11 Everybody

She’s performing an arrangement of Ingrid Michaelson’s “Everybody” with her school’s jazz choir.

So: I intend to make several posts in the next few days, as it looks like I’ll have lots of free time. Apologies to the month of May: it’s not your fault you got no Blandfill posts.

A tiny little snippet: I am in the tropical and rainy town of Hilo, Hawaii. Today is King Kamehameha day: a celebration of the unification of the Hawaiian islands, a day off of work for state employees including those of the University of Hawaii, and a chance for childhood Tom to chuckle at an obscure anime reference. I like it here, even when I don’t have much to do on account of being transportation-less. Life is lived more slowly, I keep my windows wide open 24/7, there are real people. There’s an elegant simplicity to things, despite the fact that this community doesn’t have all that much money (in comparison to developed tourist centers on the other islands). Most of all, I like how this place is the polar opposite of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Dear readers: unless I am whisked away on some sort of adventure in the near future, I shall make more posts soon. Until then, listen to some Dio.

The result:

(Charles changed my GNOME theme to pink some weeks ago.)

Tom then wanted me to write a post about how I did it, so here it is. Without going into a description of the library itself, it works as follows: when it gets a message from one of us, it prepends the appropriate initial and sends the message to the rest of us.

I guess I can go a little more into the details of the library (especially because the documentation is pretty annoying). (There still isn’t really that much to say.) You run some commands in the library to create a connection and log in, then register a function with the connection object to handle incoming messages. I suppose I can add more description if anyone wants. Code.

So that I can get all the tags:
http://acme.com/jef/singing_science/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM0ib4GxLPw

Hello readers; I realize that it’s been almost three weeks since I’ve posted, since exciting things like meteor showers, drastic concentration changes, and creepy conversations online with strangers aren’t things that happen to me. But the rest of the Blandfill has been good to me and hasn’t heckled me for not posting, as I have done to them many times. So here’s my update.

Will Ramsey bit me today at the hockey game. It was refreshing and terrifying. Ah yes, a good segue to band-related things. As the 24 tagged pictures of me on Facebook might indicate, I received a staff position in the Harvard Band, Assistant Drillmaster. I get to refill the soda machine, help run the Christmas party (next Friday), set up the Band Banquet in the spring, and of course, chart all the shows for the football season. I think it’s gonna be an interesting year, especially since now I have to basically go to every gig, while last year I only did it out of a sense of obligation, being the only tuba and all that. Glee Club is also really good; it’s about that time of the year when they start interviewing for management, and the only position that I’m interested in is, ironically (story will come later), Technology Manager. I’m not sure if that would be a good idea though, since I’ll already be extending myself quite a bit with the band, and then there’s that whole thing where I take the classes and do the homework. In fact, that’s what I’ll talk about next.

I am a fantastic procrastinator. In my English class, there are seven assignments. My TF has been very lax about deadlines, which is usually a bad idea for someone like me; I’ve as of right now turned in two of the assignments. I haven’t done badly on them either, but the problem is that I need to be finished with every paper for the class on December 9, so I have about two weeks to read five books and write 9-11 pages of interesting stuff on them. Shouldn’t be too bad though. There’s also two physics problem sets, an astronomy problem set, an astronomy lab, and of course the CS50 final project that I haven’t started it. These, plus the other obligations I have towards the band and glee club, have made me, as of the moment I leave my dorm to go home for Thanksgiving, decide to not go on Facebook until it’s no longer the most visited website on my computer, according to Google Chrome. I’ve been needing an excuse to get away from that time vacuum for a while anyway, and procrastination isn’t worth it. In case any of you are wondering, yes, yes I will be sleeping eighteen hours a day during winter break.

I’ve made a short list of books I want to read before the end of this coming summer, and so far they’re all math/physicky. Here’s what I have right now;
Visual Complex Analysis (textbook for Applied Math 105a)
Georgi’s Wave Textbook (recommended text for Physics 15c)
Bamberg’s Mathematics for Physicists (interesting at least)
Carrol and Ostlie (the better textbook for Astronomy 16 and 17)
Griffiths E&M/Purcell (two pretty cool electricity and magnetism textbooks)
Morin’s Mechanics Textbook (from Physics 16/15a)
I realize that none of these books are anything people would call literature, but this year it occurred to me that I actually am pretty far behind on reading the things that everybody reads (not that I feel like I should enjoy something just because old white men said it was a good idea; I just think a lot of interesting things have been said about life before, and maybe I should read these interesting things). So, if there are any books you guys think I should read that would change my life or would just be fun (I’m going for science or literature, either one is fine) please let me know in a comment.

While I’m blogging about CS50 (marginally) I feel like I should inform readers that I’ve finally finished problem set 6, the spellchecker. I think this is the problem set that started to make me feel like shit in the class, and today I met with my sophomore advisor, Zak Stone, who is a grad student in the CS department here, and we debugged the code together, and finally we managed to spit out a program that works, and now my program, after a bit of tweaking, is on the Big Board for CS50, and I feel like that was a big self-esteem boost, since that class has been kicking my ass since I spent five late days trying to get that motherfucker to work. My test dictionary actually only had three words in it; shit, abatement, and poop. It was a hell of a week, and now that I’ve finally gotten something out of all that work, I feel slightly liberated, and well-equipped with tools to actually learn computer science by myself. Seriously, that problem set was hell. I started looking forward to Physics 15c problem sets so that I would actually understand how to solve a problem that was given to me.

That’s all I have to say for now, but I hope you were entertained for a little while. It felt good to actually write this out, so I hope it feels good to read it. Have a happy Thanksgiving, and hopefully I’ll see most of you soon.

As Tom mentioned below, we went, along with a bunch of other people, to see the stars. (Nominally the meteors, but there weren’t very many of them.) I’ve got a little tripod, so I took some long-exposure (15 seconds, so not really that long) shots of the sky.

Cassiopeia over the horizon.

Orion.

Big Dipper.

This is the PLEIADES.

And now for something completely different.

This is awesome. Someone should do this for a CS50 final project.

This has been a pretty fun weekend.  I’m going to tell you about it.  Lucky you!  As an aside, everything I’ve done in the following had the effect of postponing the completion of my CS50 problem set that was due 26 hours ago (as of yet uncompleted).  But I digress.

This turned out to be Freshman Parents’ Weekend, which involved some fun awkward gigs for band, and a great Glee Club concert.  We went to Sanders Theater and played some fight songs.  They had a very strange panel table, and two comfy red chairs enclosed by two coffee tables with water jugs and glasses on them.  Obviously, when it come time to play Ten Thou, Ed and I sat in those chairs.  I had a good time with that.  Then there was a rehearsal from 4-6, which made getting to Sanders in tails at 6:30 a bit of an issue, but an easily resolved one (and resolved it was, by leaving the rehearsal early).

The Glee Club concert went fantastically.  It was great to be on stage in front of an almost full house, although I had forgotten how much I sweat while under those bright lights.

Everything you just read was written about a week ago, mostly because I got tired of blogging and stopped.  Then I felt guilty for not blogging in three weeks, so I’m going to finish this now.  Isn’t that fun?  Since the last time I posted, my cell phone has been acting strange.  I woke up about 6 hours after going to sleep Sunday morning and discovered that my cell phone had a funny colored bar on the left side o the screen.  I was perturbed, but not too worried; I could still use it, right?  Well.  As the day went on, I found that every other row of pixels had turned white, so I could only half see what was on the screen.  Again, not a huge deal, I could see what I was doing, but I was beginning to get a little worried.  By the time I went to sleep that night, my cell phone screen had turned completely white, and as of right now it has a lovely crack across the screen from me banging it to see if that would make it work better.  Turns out it didn’t.  Regardless, my phone still works, but now I just don’t text, and I have to hope that whoever calls me is someone I actually want to talk to.

Oh yes, the HUB 90th reunion was this past weekend, and it was fantastic; I’ll be posting the video of it as soon as it goes online.  It’s worth a watch.  Granted, there are bands that are 300+ without alumni, but something about seeing 40 years worth of crusties and undergrads scramble on a field is very impressive; it’s like Brownian motion, but with a purpose.  Pretty cool, eh?  That in itself makes this post a science post.  I’ll link to the wikipedia article on Brownian Motion as well.  Now this post can be about the Internet as well!  Fantastic!

They stare into your soul.

Unrelatedly:

Tonight marks the first time that I’ve finished a problem set well before the deadline (read: more than 12 hours) and having not crammed it all into one sitting.  Not to be a nerd, but I actually enjoyed solving the problems.  This makes me feel like I would really enjoy my schoolwork if I executed it sensibly, which I never do.  Maybe I will start this semester.

I spoke with Professor Dave Charbonneau on Tuesday, between a section and a dinner with the HSS to talk about why I should or shouldn’t concentrate in astrophysics. I was considering tactfully blowing it off by saying I was busy at every time he offered, but I did manage to catch shuttles at perfect moments (I went from the Barker Center to Memorial Hall in four minutes; I didn’t know I could do that without running).  If you have never met or listened to Dave speak, you as a person are missing out, regardless if you like astronomy or not.  He is without a doubt the best lecturer I have had so far at Harvard, definitely the best teacher (the distinction being he actually cared if we understood the lectures), and really an all around great guy.  He always spots me at band gigs and strikes up a conversation about anything and everything, and despite being incredibly knowledgeable and lucid, he is (or seems to be) genuinely interested in what people have to say to him, about what they think.

At our meeting, he started out not just getting to business, but asking me about what classes I was taking, and when he heard I was taking five classes, and had taken five classes in the spring semester, he immediately encouraged me to drop the fifth class.  His reasoning was that by taking five classes, I would still get passing grades (because it’s Harvard, you know?) but I would absolutely learn less because I would have less time.  So then it hit me that I shouldn’t be in the Chinese Popular Culture class, and I should have realized it much earlier since Tom had been telling me for the past two to three weeks that I should drop it as well.  Also, he asked me about my extracurriculars, the band, the glee club, how my math class was last year, lots of things that a head tutor wouldn’t normally care about, but a great person would, like him.  So that’s that for that.

That was a bit of a digression from whatever I was talking about before, but I’ve decided that I’m absolutely going to at least get a secondary field in astrophysics, since I only need one more class to achieve that, and if everything works out well, I’ll try to do a joint physics-astro concentration.  I’ve gotten pretty excited about this, so today I even went and filled out my course of study, and I just need three more courses my senior year.  Of course, the cores can easily be permuted.  It was also a little bit of a wake-up call, insofar as it showed that I really don’t have that much time until I graduate before I become a really cool person that grad schools think will make really awesome discoveries and publish sweet papers.

This blog seemed a little Duncan-centric, so I’m going to try and pull it back a bit.*  Aha, a bit of observation about door-holding etiquette.  I suppose I didn’t think about this so much in high school, because I didn’t go out too much, and there weren’t that many doors that I needed to go through in my high school, but here, there are all sorts of buildings that require opening doors, so I’ve had many opportunities to think about this one.  So imagine (or recall) that you’re opening a door for you, yourself, to walk through, and in the corner of your eye, you see someone who’s about 20 feet away, give or take a few.  Now we have a bit of a dilemma.  We could just go in and let the person who was walking behind you open the door himself (I’m using him instead of them because it’s singular, and hopefully understood that it could be a male or female.  Excuse the grammar tangent), which is quite reasonable, UNLESS you’ve misjudged the distance, and the person behind you gets to the door just as it shuts when you let it close.  This doesn’t exactly make you an asshole, but in the situation the person behind you may be mildly annoyed, and think you’re a little rude.  So what’s the big deal?  It’s not a big deal, really, but if it’s your first interaction with the person, it could noticeably change their perception of you if you do meet them in another circumstance.  And since it’s Harvard, this could be the future POTUS!  You wouldn’t want the President to think you’re an asshole, would you?  (Yes, improbable, but they could be important, it’s just an example.)  So if you’re not in the mood to make people think badly of you and you’ve overthought this like I have, then you wait and hold the door open.

But herein lies another issue; what if they’re far enough away that if they continued your pace, it would be about 5-10 seconds before they arrived at the door?  Big deal, you say.  I say, you’re right, sarcasm duly noted.  But I have also been on the receiving end of this many times as well, and seeing the person holding the door open for me, I feel obligated to not make them wait the extra 5 seconds, since they’re obviously taking valuable time out of their busy schedule to be polite, so I speed up my pace significantly, maybe even break into a light jog so that the door is open for a shorter amount of time.  But what has happened now?  Their act of politeness has indirectly caused me to break from a leisurely stride into a light jog.  Why not just continue at the regular pace?  Because, once again, you look kind of like a dick, as if you’re not really appreciating this enormous favor someone has done, thus sacrificing their precious seconds for an ungrateful recipient.  Same “problem” as before.  I’ve discovered then, that you can actually control people, to a small extent, by holding doors open for them when they’re too far for a door-hold to be convenient; in most cases, they will speed up so that they can accept your offer of generosity.  So now this running problem bothers me as well, so sometimes I don’t bother holding doors open because I know people will be put into a mild state of discomfort by my act of generosity, but then I risk not helping someone that would have actually appreciated the offer without being uncomfortable.  I’ll grant that this is all frivolous nonsense, but I think about it when I’m walking, so there it is.

Sometimes I try to hold revolving doors open.  It usually doesn’t end well.

*This is a good time to remind the readers that I’m not really sure why I have a blog that anyone would look at, because it’ll just be me talking about what I think, and while that could be cool, I think their time would be better spent by reading Randall Munroe or Thus Spake Zarathustra, but that’s just me.  Basically, anything I write is what I happen to be thinking about, which is inordinately vague.

http://www.cs50.net/psets/

There were really two roots for this problem (this problem being my inability to come up with an idea for the program despite thinking about it a long time). The first was that I had this desire, stemming from the last vestiges of arrogance I had from actually getting into Harvard and being the smartest person in a small high school, to make a project that was better than the average project. So I wanted to make it more complex than the dancing cookies video, but less complex than the DDR thing, but close to DDR, right? However, when trying to think up a program, the second root came up, which was that I couldn’t think of anything, simple or complex. That was a little distressing as well, since it sort of implied that I don’t have the creative skills to think up something cool (when I say implied, I mean mouthing it and pointing in my direction), which really made me feel worse about that first bit. [I have a really focused stream of consciousness, don't I. /sarcasm/] I’m too tired to really belabor that last point anymore, but I did finally think of something that I can implement fairly simply. It involves Spongebob jellyfishing, but at the same time trying not to get stung by jellyfish. It’s definitely something I can get finished by Friday at 7:00 PM, but I could see myself finishing around 6:30. The most frustrating part about this project is that it is taking me a lot of time to implement (I’d definitely put myself in the less experienced column, btdubbs) but I know that when I’m finished with it, it won’t be very impressive. I suppose that’s what separates the boys from the men (or girls from the women, etc.), and no one said it would be easy. This is way too stream of consciousness. I’m gonna break it up with something high-larious.

I’m starting to get more excited about the freshmen for Glee Club. Less so for band, but that’s mostly because you can never tell if they’ll stick with it. But with Glee Club, it’s gonna be a lot of fun. Sing-ins are on Sunday, and I remember that being one of the most exciting moments of the first semester for me, so I’d definitely like to share that experience with new members, almost like new brothers. I tell you, the Harvard Glee Club is like a fraternity, but with less exploiting women and more singing.

Tom recommended a prescription for these blog posts that he’s sort of followed for his, but I can’t remember what it was, and I’m fine with however this turns out. But I do hope that these posts are interesting to people other than me. And I will try to cut down on the stream of consciousness in the future, but it’s just so much fun! Thanks for taking the time to read, I know this was a little excessive.

Once upon a time, I played the saxophone a lot and got pretty good. (They even wrote a newspaper article about me: http://www.oregonlive.com/living/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/living/1209176704150210.xml&coll=7 ; tremendous apologies for the self-promotion.) Then my senior year of high school ended and I got lazy and stopped playing. Then my freshman year of college came, and I decided I wanted to focus on school more than music, so I didn’t join any music groups, and ultimately didn’t play my sax at all. In the end I left my horn completely unused for 15 months.

This summer, though, I realized that I’d given up a piece of my life that I’d really enjoyed, so I decided once I got back to school I’d get back in the groove. And — somehow — I’ve held to it! After fetching my sax out of summer storage last week, I started practicing again on Thursday. I even decided that I’d audition for the Jazz Band here. With only four days to prepare, I didn’t think I’d do all that great, but it couldn’t have hurt in any case.

A clip of what I sounded like on Saturday, day 3 of me “coming out of retirement”: sax_prax2

Today was my audition. I played significantly better than what you can hear in the audio file, but nothing terribly impressive. Still, I told my story to the band directors and they were quite sympathetic to my situation, saying that “you’re at the toughest point, getting back into it right now, but keep on playing; it’s great that you’re picking it up again”. It was really nice to hear that encouragement. And, even though I got an email from them at 6 PM telling me that “we are unable to offer you a regular playing opportunity”, I feel like I’m ready to get back into regular practice again. Perhaps that is all that matters.

Well, tomorrow morning Charles is taking us out to Dim Sum, woo! It’ll be my first time. And today we saw District 9, which is way cool. I’ll go shopping tomorrow for school-related stuff; I’ve gotta get some notebooks and maybe binders if I hope to keep organized this year. And maybe I’ll even finish up my CS project. Things are going decently well for a new year.