I am working on a sweet geometrical algorithm for my senior project. It is very cool. It is also top secret. Details to be revealed later…
Archive for February, 2007
I Love Designing Algorithms
Tuesday, February 27th, 2007Grad School Update
Tuesday, February 27th, 2007For those keeping track at home, I received a Rejection letter today from Carnegie Mellon, and an acceptance letter from UNC Chapel Hill. I had expected to be admitted to UNC, so although it was still pleasant, it was not exactly a surprise. I didn’t expect to get into CMU because they’re ridiculously selective, but I still had hopes. The rejection letter was like a kick to the gut. It was all I could do to finish the bug I was fixing at work without breaking down at my desk.
Rejection’s tough. I’ve never really had to deal with it before.
On Guitar Virtuosos
Monday, February 26th, 2007I play guitar. Not very well, but I do play. I started in 2001, and was always sort of an off-and-on player, picking it up now and then. After breaking up with Megan in 2006, I had more free time so I started playing guitar more. Shortly thereafter, I discovered Joe Satriani. Right away I knew I loved the guy, and I quickly obtained all of his music. I started playing guitar more and more.
I bought an accoustic and learned some kind of sing-alongy sort of music over the summer, because that kind of stuff can be fun, and I’d always wanted to learn to play the eels. Twoards the end of the summer, though, I got back into the rock / metal genre. I listened to Joe religiously and started trying (very poorly) to play some of his stuff. I rediscovered Megadeth, particulary the older albums when Mary Friedman was playing for them, and realized that this guy knew his stuff. At first I wasn’t so hot on his solo albums, and I’d forgotten about them until I picked them up again this week.
It strikes me how very different the two arists are. I’m not sure if I feel like I sound more like Satriani because I listened to him first and he’s had more time to influence my playing style, or simply because there’s something about me the makes me more like Satriani than Friedman.
In any case, I was just listening to ‘Music For Speeding’, a Marty Friedman album. He’s good. I really recommend it. If you can handle it. You know. If you’re not metal, then forget it. I’d like to incorporate more of his style into my playing. I decided the other day that the music produced in the future will be amazing compared to our music today, because the artists of the future will have had more sources from which to draw inspiration.
There’s some weird bug affecting the way my site is displayed in firefox. For some reason, the background image occaisionally gets ‘corrupted’ and gains a little speck or line on it. Always in the same location, and this speck is still there when you do a ‘view image’, so i know it’s got nothing to do with CSS. The weird thing is, if you right click on the image and do a ’save as’, it is stored correctly on the local machine. If you do a’ copy image’, though, the defect is copied. That means there’s probably an error somewhere in the code that transfers and image into a surface buffer for displaying. Huh.
Yet again, I miss Harvey Mudd College. I’m still in a good mood, though.
Hell Yes I Am
Sunday, February 25th, 2007| You Are a “Don’t Tread On Me” Libertarian |
 Religion and politics should never mix, in your opinion… and you feel opressed by both. You don’t want the government to cramp your self made style. Or anyone else’s for that matter. You’re proud to say that you’re pro-choice on absolutely everything! |
What’s Your Political Persuasion?
I like personality tests and such. I just wish they’d have chosen a better image than the statue of liberty. Nothing says “freedom from goverment opression” like a giant statue given to america by france. I’d rather have that picture of the snake. Whatever.
Very True
Sunday, February 25th, 2007I had breakfast with my friend Sara this morning. We were talking about school when she said:
“Whenever you complain about math or physics, it seems like ultimately your complaint is that they are not computer science.”
What can I say? I guess I know what I like.
I accomplished something tonight
Sunday, February 25th, 2007I implemented the random number generator and interpolation functions to produce my own perlin-noise-generated terrain. I put a new picture here.
I switched over to developing in Microsoft Visual Studio Express instead of dev-cpp. Things weren’t going right, and I wanted to be able to use the debugger. It’s amazing how much faster you can program when you’re using the proper tools. I’m not sure what was going on with my computer earlier, but something wasn’t right. Whatever the issue was, it’s no longer a problem, because everything is working fine for me now.
I do so love to program.
Dancing is Fun
Saturday, February 24th, 2007I took basic cha-cha lessons over the summer at Harvey Mudd, and I had a good time. Putting the basic moves together to make a dance was a rather satisfying experience. I’ve been doing salsa lessons in Cincinnati and today we finally started stringing the basic moves into little patterns.
I see computer science in dancing. Of course, I see computer science in everything. A “dance” is a sequence of “steps” where order matters, in the same way that a string is a sequence of letters where order matters. I could go on in this vein, but I won’t. I want to get back to work on my Senior Project. It’s pretty sweet.
For Bonus Points
Friday, February 23rd, 2007I met a girl at Xavier. The last three letters of her screen name are LCM, which are her last three initials: middle, confirmation, last names.
At work, there’s a guy named Greg C. Dietrich.
That means i know an LCM and a GCD.
A New Record
Friday, February 23rd, 2007After messing with linux for maybe 3 hours, I’m back with windows.
I wanted to get some mp3’s playing so I could listen to music while I set up my new computer. Fat chance of getting mp3 support in a standard linux distro. You have to enabled some ‘other repositories’ or something. After spending a half hour reading ubuntu support forums and becoming more irritated with my lack of knowledge I decided to go back to Winodws. I’ll be using cygwin a lot more than I was before, but I already know how to get everything working just the way i like with windows. Even if it took me a week to get to that level of comfort with unix, i don’t think it’s worth at this point. I plan to buy a mac anyways, at which point I’ll turn this machine into a linux server and it won’t matter if i can’t listen to music or do whatever on that box, because I’ll be doing all of that on my mac anyhow.
The whole process of trying to get linux working reinforces my belief that linux on the desktop is going nowhere fast. I’m a computer savy guy. I really know my way around a windows system, and I’m somewhat familiar with UNIX based systems. Nevertheless, I’ve neither the time nor the patience to learn to work linux and get it set up. I understand the merits of open source software, and I really like using the command line to get my way around. I really like the idea of geting a linux system set up, but every time I’ve tried, I’ve found the whole process one big frustrating pain in the ass. If they can’t get me to switch over, how the heck are they gonna convince joe schmoe computer user?
When you spend a half hour and can’t get something as simple as mp3 playback working, you know there’s something wrong with the system. Could I stand to be more patient? Of course. I just don’t have a week to spend fiddling with my computer, getting it ‘just right’, when I’ve already got it that way in Windows.
Linux: Not for Beginners
Friday, February 23rd, 2007I am setting my machine up to use linux. This is maybe the third or fourth time I’ve gotten irritated with windows and decided to switch over to the ’superior’ operating system. Every time I have done this, I’ve found myself thinking ‘thank god I know what I’m doing, because otherwise I’d be screwed.’ I have no idea how these people expect this system to become at all popular when something as simple as changing the resolution on your monitor requires to disable the windowing system type in a bunch of cryptic command line arguments.
Hopefully, once I get this working, I’ll be happy with it.