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.

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

Remember how I said I was writing an essay last Thursday? Ha, well, just finished it last night. For those of you who learn about details of my life solely through this blog (I don’t know whether any of you exist, but if you do, please feel free to contact me IRL or through facebook or something, I promise I won’t think you’re creepy!) , here’s a quick update:

• After my three-hour sleep thing, I wasn’t able to work on my essay anymore, so I didn’t drink that red bull.
• In section, I got an extension until Tuesday night.
• Astronomy lab! And CS50 final project! Ouch, double all-nighters, not doing that again.
• On Tuesday, I got way busy accidentally because of CS50fair and other stuff and failed to do the essay.
• So I spent ALL DAY yesterday working on that darn essay.

Now, I don’t intend for this blog to become “oh my god my life is so busy, let me tell you all the details of how busy I am”. That would be uninteresting and unoriginal. But there’s some unresolved things from my last blog post, which is why I’m posting.

So, this creative process. It is, I suspect, important in the humanities. As a young scientist I’ve spent some time questioning whether the humanities are worth anything; my answer is pending but leaning towards “hell, I’m not sure anything’s really worth anything, so why not?”.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with my own creativity, however I can manage it. To be creative, let’s try to define that: “Creativity is a mental and social process involving the discovery of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts. Creativity is fueled by the process of either conscious or unconscious insight.” (Thanks Wikipedia.) I like being creative in different ways. Creative with language; creative with code; creative with images; creative with problem-solving. Maybe I’m getting better at these. If I am, it’s exciting.

Well, I don’t have much else I feel like writing about at the moment, but I found this video online and Charles thinks it’s extremely cute:

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.

They stare into your soul.

Unrelatedly:

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.

Dear potential readers,

Do not skip dinner and then make up for it by eating a Qdoba burrito in a minute.

It’s amazing how only two extracurricular activities have managed to take up so much of my time, but since I’ve arrived at Harvard, I believe I’ve done something for either band or glee club every single day, and today I managed to have both which entailed a total of five hours of commitment (to be fair to the band, their commitment was a little over two hours, and I only attended one of them so that I could spend more time with the glee club). I’m looking forward to Tuesday, my first day with nothing. It’s funny how different extracurriculars are in college than from high school. In high school, you (I’m assuming “you” is a similar person to me who was motivated and wanted to impress college admissions officers) racked up as many activities as possible so you could add an extra sheen to your resume, and most of these activities didn’t mean anything. Hell, I had band, choir, knowledge bowl, cross country, swim team, NHS, and probably something else, and by Harvard standards I would have been an underachiever. Here, every organization knows you’re motivated and capable; otherwise you wouldn’t be there. So they expect you to give everything you can, and actually treat you like an adult a little bit, which is both good and bad, depending on how much you depend upon the security blanket protecting you from the real world. In any case, two years ago I wouldn’t have expected two organizations to be able to take up so much of my time and energy. (I suppose the same could be said about classes as well, but I’m not thinking about those yet.)

Isn’t that a cute kitty/dog/Japanese animal?

Today was the first day of classes, and we are all pretty wiped out. On a happier note, I am working hard to make “Keyboard Cat” an official tuba cheer, preferably to be played when the referees skate out during hockey games. Hooray for the HUB.

Keep in mind that I have no idea what kind of posts I’m meant to put on this website. Usually they’re a stream-of-consciousness type of thing that few people want to read, so I’ll do my best to avoid that.

“I hate the people that love me and they hate me.”