Everyone in my resesarch group was goign to play video games tonight at a place called Game Works, where you pay $10 to play all the games you want for 3 hours. That sounded like a ton of fun to me. Rumor had it there were cheap drinks to be had, too. I felt really tired, though, so I figured i’d take a nap before we left. I felt much more tired when I woke up, so i decided not to go and got back in bed. After sleeping for another two hours, I was awakened by a bunch of screaming. I was worried at first- it sounded like a bunch of deep, coarse, barking interspersed with high pitched shrieking. What was going on outside? Terrorist activity in Claremont California? Some kind of fire? Spontaneous dance competition?
Then i remembered that there were a bunch of high school kinds on campus, and that whoever ran that group usually had them doing some group activity around 10 or so, probably to get them all tired out so that they’d sleep instead of running off and braiding each other’s hair or whatever it is high school kids are doing these days. Thanks a lot, guys.
Reading the news just makes me angry. Free Chipotle pretty every day, though, is a good thing.
Writing super slick python code is just awesome. I’d been doing theory all this summer so far, and working on some actualy coding lately has been wonderful. I found awesome graph theory and mathematical plotting tools for python, which make me want to study graph theory just so I can use the libraries. My python skills have inreased significantly ever since I discovered list comprehensions and how to use them. Them are so georgeous. Last fall I worked on code to simulate random walks on the surface of a sphere, and I used python scripts to generate large numbers of random experiments, then to analyze all the data. I did something simliar today, and I don’t know why but it find it supremely enjoyable to generate large amounts of data, then sift through the data looking for patterns.
Peter coded up a ‘pressure’ algorithm that Kevin and I came up with; I thought of requests for bandwidth as fluids trying to fit into buckets, and modeled some kind of weird potential-energy type hueristic that would select the fluid under the ‘most pressure’ to satisfy. We had no idea how to prove the optimality of the algorithm, and after some thought we found ways to concoct devious instances to make it perform arbitrarily poorly, but the analysis says it works quite well in randomly generated instances.
Work is moving along quickly because I get to (well at least untill yesterday; i might be done with coding … 
) spend the day writing code to solve problems. I have tommorrow off to visit my sister and UCI, and then after that there’s just a week of work left to be done. It’ll be weird to leave this place behind, because it has been my life for the past 9 weeks. I have spent pretty much every day with the guys I’ve been working with, and it will be weird to leave knowing I will probably never see some of them again. I’ve gotten pretty close with a guy named Kevin, who comes from missouri and shares a lot in common with several of my friends; he tells me I bear an uncanny resemblance to his room mate. I wonder if we’ll see each other again.
Speaking of people whom I will never see again, I had a ’summer romance’ in a rather odd sense. There was a group of students here from Puerto Rico, doing research on an engineering project. They were part of this exchange program; some Harvey Mudd kids went to Puerto rico for a couple weeks, and then the Puerto rican kids came here for a couple of weeks. They were staying in our dorm, and Jerrah’s friend heather was part of that research group, so I ran into them a decent amount. One of them would sit next to me while i played poker, and I would show her my hand and ask for advice. Every time I did, this she would say “I don’t know how to play” and look slightly worried/confused, which I found very amusing, so I kept doing it. Whenever I won a hand, I would thank her for her advice, and whenever i lost a hand I would complain to her; she seemed to think this was funny, I guess, because she kept sitting next to me while I played.
They invited me to go clubbing with them the last night before they left, and I figured I’d go along because I’d never been to a club before. Here is a picture of us. On the right is Claudia, a UC biomedical engineering major who also happens to be in California. Weird how I keep running into those kids… Me and the girl who sat next to me while i played poker, Aisha, hung out the whole evening and got along really well. We spent the next night together talking and hanging out; it was hard to spend time with someone that I knew was going to leave and I’d never see again, but it was worth it. She left at 4am saturday morning, and I felt pretty crummy. I went to bed and was awakened at 6 the next morning to find out that their flight didn’t leave and they needed someone to go pick them up at LAX. I drove down there, very tired, and picked them up. I had one last day to spend with Aisha, and I knew it was going to be difficult to say goodbye. We went to the park and talked some more, and then we had to go back and get her stuff ready to leave again. There are some things that you can ‘know’ but not know at the same time. I ‘knew’ she was going to leave again, but i didn’t really ‘know’ it untill that ‘again’ was 5 minutes from right now. It was tough. But that’s life. Even the painful things are wonderful if you have the right attitude, i think.
Next saturday, I’m driving up to San Francisco with my dad, who needs to be there on buisness, and while there I plan to visit standford and hang out with my friend Chris Wanstrath. After that, I head out for the trip home; first stop is in Salt Lake City, Utah. That has special significance for me. The only time I have been there was in January of this year, and that was about the breaking point of my relationship with Megan. I wanted to do something while I was there, but I knew that I couldn’t. At the time, it seemed like a far-off impossible wish; a desire on par with wanting to fly a unicorn through space or converse with someone long dead; a desire for something glorious and wonderful that I could never have. Now, things in my life are very different than they were, and that desire is entirely realistic. I will go to salt lake city, and do what it was that I wanted to do so badly on January 9th, 2006. Nothing lifts my spirits like knowing that I am about to fulfill what once seemed an impossible dream.
I get home on August 16th. I will probably just drop my stuff off at the house I’m moving into, since there’s no point in loading it and unloading it twice. I’ll have that evening and the day of the 17th at home, and I’ve already made plans for both days. On the 18th I’m leaving for a whitewater rafting trip in West Virginia, and then I have a week to prepare for school to start. This summer has been great. It is winding down now, and the school year is in sight. The last time I looked forward to the start of the school year with as much anticipation as I do now was the summer before my senior year of school. I think it will be a good year, and after this year comes grad school somewhere far away from cincinnati. Lately I have entertained thoughts of going to Grad School outside the U.S.
This time last year, I dreaded the start of school and the future life that I was sure awaited me. Now I eagerly await them both. I feel like i woke up from a terrible dream and the realization that it was all just a dream has hit me now; nothing can bring me down for any sustained period of time. Before this year, I had no future to look forward to; now it shines brialliantly at me.