Just in case you weren't sure how big a nerd I was: Song Chart

I discovered new meme, via the SDMB, where you take the lyrics of a song, and represent it as some sort of chart or graph. These range from scatterplots to bar graphs, pie charts to flow charts, and represent all kinds of songs. Some of the best ones, in my opinion, are An Analysis of Our Discussion, I don't care too much for money..., Jay-Z's current problems, Test Results, deepness of cuts, class DancingQueen, kung fu fighting.

Cycles

There is extreme comfort in cyclical patterns. When you know exactly what will happen next because you've seen it before, far from being boring or irritating, it is actually quite comforting. When times are good, we kick back and talk about how great it was the last time around, or about the times when things were a complete disaster, but it's funny now, in retrospect. And no matter what happens at practice, or on the bus, or in an airport, we all know that the cycle will complete itself and everything will be as it was soon enough.

Alone

I think part of the reason I'm always up late is that I like being alone. When I'm in my room, even though I'm not necessarily doing anything particularly unusual or secretive, I just feel weird that my roommate is there, as if he's watching me. Maybe it's because I'm often watching him, not judging, just curious what he's doing. Usually watching something, but what is he watching? For some reason I often have a desire to know the answer. Out in the living room, late at night after everyone has gone to sleep, is one of the few times I can feel like I'm alone. I keep meaning to spend some time in the "backyard" of Century, particularly since I won't have one next year. Maybe I should also do some studying in one of those closed-off rooms in the library. Or in Doheny somewhere, since Leavey is too bright and everything. I'm just really bad at making plans and sticking to them.

Pet Peeve

When people mix up dates and days of the week. For example, my next math assignment is due on "Monday, March 11" but March 11 is a Tuesday. How do you fuck this up? Look at a calendar.

Philosophy class is just starting to get interesting again after a couple weeks of being kind of tedious. I think the idea that a complex enough computer can be, at least for all intents and purposes, conscious, is really fascinating.

I'm going to Northrop Grumman on Monday for an interview for a summer internship. It'll be something software-related but I don't really know anything else. I feel like my strategy needs to be to prove that while I don't know a whole lot, I can learn new things really quickly. Also I'm totally a team player.

Google All-Nighter (or, I am so tired I feel like I'm about to die)

Well, I decided to go ahead and enter the contest, and I'm glad I did because we ended up winning some prizes! We mashed up the data from Citysearch Los Angeles (screen-scraped... shhhhh!) and Google maps, so that users could find restaurants in their area, and find out how much money they would spend in gasoline to drive there from their house, as well as how much CO2 they would be releasing into the atmosphere over the course of the drive, which is how we tied it into the theme of the contest, "Think Green." We ended up with a really good team. Ben pulled the data from Citysearch, I did the mapping stuff, Josh did the HTML, CSS, and processed the data so that I could use it, and David designed some awesome icons to use as map markers. In the end, we won "most useful" and I got a beanbag chair and a sweet Google lava lamp. Now I'm extremely tired, and I still have philosophy homework due in about 13 hours.

Google All-Nighter

There's a contest this Sunday and Monday, taking advantage of the long weekend, called the Google All-Nighter. You have 24 hours to write an application that uses one of Google's APIs in some way, and fits the theme, which will be announced at the start of the competition. It looks like I'll probably team up with this kid Ben I met, and I'll have to leave in the middle of it for the big ucla game, but it should be pretty fun. All this week, Google and USC UPE have been holding workshops on the various Google APIs and other technologies that may be useful in the contest, like Javascript. On Tuesday, we learned how to use the Google Maps API, so I made a little USC trivia game, where a marker appears, pointing at a building on the USC campus, and the user is supposed to guess the name of the building. I'll post a link once I get it working better. Luckily, a lot of the data I need, including a couple of really nice USC map overlays, already exists, but I didn't realize that when I started writing, so when I get some time, I'm going to rewrite my code to deal with that data, and it will be awesome. Perhaps the hardest part will be making it forgiving, so that if the user misspells something, or adds a tiny bit of extra whitespace, the game will still count it as right. I guess I could make it multiple choice instead. What I really want to do is learn the Google Calendar API since I could probably make things that are actually useful, rather than just fun, with that.

In other news, the white-space-phobically named LetMePracticeAtUSC system could be improved so much by a couple of tiny changes, and I have a feeling that, given several hours to understand the code, I could fix it. It appears I would have to learn ASP, and the source code isn't publically available, AFAIK. Which makes it a lot easier to say that kind of thing, I guess.

Sidewalk Chalk

I wasn't sure who I was going to vote for in the primary, coming up this Tuesday. I guess it's basically between Obama and Clinton at this point, but they both make such good points in their debates, I really can't decide between them. Luckily, someone at USC decided to make it easy for me. They wrote, in big sidewalk-chalked letters, multiple times, on the corner of Jefferson and McClintock, "Vote for Barack Obama," "Vote Obama Feb. 4th," etc. I guess now I don't have to worry about their voting records in the Senate, their policies on gay rights, immigration, the war in Iraq, etc. Someone has made the decision for me, and informed me of this service, via sidewalk chalk. Thanks guys.

Spring Semester 2008

There's no better way to celebrate surviving the first week of class than going directly into the first three-day-weekend of the semester. And no better way to spend a Sunday afternoon on such a weekend than to blog about that week. These are my classes for the semester:

MATH 445: This class is going to be all about partial differential equations and such, but so far all we've done is Fourier analysis, which allegedly is an important step towards solving PDEs. My favorite parts of this class are the professor telling us that the required textbook kinda sucks, but we have to buy it anyway, and the fact that we spent almost no time on boring administrative stuff, instead diving right into Fourier series, deriving the formula for it, and then proving it converges, all in three lectures. For the first time in a USC math class, the homework is actually required, but there's none assigned yet.

EE 101: Very low-level digital logic stuff. Binary representations of numbers, and gates, or gates, etc. The "textbook" for this class is a course reader that only cost about $18, and since everything so far is fairly trivial, I've been reading ahead about how to build multiplexers and adders and such. Seems like this is going to be an easy A.

MUEN 308: Men's choir. I did this last spring, but I've never done it in the fall. I guess this is a pattern that could continue to work: Band in the fall, choir in the spring. Anyway, the director is redoing some pieces from last semester, which puts the new people (there are about five of us) a little behind. This was fun last year and it's looking like it will be fun again this year.

PHIL 262: This is my category I GE. The title is something about "Mind and Self." Since this is a philosophy class, I was worried it would be a little like this. And it might be, but I'm very optimistic about it, at this point. The professor told us we can call him Jake. "You do NOT need to call me Professor Ross. My father was Professor Ross. Well, my father wasn't a professor, but if he had been, then he would have been Professor Ross." What's more amazing, he actually listens when students ask questions, instead of assuming he knows what they're going to ask, then going on and on about something unrelated. Again, it's only the first week, and we've already examined five alleged "proofs" for the existence of God. Not an easy A, but it should be interesting.

CSCI 101: I had already heard from my friend Greg, who took this class last semester from the same professor, that the professor wouldn't be all that great, and it's looking like it's going to be a few weeks before we get into anything remotely challenging. Eventually, I might learn something, and it looks like another easy A.

Basketball Band: Another semester of Tony Fox. Joy. This week, we recorded this Foo Fighters song for some youtube contest. Every other week is going to be pretty lame in contrast.

Concert Band: This year's show is all Broadway songs, so I couldn't really pass this up. Still, I feel like the music is way over my head, so I'm going to have to practice a lot. Apparently, I'm allowed to reserve PIC rooms since I'm officially in this class, even though I'm not a music major. This could end up being a really rewarding experience.

Overall, I'm pretty excited about this semester, and I'm fairly confident that my GPA will go up when it's all over.