Electrical engineering gets sketchy...

I can just see the EE geeks drooling now. What happens when you combine lasers and Spears: Britney Spears guide to Semiconductor Physics.

Thursday I went to the GSC Thanksgiving dinner at Wilbur. Most food I'd ever eaten at Wilbur... and definitely the most grad students I'd ever seen in one place. While it's a well known fact that free food is the most surefire way to lure grad students out of hiding, it's still impressive to see. The food itself wasn't bad, although the mood was definitely changed this year--they were carefully portioning out exactly three pieces of white meat to everyone.

Which was definitely made up for on Friday. Yune and I headed down (up?) to San Francisco for dinner in North Beach and improv on the bay. BATS is always fun, especially when they're facing off in teams. And San Francisco is not Palo Alto--at 11 PM, much to our joy, Ghiradelli Square was still open. Somehow Yune had lived in the Bay Area for three years and been to SF five times and still never experienced Ghiradelli, so naturally we rectified this.

On the Caltrain we ran into these people from Notre Dame who were so impressed and amazed by, well, the Caltrain. Apparently South Bend lacks major commuter transit. I felt so jaded. Of course, we were so impressed and amazed by a football team with a winning record...

Poor little mammoth...

Proof that English-language sites don't have a monopoly on bizarre Web phenomena. Lifted from Becky's away message.

"The tiny mammoth wanted to fly. He tried and he tried but he couldn't fly. He went and cried to a duck, and from the fifth floor he made him jump off... What happened? Shit. The mammoth turned to shit..."

Tuesday, 11 hours.
Wednesday, 0 hours.
Wednesday night-Thursday, 12 hours! So exciting...

Upperclass dorms are so dead silent over Thanksgiving. It's so eerie without the familiar pot and loud guitar riffs or boisterous drinking that usually marks this end of the hall...

Everything's funnier when you haven't slept

Ragtime was really the highlight of my weekend. It was fun, albeit ridiculously crowded. Come on, people, Big Game weekend isn't for dancing, it's for getting drunk, defacing public property, and rioting. When will you learn?

Ragtime was also the only time I emerged from my room, save for eating and my Lair hours. Mr. Othello and I were having some quality moments.

Saturday, 3 1/2 hours.
Sunday, 3 hours.
Monday, 1/2 hour.

OK, so I ducked out of our all-night mad coding party to go stop by a neighbor's party. It really amazes me how some people can't even conceive of having to do work on a weekend. (I've long since gotten over the fact that some people never seem to have this problem... but it seems you'd have to have a pretty narrow social crowd not to be aware of this.)

What really irks me though, are the people who think engineering is some sick addiction, that we really do want to spend hours on end parked in front of our computers and problem sets. We're people too, dammit... and it's not that we don't want to have lives.

That takes care of rants for the weekend. Today Othello was due at noon, thus ending our computer-shackled bondage. We'd all gotten together for one last coding party and we'd all gotten so little sleep we were getting to the point where anything was funny. So around 11, we make the discovery that our AI player gets completely wiped out, spectacularly losing on some of the test cases we're graded on. Naturally, with the deadline approaching we all start freaking out, frantically digging through our project to find any blaring bugs. At 11:55 we decided to replace our training weights, the results of a week's painstaking work, with the hand-tuned weights Guy randomly chose a week ago. But it still didn't seem to be working. Panicked, we submitted and went to lunch, thinking we had just bombed big time on this project.

So imagine our surprise when we go to examine what we did wrong and find out... we were looking at the wrong side! We'd gotten all worked up about the fact that Red was losing 0-91 and forgot that, well, we were White. And those random weights? In ten seconds, Guy had outfoxed three days' worth of reinforcement learning.

In short, it all comes down to this: machine learning is only better than human learning because machines don't need sleep...

The sun shines brighter after a good night's sleep

Friday, 8 hours. W00t! In a bed, no less.

The main reason, admittedtly, was the Microsoft interview I had this morning. Which seemed to go well. Though it's impossible to tell with these things, because like so much, it depends on the curve. At least with an exam you know how many points each question's worth.

Why do I feel so ridiculous carrying a backpack, wearing a shirt and tie?

I don't have to sleep till Monday now... in theory at least...

Now there's a job idea...

I must say, I never considered this...

Thursday, 4 hours. In a chair. Accidentally.

What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

As with all great rhetorical questions, some engineer has come up with the answer: 24 miles per hour. For those who don't get the reference...

Tuesday, 6 hours
Wednesday, 4 hours

Proof that Windows is the Matrix...

and Bill Gates as Morpheus? Messed up on so many levels. Oh what I wouldn't give for video of this...

Sleep log for the week so far:
Monday, 5 hours

Othello, that dastardly moore of Venice that he is, has come for my soul. Won't he be disappointed to find it's being eaten by my *other* CS classes. Maybe he'll just settle for my sleep instead.

In other news, I've now regained all my worldly possessions from Japan and my computer too. And by "regained", I mean they're all unpacked. They actually arrived three weeks ago at the height of midterms and just sat in boxes until procrastination overrode laziness and I started putting stuff away. It's a great way to procrastinate: when I'm too lethargic to work, I just start cleaning my room. Before too long I'm so sick of it I'm almost psyched to do work.

And it's Big Game week. I'd like to go to Big Sing and Gaeties, but I'm not really pumped up about the game, especially given that we just lost horribly to a team Cal defeated not too long ago. I never really did figure out what was so thrilling about sitting around watching a game that mostly consists of waiting for a 20-second plays. Ah well... But we'll see what Mr. Othello has to say about those plans for this week.

Boosting that does something useful

As if I hadn't had enough AI for the day, Erika pointed me to a great procrastination tool: Gnod, a site that recommends bands, authors, or movies based on what you tell it you like and don't like. The scary thing is, I think I almost understand how it works. It also has a nifty feature that generates maps to show how similar two items are. (Did you know Matrix fans tend to hate Sleepless in Seattle? Or that Michael Crichton readers tend to love Dr. Seuss?) Combined with iTunes and the most excellent hack MyTunes you can wile away hours discovering new music. If only iTunes let you search across your network of users... then it'd be almost like KaZaA...

Why didn't I have my camera?

As I was biking by Forsythe (taking the patented "funk-ass way" back), I saw this odd neon green sign that caught my attention. So I paused to look at it. It said "Disaster Preparedness Drill In Progress: Pneumonic Plague Scenario". Of course, the first time I read it in my sleepless delirium I thought it said "bubonic plague". But still, of all the euphemisms you could think of for "bioterrorist attack", plague definitely isn't top on the reassuring nothing-to-worry-about-folks-everything's-under-control list--it sounds so epic. I looked around, half expecting hazmat squads and people in gas masks, but didn't notice anything unusual; Forsythe seemed its usual sedate self.

So rest assured: if the black plague makes a comeback, your phones will still work.

what have i done to accrue such bad computing karma?

So i finally got my sick desktop back. I went to go set it up, thinking it'd just take an hour or so.

Mistake #1.

10 PM. Plug it in, boot it up, install that RPC patch. Note this was the first thing I did.
The CD instructs me to reboot and run Windows Update. Which I do, since there's another RPC patch I need. Only trouble is there are like 25 MB of "critical" updates I need for this machine. Which, of course, I download like a good little Microsoft lemming.

It also turns out I need to activate Windows. Fine, I muse, as the updates download. Mistake #2. So I painstakingly key in that ghastly 30-character product key, only to be rejected. I need Microsoft's explicit permission to use Windows. So I call and start reading off an even longer 45-digit number over a cell phone. Mistake #3. The automated voice couldn't understand me so I eventually start typing in numbers the old-fashioned way. I finally get them all in when the voice decides to disconnect me, as if to spite me for not wanting to talk to it.

When I finally get a human to talk to I got the third degree, since this being my second activation in the past month, it looked as if I either got my kicks by installing Windows or was pirating Windows on three machines. I'm reminded why I never bought Office XP (or 2000, for that matter...) Eventually, Microsoft bestows on me the privilege of running Windows by giving me another 30-digit code to enter. I finally reboot. Everything's happy. I even download a firewall and antivirus software to complete my newfound sense of security. Mistake #4.

All of a sudden my Internet connection dies. Sort of. OK, I figure, as a seasoned Windows user, I'll just restart. Mistake #5. Windows doesn't want to reboot completely. So I start freaking out in my sleep-deprived state, suspecting this has something to do with that RPC vulnerability. I shut down the computer and start hunting around for an antivirus disc to boot from, which gives me a clean bill of health. E-mail sent to RCC at 1 AM reporting suspiciousness.

Next I wanted to determine that it wasn't Windows screwing up. So I boot into Linux (off a CD, since the people who fixed my computer decided I wouldn't need the Linux that was on my hard drive and conveniently obliterated it for me), to find, lo and behold, that I can't connect from there either.

Eventually I discovered that I can boot...every 3rd or 4th try. And I eventually found out the reason why this minty-fresh Windows install is flaking out is that it can't connect to some important server. And the reason it can't connect is I've been blackholed. (Nice of them to tell me... eventually I was moaning to Jim, an RCC from outside Potter, who tipped me off to this underhanded practice.)

Yes, me, the innocent CS major who installed all the patches, and even firewalled off the RPC ports to make sure, got blackholed. See, during my half-hour Microsoft lovefest with Windows Update and Product Activation, ITSS port-scanned me and discovered one of the holes hadn't been patched yet. So they put me on the blacklist--even though I closed off that port entirely afterwards. It seems I fixed the problem too well with my firewall.

So now it's 2 AM and I'm sitting here, grumpily listening to 98 Degrees from "Benny-pod" because iTunes is the only Internet app that still works. (Clearly our priorities are in line.) I'm waiting for ITSS to scan my system through the little back door I left for them. But even though it took them only half an hour to block my system they report it may take 25 hours for them to unblock it.

If this is what I'm like on 5 hours of sleep this week is going to be very interesting...

Word...

Courtesy of Yune: The End of the World! Why I find this amusing I don't know... perhaps because it's at least as plausible as the last Matrix movie...

Maybe this election will be fun too...

The Democratic primary's shaping up to be as amusing as the 2000 election... the debate in Detroit was getting to SNL-grade material

GOOD DAY

Attn my friend,
With due respect and huminity I propose this to you. I wrote to you last time no response and I decided to write you again.

Now that my filter catches messages like this, it's easy to miss how amusing spam can be. Just think of all the opportunities I'm missing out, like this "businness proposal" to get access to the funds in a mysterious Benin bank. I've heard all about how I can Get 12 CDs for the Price of 1!, just about every Home Business Opportunity, or how Wk can make it longkr (damn those scientists for discovering people can dkciphir silgthly gorbled werds... now every spammer's doing it). But the conversational tone of this guy struck me as nice...and it almost fooled my spam filter.

The spammiest word in the entire message? Letter, whose presence my filter says indicates a 96% chance of being spam. Isn't that sad? Apparently the whole notion of letter-writing has vanished from my contacts' e-mail vocabulary... Other particularly spammy words: discovery, respect, and verification. Now what does that say about how academic my e-mail is?

Looking for the perfect woman?

Why bother with degrading beauty pageants, wasting your time on humans, when you can drool over virtual women instead? Before you think this might just be some unprincipled shallow competition for male computer geeks who need to get out more, consider the stringent criteria for virtual models:

"They should not have taken part -- not even as extras or cameos -- in pornographic films, shows or plays nor have made statements ... in any way out of tune with the moral spirit of the competition."

Thank you for the interview

Thank you so much for taking the time to interview with me yesterday. I enjoyed the opportunity to meet you and your colleagues, as well as visit your worksite. I was impressed with the quality of the facilities and the overall attitude of the employees.

After speaking with you, I am even more enthusiastic about the opportunity of working as a code monkey. Though I have enjoyed my previous experience as a student researcher, the workload of current projects and the non-stop, high-stress philosophy of the design teams you described offer an exciting new dimension in software engineering for me. I work well in a fast-paced, dark windowless environment, and appreciate the opportunity not only to code but devote my entire day to it from dawn to well after dusk. My experience in CS 221 and 248 exposed me to this "work-life balance", and I feel confident that I can apply that experience to the demands of this position.

Thank you for considering me for the code monkey position. I look forward to hearing from you. Please express my appreciation to your colleagues for leaving their screens to meet with me and share their perspectives. In the meantime, good luck with your weekend coding marathon!

Trick. Or is it treat?

Best thrill of the morning:
Submitting our CS 221 program at 11:59:58 AM, yes, that's right, two seconds before it's due. Talk about pressure... cause unlike every other submit script I had to manually type in everyone's e-mail addresses as the clock was ticking... But thus ends a sleep-depriving chapter of the month.

Best thrill of the night:

The pictures are all up for your viewing pleasure. Operation Haunted Cake was a definite success as we celebrated Cheng's graduation from adolescence. This guy's going to have his masters before he can drink...it seems somehow wrong. I feel like such an underachiever...