Forrest set up our wireless internet today, so we are no longer leechers. I wish to thank the NETGEAR network for their bandwidth while we were connectionless. We also got my server back up and happy; thanks go to Jerry for hosting my site in the interim.
Categories: computers
Yesterday my high school friend Kurt (who has an internship with Boeing in the area) dropped by to visit. He brought over The Life Aquatic, which was interesting... but I think I liked it, overall.
Kurt, Forrest, and I wandered down to the clubhouse afterward. We showed him around, then chatted for a bit. It was drizzling off and on, so the clubhouse's covered spa was especially inviting. I rolled up my jeans and dangled my feet in the spa — so warm! Kurt had to go back home, but Forrest and I stayed at the spa.
Digression to how much shopping for swimsuits sucked earlier that day. I went to four different stores looking for a swimsuit that fit. One of said stores was a swimsuits-only store, with quite a selection. None carried anything that really fit, and the ones that were closest were really expensive — we're talking $60-80 here, for a freakin' swimsuit. It looks like if I want a swimsuit, I'm going to have to ask my mom to sew me a custom one.
Back to dangling my feet in the spa. Since the beginning of the day, I had wanted to go in the spa; hence the depressing smimsuit-shopping. And now with it right there, I was very tempted to just jump in anyway, fully clothed. I eventually talked Forrest into being ridiculous with me; we emptied our pockets and jumped in. Being defiant* and all, I enjoy doing such things that aren't normal per se by society's conventions. But we double-checked the listing of all the spa's rules (including a ban on anyone with communicable diseases using the spa), and in the whole long list, it said nothing about proper attire (or attire at all, really, so it doesn't necessarily ban skinny-dipping, either).
While in the water (sooo warm, mmmmm, may have to go back...), street clothes really weren't much less convenient than a regular swimsuit. It probably would have been more annoying if we'd been in a pool proper, doing actual swimming and such, but for lazying about in a spa, it was no big deal. And the walk back up from the clubhouse to the apartment was surprisingly non-icky. It was drizzling again by that time, but we were already soaked. Wind would have been bad, though, I s'pose.
All in all, I recommend the jump-in-the-spa-anyway method of spending a Sunday evening. :)
* My MSN project lead called me "defiant" after I made a wallpaper for my work machine that said — written in the shape of a flower — "no flowers." He had told me the previous day that I could do any sort of customizations I wanted to my computer... except that flowers were forbidden. Thus "no flowers." He's a cool guy. :)
I filled out a blog survey being conducted by MIT. They're looking for a larger sample size; go take the survey!
They have questions about you, your blog, your blog's links, other forms of online communication, the kinds of people you know, and how you know them. I'll be interested to see what their final data shows.
One thing I found surprising about my own answers was on the last question, asking about whether I knew people in a given profession, how I knew them, and whether we had met on- or offline. A large number of the professions I did know were family, and I met every single person offline.
So I'm now settled into my corporate housing apartment here in Redmond, rooming with Forrest and an acquaintance-becoming-friend, Shane. We don't have internet per se — I blog now via cantenna-stolen wireless. If I'd had more reliable wireless, I would have posted more detailed entries about the various goings-on of the drive up, settling in, and starting work as a Microsoft SDE intern. But I didn't, so instead I'll just give a brief overview of what's been happening.
I set up the route Forrest and I will be taking up to Redmond, via the coast the entire way. At least, that's assuming and hoping that the coastal highway isn't too terribly nasty. I didn't like being a passenger on Highway 1 between Monterey and San Simeon, but this time I'll be the driver, so it won't be quite so harrowing. Following the road via Google's satellite imagery, it looks like it's not so cliffy as it is down by SLO. Good deal, as far as I'm concerned.
Microsoft is reimbursing us $70 each of the two nights we've been allotted to get up to Redmond, and $30 in meals per day. Not as insanely generous as the courting-the-recruits allowance we were given earlier (which added up to $75 per day), but still decent. I find I don't eat as much when I'm on the road, anyhow.
I'm starting to get antsy about heading out. This should be a fun little adventure before the code-monkeying begins. I'll try to remember to take pictures along the way — the plan is to get out and stretch once and a while during the 7 hours of driving each day, so maybe I'll drag the camera out with me. We shall see.
Categories: driving, internship
There's been a suggestion to hold a hot geeks contest. Amusing. As opposed to mildly disturbing.
In other linky news, there's a fairly detailed walkthrough of filming a LotR scene yourself over on Machinima .com.
I'm back home with my parents for the next few days, visiting and killing time until Thursday when Forrest and I leave for Redmond. Tomorrow I'm going with my mom to visit my grandfather, who's been living in an assisted living facility since his most recent stroke. I haven't seen him since before that, at my grandmother's funeral. Makes me think of the second-to-last line of the second verse of this one song...
Earlier tonight, My dad and I went to the grocery store to pick up some stuff, and I ran into an old acquaintance from high school that Olya had a crush on for a while. He never intended on going to college, and has instead been working for the past three years. Talk about a different life experience, eh? He looks just the same as in high shcool, down to the AC/DC t-shirt. Wonder if he's happy.
Categories: home, family, HighSchool
I forgot that I had already started LCS, but that it wasn't 100% correct yet. I thought that perhaps LCS just needed optimizations, so I submitted the code I had to ETP, looking for whether the problem with it was "incorrect answer" or "ran too slow." Imagine my surprise when it tells me instead:
Your answer was graded automatically. Your answer received a score of 100 out of 100. You have completed this problem.
Well, damn. I like it when supposedly non-functioning code works perfectly instead. Two to go by tomorrow night — I might even make it! :)
Categories: homework
So it took me, from starting in the 3-hour break between finals yesterday, until now to solve the edit-distance algorithm. That is: it only took me 8 measly hours to get the problem done. Now, if I had been smart and industrious, I would have taken those the 8 hours and done the assignment 8 hours after it was assigned a month ago. But no, I had to get a special exception from the prof to let me turn in my remaining 4 (3 now) assignments.
This leaves me with the scheduling algorithm to optimize, rank selection to debug, and LCS to do. By tomorrow at midnight. Or else flunk and have to retake this class. Gah! Stupid, stupid self...
Much thanks goes to my awesome friend and this class's grader, for putting up with my very-last-minute and past-last-minute questions. I owe you bagels!
Categories: homework
Tim forwarded on to me Joe typo'dly being Canadian:
Joe: sounds aboot right Tim: yer Canadian now? Joe: eh?
And I was good; I didn't start in on a rant/discussion at Tim about the details of Canadian pronunciations! But, as it turns out, I did recently track down some useful webpages about it, because my mom had asked me for some details. The two sites are here and here, but I shall attempt my own explanation.
You'll have to play along and say words and notice how your mouth moves to form the words, for this to make the most sense. It also helps if you have the same dialect as I do, because then you don't have to read the IPA transcriptions of how to pronounce these words.
Say "about" [əbæut]. Focus on the "ou" part. Try to feel how your tongue moves throughout the sound, starting from the position that it's in for the word "at" and ending at the position that it's in for the word "boot". (This vowel sound, which you should be able to see is actually made of blending two vowels, is called a diphthong.) You'll probably have to try saying "about" ridiculously slowly to be able to see what I mean; that's okay. :)
The Canadian pronunciation is technically called "Canadian raising," so-called because they say their diphthong starting at a vowel higher in the mouth than our starting point. Instead of starting your diphthong at the vowel sound in "at," instead start at the sound of the first "a" in "ahead." End the diphthong at the same position as you normally do, and you should have a rough estimation of the Canadian pronunciation.
Now, you may have noticed that the typical way of imitating the Canadian pronunciation of "about" is to say "a boat," and that that mimickry never says 100% like Canadians, just close enough for mockery's sake. That's because the imitation is "a boat" [əbut], without a diphthong for the vowel. The actual pronunciation is something more like "a buh-oot" [əbʌut].
Stumbled across Threadless T-Shirts, a site that runs a continuous T-shirt design contest, voted on by site users. They print and sell the winners in limited-run batches. My favorite is Dark Side of the Garden, but alas, they've already sold out. Good thing is that you can request a reprint and if enough other people are interested, they'll print up more of the shirt.
Two other good designs are We're Toast (which I may buy) and Ah Munna Eat Choo, unfortunately also sold out.
For those of you on the edge of yours seats about how I'm doing on catching up with my algorithms homework, I'm down to ten problems with four days to go. Three of those problems should be quick to finish, but another four are programming problems and another two are on a subject we were never lectured about. So we'll see.
Categories: homework
*mutter* Creating new algorithms, my head wants to do BFS like the computer.... *mutter* Needing to use alternate data structures... *mutter mutter*
That'd be one more down, and homework #4 completed, finally.
Categories: homework, algorithms
After the choppage.
Tim's left for D&D, so I can't post a photo yet. But my hair is minus a foot! (This foot of hair is not to be confused with the condition foot in mouth, which other people suffer from. Other people who insinuate — wait, no, come right out and state — that certain other people have large posteriors. Which they don't.)
Believe you me, it's very weird to halve the length of your hair, when said hair has been at a constant length for more than a decade.
Update (Sunday, 1:35 AM): Tim's home now, and here's the pic!
I haven't had my hair cut, other than for trimming, since first grade.
I'm out the door to get my hair cut now. Plan on seeing it next at just past my shoulders. I'm actually a little nervous about this, which is silly, but whatchya gonna do.
Will post again in maybe an hour or so!
Still slogging away at algorithms homework, here in the salt mines* this fine Friday night. Five problems down, "only" fourteen more to go. Need to be done by Thursday, which really means by Wednesday because I have finals from 10 in the morning until 10 at night Thursday (with a 3-hour break in there). Four of the remaining fourteen are programming problems. :( But if I can keep up the pace of finishing five a day, I'll just make it.
So when are the scientists going to stop piddling around with trivial things like, say, cancer, and get to work on a cure for procrastination and easily-distractedness? Maybe they all figure they'll start working on it tomorrow...
* This is a relatively random link, but interesting history nonetheless.
Categories: homework
Even when I've holed up in my apartment working on algorithms (required to be 100% completed and 100% correct, or else I get an F — it's very all-or-nothing grading), my life is still touched by my friend's drunken antics. We'll leave aside for the moment discussions of his liver's plots to kill him before he does likewise to it, and move on to the phone call with him.
As I said before, I was alone in my apartment doing homework this Friday night, chatting intermittently with my friends online. Some time after talking with them last, I went to send them an URL for a 5-page Serenity comic preview, but I discovered that they had all logged out. Suspicious, I tried calling them.
Two of them didn't answer their phones. The third picked up, but then hung up, making much fumbling noises in the process. I tried calling him back, but I got his voice mail that time. Ten minutes later, he calls me, but he can't hear me over the noise in the background. He hangs up on me, but then calls me back a minute later.
Apparently The Gang plus Joe is seeing Star Wars III, which explains why no one else was answering their phones. And Aaron is drunk, as he announces to me, which explains why he did answer his phone in a movie theatre. ;)
Hanging up, I told him to go enjoy his movie. He replied that he wasn't understanding what was going on, but that "we will go there from then." As if that makes any kind of sense. Is this some drunken way of trying to use the phrase "let's not go there" or something, and failing miserably? Drunken Linguistics might be an interesting field...
Update (Sunday, 1:53 AM): Linkified my post.
So if someone wanted Blogger's navbar to go away on all blogspot sites, one might install Greasemonkey, save some code that looks like
// ==UserScript==
// @name Blogger Navbar Removal
// @description hides the Blogger navigation bar
// @include http://*.blogspot.*/*
// ==/UserScript=
(
function() {
alert("Foo!");
var navbar = document.getElementById('b-navbar');
if (navbar) {
navbar.parentNode.removeChild(navbar);
}
}
)();
as blogger-navbar.user.js, install it with Greasemonkey, and see the navbar no more.
Categories: greasemonkey, programming, blogs
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