misleadingly familiar letters, then she's going to be paid to live at Stanford and write about deep things, then she's going a country where everyone's middle name is their parent's name plus "vich" at the end. And she does amazing things with a tripod. I must begrudgingly admit that she's added a lot of cuteness to my world, and that it might just be a little bit awesome as well.

Turning 21 is awesome. Just so I can, y'know... get a regular-looking drivers license... loiter near the slot machines in Las Vegas McCarran Interxl Airport without feeling like an outlaw... rent a car from the on-campus Enterprise at a cheaper rate... and so on.

Coming soon: my family is awesome.

"24"

2006-05-23T00:21:00.000-07:00

A somewhat lacking two-hour conclusion to the fifth season of Fox's "24". I mean, it was still good, but it just didn't hold together like a tight show should. Some of the developments were straightforward "the pieces are in motion and will soon converge" and some of them were unrealistically rapid, violating the show's usually-strong real-time principles. In fact, all season I found myself just yelling at the show's writers via the TV screen:
"That makes no sense! How could security be so low at CTU to allow multiple successful infiltrations by assassins in a single day?"
Or,
"How could Jack Bauer spend six hours, kill over a dozen people, watch several good people die, and hijack a plane, all in order to secure an indescribably vital object, and then, once he finally delivered it to CTU and it was about to be used to save the day, leave it almost completely unguarded for fifteen minutes?!"

Usually, the unexpected, improbable twists are what make "24" the exciting roller coaster ride that it is. But when it approaches the level of reverse-deus ex machina -- where the authors, rather than extricate the protagonists from difficult situations, just blatantly screw things over to create more conflict for them -- the ride becomes one of those uninspired dead drop/free-fall towers. I get it: we're supposed to be jerked around. But give me subtle twists and supple turns, not just an obnoxious lurch.

Still, a well-spent 24 hours.

My favorite moment of the finale was a Pulp Fiction-esque bit of dialogue. Jack Bauer's only chance is to direct a young Petty Officer Engineer Rooney over the phone to steathily stab a terrorist watchman. The nervous Rooney gathers his courage, creeps up slowly, and manages to cover the terrorist's mouth. The terrorist struggles, but finally Rooney lands the stab. Jack, hearing the fight, yells into the phone, "Rooney, what's your current status?" Rooney, slumping to the ground from shock, gulps, "My current status is... he's dead."

Same random content, fleshed out a bit, now with title

2006-05-22T02:15:00.000-07:00

British slang is really cool. Especially when used by The Streets. (When you're out sharking for really fit girls, you might be able to pull a girl who's rude if you if you don't too pissed.) UrbanDictionary.com is useful for understanding it. It was fun to talk to some real live Brits at K's house (they were friends of K's birthday-celebrating sister).

Next year's Roble staff is a fantastic bunch, based largely on a bowling trip with about half of them last Thursday. (In the second game I bowled 106, narrowly beating my score from Spring Break.) I'm really looking forward to working with them.

My summer's looking decent, albeit lonely: after finals and tearful goodbyes, I'll be going home for a week. I turn 21 on June 25th, hopefully celebrating with some friends on the tail of their post-graduation celebration in Vegas. (Make no mistake; for these friends, that means a weeklong bridge tournament, not bars and strippers.) Ironically, K will be long-gone to the Russian Gulag in Vermont and thus unable to celebrate with me in her sketchy hometown. Anyway, the next day I'll return to Stanford to live with/next to old drawmate Robert, where I'll work on a groundbreaking (we hope) AI research project for ten weeks. Near the end, K will make her triumphant partial return to the English language and temporary return to the Greatest Farm on Earth. To finish off the summer, I have just a few days off between research and the staff bonding weekend, then a week of RCC training, then freshmen orientation, then classes start.

The Roble Musical was amazing as always. Guys and Dolls this year, with all the songs, a low-key five-person orchestra, and some funny anachronisms and inside jokes to maintain interest (Nathan Detroit tells Adelaide he meant to get her a diamond-encrusted iPod for their anniversary; Sky Masterson, suggesting that Sergeant Sarah Brown join him for dinner in Havana, Cuba, asks, "Where would you have us eat, Stern Late Night?"; during the Havaba dance number, Mark dressed as Swedish pop artist Gunther stops the music to deliver the lyric/catchphrase, "Tutti Frutti Summerlove"). Special praise to Hofmeister (a smooth-talking Sky Masterson) for bringing greater glory to the "Hof-" name. (Can you believe there's a Class of 2010 Jeremy Hoffman?! Oh you admissions officers, surely you realize that there can be only one!! My plastic swords are ready.)

Incidentally (has this word become too vapid?), happy 21st birthday to my friend, the conductor of the Roble Musical (who also pitched in on two of the six instruments played), one of the better RAs, and potentially a key player in my 21st birthday come June.

I'm still over a week behind in one of my classes, but I'm doing pretty well in the other two, so I should end up all right.

Procrastination through busyness

2006-05-09T01:43:00.000-07:00

The way I combine perfectionism and multitasking sometimes amazes me in how well it delays me in getting stuff done. Several times in the last few days, I have carefully composed an email, held off on sending it while I alt-tab to another application, use the bathroom, or go get food, then returned to pore over that same email, questioning every word choice and sentence phrasing. Even as I write this post, I have three half-written emails minimized in my taskbar, and I'm stopping to write this blog post. I think I need to work on shooting from the hip and moving on with my life.

Super Mario reenactment

2006-05-08T02:29:00.000-07:00

It's kinda long and boring if you're not a Nintendo kid, but this makes me giddy like only someone who was five years old with a Nintendo can feel.

Oh Internet, have I told you lately that I love you?

Same Ol', Same Ol' -- just more of it

2006-05-07T15:25:00.000-07:00

I've back to full health, which is wonderful. Just a bit of hay fever -- downright refreshing compared to my past sinus and stomach woes. I do have a nagging feeling of being a bit tired all the time. My sleep seems to cap at about 90% -- I just can't get that last 10% of restfulness.

I also got selected to be RCC (Resident Computer Consultant -- a dorm staff position specifically for helping students with their computers) in my beloved dorm, Roble. It should be a blast to be on staff next year.

Now I'm facing a seemingly insurmountable, um, mountain of work to catch up on EE 364, a class that was already hard before I stopped following it for two weeks.

Also there's the urgency of having only 5-6 more weeks before K goes to Middlebury and then Moscow. Losing two-plus of these short weeks to sickness was tragic; being well now but having the missed homeworks weighing me down is added depression.

The summer may still be a bit lonely, but at least I found a drawmate: ex-{3B,penthouse}-mate Robert and I have joined up.

So, yea... same old Stanford life right now... just trying to/being forced to pack more of it in to make up for lost time.

Rumors of my health have been slightly exaggerated

2006-04-27T06:41:00.000-07:00

I'm afraid there's still something going on with my throat and/or sinuses. I haven't slept soundly through the night in a week, despite using every home remedy on the market. This night's/morning's cocktail will be Robitussen, warm water with salt for gargling, hot tea, nonperscription allergy medicine with decongestant, a cough drop, some tissues, and a venting blog post. No NyQuil; I ought to wake up in far less than eight hours. That heavy machinery won't operate itself. (That's a little drug warning label humor for you.)

Coterm applied

2006-04-25T03:52:00.000-07:00

Whoo, I just finished an application to the Stanford Computer Science Graduate School! And I did it without any direct involvement of my parents! To be sure*, I owe both my parents greatly for getting me into Stanford and teaching me how to take care of business, but it's refreshing to know that I'm not stuck in the penumbra of parental involvement that dominated my college application process -- they taught a son to fish, as the idiom goes, rather than cooking him fish sticks.**

One might think that applying to coterm in the same department that one*** is undergraduating**** in would be simple. Not the case-- not only do they make coterm applicants go through everything non-Stanford-undergrads have to go through to apply to a masters program-- but also, the CS Graduate Admissions web pages and handouts contain incomplete, ambiguous, and blatantly contradictory information. Most egregiously:

The main info page for graduate admissions says, explicitly and unequivically, The Computer Science Department does not provide paper application and requires all CS applicants to submit their application online. Elsewhere it states, "All application materials must be submitted on-line [including recommendations], no paper materials will be accepted except official transcripts."

In a packet of papers available in a bin labeled "Coterm" outside the CS Admissions Office, on the back of the first page, in a list titled "The CS Graduate Admissions Office must receive the following documents by the deadline," the first bullet point reads: "Completed Coterm Application Form with the signature of your undergraduate department representative - DO NOT complete an online application."

Guh*****-gah-wha?! But apparently the run-on sentence on that paper is right and the coterm app is an unlisted exception to the dire anti-paper warnings everywhere else.

Yesterday I had a brief moment of terror when I couldn't find any confirmation that I had requested an official transcript mailed to the CS Admissions Office from the Registrar, or that it had been sent. Then Axess wouldn't load. Finally it did load, I found the "Official Transcript History" menu option, and confirmed that it was sent weeks ago.

OK, now to go to sleep so I can wake up early and deliver the application without a hitch. My chances of acceptance are very high as long as I cross the finish line without blowing it.******

Footnotes:*******

* Is there a more pretentious way to start a sentence?
** I haven't had fish sticks in years; it must be Mitch Hedberg's twice mentioning of the food (once re: fishing, once re: dental tartar) that made me think of it at all.
*** In this sentence, "one" is used to refer to two distinct hypothetical people, which might make one wonder whether the sentence ought to read, "One might think that applying to coterm in the same department that two is undergrad..."
**** I really like making up words that one could imagine two using.
***** K used to "guh" all the time; now, nary a "g-". I guess I'll take... credit... for that?
****** Not to jinx myself, but I have all the right qualifications in spades, with some spillover into hearts and diamonds. And if I don't get in, I can re-apply in the fall and winter quarters of my senior year (although completing the masters in a 5th year would get harder and harder).
******* Sorry, I read some article (probably about Magic, the game I most love and least play) where the author had Fun With Footnotes(tm), and tonight******** I was delirious enough with exhaustion and sense-of-accomplishment to think that this would be a good idea.
******** Technically my mom is already awake and probably driving to work at the time I publish this, but to me it's slightly more "tonight" than any other concise time descriptor.

Situation grows hairy

2006-04-23T00:35:00.000-07:00

Horaay for the average cold lasting only 5-7 days! (But boo for those first few days absolutely annihilating me, seemingly every time I get a virus.) The silver (actually, brown) lining: after sickness-induced apathy kept me from shaving for five days, I've decided to see if I can grow a little goatee. Pictures forthcoming.

Admit Weekend

2006-04-20T12:23:00.000-07:00

The largest Admit Weekend ever: 1,400 prospective Robber Barons (the mascot we shoulda had instead of a color.) By comparison, Stanford has about 1,600 freshman.

Too bad I'm still under the weather. Jeremy Hoffman of the prospective class of 2010 is coming to Admit Weekend. Name twin powers activate!!

Gray Spring

2006-04-17T22:56:00.000-07:00

Some things are going well (including one thing I'm not at liberty to discuss), but others are a little dicey. I dropped one class last week, as planned (the General Game Player AI class), but I still have a very large amount of work this week. Then today I came down with one of those ever-lovin headcolds. Going to sleep at the embarassingly early hour of 11:00pm to try to beat this thing, and because consciousness hurts right now. I have ever so much to do tomorrow and Wednesday.

I just wish Spring would come to Stanford. Partly cloudly, occasional showers, highs of 65-70 is not what I signed up for.

Some filler about Windows Vista

2006-04-12T15:03:00.000-07:00

Today I saw a demo/discussion for Windows Vista the next incarnation of Windows's operating system. It has some security improvements, interface improvements, etc., but the most exciting feature to me is fully integrated search within the operating system. There's a search box within the Start Menu -- the cursor goes to the search box immediately upon clicking the Windows start menu icon or hitting the Windows keyboard key -- and it can find anything. To run notepad, you can hit Start Menu, type notep--Enter. To change your desktop background, you can hit Start Menu and start typing "desktop" "background" "wallpaper" or whatever, and the appropriate system properties will be displayed for you to choose from. It should save precious seconds off of common actions for power users and help normal users too. (It probably won't help beginner users much, since they won't even know what to search for.)

I've been meaning to write about finally getting to meet Nick Lewin, but I haven't had a chance to give him his proper dues yet.

One week into Spring Quarter

2006-04-10T02:32:00.000-07:00

Lots going on. For now, here's my shopping schedule (5 classes, one likely to be dropped, plus a work-free seminar)

MW 11-12:15
CS 224N Natural Language Processing

M 4:15-5:30
Broad Area Colloquium for Artificial Intelligence, Geometry, Graphics, Robotics and Computer Vision

W 4:15-6:05
CS 227B General Game Playing
(It's less fun and more work than it sounds. You don't really get to play games. You get to write a computer program from scratch that can at least somewhat intelligently play any game you give it the rules and goals for. The whole field is only a few years old. It has applications to business, or something. But also you get to pit your programs against each other in Chess/Othello/Chinese Checkers/Any-Game-You-Make-Up Death Matches, which is exciting if you're a capital-N Nerd.)

TTh 9:30-10:45
CS 227 Reasoning Methods in AI

TTh 9:30-10:45 (see also, CS 227 above; but this one is taped and available online)
EE 364 Convex Optimization
(You know you're playing in the big league when you're taking a 300-level class that lists as a suggested preqreq a 200-level class you haven't taken that itself lists a 100-level prereq you haven't taken. Uncoincidentally, I might take EE 364 credit/no credit.)

TTh 3:15-4:30
SlavGen 147 The Age of War and Revolution: Russian Literature 1900-1953
(The seemingly impossible, and certainly unexpected, feat of me and K taking the same class at the same time may actually happen this quarter. This class looks to be interesting and stimulating, at least for a literature course as a techie, and looks to satisfy the two General Education Requirements I have left without too much hassle.)

BONUS SECTION:
I just bought a live recording of Bill Kirchen's extra-long rendition of "Hot Rod Lincoln" on iTunes. His gimmic -- brilliant, IMHO -- is that, in the middle of the narration of the car race, he "passes" several dozen famous musicians, each time playing one of their distinctive licks: Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Johnny Rivers, Chuck Berry, Elvis, Deep Purple, The Beatles, The Sex Pistols, Jimmy Hendrix... on and on.

My dad's acquaintances with Kirchen, and took some guitar lessons from him. My dad took me to see him perform once when I was kinda young (maybe 12?). In the middle of the set, Kirchen spotted us and said, "Folks, it's been about 20 minutes here since I've played a truck drivin' song. My friend Steve there tells me his son -- I'm sorry, I don't remember your name [I yelled "Jeremy" but he probably couldn't hear] -- would like to hear a truck drivin' song by the name of 'Nitro Express.'" That was one of the most exciting things to happen to me as a kid outside of Disney World -- meeting the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was tops.

Ixnay on the ee-R-E-jay

2006-04-03T20:41:00.000-07:00

I just realized that I ought to censor my blog post from a few days ago. Those are state-controlled secrets that I'm not allowed to share with the outside world.

Edit: To clarify, I don't mean my scores, I mean my allusions to specific questions on the test I took.