After my 6.034 (Artificial Intelligence) class let out a bit early today, I had to make a trip over to the bathroom. Now, in the building (Stata Center) where I have that class, that bathroom (and indeed, the entire building) is very particularly designed, and the stalls in the bathroom are very particularly arranged. It just so happens that the stall that I went to was occupied by another person. I started thinking: what exactly are the considerations that a guy makes when he’s picking out a bathroom stall? Do these conditions change when choosing a urinal? These questions, inevitably, led to myriad other equally nonsensical formulations and conjectures about how people go about walking and sitting the way they do.

As with any imperfect solution to a complex problem, our path finding algorithms occasionally fail us. On my way to 7.012 (Biology) lecture, I noticed a person stop dead on his tracks, and after a brief pause, let out a long, frustrated “ffffffffff-”, the beginnings of a drawn out expletive seemingly expressed through the deflation of his hopes of getting to class on time. Often, the problem isn’t finding an optimal (or any) path to a destination, but finding an optimal seating position in a class, or the least awkward urinal in the bathroom. Surely, I can’t sit too close to the front, and risk looking overly enthusiastic about learning, nor can I sit too far back and look like a deadbeat who’s only there to catch up on the sleep he missed because he was playing Super Smash Bros. And surely, sitting immediately adjacent to someone I don’t know is right out, unless, of course, that someone is an attractive individual whom I might want to introduce myself to. If I arrive late to class, I certainly cannot walk all the way across the room to sit; I take the nearest available seat instead.

It’s an interesting question for me, sitting here between classes and watching people pass by: finding destinations, empty seats, power outlets for their exhausted laptop batteries, the best tastiness/(time*cost) ratio for a late breakfast, the most amusing company for an evening’s debauchery.

When you boil everything down, people, in all of their irrationalities and idiosyncrasies, do actually operate based on real motivations and principles. I make no guarantees as to the quality or consistency of said motivations and principles, but behavior is generated by something. Even “random” behavior in people isn’t truly random. Tell a room full of people to arrange themselves randomly, and they wind up spacing themselves out, instead of truly randomly. +10 points to the first person who points out that reference. Note: points cannot be redeemed for cash, food, favors, or just about anything except self-empowerment.

Or maybe I’m just thinking too hard.

I’ve recently been involved in a relatively non-trivial undertaking known as Tech Theater. For those of you not hip to the jive, Tech Theater is a small production that is put on for the incoming freshmen during their Orientation that’s written and performed by current MIT students. Its purpose is to inform them about all the ways they can avoid drinking themselves to death, and all sorts of fun and family-friendly things of that nature. Somewhere between the free dinner at one meeting, and discussions about the implications of cricket death, we all decided that the introductory video for our little play should be shot and edited in the style of the Friends intro. We’re actually going to frolic in the moat. Frolic. In the moat. On camera. Overall, I’m pretty thoroughly amused by the whole venture, and also pretty excited about getting a chance to act completely ridiculous in front of most of the new freshman class. I need to start things off on the right foot, don’t I?

It’s both comforting and somewhat disconcerting (you resolve that contradiction, I’m lazy) that summer is almost over. It’s been a pretty unusual summer for me, as far as summers go; it’s been my first summer away from home, and also the first time that I’ve worked full-time for any real length of time. I’m going to miss having up to 40 hours a week to devote to improving Timegrid, but I think it will be refreshing to move on to spending my time on other things (like classes, and stuff). There’s also the idea of people that I know (!) and like (!!) actually living on the floor, which is exciting. Perhaps even more exciting is the idea of people I don’t know moving into Burton-Conner, i.e. the freshmen, that I can corrupt enlighten.

I had the opportunity to see the Transformers movie today with a few friends, and while I’m not going to review the movie here (it was awesome, ’nuff said), it inspired a few thoughts that I thought I’d post about. Basically, if this post bores, offends, or otherwise intrudes on your quality of living, you can blame Michael Bay and his ridiculously cool movie.

Do you ever watch a movie where the characters, who are otherwise just regular shmucks trying to make it through another day, get tangled up into a conflict larger than most people see in a lifetime? Frodo never asked to leave the Shire. He seemed pretty happy right where he was, but he ventures out; he risks his life for something bigger than himself. People in movies like that go through trials and torments that are only tolerable to witness because we have a the protection of reality, a thin screen dividing Frodo and his ring from our safe, air-conditioned seats and overpriced popcorn. Those giant robots that tore through buildings like so much tissue paper are placed safely in the realm of impossibility. Even movies where the element of fantasy takes a backseat to the element of realism are thus tamed.

Good movies erase that boundary, if only for an hour or two.  We can all easily sit back and point out all the reasons why giant autonomous robots from Cybertron could never crash land on our planet.  It’s more fun to lower your defenses for a while though, suspend your disbelief, and for just a little while, live vicariously through the characters on the screen trying desperately to save their world from extinction.  It’s a strange and exhausting sensation for me, to feel all of these big, noble emotions.  Maybe we all want to taste, even for a second, what it feels like to have something more to worry about than whether we’re going to finish our next project on time.

When I walk out of a movie like The Lord of the Rings or Transformers, I always feel exhausted.  More than that though, I always have trouble going back to my life, unenhanced by special effects and unplagued by absolute evils, and not feeling a little insignificant.  How can I possibly have any real problems compared to those characters?  I don’t have any worlds to save, evil rings to destroy, or Persians to defeat in glorious, slow-motion combat.  All I have are my comparatively inane worries that I’m not getting enough sleep, that I need to make myself dinner tonight.  Ironically enough, my life is the one that winds up feeling contrived and artificial.

The feeling never lasts too long though.  I guess I just go back to my regular life and get used to it.

Today marks a momentous occasion in the history of this little blog: the first post ever with embedded Flickr photos! You’ll have to try your best to contain your excitement; we wouldn’t want any ecstatic screaming at this hour of the night now, would we?

Browsing Facebook one lazy evening, I came across a Marketplace listing for a used Fender American Stratocaster for $450. I wasn’t actively looking for a new guitar, but this was potentially a tremendous deal, and if I were to buy another guitar, it would have been a Stratocaster anyways. My interest piqued, I e-mailed the poster and opened the appropriate lines of communication. After meeting him and playing the guitar in person, I wrote a check, and came away the proud owner of a beautiful guitar. Curiously enough, I can’t seem to quite pinpoint the exact model of the guitar, since the serial number is missing. I suspect that it has either worn away, or the neck was replaced at some point. Anyways, here are the specifications:

• White Fender Stratocaster
• 3 Rio Grande pickups
• Vintage tremolo, temporarily stopped for more sustain
• 21 frets
• One-piece maple soft-V contour neck

And the promised pictures:

If anyone needs me, I’ll be channeling Stevie Ray Vaughan and wailing away in my room (which, incidentally, I moved into about a week and a half ago).  I’d post pictures of it, but that would oversaturate this post with pixels, and they’d start dripping all over the place and everything would just get messy.

I haven’t posted here lately, which doesn’t bode well for the future continuity of this blog, but hopefully my post velocity with respect to time isn’t a simple linear function.

I actually had the distinct pleasure of having my four wisdom teeth removed this morning, an experience that turned out far less unpleasant that I’d anticipated. The procedure itself was completely painless, since I was asleep during the painful bits. My only real complaint is that I’m unable to eat any real food for a few days, but it’s not nearly as bad as when I first got my braces on (two weeks). Until I get the stitches out, I’ll be resting and relaxing at home, consuming as much ice cream and mashed potatoes as I can stomach.

Other than that, I’ve spent the past week or so alternating between working at my UROP, sleeping (including napping), and frantically trying to paint my summer room so that I can finally move all of my worldly possessions at MIT into it, which doesn’t leave too much time for blogging. At least, that’s how I rationalize it in my head.

My UROP has been going well; I actually physically go to work at CSAIL now, instead of sitting in front of my desktop in my room in my pajamas. It helps keep me disciplined and focused, and it’s nice to be able to interact with the other UROPs working under my professor. I’ve got a bit of a head start on them, since I’ve been working at Simile for an entire semester already, but I suspect that they’ll catch up quickly. Timegrid is coming along nicely. I recently tore out the rendering algorithm and completely rewrote it, due to a realization that my old design made a few features impossible or difficult to implement. The new algorithm essentially renders events and gridlines as absolutely positioned <div> elements in a container div, instead of relying on a <table> element to render lines and cells for me. The DOM actually turns out much cleaner, at the expense of a bit more code complexity.

Painting my room was a whole different venture entirely. I had actually agonized about the design and color scheme of the room for at least two weeks before actually painting, and my poor friends had to put up with some of the most ridiculously hideous combinations of color that my imagination dared bring into existence (”How about lime green, pink, and dark blue?”). I eventually settled on a comparatively tame design, with walls alternating between green and blue themes. Each wall has a larger top portion painted a light shade of the theme color, a stripe of white, and a smaller bottom portion painted a dark shade of the theme color. I still picked lime green as my light green shade, but overall the room gives off an interesting vibe laying somewhere between “responsible adult” and “oh my god, my retinas are on fire.”

I’ll take pictures once the room settles into a happy equilibrium.

This summer, I’m working as a UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunity) at MIT’s CSAIL. I don’t think I’ve ever made a post about my actual project, Timegrid, so I think I’ll do that now.

My task is to design and develop a client-side Javascript framework that takes event data in some format (iCal, XML, etc.) and renders it out to a number of different, configurable, dynamic views. What kind of views will Timegrid support? For starters, it will support all of the views that Google Calendar is currently capable of: weekly, monthly, etc. Timegrid is more flexible than Google Calendar though. Imagine that you want to render a table of events happening in various locations, and you want each column to represent a different room, and each row to represent a starting time. Timegrid will be able to handle that as well.

Timegrid is designed to be easily configurable, incredibly flexible and customizable, clean, and beautiful. Good thing I have all summer to work on it.

Timegrid Project Page

Delicious, warm, flaky biscuits, but without any gravy, unfortunately.

I got my first B ever today, an event whose supposed significance is surpassed only by its actual complete and utter meaninglessness. I guess that means that my tiny inner Asian is dead after all, or just that the forces of apathy have captured him and placed him in an uncomfortably small, toroidal cage. In all honestly, I tried my best in the class, and I don’t really think anyone is going to be too miffed about a B+ in “The Art of the Probable,” a class so ill-defined and cross-curriculum that I had difficulty explaining what it was to others not because they wouldn’t understand, but because I myself didn’t understand.

So now I’m sitting in my room at home, listening to some downtempo lounge electronica in my pajamas, and wondering how much of a blog post I can honestly write about absolutely nothing without feeling genuinely guilty. It’s been nice to be at home after an admittedly difficult semester; I think I’ve put on at least a few pounds in the past few days, something I’ll have to remedy once I head back to campus. Man, this electronica just got really blippity and bloopity all of a sudden. I’d skip the song, but it’s Pandora, and they tell me that every time I skip a song they brutally slaughter an infant of some adorable animal species. Oh, it just changed on its own. Guilty yet? So far so good.

So after about nine months of trial and tribulation, my first year at MIT has been vanquished. I’d be lying if I said it was easy, but I’ll skip the cliché and spare you all the reasons why it was hard.

I’ll probably have more to write later; I’d like to resuscitate this blog over the coming summer, and probably consolidate it with my LiveJournal as well.

I had hot dogs for lunch today, which I heated up on the stove and consumed on some toasted hot dog buns with ketchup. As I was reheating my meaty treat, I realized something: you can cook a hot dog in just about every way you can imagine, and it will still taste just fine. In fact, more often than not, they wind up tasting delicious. Just off the top of my head, you can: microwave, boil, steam, broil, bake, stir-fry, grill, and roast them. Beyond the method of cooking, hot dogs also have an extraordinary tolerance for how much they are actually cooked. As long as the middle is warm, and the outside isn’t on fire, your hot dog will turn out just fine. How many other foods can claim such versatility? Not many, I assure you.

So when designing a piece of software, robot, building, or anything else that demands reliability, remember: be as the hot dog. Be versatile. Be durable. Be strong. Most of all, be delicious.

I was thinking yesterday of things I could write about in my blog, and a lot of them seemed really interesting and amusing, the sorts of things that people tend to want to read about. Of course, they were almost all anecdotes from my personal life, or just random oddities that I had stumbled over. So how could I possibly write about them in a blog that’s supposed to be strictly informational?

It’s simple really: change the premise of the blog and pretend that nothing happened.

So welcome back to exactly the same thing. It’s always been this way. Really. I promise.