Planet Olin

Hi all. Haven’t posted anything for a while. Here’s a quick update on life:

Fall Semester: Went to school.

Winter Break: Didn’t.

Spring Semester: Now back at school.

 

I’ve been playing lots and lots of DotA these days. Rocks hard. How much you ask? This semester I’m currently at about 3 and a half hours a day. The goal is to spend more time on DotA than on all my classes combined. o.O

 

On an entirely unrelated note - analog filters seems like a /sweet/ class. Somewhat related to that second note - I’m in 5 classes with a sum total of 28 people. Tee-hee.

There was no Technology in my elementary school. Sure, we had decrepit old Macs that ran Oregon Trail and Dinopark Tycoon, and the occasional egg-dropping fiasco, but nothing was explicitly labeled Technology. We had English classes full of grammar and analogies, Music classes with 30 identical sets of plastic recorders and wooden xylophones, and Science textbooks with pictures of animals and planets, but no Technology. Every now and then my dad would talk about the coming Information Superhighway in hushed tones, but these were meaningless words to me.

My first brush with Technology didn’t come until the summer after my first year in middle school. Summers were hard; my parents were divorced, and both worked full time to pay the bills. Both lived in small, two-bedroom apartments chosen for the quality of the neighborhood as opposed to the location near schools. As a result, I went to a magnet school that was a half-hour drive away; my closest friends were unreachable by my short little legs, so I spent the days at home. Suffice it to say that within days of each summer starting, the worst cabin fever of my life would begin anew. My parents hated this as much as I did, and tried everything within their power to make me feel better. Every weekend they would cart me to a friend’s sleepover, take me to a new museum, and generally try as hard as they could to alleviate my frustration. One day, they took me to a comic book store.

The store was Dave’s Comics, buried at the end of a deep hallway cut through the center of an gaudy open-air strip mall. The store was tiny, with a display case taking up the right half of the store and a single set of shelves forming two small aisles on the left half of the store. Dave himself could’ve passed for a grungy, laid-off Santa who now spent his time reading trade magazines about the latest increases in Magic card retail prices.

Most of the store was interesting in a way that a wax museum was interesting. The figurines were exquisite works of art, fun to look at in a detached sort of way. The comic books themselves fell into the same category, full of story lines I didn’t particularly care to follow and unbelievable characters that seemed to be made of chiseled and polished marble. It was in this forgotten store, in the dusty back corner, that I found the Box.

The Box was Technology. On its face was a polished, 40-foot tall robot gleaming with city-crushing weaponry, standing at attention with one foot on a pockmarked and broken opponent. On its back was an introduction to a truly epic tale of an advanced spacefaring civilization being torn apart at the seams, intent on conducting warfare in as civilized a manner as possible. Instead of feeding billions of troops to the meat grinder of ground warfare, hundreds of expertly-piloted 100-ton robots fought proxy battles for control of entire star systems. The game was called BattleTech, the robots BattleMechs.

My parents were confused. The boardgame was obviously intended for a much older, more friend-laden audience. They were worried I wouldn’t understand the rules, or worse, would have no friends capable of understanding the rules (if they could make it over to the house to play in the first place). They offered robot comic books and robot figurines in an attempt to dislodge my grip on the Box, to no avail. After a half-hour of wrangling in front of a thoroughly disinterested Dave, they threw up their hands in frustration and bought me my Technology.

I spent the next week swimming through the BattleTech universe. I learned about the technology-starved systems, surviving in the future equivalent of a stone age where they maintain technology for as long as it will run. I stood on the bridge of a spindly JumpShip, laden with a company full of mercenary MechWarriors waiting patiently for the main drive to recharge so that they can conquer a star system for profit. I sat in the stands of Solaris VII, watching arena champions battle in front of legions of gamblers for fame and profit.

I memorized the order of play. Each turn was divided into phases, including determining who went first, movement, declarations of fire, and recording the damage dealt. I learned the strengths and weaknesses of each ‘Mech, the advantages and disadvantages of speed, weapon load, jump capability and so on. I learned how to create my own ‘Mech from scratch, using a simple rule system, my imagination, and a piece of notebook paper.

I emerged from the universe gasping, aching to play with someone as enthralled as I was. Try as I might, my middle school friends weren’t interested in boardgames, opting instead for days spent in front of their Sega Genesis. I even called Dave, asking if he knew anyone – he reported that I had taken his last Box of an out-of-print game system from the early ‘80s, and he didn’t know of anyone who still played. I was livid with frustration.

Ironically, the answer to my dilemma was more Technology. By sheer coincidence, my mother decided to sign up for a new service called America Online within days of my acquisition. On a lark, she asked if I wanted an account; little did I know I was being handed the keys to take a drive on the newly developed Information Superhighway. I chose my favorite ‘Mech from the list the Box offered (an RVN-3L Raven), and made its name my screenname. On a whim, the first action I took once online was to type “BattleTech” into the AOL search field.

I’m not sure what machinations transpired during that fateful instant, but I was directed to my first chatroom. Text began scrolling past my window, just faster than I could read. Other screennames were present, some familiar from the universe and others unintelligible. Strange snippets of conversation were interrupted by what appeared to be meaningless symbols, interrupted further by what appeared to be the chatroom itself rolling dice and reporting the result. In awe, I simply watched for the first few days, saying nothing.

After days of staring, I became capable of following the disparate threads of conversation. I grew to understand that the symbols were encoded ways of communicating troop movements and firing solutions. The chatroom was, in fact, rolling dice upon user command, to decide which attacks hit and which didn’t. The disparate conversations were usually background noise, with a subset of people occupied with a game and the others acting as a peanut gallery commenting on the battle.

My anonymity made me bold. I was determined to speak at the same level as those in the chatroom, so as to not betray my age. I played the game as much as I could, for hours on end. My parents would come home and find me thoroughly engaged, with maps and small figurines spread throughout the room and my brows furrowed as I thought through the next set of movements.

Thus, my life’s purpose became Technology.

A fascinating and lengthy in-depth look at some of the photographs that best defined George W. Bush’s presidency. I just read through the whole thing.

I haven't posted in a while, which generally means life is good. My biggest accomplishment over the last couple months is that I've completed ALL my grad school applications! I applied to the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and 7 graduate schools in Electrical Engineering going for MS/PhD, hoping to focus on power electronics/power systems. Here is my list of schools in east-to-west order:

For those of you following from home, here is a long overdue update to my blog. I’m working my way up to the present. What follows is an abridged account of the month of November 2008…

After leaving the vineyard I really liked in Bergerac, I spent the months of November and December bouncing around from one “meh” place to another (now is awesome though so now worries).

First I went to Languedoc-Rousillon to this vineyard run by a British couple. They were ok but it was totally not French at all nor did they know anything about wine. She would make things like pot roast and yorkshire pudding for dinner and not only did they not make their own wine (they sold their grapes to a box wine cooperative), they seemingly knew almost nothing about it. I’m not surprised to hear “it tastes like wine to me” usually but I was hoping for more in the way of wine education from the experience. Also, the work was really boring –driving wooden stakes in to the ground.

So I left that place early and ended up going to this blacksmith forge not far away, just to get away from where I was for a while. Unfortunately I ran to the wrong place. I was trying to at least find a place where the people were French but it turns out they were Israeli. Not only that but the guy was a complete asshole. Everything I did, from the way I washed the dishes to where I sat at the table to how I used a shovel was wrong and needed to be corrected with harsh criticism. I even tried to have a heart to heart with the guy but after about an hour of peace, the cease-fire ended again and I knew I needed to be gone from there. Fortuitously (I thought at the time), I received an email from an intentional living community on the Dutch/German border asking me if I wanted to come since they needed more people. Since I’ve always been curious about cooperative living and there’s not much vineyard work during the winter I decided to give it a shot (admittedly the fact that the Annual cannabis cup was going on in Amsterdam at the time did factor in to my decision making as well) and left the place from hell after only 5 days.

I decided to hitchike the 500 miles up and make a little trip of it, thinking that I would stop in Chalon-Sur-Saone, Paris and Amsterdam on the way. Well that plan started out great, I set up base camp in Ales, near to where I was, just to get closer to the highway and rest up a bit. I couchsurfed with this nice girl who fed me filet mignon and took me to play badminton. The day I was supposed to leave, I got a late start and didn’t get out to the highway until about 2 in the afternoon which was definitely cutting it close to make it to Chalon before dark under the best of circumstances. After waiting forever for a ride to the autoroute, I finally got one but then proceeded to wait even longer than forever in the freezing cold for another ride. At about 7 in the evening, I was a grand total of 30 miles away contemplating having to spend the night in the bathroom at the toll plaza. I finally got a ride to Valence, about halfway and was in good spirits. I arrived in Valence and picked up another ride after about an hour, which is a longer wait than usual but great for the day. At this point it was well past sunset, around 9:00pm and I had another hour or so to go. As if the day hadn’t been full enough of bad luck and poor judgment, I made my final mistake in turning down an offer of a bed, not wanting to disappoint my host in Chalon who was waiting for me and thinking that surely I would find a ride since I was so close now. Well I was wrong and finally had to admit defeat about midnight and call and apologize to my host. I ended up spending a very cold and uncomfortable night in this walking bridge above the toll plaza (pics on facebook) which sucked mightily but was thankfully followed by a ride straight through to Paris the following morning.

I spent a couple of relatively uneventful days walking around Paris and seeing the sights. I couchsurfed with a Columbian immigrant in the 18^th district which might as well be somewhere in Africa or the Middle East. I’ve never been but it was exactly like I imagine a bazaar or market somewhere would be like –crazy, loud, and full of brown faces.

Had some difficulty making it up to Amsterdam –had to take the subway and then a bus out to the outskirts of Paris, hop 3 fences (with all my luggage) and walk through the marsh to make it to this gas station which was supposedly great for picking up longer rides but sucked. I finally caught a ride with this Lebanese couple heading up to rural Holland and decided to just take the train from there since I had had enough with waiting in the cold for a while. Amsterdam was awesome though. Like Venice without the smell and the crazy Italians trying to rip you off. Really pretty streets, chill people, all the french fries you can eat, I really liked it. I’ve been wanting to go to the Van Gogh museum (and see the tulips but it’s not the season) forever so that was nice to finally do as well.

To be cont….

This blog post didn’t get Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering’s name right, but the random Flickr photo they decided to link to is the common room from my 6 person suite senior year. That’s my Oklahoma flag!

In the last couple years, I have started reading several books, but finished very few. It would seem that my appetite for new knowledge doesn’t have a very long attention span.

Meanwhile, I spend night after night reading as much as I can from my feed reader, which right this instant clocks in at 501 subscriptions, with 1295 unread articles. I have yet to discover anyone who is subscribed to more feeds than I am.

Now I know that sounds staggering, and it should, but I don’t read everything. Indeed, it would be pretty much impossible to do so. But I do make quite an effort, and in doing so I have initiated the reading of countless streams of never-ending text. Yet more books I will never finish.

One thing I did recently finish, in one sitting, is Patrick Combs’s story from 1995 about cashing a junk mail check for over $95,000. Not sure how long it would be as a book but it would certainly take more physical pages than the 10 or so webpages that the story is split into.

The other day at work I printed out a page of Google API documentation that I was reading, and it came out to about 36 pages. I had already pretty much read the whole thing by the time I hit “Print”, so I was taken aback a little bit at just how much I must read in any given day without skipping a beat.

I’m even starting to read books on my iPhone. Right now I’m reading Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland as part of the fun little Classics application. So there’s yet another incomplete reading.

So I guess the point is that I read a lot. My hunger for knowledge cannot be satiated.

So how do you occupy your time? Video games? Some sort of physical activity? Let me know in the comments.

You’d think my work laptop would have all the bells and whistles ready to go. After all, I run cygwin, the Linux emulator, as well as have full (legal!) installations of Office 2003 Professional and the latest updates from Microsoft. Apparently, my installation has issues, both of which are font related.

First, with cygwin. I tried to set up LaTeX, and hit wall after wall. Getting past using TeTeX instead, I still hit issues with installing Ghostscript, both the windows executable and the binary from cygwin. Something, deep within the belly of the machine is going haywire, but it pains me how easy it is to set up LaTeX and GS in Ubuntu: GS comes pre-installed in Hardy Heron, and after 10 minutes with the CLI I had a full PDF version of Professor Allen Downey’s How To Think Like A Computer Scientist, compiled from source. As of this writing, my windows/GS problems are still unresolved, so thanks, Windows.

The other issue is with unicode boxes in Firefox. Even in FF3.0, you can run into problems with boxes instead of text like this: さんぽ (if you’re seeing boxes here, you’re seeing the problem.) Apparently, Widnows doesn’t have full-on unicode support on by default, so you’ll have to get a full sans-serif Unicode font and install it. A simpler way might be to follow these instructions for Office installations, though YMMV. Don’t forget to restart FF if you go this route.

Even with years of experience, I still slap my head when it comes to understanding the pains and hassles Windows environments face. One of these days…..

So, I'm starting to think that my chances of getting a summer internship at a power plant in Baltimore are slowly slipping away. Stupid economy making companies seriously consider dumping internship programs. I won't know for sure either way for a couple more weeks but . . . my new and exciting back-up plan is to spend the summer on a U.S. Coast Guard approved sail-training ship and get my Able Seaman license!

I'm not exactly sure how that fits into my life goals, but it seems like a cool thing to do and it lasts 5 years. I'll already have 106 of the 180 days of sea time that I need from Sea Semester. I hear that licensing is a huge pain these days - so I might as well get started as soon as possible if I ever want to work on a boat. I'd probably do my last bit of sea time with either Sea Semester (as a volunteer deckhand) or with Living Classrooms (as a paid deckhand on the Lady Maryland - but they might already have all the people they need by the time that I figure out what I want to do). Or, you know, any of these boats and sail from Charleston to Boston to Halifax to Belfast. Actually, sailing in the race from Halifax to Belfast would be freaking amazing.

I must discuss this with my mother.

HAY GUYS what should I do in Manhattan? I get in to New York midday Wed and I'm leaving Thu evening; I'm spending the intervening night with Matt Ritter after checking out the Amazon Web Services meetup.

Ideas I have so far are:
- the Guggenheim.

While cool, this is a very short list for a potentially very full day of New Yorkin' it up! LET ME KNOW.

I've been chilling in Charlottesville this week, doing a very little bit of helping my parents move in. Major projects so far have included doing reading for Tissue Engineering, finding REU's for this summer, and starting work on my bizarre Frankenstein synchronization web service.

Observations so far:
- Google's documentation consists of a set of examples. This is very useful if you are trying to duplicate their examples. It is less useful if you are not. Would it kill them to provide an annotated list of objects and methods? pydoc is nice but insufficient; the SNR is poor.
- Trust me on this one: suds is the Python SOAP client library that you want to use. It's actively maintained and uses modern Python XML libraries, unlike say all of the other ones.
- NTLM authentication is a pain in the ass, but python-ntlm (a new project!) makes it easy, with urllib2. I'm glad I didn't try to write this app a month ago.
- Microsoft ships an incomplete WSDL file with Exchange and didn't bother to document it. What? Who does that?

Anyway, about those REUs. TTYLz baiii