Some pictures of my (messy) room:

I've been alternating between the beds, so they're both unmade.

The showerhead broke on the first day, so I had to spray myself with just the metal hose for a few weeks.

I asked the front desk several times to fix my showerhead, and the response was always, "Yes, of course. First thing in the morning!" I ended up jamming a water bottle cap in there to fix the hose in place. But still no showerhead.

If I didn’t have free internet access in my room, I probably wouldn’t spend any time in it. Not that I would permanently sacrifice waking up to sunlight for convenient access to Google News and email, but the internet provides a sufficient temporary placation of my needs.

In fact, internet access probably dulls my desires a bit too much. Every summer, I set goals of productivity: skim through some textbooks, read up on finance, learn more Chinese, etc. Before coming to China, I had this grand vision of working during the day, exercising or going out to eat with friends afterward and toiling away at books at night. The first two parts are fairly easy to accomplish, but the last requires much more willpower than I have been generating.

I usually return at about 8:00 pm, but after checking my email, going through my daily set of websites, handwashing my clothes (no washing machine) and showering, I am left with an hour before going to bed, but I’m pretty tired by that point and don’t care to do anything productive. That hour becomes consumed by surfing the web. I realize that no one ever became successful by being lazy, but for some reason, I have trouble motivating myself to take that extra step and go beyond what makes me comfortable. Yes, I realize that humans didn’t evolve to be productive during every waking hour (HarvardFML posts about spending the summer watching TV make me feel slightly better about myself), but it annoys me to no end that I cannot throw aside my tendencies to waste time, no matter the amount.

As a child and even up until high school, I believed that getting good at things would be fairly easy, and I wasn’t aware of how much effort was required to actually become proficient. I assumed that simply following the school math curriculum, participating in chess tournaments or playing pool would passively give me mastery of those skills, and I wouldn’t have to set aside extra time to acquire expertise. I was waiting for others to provide me with opportunities to learn, but what I really needed to do was actively pursue those opportunities.

A classic example was my attempt to teach myself programming in 9th grade; I only learned up to loops and conditionals (the most basic elements of programming), and then I stopped because I believed that it wasn’t necessary to push myself. My thought was that I would eventually take a structured class about the topic, so why bother? Chess was a similar situation; I incorrectly assumed that playing lots of games would impart new strategic and tactical knowledge upon myself. I realized too late (junior year of high school) that studying was a requisite part of improving my game, but I didn’t have enough time to devote at that point (or maybe I did but just squandered it).

As a result of my past naivete, I am frustratingly mediocre in all of the activities that I enjoy doing.

Recently, I’ve been finding myself stuck between two trains of thought. The first one is along the lines of “You’re already 19. What have you been doing? Magnus Carlsen is your age, and he’s the number one rated chess player in the world. When Ken Griffin was your age, he had written computer programs to price convertible bonds, and he had started two funds from his dorm room. All successful people have already proven themselves by this time in their lives.”

Fortunately, I can usually shake myself free from this kind of negative thinking (no one should compare himself to prodigies). My second mode of reasoning is slightly better: “You’re only 19. You’re still young, and you have the rest of your life to do things. However, you’re pretty average, and it’s too late to change that.” When I went off to college, I knew that I would be somewhere in the middle, but I never expected it to bother me to such an extent.

Ok, I really wasn’t expecting to write a serious post when I started off with my room, and I’m not even sure if my rambling was entirely coherent, but here I am. The (cliched) question is, where do I go from here?

I can’t blame internet access for my own lack of willpower. When I decided to quit playing video games freshman spring due to wasting too much time, Duncan told me that it most likely wouldn’t work because I’ll just find some other method of screwing around. This turned out to be very true. How do I get myself to just suck it up and work harder?

Highlights:

• There was a music-identification round (part of a larger trivia round), during which they rickrolled us and played awesome music like the Firefly theme, Korobeiniki, Do You Wanna Date My Avatar, and Dragostea Din Tei. Unfortunately, I was unable to correctly name Korobeiniki, as I have long held the misconception that it is called Kalinka. (I’ve been disabused of the notion before, but still couldn’t remember the right name.)
• There was a puzzle round; I spent the last half hour or so working through about 70 cases of one puzzle, looking for the one that satisfied certain conditions. At the one-minute-remaining mark, I had three cases left. I managed to eliminate one more of them, and then sent in the other two as answers, feeling sure that I had missed the answer. Instead, one of them was correct! I was both happy and sad.
• I was really excited to play Wii Sports Resort (there were supposed to be rounds in rowing, basketball, skydiving, and swordplay), and I was the only one on the team who’d played before, so we kind of figured I’d do them all. Then they said each person should only do one event, so we decided to be good competitors (they almost definitely wouldn’t've noticed had I done them all), and two other people did the first two events (I wanted to do swordplay). Then time ran short and the last two rounds were canceled. I was and remain severely disappointed.
• We were the highest-ranking Harvard team (the first five spots went to MIT). Success!
• Foosball. Playing with new people was fun. There was a left-handed table there (you shoot left instead of right); interesting, but it was also a really bad table.

After that he asked how to do quickselect, which I answered fairly well, and how to partition an array in place, which was okay, though I didn’t say it very smoothly. Then he asked a pretty simple probability question, which I sort of figured out how to do pretty quickly in kind of a neat way, but it was different from what he was expecting and I didn’t explain it very well, so that kind of fell down. I got the expected method with some prompting, but I really should’ve made it more clear that I actually knew what I was doing. I think he did somewhat recognize what I was saying, at least. Still, I think that was quite a trip-up.

“I will stomp on things to focus my mental energies, or ‘menergies’.”
– T-Rex

I’m almost having trouble wasting time on the internet; luckily, failblog and the Onion are still accessible.  My Google searches are also limited although I was able to access images of the Tiananmen square incident while I was in Beijing.

Interestingly, Google is considering abandoning its Chinese operations.

More interestingly, why isn’t the most morally decadent site on the internet, 4chan, blocked?
Gotta go, angry voices are knocking at my door.

I’ve been playing Diablo 2! I finally beat Duriel. I’m a necromancer and I summon skeletons. That game is hard and sometimes repetitive so I’m gonna lay off for a while.

There was a robotics kickoff! I didn’t sleep last night! Instead I played Diablo 2 with Nico. Nico has returned to school, to the best of my knowledge. So, today I am pulling an all-day-er. I made up this term; it describes when you have been up all night for some reason and, if you were a rational person, you’d go to sleep as soon as you were done with whatever was keeping you up all night. But I decided I want to stay up so that my sleep clock (totes not a biology person, someone explain why it exists) isn’t all screwed up, and I’m trying to make it all the way to normal-people’s-bedtime so I can be set all right and stuff. It’s about 9:20 PM as I’m writing this sentence so I think I’ve been mostly successful! Also hugely sleep deprived, which is why this post is a collection of words that lack logic or intelligence behind them.

Adrian sent this out over that one email list: http://www.dontevenreply.com/
I countered with http://www.asofterworld.com/oqarchive.php and http://www.27bslash6.com/

Here’s a silly video to break up the pace:

I have been playing the xkcd game for like two whole hours without ending. (The xkcd game is something we made up, I think, where you click “random” until you get a repeated comic.) Usually it doesn’t take more than 20 minutes, but I’ve been going really slow and leisurely, analyzing the details of each drawing, trying to make sure I don’t miss any of the jokes. (Like backslash escape sequences, for example — something I wouldn’t catch in a handcuffs reference even if I was vaguely familiar with the idea when comic 234 came out). I think my patience to do it so slowly is very related to my sleep-dep-ness; reading xkcd endlessly is trance-like.

I am reasonably sure that I haven’t been just forgetting which ones I’ve seen since I began playing, since my browser cache would load previously seen images instantly but all the comics I come across load noticeably slower than instantly.

I imagine this blog post is pretty boring. I’m streaming all over my consciousness right now.

This comic is funny.

To come, two posts (which I might combine into one) on less playful topics: A) New year’s resolution (1240×1480? ^_^), B) What happens to me when I am at home.

Note: The cloud is being reset on January 1, 2010, so the links will no longer work  soon.

Charles’ Project:

An automated trading system analyzer written in Python3 (eventually going to be moved to its own domain).     http://cloud.cs50.net/~li15/fp/

Duncan’s Project:

A course selection tool that randomly selects appropriate Core classes.  http://cloud.cs50.net/~dwatts/final

Tom’s Project:

An interactive speech recognition program named “Hal Py-Thousand.”  Source Code:  http://www.blandfill.com/tomstuff/CS50.rar

Danny:

Look at the post below for one of Danny’s many projects.  http://www.blandfill.com/2009/12/13/gchat/

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!