Work is so tough. I thought it’ll be pretty chill and have tons of time to relax at night. Nope… too tired to do other stuff.
I’ll be posting some statistics soon though!
Quit
Well, this past month has been a doozy. From finishing up my semester, to having a personal crisis; I haven’t been able to document much of my thoughts at all.
As the semester came to a close, mom told me that my grandma had a form of cancer. We didn’t know how serious the cancer was, or what stage it was in. All we knew was that it was definitely not benign. This caused a rush of emotions that I didn’t know how to respond to or talk to others about.
Inability to discuss what I felt during those 4-5 days led me to cast a doubt on myself. “What is wrong with me” was asked many, many times with no response from my usually egotistical self. It even spilled over to a game of League of Legends. For some odd reason, I just bursted out in tears after losing a game that we should have won; I still don’t understand why I would cry over such a trivial matter as a video game.
Around that time, I had plenty of projects to work on. The most interesting was probably the animation-esque class I was doing. Jane and I decided to implement the Fattal paper on target-driven smoke animation. For some reason, I turned into a total douchebag by the end of the project. I dictated what should be done in an extremely condescending way, while shooting down all her ideas. Thankfully she was kind enough to stick with me all the way through.
On the front of my research and parallel computing though, it went pretty poorly near the end. I ran into quite a few problems which I’ll have to resolve throughout the summer. There is a large hope that a paper will arise out of this with enough work.
In terms of logistical issues in my life, moving out was a bitch. The kitchen was almost more dirty than Detroit, and my clothes was incredibly hard to sort through. “Should I send this back home… or to DC?” In the end, I finally packed everything and sorted everything out between the times when I was not on campus for senior week.
Speaking of senior week, it was extremely sad seeing the world change. It seems that I while I don’t love the status-quo, I like it more compared to the increasingly faster progression of time. In only a year time, I will be graduating from Cornell.
This made me wish I had done more social stuff this year. Besides Jane, there was literally no one I got particularly close this year. It’s almost like a “lost year” in terms of social development (which I desperately need). I am currently reading through the Carnegie book hoping that it’ll help eventually…
My first day today was great. Great food. Friendly people. Seemingly interesting project. I have high hopes for this summer, and I intend to reach them. The problem seems that I’ll be quite busy after work too. From the research with Bindel to my undying faith that I’ll be the next Penn and Teller, I’ll be busy in the night.
I guess the question I’m faced with now is at what point do I call it quits?
Paper
Busy with final projects, and watching Pokemon.
*team rocket does something stupid
Jesse: why did we do that?
James: because we have to fill the half hour
Religion
Feelings
I have trouble expressing feelings.
What do I do when my mom tells me that her mother has a form of bladder cancer? I was too shocked even to ask about how far along the stage it was; I just “smiled and nodded.
Maybe this is part of growing up.
May It Never Come
One began to hear it said that World War I was the chemists’ war,
World War II was the physicists’ war,
World War III (may it never come) will be the mathematicians’ war.
Rochard
Some a year ago, I spent around ten dollars and bought the sixth Humble Bundle. Now I officially played more than a quarter of the games in that bundle with the completion of Rochard.
It’s a simple game, with intuitive mechanics. The idea is that the series of barriers, lasers and gravity control will pose moderately hard puzzles for the player. It was a rather simple puzzler though, with only one which took me a moderate amount of time. The expansion pack is suppose to remedy this by providing 4 supposedly hard levels for the player.
Mechanics-wise, it was a smooth experience. My only complaint was aiming the gun was mildly rough. It was a line-aim type of experience, which is fine for “grabbing” various objects, but quite tough to aim accurately fast.
Speaking of fast, this is a very fast game. The entire thing took me under 5 hours to complete. It seems that the producers ran out of budget for animation at then end: the story was extremely unpolished at the end.
It’s an almost Epcot-like experience, where the beginning and middle parts where quite pleasant, but the ending has no… end? They just swept everything under the rug.
Overall though, fun game but terrrriiiblleee story near the end.
Dirty Little Secret
The worst math grade I’ve ever gotten was a “B.” Not even a “B+”, it’s just a plain old “B.”
It happened many years ago at a school called Florida State University, where I was taking numerical linear algebra. Somehow, I completely fluked the final.
Looking back, this was almost expected. I didn’t start studying until 3 hours before the exam. I recall that I got over 2 standard deviations above the mean on the first two exams and though I can just depend on the average. Little did I know that this final was more than the previous 2 exams combined…
Whelp, that’s my dirty little secret.
Cough
Day 1: slight cough, mild headaches. Slept well.
Day 2: slight cough, no headaches. Slept well.
Day 3: slight cough. Coughed a lot while trying to sleep.
Day 4: slight cough. STAYED UP TILL 5AM BECAUSE WHEN I TRIED TO LAY DOWN, I ENDED UP COUGHING.
Day 5: slight cough. slept well.
Day 6: slight cough. Sleep condition TBD.
Monies
After 11 years of playing the clarinet, I have finally made some money from playing it. This past Sunday, I played in a gig for some Ithaca music group as a cuckoo in Saint-Saëns’ carnival.
Grant total profits? Fifteen dollars.
Made quite a dent in my two thousand dollar clarinet, and upwards of five thousand dollars worth of lessons.