And so, what wisdom can I impart, you ask?

Trader Joe’s Frozen Tamales. They are very tasty, and very convenient on a late night after all other dining options have closed. Always keep a few reasonably healthy, tasty, and filling food options in your freezer. “Break glass in case of emergency” if you will, although I’m sure your kitchen-mates will be displeased if you choose to smash your fridge open in the event of a hunger pang.

A few other things:

• Dress up every now and then, even if you feel terrible. A lot of times, if you feel tired or upset, dressing to look the part will only make things worse. As much as your outside reflects your inside, sometimes the inside can follow the outside too.
• Get off campus at least once in a while; it is healthy and will make you less crazy and more happy.
• No matter how many friends you think you have, there are usually about 10 times that many people on campus that you will never get to know, but would make wonderful friends with you if you ever met them. Moral of the story is to always meet new people, especially outside of your regular social circles.
• Everyone and everything will clamor for your time: clubs, classes, friends, enemies, girlfriends, boyfriends, hobbies, jobs, and a million other things. Learn to say no. Consciously taking time for yourself, even if it’s just 5 minutes in a day to listen to some music, catch up with an old friend, or even just dancing/singing in your room alone to a silly song, is invaluable to your mental health and happiness. “Me” time is a precious commodity.
• Sleep.

Oh, and greek yogurt. Buy it and eat it, especially the honey-flavored kind. Mmm.

We had a concert this past Sunday for our 21M.303 (Writing in Tonal Forms I) class, where the fantastic QX String Quartet performed our humble compositions for us. The project was to write a minuet & trio for string quartet in idiomatic 18th century style, a goal I think all of us in the class achieved quite well. My minuet & trio pushed a bit against a few rules, a few dissonances sounded more 19th century than 18th century, but overall I (and I hope my professor as well) was pleased with the final result. A classmate and I recorded the concert, and recordings will find themselves on the Internet sometime in the near future.

Thanksgiving is coming up. Does anyone else notice that it’s basically a week late this year? I thought it was always the third Thursday of the month. Apparently somebody decided that it would be the fourth Thursday of November for 2008. I had a friend who actually booked her flight home incorrectly because of that faulty assumption. Is there some committee somewhere that’s in charge of deciding these things? Are there some people somewhere who sit around and vote on when Thanksgiving will be? The National Committee on Holidays and Funtimes, I would call it. I wonder if they have lobbyists. Could I lobby for a new holiday? Do companies lobby for holidays? Coca-Cola Day? Christmas, brought to you by Samsung?

I couldn’t think of a simple circuit that would implement the desired behavior.  Clearly, neither putting the switches in series nor putting them in parallel would work.

The strange thing is, after observing the behavior of the switches for a while (much to the bewilderment of my suitemates), I realized that the state of the light was a simple XOR of the positions of the switches.  My bathroom has an XOR gate built in to it.  I wonder what would happen if I somehow “wired” together enough bathrooms.  Could I make arbitrary combinational logic circuits?  I’d need one other type of gate…

• In lieu of a laundry hamper, a towel wrapped around your clothes functions quite perfectly.
• Looking well-dressed is as easy as getting well-fitting, nice basics (good jeans, some t-shirts, some dress shirts) and recombining them endlessly.  This need not (and should not) be expensive.
• When dancing hip-hop, I find it helpful to focus on two things: where you go, and how you get there.
• Teaching someone to give good massages is the gift that keeps on giving.
• Backstreet Boys.
• Happy hour sushi is made of rainbows and unicorns.
• When at a loss for content, make a list.

The worst part about writing a random list post is that I’ve never really figured out a good way to end it.  Oh well.

So, without further ado, I present the Tang-Nicholson System for Procrastination Classification.

Types of procrastination are given two attributes: class and level. Procrastination class can take on one of the following three values:

Class 1

Procrastination from a productive task by either not doing anything at all, or doing something purely recreational, e.g. playing video games, reading a book, or spending time with friends.

Class 2

Procrastination from a productive task by performing other productive tasks that are lower in priority, e.g. doing the dishes, running errands, or doing assignments due at a later date.

Class 3

Procrastination from a productive task by focusing and obsessing over details related to the task, e.g. learning LaTeX in order to typeset an essay, copying problem sets to make them neater, or obsessively refactoring code instead of finishing features.

Procrastination level is a positive integer that, in relative terms, describes how far removed from the actual productive task an activity is. Since procrastination can be composed with itself, this metric measures the level of nesting. For example, if one’s original task was writing an essay, imagine the following procrastination composition: write essay, learn LaTeX to write essay, configure Emacs for editing LaTeX, submit patch for bug in Emacs. The final step, submitting a patch for a bug in Emacs, is a class 3, level 3 form of procrastination. In fact, all of these steps are class 3, with level ranging from level 1 for learning LaTeX to level 3 for the last step.

And there you have it: a simple, concise way to precisely define how you are wasting your time.

Quick, what level of procrastination was I at when I first thought of this system instead of doing my psets?

In my tragic shampoo-less state, I didn’t know what to do.  Go without shampoo?  Could I substitute body wash for shampoo?  What if my hair dries out from the soap?  That would have been tragic.  I’m fairly certain that all my friends would have left me if I used anything less than amazing shampoo on my hair.

Mason, we all talked, and we’ve decided that your hair is simply not moisturized enough for us to associate with you.

The horror.

A sudden realization.  A spark of insight that grew from some dark, unexplored corner of my mind.  What could it be?  Dig deeper, Mason, follow your instincts.  Yes!  I’ve got it!  The apartment came with complimentary conditioning shampoo!  Now where did I put it?  This drawer here, yes!  Luxuriously clean hair can once again be mine!

It wasn’t much, but it tided me over until I made the trek over to the local mall and restocked on my preferred shampoo.  I can have friends again.

Somehow though, I managed to inspire myself to put on some house music and start dancing.  I love house music, and I’m trying to learn to house (dance style), but it’s rather difficult to not look like an idiot unless you’re pretty good already.  Luckily, my roommate was out, so looking like an idiot was not an issue.  I don’t have dance classes for the next three weeks, so I figured that it’s probably a good thing to dance on my own to keep in shape and keep my skills nice and skillful.  For the next two hours, I switched up the music a bit (old school funk, nothing like it) and managed to practice popping, locking, and some breaking, and felt infinitely better than how I felt before I started dancing.

The joy of motion, the ecstasy of rhythm, there’s nothing like it.

So next time you’re feeling down, throw on some awesome music and just let yourself go.

A quick shower afterwards, and I feel content and happy.

Executive summary:

• I’m working as a software engineering intern this summer.
• Heaps are cool.
• Django is cool.
• Sleeping enough actually does help you learn better.

Actual post to come soon, I promise…

I should deliberately make a mistake to help the process.  Maybe some typo, or unforgivable grammatical sin that would have, in high school, cost me an entire letter grade on an essay.

Its as easy as this.

Would anyone believe if I told them that writing that sentence almost caused me physical pain?  It was worth it though: the bondage of grammatical perfection, relevant content, and post length shall haunt me no more!

I wound up winning first place in entrées for my Apple Bacon Cheddar Omelets, which I finished at the absolute last minute and without recipe. I’m not really a fan of cooking from recipes. The way I see it, when you start cooking, you should probably have an idea of what you want the final product to wind up looking and tasting like. From there, you draw on your skills and ingredients (and fancy kitchen gadgetry) to get there. And so, with 10 minutes remaining before the submission deadline, I pulled out my chopped onions and apples, my smoked cheddar and gouda, and my delicious bacon, and started throwing things into a hot skillet. A few dashes of sea salt and a sprig of parsley later, they were done.

When you learn differential equations, you never learn how to solve just one particular equation. You learn methods, pattern recognition, what to do when you have a square hold and a round peg, and how to draw hundreds of little arrows with remarkable efficiency. Cooking should really be the same way, except maybe direction fields don’t make omelets taste any better at all. I’ve got a bunch of ingredients floating around, and the solution I’m looking for is the tastiest one. Hopefully it’s a stable solution, but not always (soufflé anyone?). If the problem is at all interesting though, it’s probably one you haven’t seen before. Improve, adapt, overcome. Make the best damn omelet the world has ever seen, despite the fact that you ran out of eggs and maybe you don’t have a skillet either. Just because a few recipes happen to call for eggs and a skillet doesn’t mean every omelet needs them. Throw some tofu and cheese on a piece of tinfoil placed over your stovetop.  Blam, instant omelete-esque.  Mmmm…aluminum.

So learn yourself some Laplace transforms, and maybe you’ll cook a bit better.