Archive for the ‘Math’ category

Nightmare before Christmas (on December 15th)

October 27th, 2011

Naively, I thought that after I finished applying early to a certain East Coast academic institution, the rest of my senior year would be a thrilling downhill ride that I would breathtakingly enjoy every scenic moment of. Well, breathtaking, yes, but not quite scenic, and definitely not enjoyable.

First of all, yes, I do need to also apply to a certain West Coast academic institution that I fell in love with this summer. I’m evidently quite tired of college apps, so I’ll put that off at least for a week or two. I still have competitions — Intel STS is going to be fun, especially — and I plan to put a lot of time into studying physics and seriously aiming for IPhO ’12 as US Team. Also, yes, I plan to miraculously jump from AIME to Red MOSP (pronounced “mop”), and that is going to take some serious mathematical work. Studying for competitions is actually quite fun (especially in comparison with college essays). Math competitions have been a frustrating area for me since freshman year, but that’s why I want to put in a final spurt. Unfortunately USAMTS conflicted with my early app this year, so I’m not participating and aiming for a gold (after all these consecutive years of silver and coming so close to gold… sigh). But yes, nationally speaking, I am quite dumb at math.

For the near future I guess I’ll review the Lagrangian and attempt to teach it to physics team — the Lagrangian is fun and I expect it to be fun to teach. Oh, but I guess not all of them know calculus.

My overbooking is especially apparent looking at my calendar (which I’d love to post a screenshot of, but no), it’s almost like one of those strange works of modern art that go in every direction with all these abstract arrangements of color and shape. Well, I appreciate my calendar, and I’ve become a bit better at following it (just a bit). I’ve gotten into the habit of entering my sleep times in there too. Later on in senior year I’ll have fun reminiscing on how little I slept.

Just to put it out there, yes, I am writing this blog post in lieu of working on my Chaucer essay. Also, I love my APENG teacher. I’d like the class if it wasn’t first period, but hopefully caffeine supplements will be able to remedy that.

My seat partner in English, Kenny, has been very good to me (despite my frequent sick leave — bad immune system, it’s true). In the last few days we’ve been discussing Asian music, and I’ve found I really don’t know much about Asian music, even J-Pop. It’s because I’m too contrarian, of course, but I definitely felt I needed to get out there and explore mainstream J-Pop and Mandarin music. I’m Chinese, after all.

I haven’t been following anime at all during the month of my college application internment. Coincidentally, Fall 2011 has many series that I thought I would be very eager to see, but now that I have had time available to watch anime, I find that I’ve only been keeping up with the series I’ve been watching previously (Beelzebub, Fairy Tail pretty much). Looking back at Shana, I don’t really want to watch Shana III (and that movie has been sitting on my hard disk somewhere, too). Mirai Nikki is great (beyond great, loved every page of the manga) but I feel absolutely no compulsion to watch it. In fact, I feel no compulsion to watch any new series, and I only forced myself to watch Fate/zero because… well, it’s Fate/zero and by all accounts THE anime of the season. Oh, it was epic all right, but I don’t feel eager to watch the next episode. For some reason, I don’t feel eager to watch anime. I guess it’s what a month without anime does to you.

So yes, I’ve only watched one episode of one series of Fall ’11 strangely, considering how many non-dumb stories this season has. By request, I’ll check out Guilty Crown soon.

Not watching anime has definitely freed up a lot of time, but somehow I still feel much busier. Most of the work is AP Mandarin, which I think I somehow still have an A- in despite my utter failure in every realm. I think I’m really learning a lot in this class, though, and I hope I can read 95% of a newspaper by the time I get out of high school. Still, I don’t feel AP Mandarin is really worth the effort, and I’m afraid college adcoms will frown on me for being Chinese and “taking the easy route” by taking Chinese in school. In this regard, I truly should have gone for French or Spanish (both languages I am very interested in anyways). Japanese would also be easy and fun.

I’ve picked up trying to read Japanese light novels again. After giving up reading untranslated manga. It’s just too difficult trying to look up words you don’t know. In light novels on the computer, all I need is a mouse-over or middle-click, and my definition is right there (courtesy of Yomichan or Rikaichan or any other member of this inordinate family of tools with -chan inexplicably tacked on). One more click, and a flash card of the word is added to my flashcard deck on my computer (I worshipped Anki).

Speaking of which, I haven’t had a chance to add AP Mandarin words to my Anki deck that I haven’t reviewed in half a year. Anki was even convenient for learning physics — it was quite useful memorizing facts and formulae for my physics competitions back in the day. I have a server set up to host the LaTeX notation rasterized into PNG files, and I can review my flashcards from anywhere on the globe with a web browser, or the awesome Anki Android app on my phone. So yes, I am plugging Anki for all your memorization needs. I have a cool Needs Statements flashcard deck with Precalc/Calc A and Calculus BC versions, if anyone wants. With really cool LaTeXed math notation, and word-for-word from the Needs Statement sheets. Ahhh, calculus feels so nostalgic. I also have my Mandarin 4 deck, but they changed the textbooks after my year.

With all this language-learning, physics, math, college applications, research, and much miscellaneous matter, I haven’t had a time to code, work on projects, and fix up my Linux servers. I need to put Altair to good use as my backup mail server. This summer I put lighttpd on Altair (Reverie has Apache2), and — by god — the performance is astounding! I have a fully-functional web server on maybe 30MB of RAM with Debian 6. I put nginx for Windows on Mizu (pretty much just used to host my flashcard media), and it’s been a snap to use as well. Apache is definitely going out of business. Well, I guess it’s open source, so that’s technically not possible.

Yes, I did set up FCGI on Apache (and suexec since I plan on doing shared hosting). Messing with Apache is not fun. PHP loads a lot slower than mod_php, but I can squeeze a lot more httpd processes out of my precious RAM. I wish people wouldn’t spam, so I wouldn’t have to run spamd. It eats like >70MB whether there is mail or not. It’s been great at blocking spam though, and I have it configured to automatically delete mail with a spam score over 15. It pained me incredibly, but recently I added the Spamcop and XBL blacklists to my Postfix configuration. I don’t like blacklists, but the spam volume annoys me. I purposely held off on the PBL list, because I am in support of people running private mail servers on their home ISP networks. I remember when I was running my copy of hmailserver on my Windows box through a crappy AT&T (those are synonyms, I checked the thesaurus) DSL line. Haha, good times. Fellow computer enthusiasts for the win!

My east coast college’s interview is coming up as well. I’ve been increasingly noticing the unpleasant, slightly nasal quality of my voice. Besides generally improving my speaking skills, I really need to train myself to not make that noise. From what I’ve read online, the key to getting rid of the nasal quality is to act like you’re about to yawn when you talk. The reason for the nasally noise is because the soft palate is not completely blocking the path to the nose, so some the sound from your vocal cords also passes into and reverberates through the nasal cavity. And when you yawn (and you can feel it yourself), your soft palate completely closes the passage to the nose so this problem is solved. I know close to nothing about anatomy, but this makes a lot of sense to me. Unfortunately, making sense does not make it any easier to put this into practice…

I’m thinking of getting this book or this from Amazon. The reviews are very laudatory, of course. Speech tutors/therapists must be expensive.

Rather than doing nothing but waiting for the nightmarish announcement coming on December 15th (and groundlessly hoping/praying for a fat envelope), I’m up to my nose.

I’ve spent too long ranting. Time to get back to work on that essay.

Edit: Amusingly, this blog post is longer than my essay.

That’s Your Title

July 20th, 2011

I post so rarely now that I have to look up the date of my last post, and go into my Google Calendar to look up what I wanted to talk about. That post was nearly a month ago… and this is a summertime post, where I supposedly have boundless amounts of free time to dedicate to various assorted meaningful and meaningless activities. Well, that’s not quite true. With my full-time summer job that barely pays minimum wage at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I don’t really have free time on weekdays.

Said occupation began humorously on June 27, two days after my last post– well, to tell the truth, I met with my research professor as a JPL visitor on Friday to discuss my research, as he was leaving for a 2-week trip to attend a conference. By humorously, I don’t mean that anything humorous happened; I only mean to say that I was in good humor. Arriving late on the first day to orientation, as any respectable new hire would do, I moped around the visitor center for a few minutes before I found out that the orientation was to be held in the Von Karman Auditorium. There was a nice big sign that directed us towards the auditorium that my eyes had conveniently missed.

Cool videos were projected, boring Powerpoints were presented, ignored rules are laid down. We can’t sell our research to foreign governments, play World of Warcraft on company time and computers, torrent movies (not that I was planning on watching anime at work), or sleep. (Blogging was never disallowed :D) My boss is cool, my coworkers are friendly, my section manager is awesome (totally reminds me of Ms. Chen, our music director, who by the way was re-hired… congratulations!), and life’s great — the greatness of life rears its head in some way or another every day.

The internet here is mad fast. Yay for government/military-quality connection. Speaking of internet, I need to move to Sweden. AT&T hasn’t even released an LTE phone yet, and average speeds aren’t going to top 10Mbps anyways… America is sad. Especially judging from past experience. If I get to check out Estonia next year (43rd IPhO), maybe I’ll like it so much I’ll apply for a green card.

After a wonderful three days on the job with my professor gone, familiarizing myself with my new environment, getting my office workstation set up with Ubuntu 10.04 (god bless he who has granted Linux unto my humble PC), meeting new people, and nearly killing myself driving to and from work multiple times… after three days on the job, I got five days of vacation. Now how may this be, you may ask. We have a wonderful little policy here called RDO (Regular Day Off) in which we get every other Friday off. In addition, this was Independence Day weekend, so Friday and Monday were off anyways. So in total, five days off. After three days of work. Brilliant. I wish every week were like this.

So what do I do with my five days? I visit Stanford!

(This was post #321. Brought to you by The Common Application and the letter Q.)

Apology

June 8th, 2011

I wanted to post during camp. I wanted to post lots and lots, describing every last minute detail and juicing every last drop of emotion, lest they drift away as memories do, eventually rendered forever incommunicable.

I’ve disappointed you, my dear reader, yes, but even more, I’ve disappointed myself. Oh dear. Here’s to an attempt to atone for two-and-a-half weeks of no posts.

It’s so hard to post after not posting. Because then you have to post something good enough to make up for not posting. And to write a good post, you spend a lot of time and thought, further prolonging your post debt.

Well, I’ll start by finishing. I spent an inordinate length of time brainstorming and revising ideas for my Math Team captain speech. Being as dumb as I was in my childhood (as again, everything that happened to me before yesterday occurred “in my childhood”), I focused on things that would actually (hear the cynicism kick in) help the team.

That’s weird, I’m not in the mood for cynicism right now. I was brimming with it just this afternoon. Cynicism really doesn’t help you win any friends, after all, so I’m careful to not let it out. When it spills, troublesome things happen. Awkward conversations and strained relationships. First hand experience from just last week. But just let me finish here.

Besides the typical bragging (I hate bragging… I really can’t respect myself for doing that) about leadership and math skills, I brought up as a big topic my idea to keep members from “flaking” — ditching meetings and not doing work. Reduced to a single sentence or two, the idea was that every two months, if a member was absent for more than three meetings then they would have to make up the missed meeting time at home, studying by themselves. At the end of every 2 month period, we would set a moderate cutoff on the team selection exam for these people. This way they would be heavily pressured to make up at least as much time as they missed; in reality, more. And if they didn’t care enough about Math Team to study, they would be kicked. No changes for people who attend regularly; they are in no danger of being kicked. Simple.

The other point was my computer skills, of course; I offered to create a website for Arcadia Math Team just as I had for Physics Team, posting our weekly meeting agendas, homework assignments, and math resources, and providing a central hub for the team’s communications and scheduling via forums and calendars.

The question I was offended by during the “interrogation” session after the speeches was from Erik Krogen. Would you still create this website for our team if you weren’t selected as captain? Are you really dedicated to our team or are you just doing this so you can call yourself captain?

Ms. King was on my side for this question but I’m still thinking about this. Fine. Still angry about this, I’ll admit. Are you really qualified to ask me this question? I’m staking my entire captainship on a bulletproof anti-flaking system that will (and did) cost me the entire cake. Nobody will vote for me, because they don’t want to be kicked off the team for flaking. That’s how people vote, after all. It’s real phony, but what isn’t. It’s not how good or dedicated they think people will be; it’s who gave them candy, who’s their friend, who will keep them on the team next year. Do you think I’m doing this just for the name? Do you really have the right to accuse me of flaking, myself?

The above is what I should have said. Minus the emotional and angry tone. I suck at being emotional and angry off the page. Some people can do it and be effective, successfully intimidating people. My mom can do that. I can’t — I just sound wimpy and people laugh or bully me. At the very least, nobody takes me seriously and listens to what I have to say. That’s why I try to keep myself calm. May peace prevail in the world.

James totally deserves the captainship. I was rooting for him all the way. He was my only friend as a freshman in Math Team, and although we haven’t talked much lately, I remember walking down to Le Roy with him after every Math Team meeting. Now, allow me to be cynical about David Liu. Kind of a different sort of cynicism. Cynicism plus, what, admiration? He is amazing; in a class of his own, for being able to incite such excitement, enjoyment, and camaraderie radially around him. It’s even stronger than electromagnetism, whose force decreases by an inverse square law — I’m sure his powers are proportional to the first power inverse. (That was my attempt at the lame physics joke you were probably partially expecting of me today.)

Meh, let’s drop the topic.

I’ve had an issue with whether or not to be completely honest on my blog about things that would offend others. Something to contemplate. I like the motto of thinking twice before talking. Unfortunately I never seem to think twice when I open my mouth like an idiot and demonstrate the fool I am, and I always seem to think too much and eventually decide to keep my mouth shut when people take advantage of me and push work onto my shoulder for not talking and complaining and expressing my opinion.

The optimist in me (it’s somewhere inside all of us, I swear) tells me to just keep swimming, or something. Just try not to drown, and you’ll turn out all right eventually. Eventually. I think.

I’ve talked a bit about not letting cynicism spill out; keeping myself calm and not getting emotional or angry in front of people; keeping my goddamn unwarranted honesty to myself.

Jeng has been giving me a lot of work. Now before I present anything, I will tell you that I was wrong, and Jeng was absolutely right. First, some background on why I’m so mad about Jeng’s work.

It was only a few days before I left for Maryland. I had Vincent’s material from the previous year’s camp, which put me at a huge advantage (as I now know) in terms of making the traveling team. Basically all of the traveling members this year are returners. The camp is simply too difficult to do well in on the first try. There are so many new concepts to get used to. The second camp is basically the same, including the material, so knowing the material beforehand put people at a huge advantage. I had the material from a previous year. I could have had that huge advantage.

What I didn’t have, however, was time to study this material. Unlike those who were homeschooled or go to private school (which I wish my parents had done — let me homeschool myself), I had to make up all the work I was “missing.” Because I seriously learn stuff from this. Sarcasm. On a tangent, I also have to deal with annoying things like attendance, tardy sweeps, and mandatory homework in the first place. These things are made to deal with the problem students, the people who aren’t able to learn quickly and on their own and need school faculty to dish out punishments for not showing up and homework to force them to care and spend time. How much better my life would be if I had dropped out of middle school.

I’ll talk about the stupidity of public school as a part of my eventual post about US Physics Team and the camp.

I had this… unpleasant conversation with Jeng. It stemmed from an email I typed to her at the airport, at Baltimore Washington International while waiting for the other members’ flights to come in. I had done a boatload of work for her class, fearful for my English grade which tottered at a dangerous 92%. We had a group project, short stories written by women. Group projects in normal English… are impossible unless you do all the work. If there is one achieving person (notice how I didn’t even write “overachieving”)…

It’s not that I don’t respect non-achieving people. You don’t need good grades. You don’t need college, heck. My buddies at Methodist are the most optimistic, upbeat dudes ever. I love that job, and I have my first training session with somebody next Thursday. I’ll do my best to seem way cool.

Anyways… she noticed I did all the work for that group project. Worried, unlike some English teachers who don’t care at all, she sent me a friendly email asking about the project.

Alright, there I am in the airport, with what, five hours on my hands to commune with my netbook. (Now that I think of it, I should have spent this time chatting with the other members — they are all so exceptionally fantastic I wish I could have made more friendships than I did.) Alas, stupidity struck, and I listed the contents of my mind regarding her class and her work. Stuff like, this work is stupid, I don’t learn anything, there’s no helping my doing all the work for the project.

Well, I thought it was politely phrased and that she would appreciate getting to know my internal thoughts. After all, I really liked her. At the time I thought she was the teacher who knew me the best. When I got the email, I was extremely happy that she cared so much. I wanted her to know what I thought about the project, and while I’m at that, about the homework she gave, and the essay I had to do, all by my departure date.

Again, I am pissed that she gave me all that work, because otherwise I would have intensely studied Vincent’s material and had a greatly enhanced chance of going to Thailand. I am fairly confident that, on the semifinal exam, I was in the top 5. That’s why I got so emotional when I was talking with her after I got back, perhaps, in hindsight. Actually, I probably wasn’t thinking about that. I was mad that she “pretended” to care in her email to me but now is being my enemy. It was more of a semantics thing during the actual argument, I think, of whether or not she cared about me.

Moral of the story: Don’t goddamn spill out your innermost thoughts to some random stranger who you think cares about you. Nobody wants to hear your freaking honesty. Nobody really cares about your life story. If it comes to it, even, just lie, just lie and be done with it. Say “oh yes, I totally love your class, and your homework has helped me learn so much!” and make your teacher smile. See? There. You’ve made the world a better place.

My mom promised me she would deal with it. She promised she would deal with Jeng and my English grade and all my work. She told me to not worry about anything at camp, that she would take care of everything, and that I could just focus on what was in front of my eyes. That’s why it caught me by surprise when I got back and nothing had been resolved.

After the argument between me and Jeng, in which I almost cried (I did actually cry when dealing with Lee, and that was the most recent time), my whole end-of-school period has been not quite going so well.

Steven was elected the other Physics Team captain while I was in Maryland. For some reason, Glen is also tagging along in all the “meetings,” and it seems like he and Steven (they are very good friends) are deciding everything regarding the team now. I don’t mean to be a jerk or anything, but what exactly is Glen trying to do? Why are they ignoring me? They called me to a meeting at lunch today, and we basically did not do anything. Besides decide upon two or three more meeting dates during the summer. That we can spend doing the same thing: nothing. Seriously. Physics Team does not need to meet during the summer. Do you two really want to make me walk out to some obscure Starbucks in the middle of the day to stare at you guys for a few hours before walking all the way back?

I am pissed that they decided to run the team. Without me. I don’t want to meet during the summer. We don’t need to meet. Honestly, and here’s me being arrogant, I don’t think we need either of them. None of them have any physics achievements, really, although I can’t complain about that looking at Math Team captains and ASB people. Okay, I realize I’m now just dissing people left and right. At the very least, I don’t see why Glen is acting like he’s the third captain. Or, rather, that he’s the first captain, and I’m just some bystander.

Armed with these thoughts, I called Vincent. He’s very social, very different from me and all, but I suppose he’s still the person best suited for me to call my mentor.

I think that the advice you get isn’t important. When you ask for advice, the important thing is the act of receiving the advice. The act of giving the advice… is what’s significant.

Vincent told me to draw up my own plans. Instead of messing with Steven, I could draw up my own, and let him have some input. And I didn’t need to care about Glen, said Vincent, as I could override him. It’s unsatisfying advice, really. My plan for the summer is to do nothing. Just check up on the hopefuls every week or so. That’s all they need. And it just bothers me that Glen is there. So the advice is kind of moot.

But it made me happy to receive advice from Vincent.

James asked me whether or not I would still create the website for Math Team during the meeting today. He wasn’t here during the questioning session (we were interrogated separately — solitary confinement) so I don’t blame him. Do I sound like a selfish bastard for saying no? I’d probably give him the feeling that I was running for captain just for the line on my college app. Not that he or David or any of the other candidates weren’t guilty of the same.

It’s so phony.

I’ll end with a line that I liked to repeat to myself sometimes, a while back. It resurfaced this week.

A little bit of courage is the real magic.

May Showers

May 21st, 2011

There’s a curious word in Japanese. It’s written “May rain” but pronounced completely differently: “samidare.”

I was thinking of this word when walking home with Eric after the Math Team meeting today, where we elected captains. It was sunny, yet vaguely drizzly. I liked the lazy, sporadic raindrops. The sunny rain made me happy.

I was actually thinking of titling this post “insincerity,” or perhaps “contingency plans” — gotta have ’em.

As I’ve been ranting about for the last few posts, the damned public school system isn’t cutting me any break at all with homework and schoolwork. This is causing my slow and painful death before I even get on the plane to go to camp. It’s like the school doesn’t want me to do well in camp and win medals in an international competition. I am seriously considering homeschool next year. I would recommend it to anyone who asks me what the best school is.

“Your mom.”

And that’s serious.

I wore my black Adidas shoes to our assemblies, and Mr. Forbes noticed (what the hell was I doing!? standing in the middle of the room with few people, with a direct line of sight to the office? sigh…) and said some really harsh things (notice he never says harsh things to female orchestra members). Get your shoes, or you’ll be performing in your (black) socks. He totally expected me to not have black socks on, so he could criticize me more, but I did have black socks on. It’s a hassle. Like I (and Andy, seemingly) like to say… 面倒くさい (mendou kusai). It’s so troublesome. Not only for me, but it caused my dad a lot of trouble as well.

I should have thought of this. I should have at least considered this event, which is in the very basic range of possible mishaps that I could encounter. How can I call myself smart if I’m not even able to predict and account for misfortunes as simple and predictable as this?

Also, I seem to have lost my genius ability to fall asleep whenever convenient. I guess it’s because I’m sleeping too much. But when I’m sitting during the assembly, I feel like I’m wasting time. The only thing I hate more than wasting money is wasting time.

My APN interviewer apparently didn’t get my email. Jeng doesn’t even show us APN. My interview is tomorrow during fourth period, and I don’t even feel like showing up.

Jenglish has been the harshest class on me this entire year.

I don’t know what to say about it, since it’s pretty much the only non-honors or AP course I’m taking.

***

Okay, looks like I wasn’t able to finish this post on May 19th. It’s May 21st in College Park, Maryland, and you can look forward to semi-regular updates. Maybe.

I’ll probably follow up on this post later. There is a LOT of stuff I didn’t get to talk about. Like the actual Math Team Captain election.

still trying to hold on

May 15th, 2011

Here’s to my well-intentioned resolution to post every day. May it rest in peace.

I thought I should at least keep to posting once per week. So here’s my post for the week. I’m really looking forward to writing this post. It was an eventful week, full of delicious food, tender pride, sore elbows, childlike excitement, and broken gestures.

Thing about Jenglish… I have a really mixed opinion of it. She gives us more work than Villalobos did for Honors English last year. She’s very anal about my doing physics or other homework in her class, something I am very annoyed at her for. Her class activity on Friday was brilliant, however. We made Mother’s Day cards! She bought dozens of reams of pretty, flowery, expensive, professional design paper in all sorts of colors and variations, and a vast supply of scrapbooking supplies. We made beautiful cards. I made 3, one for me, and two for each of my siblings, to give to my mom. When I told Ms. Jeng about my 3 cards, she thought it was so kind of me that I almost felt like she was going to hug me.

One thing I have come to feel about Ms. Jeng — her goal in life seems to be “to bring happiness to as many people as she can.” She brings us food, candy, treats out of her own pocket money; makes us write down something that happened each day that has made us thankful. This Mother’s Day activity illustrated it best — Jeng wanted to bring happiness to hundreds of mothers that day. I’m sure she succeeded. My mom was very happy to recieve the 3 cards, although she figured out that I had made all 3 myself, in English class (Ms. Jeng had instructed us to tell our moms that we had made the card of our own intiative and not because she told us to).

My typical weekend goes through like this. The night before, I set my alarm for some outrageously early morning ear torture. The morning of, I sleep through all the alarms. Or, I get up, defuse the infringing eardrum explosive, and lie back down dreamily.

At sometime after noon, I sit up in my bed with a start. Oh no! Half of my precious day has drifted off into the silence! “What to do?” I think to myself, as I hastily brush my teeth and organize my thoughts. “So much stuff to do today!”

I sit down at my computer and turn on my 3 monitors. Oh yeah, I should check today’s anime. While I do that, I’ll flip through my email. OH, this week’s episode of THAT anime is out! Gotta download asap. Wonder what’s up on xda. Look, my ROM has been updated. I plug in my phone and prepare to load a new ROM, backing up my apps. Cool, my anime download finished. Wonder if there are any cool blog posts on Google Reader. Hey, there are five new chapters of manga! Google has a cool new product — I gotta check it out. Wow, that anime ep was epic. I wonder if there are any related anime. Gonna do a search on MAL. Oh wow, this anime was made by the same studio that did this other anime! And I’ve been wanting to watch that other anime since forever! I’ll download it immediately. While the torrent is running, why don’t I check up on Mabi?

Repeat for nine hours, with intermittent breaks for food and such.

By 9 or 10pm, I’m desperately trying to resuscitate the day’s productivity. This is sounding awfully like today. Huh.

I had a nice Mother’s Day. We went out to lunch at Zen Buffet — they were having a Mother’s Day special event. The venue was packed; if my mom hadn’t gotten a seat early we would have waited outside for hours. I haven’t had a buffet in months — long months filled with the void of non-buffet food. I’ve been dreaming about the food I had on Sunday ever since.

Breaded cheesesticks. They have pervaded my dreams for a week. I spent my early morning classes for the past week thinking about them. I’m not even sure what they’re called. Mozzarella sticks? Intensely craving them for days.

Monday was AP Physics C. I had a lot to say about my adventurous invasion of Alhambra High School, and I was completely planning on dedicating a post to their queer customs and savage rites. A paragraph will have to suffice for this topic.

Since over a month before the actual exam, I had been calling them every week to try and find out where, exactly, on campus the test was going to be held. I never found out before the actual day. Nobody knew (or cared enough to get out of their seats to find out for me). Finally, the receptionist just told me to give up on trying to find out, and just ask around on test day. Unsatisfied, but left without a choice, I agreed.

So I strolled into the gatekeeper’s lounge on Monday. When I say gatekeeper, I’m serious. The entire campus is completely fenced down. Nobody can escape. I felt like a visitor to a jail complex, almost, what with all the guards and patrolmen– “proctors.” Oh yeah, about the “proctors” — there was one proctor every 30 meters. It was during a class period that I came in (extra-early… at 9am or so), and I initially thought the proctors were… I don’t know, photographers documenting the school or something. There were so many! And they were everywhere! And they weren’t doing anything, because there weren’t any students outside anyways!

I’m sure if some student suddenly bolted out from their classroom door, thirty proctors would chase after him, tie him down and restrain him while others take down his prisoner student ID number to extend his sentence for another two years.

Luckily for me, all the proctors had a radio on them (like real prison guards! oh my god!), so they asked on the radio where my AP exam was, and I was directed to the library. Alright, cool. Let’s see. Three hours until the exam. Woo-hoo. I stare at the locked library door, where like two people are taking AP Biology.

I sat down next to a flower bed. Immediately, the nearest proctor aggroed me. He was a nice guy after finding out I was a visitor (not a prisoner student), and he helped me find a place to sit while waiting for my test. We went to the Career Center, and they gave me a nice table to sit at.

I did bring a backpack with some stuff. I wasn’t planning on studying for the AP Physics C exam though (psh, how hard can it be?) but I did print out a copy of the 2010 free-response questions. I took those out, and worked through the problems. The difficulty really surprised me, but I was able to figure out all of the questions. “Al-righty,” I thought to myself. I’m set.

Flash forward three hours. The library doors finally come unlocked to let us unsuspecting College Board victims in. I was surprised at their library. Shelves upon shelves of manga, comics, graphic novels. I would have loved it if our library had half of what they had. I’d go to the library every day. I’d never eat lunch anymore.

They made us rip the labels off of our water bottles. That was just… odd. They didn’t want us to cheat by writing formulas on our water bottle labels? Really…

We were sat down in a small corner of their fantastic library. Only about five people taking Mechanics, and that would dwindle to only about two other people taking E&M two hours later. It was the reference corner, and I was sitting next to some fifteen-volume World Cultures set that I’m sure nobody has ever touched since it was purchased by the school. All the manga in the library seemed well-used.

About the test… I found it difficult. On AP Chemistry, Comp Sci, and Calculus BC, I always had time (sometimes even more than a half hour) left after I finished questions. On all four sections of the AP Physics C exam, I was strapped for time. I found that odd, because I’m supposed to be like, the very best at this, or something. Oh, by the way, at this time I didn’t know that you only needed a 50% to get a 5. I’m still WTFing at that statistic. I mean, you’d actually have to TRY to not get a five if the curve was that low. But yeah, at the time I thought I had failed the test or something. I hate how the College Board made us pay twice for AP Physics C — it’s a shorter test, so come on!

I missed something rather important that was happening. As you might or might not know, my blog was hosted on my home PC (which is on 24/7 anyways). I had Apache, PHP, and MySQL running on it, along with an SSH server, hMailServer to serve SMTP and IMAP, and various other goodies. I’ve got lots of RAM, and not a lot of people visit my site, so it was fine, but I wanted a dedicated server in a real datacenter to play with and to put to use in my future endeavors.

I spent most of my Sunday researching virtual private server (VPS) services. Initially, I searched through big-name sites like HostGator, and the cheapest prices were $20 per month. I thought, “alright, my dad will be okay with that,” but of course, being me and suffering from chronic Refusal-to-spend-money-unnecessarily Syndrome, I furiously set out to find cheap VPS servers.

I was overjoyed when I found servers at $15, then $11, then– wow! six dollars! My amazement turned to awe when I discovered servers at $3 per month… $2.50… $2… $1.67! That’s twenty dollars per YEAR — as opposed to my original price of twenty dollars a month! God, sometimes my strange Syndrome does pay off as opposed to annoying people around me.

I made a brilliant Google Doc comparing the best VPS offers I could find. Here, I’ll even share it with my beloved readers. I decided that 128MB of RAM was too low for me. There was a really good offer for a server with brilliant specs, but only a 10M uplink. I thought to myself, even my home download speed is faster than 10M! So I decided on at least a 100M uplink (preferably gigabit). After sorting through more and more deals, I decided to go with my new friends at HostFolks. On Monday morning before I left for my AP exam, I sent them an email asking whether or not their RAM was dedicated (as some retailers oversold their RAM), and whether or not their servers had a gigabit uplink.

To my glad surprise, the man replied five minutes later! I was expecting him to reply in like, two days, one day at the best. But wow — what great service! Instant reply! The RAM was indeed dedicated, and the uplink was in fact gigabit! HostFolk’s deal was pretty perfect. I shot off another question that night, and again — near-instant reply. Late at night. What kind of customer service representative was awake at 1am in the morning? Outrageous.

I bought the VPS from them, and I spent my Tuesday and Wednesday setting it up. Took a break from school. School is tiring. Also, we wouldn’t be doing anything in most of my classes, especially on Wednesday when everybody would be gone for AP English. I actually kind of really regret not taking AP US History and AP English, even at some other school.

All the guides pointed to one thing — Apache sucks. It spawns fifty threads that take dozens of megabytes of precious RAM each. I was going to install lighttpd or nginx as my webserver, but my server had 512MB of RAM — plenty of RAM to waste. I still haven’t used up all 512MB of RAM yet, even with KDE running on top of vnc3server.

The thing that took me the most time to set up was email. By default, sendmail was installed. I installed exim4 and unsuccessfully attempted to set it up following some guide. Eventually I gave up and removed exim4, opting for a guide that was dedicated to my operating system (Debian 5 “Lenny”). I installed postfix, dovecot, various administration tools, following the guide. I ran into so many problems I won’t even document them.

I still need to lock down many parts of my system. Security is really a big thing these days, and it would piss me off if some lame script kiddie got into my hard-earned system with everything set up, and blew it up, and I had to start all over (and waste another week…).

On Thursday, Justin somehow convinced me to let him come over. Oh, it was also Ms. Jeng’s birthday. Hanchan had taken all of her leftover cake and cupcakes, interestingly, and brought them over to my house. No, I didn’t invite him. One thing I absolutely can’t resist speaking up about is how Hanning always sits on my bed (without asking) when he comes over. I sleep there. After showering every night. It’s clean. Your pants have been in six different chairs in six different classrooms throughout the day. They touch the pee-stained floor when you use the restroom at the high school. I wish you would refrain from rubbing them all over my blankets and my sheets. Also, please don’t put your socks on top of my pillow. My head goes there every night.

I’m really stuck on the topic of “friendship,” especially in the superficiality of society as it is, and even more especially in the superficiality of Arcadia High School. It’s troublesome. I think too much. Thinking is troublesome. Moving on, leaving this topic for another post on another day.

Yes, I am anal about cleanliness. Dust pisses me off. And there’s always so much of it in my room. I can never get rid of it all. I can remove every speck of it in my room, and tomorrow it’ll be just as dusty as it was before. I hate dust. It’s my mortal enemy.

I even bought a air purifier for my birthday present. Yes, instead of asking for a game or a car for my birthday, I asked for an air purifier. Really shows you how much I hate dust.

We watched Denpa Teki na Kanojo, and I’m worried that they didn’t enjoy my choice that much. I really should have shown them Bungaku Shoujo, since I still haven’t seen it yet, and it was sitting on my hard drive, but I stupidly didn’t think of it. I also seem to tend to get excited about anime and disrespectfully spoil things. I would imagine that most people enjoy anime more when watching with someone else, but for me it’s rather awkward, because I have to worry about whether or not the other watchers are enjoying the anime I chose or not, and whether or not that part was appropriate for them to see (Denpa Teki had some pretty adult parts).

Thursday was a tiring night. I conveniently had a history project due the very next day. When finally Hanchan and Justin left, and I was done with the other business I had that day, I sat down with Alfred and began working on the powerpoint. I showed Alfred our song (the version sung by me on both parts), and he approved. He found us videos, and wrote half of the powerpoint. He even wrote a rap, and printed out the lyrics as a review sheet. I loved the pun he made — the rap was a “wrap-up” to our presentation: a “RAP-UP”! Ahahaha~

I had written the song sproadically over the week before. Usually I procrastinate on things like these, but bashing Bush is fun, and I even chose writing the song over watching anime on several occasions. I was originally planning on finding a good MIDI file of the song (“A Whole New World” from Aladdin) and repeating the verses that needed repeating, and then rendering, but Sibelius refused to cooperate, so I ended up taking an instrumental backing recording and cutting it raw in Audacity. It turned out pretty horrible, but I guess that added to the hilarity of our presentation.

I found Alfred to be the perfect partner — we basically finished everything in one night besides the song and rap editing. Less than one night, really — we started at 8 or 9pm.

Friday was quite fun. Here’s period one. Originally I had planned on finishing my entire Game Project in one day (to demonstrate my brilliance as an act of defiance, or in an attempt to seek self-satisfaction), but I didn’t quite finish it on Thursday. I spent Comp Sci on Friday mostly preparing presentation stuff with Alfred, and not doing Comp Sci (not that anyone was doing Comp Sci, really).

Here’s period two. Alfred and I talked about stuff for maybe five minutes, I turned in my math team app, and I did the annoying Formal Logic homework. Period three was orchestra — Smooth sounded so good with full orchestra+percussion! Danzas Cubanas wasn’t bad either. And I had LesMis stuck in my head for the rest of the day. Ah, it’s moments like these when I love Orchestra.

In period four, I explained my leave of absence to Jeng. “Too cool for school, aren’cha?” I didn’t assume she would let me off on writing the narrative essay I heard about, and she didn’t, of course. I really wish my teachers would let me off on classwork and homework for these two weeks. I’m already stressed out enough. Well, teenagers aren’t supposed to expect adults to understand anything.

We also have a presentation in English next week. I really don’t see the point in wasting my time doing these things. This brings me to my convo with Andy last night, but I’ll get to that at the end of this huge post.

My dealings with Jeng took quite a while. I was originally planning on making an illegal trip to El Pollo Loco for some mmmmm– yummy cheese quesadillas. In fact, I had planned the trip a day before. I didn’t get to go, of course, and I ended up having a delicious chicken taco for $2. It was delicious. Seriously. Unexpected.

But of course, what I was really craving were mozzarella sticks. Ugh. Still dreaming about them every night.

In Period 5, I finished the lab I had started on Thursday with this bright man whose name I have yet to request. A lot of work in this class that usually gives no work. Why does it all have to be this week?

Finally, our presentation came to be on a clear Spring day in a classroom.

It was great.

Next up, I had an appointment with Mr. Zhang, my AP Physics B teacher last year. Sometimes I feel that he’s the person who understands me best in this world. If I were to make a list of the people who understand me the best, I would put these four people: my parents, K, and Mr. Zhang. In fact, K would be at the top of the list, actually. (It’s awkward reminding myself not to type K’s full name.)

He had invited me a few days before to do a new  “oscilloscope lab” and I, of course, accepted gladly. I didn’t expect him to also invite two sophomore girls as well, one of them Lucy Chen, who had scored only two points less than me on PhysicsBowl 2011. My impression of her was different from the actual her. I expected her to be similar to me, but she was in fact a talkative, cheerful kid. She completely reminded me of Rose, including her voice. I don’t think anything bad of her, it’s just that her personality didn’t match what I had imagined.

We were soldering circuits. The two girls worked on a frequency generator circuit, while I worked to repair a voltage regulator circuit. I like Mr. Zhang’s soldering gun. It heats up instantly, and its shape is so much more maneuverable than a conventional soldering iron. I failed to fix the circuit, and we tried many, many times to diagnose the problem, including replacing the voltage regulator chip twice, and replacing the resistor twice. Eventually we gave up on the circuit, and he brought out another one, which I was able to set up perfectly. I think there was either something wrong with the chip specifications, since it didn’t match the chip on the working circuit, or that the potentiometer’s range was too low. It was probably the latter — we measured currents of 2.0 A! That’s outrageously high current. It heated up the circuit so much I gave myself a pretty bad burn touching the voltage regulator chip.

We took Mr. Zhang out for dinner that night. Both girls had left, and I was having an extremely enjoyable conversation with him. We talked about biology, school, the future of the Physics Team, math, computers, his future plans, his tutoring program, setting up a website, and my experience with computers. We were interrupted by my mom, who dropped in because my phone was off. We decided to go out for dinner, and Mr. Zhang expressed his desire to eat at a buffet. Zen Buffet was packed to the max, for some reason, so we went to Hometown Buffet. The last time I had gone to Hometown was on Hanchan’s birthday. (I wonder if he dislikes me because of something his dad said that day. We talked a lot, and maybe he got the impression that his dad thought I was his perfect son. Maybe at home his dad gave him a painful lecture. Blah, now I’m overrationalizing.)

Naturally, the conversation drove towards college and my career. I hate talking about that. I hate it. I’m not even going to describe the conversation.

But the food. THE FOOD! I had been craving buffet ever since last Sunday on Mother’s Day. BUT NO! THEY HAD NO MOZZARELLA CHEESE STICKS! I will hate Hometown Buffet for all of eternity.

The other food was quite good, though. I liked the “dirty rice” — I’ve always liked variants of Spanish rice, and this rice was especially good. They also had some New Orleans something-or-other Chicken that was absolutely delicious. God, I want to eat buffet again tonight.

Saturday night was another stereotypical weekend. I didn’t attend ARML, and after much angst, decided to not travel to Las Vegas for the competition. I’m suffering from low self-esteem regarding math (been suffering it ever since 9th grade). One facet is due to the intense competitiveness of mathematics.

The reply to Dr. Merryfield’s email took me six hours to consider. My efficiency has been steadily dropping ever since — I don’t even know when. I haven’t watched anime for days, either.

Besides three weeks of homework that I have to finish, I also have to study physics for camp on Friday. It’s stressing me out. I need to keep up with those crazy academic monsters. I need to. I need to, in order to rescue my blurred self-confidence from a watery death.

The final brick in my tower of stress and worry was a conversation with Andy late at night. I had promised myself I would sleep early. I seriously needed every second I could save. I needed every minute of sleep I could salvage, because I know how hard-pressed I will be for sleep during camp. Yet, I stupidly allowed myself to be drawn into a Skype conversation at night. I told myself I was multitasking, but really.

I don’t know what I feel about Andy anymore. He was my best friend from fourth to fifth grade. We lost contact after that. I’ve always admired him, respected him for his uprightness. I’ve always looked up to him. Yet I feel something wrong, something distasteful about him now. It’s not that he rejected our idea. Now that I consider it, he’s quite right in many ways. It was one line, specifically. One idea that he conveyed during the conversation last night. He said this. He said that he was enjoying his high school life. He said that he wasn’t doing anything for his college apps. He said he was enjoying his high school life, and that his goal wasn’t college.

I can provide a probable reason for this answer, for this statement. His parents probably told him not to do anything for selfish, corrupt reasons like college apps and beating others at this college game. His parents probably told him to do everything for self-improvement, self-enjoyment, and that if he did that, he would naturally surpass others. And it’s really what you’re supposed to say to college admissions officers. You’re supposed to tell them that you learn because you love to, you did all that stupid APENG homework that had no contribution whatsoever to your education because you had fun doing it…

It’s just fishy. It stinks. It’s worse than admitting that you hate the system, and your teachers, and all the pointless work that you have to do every day. It’s very bad that you’re not only putting on the facade to admissions officers, but also to your friends. We’re his friends, right? I probably don’t have the right to say “best” (at least not anymore). I considered him my best friend since fourth grade. He understood me, understood the joy of tinkering with computers, and learning how things worked. I suppose back then, our motivation for learning was criminally sincere. We loved learning.

Maybe he’s still desperately trying to cling to that elementary school sense. Still trying to hold on, long after I had let go.

Once Upon an AP Test

May 4th, 2011

Depressing thing of the day: I got #6 in the free response (AP Calc BC) completely wrong, I think. Sucks, and I feel stupid.

You know, when I get a question wrong, for some reason it’s always Alfred that asks me about that question and makes me figure out I got it wrong. Like, for the F=ma physics competition this year, there was a question about springs that I got wrong, and Alfred asked me about that question, and he got it right. Again, for the PhysicsBowl competition this year, he asked me about a question about how much of the moon was lit during a new moon. Although the moon is completely dark during a new moon, 50% of it is lit at all times (we’re just seeing the unlit side), and I got tricked by that question. It’s always Alfred asking me about the questions I get wrong. If Alfred asks me about a question, so far I’ve always gotten it wrong…

Gotta stop him from asking me questions.

Anyways, today’s “continental breakfast” was pleasant. I swear, the apple juice tasted expired, but my stomach is still holding up so far. The AP test was great (except for that last FRQ), not as great as APCS or APchem, when I had like over 30 minutes of extra time after I was done. If I get a 4 on AP Calc, I swear I’m gonna… murder something. Probably some insect. In cold blood.

Today’s HUSH was awfully boring. Alfred kept flirting with Rose instead of working on our Powerpoint. I don’t mind him flirting with Rose, but he needs to help me work on the project too. Why is this post all about Alfred. Geez. And he won’t even sing for me.

Speaking of which, I’ve added quite a few lines, and fixed a lot of awkward places. Hold on, I’ll record myself singing it.

I’m planning on composing the actual backing instrumentals to this in Sibelius, although I really do not know if I will have time to (presenting next Friday). It’s going to be a lot of work.

Finally, at 6:45 I went to help organize the new Junior Volunteer Orientation at the hospital. We did a skit on “what not to do,” and I played this dying patient while Ricky played the bad volunteer who texted in my hospital room and ignored my cries for water, got annoyed as I started dying, and started kicking me and stepping on me (not for real, haha). Yeah, that was… interesting. Then we introduced our departments. I fail at public speaking (god… how was I -ever- ASB prez of First Ave?), but I think this was a good opportunity to practice.

Central Services basically sets up and delivers equipment all around the hospital, and sorts and delivers supplies like scalpels and gloves to places that order them. We get to go everywhere in the hospital, so we see a little of everything that goes on in the hospital. Although we don’t get to interact with patients as a part of our job, we still see them while we are on deliveries, and are happy to fill their requests, listen to their stories, and give guests directions to places in the maze-like hospital. When we’re not running around the hospital, we sit in our warehouse and sort things into bins, so if you’re interested in that…

^ is what I should have said in my speech roughly, but I failed, evidently.

Okay, I just finished recording it. Damn, it’s so bad I’m not going to post it. I’ll just put it on Skype. Don’t want random people from Estonia opening it and destroying their eardrums.

thinly veiled apathy

March 21st, 2011

This is part one of a three-part series of posts on the month of March 2011, in all its fantasy and fragrance.

I was in a misanthropic mood this morning. The morbid cloudiness and bone-soaking chill probably contributed. Oh, and I had Opera Fantasia stuck in my head. I’ll admit that last sentence is non-sequitur.

I’m putting myself under a bit of pressure to write the best post I’ve ever written. That’s because, the weeks I’m covering in this series of posts is probably going to be the most important week in my life for quite a while. Important spans of time deserve important amounts of focus — and copious concentration is required to produce my best writing. As lately I’ve been watching a lot of anime to de-stress from the to-be-described events, I hope my cerebral tissue has not deteriorated enough to cause a reduction in the quality of my penmanship.

***

I’m a fast learner. No, strike that. I would like to claim that I am a fast learner. Memorably, I completed all of  introductory college level E&M in one weekend. However, like all of my flawed kinsmen, boredom sets in.

If I were to put out my own edition of the Bible, I would add Boredom as a Cardinal Sin. It is the one deterrent to human progress, both as an individual and as a society. France got bored of absolute monarchy, so Robespierre pulled out the guillotines. Dudes got bored of work and invented slavery. Totally against human progress. Steve Ballamer got bored of Google and invented Bing. God got bored of being omnipotent and omniscient, so he created mankind, its own biggest threat. (I told you I was misanthropic today.)

I got bored of physics. So I stopped studying, the Friday before the competition. I think the last practice exam I did was 2003 or something; I had started from 2009 and worked my way towards the past. Now don’t worry, this isn’t running towards any sort of tragic conclusion, so just listen. I was enraptured that Friday night in a web of feeling and meaningfulness that can only be attributed to art of Japanese nature.

(See how good I am at excuses?)

***

I like stories. The preceding line is likely to show up again in another post. That is simply because it is so true. I like stories. There isn’t really anything particular about anime sometimes. I simply like stories: beautiful, tragic, soothing, and thrilling adventures of the soul.

I’ll admit, I am very much a sucker for many of the stereotypical characteristics of anime sometimes. I choose anime and manga largely based on the art. No works are produced in any other country that can rival the art and production quality of Japan.

But, fact is, I like stories. I read because I like stories. I watch anime because, again, I like stories. Unfortunately, I have become too genre-savvy in my quest for new, original adventures to embark on through the mirror of my monitor.

Some plots never die. But most need to. Really need to. Some phrases and plot devices need to perish from the face of the planet. Really need to.

One of the plots that never dies for me is the idea of the Journey of the Hero. I hated 9th grade Honors English, but that is irrelevant. I like stories where the protagonist begins the story flawed, is called upon to embark on an adventure he’d never even dream of, make friends and sacrifices along the way, and return with a “foundation”, a sort of personal understanding of the reasoning behind society, of the cogworks that drive the world.

Why do a lot of children’s shows employ plots that often revolve around a neverending journey, besides the continuous status quo, maintaining its differentiability over all real numbers? Children often represent our pure, primal desires (or so I would like to believe but am led to see otherwise due to my rowdy siblings). The fact that this pure, untainted type of adventure appeals the most to kids must mean that the desire is present in all of us.

Personally, I would decline (I especially like the example on that page; it’s from Samidare, totally the best manga ever) a call to adventure. On the scale of male protagonists, with 1 being moralfag, and 10 being moron, I’d transcend the boundaries of the real number line as the lamest main character ever.

Anyways, I spent that time (the time I should have been spending reviewing for this really important national competition) searching high, far, and wide for a breathtaking story that matched my expectations. I wanted a protagonist that could score “just right” on the scale — not an insensitive bastard, and not a moral-obsessed catchphrase-spewing preacher. I wanted traveling companions that had depth and dimension. Something lighthearted on the surface, with a nostalgic or longing tone that belied great meaning and significance.

Closest I got, it seems, was Tales of the Abyss, which gets the journey and character development parts down, but is a bit lacking in general plotline and side character appeal. Most of all, the biggest gripe I have about Tales (I haven’t finished it, I still have about 5 episodes to go) is that the protagonist scores 10 out of 10 on the moron scale. I haven’t seen such a moronic MC since… I just haven’t. Which I guess was the point, in order to get his character development going, but… no.

To get to Tales, I was looking along the lines of Tears to Tiara. It’s probably the closest anime I have found to this ideal journey story. We have the best side characters ever, the awesomest MC ever (Arawn-sama!), and a very satisfying plot until the end, which was still OK by my memory. The fights were brilliant, and the animation and music were gorgeous. Tales… it’s a long shot.

In manga, though, I can name a couple. Negima comes to mind; the Magic World arc specifically. Samidare has the “interesting main characters” down pat — Yuuhi+Samidare brings me inexplicable joy, and I’m saving the remaining unread chapters of a manga like a dog buries his favorite toys. Then there’s Beelzebub, which does partially incorporate a journey into Hell, but mainly on the humor and general interest part. I realize most of these aren’t “journeys” per say — they’re not person-departing-on-journey-to-save-the-princess journeys, but more at-home journeys. I wish I could find more, but perhaps it’s just that the traditional journey is too cliched to use on a regular basis anymore.

I am and will continue to be incessantly on the lookout for new adventures.

***

Thus went my weekend, plus Pi Day. It intrigues me that the school has scheduled a holiday on Pi Day. Despite the fact that pi is wrong and should die, I think Pi Day should be a national bank holiday, and there should be celebrations around the world. We should hold an Arcadia Pi Day Competition… Arcadia Invitational Mathematical Olympiad. That actually sounds nice. The AIMO. It’ll totally be prestigious.

(There was not much to say about the first week of March. The only event of consequence listed on my calendar that week was the Orchestra Vertical Concert, and that’s not of very much consequence really.)

I also had an English project conveniently due on Tuesday, the all-important Day. I do my best to keep up with schoolwork, I swear, but there is still an order of things to my life. Really. There is.

First comes anim— I mean, first comes the physics competition. Then comes the math competition. After that is anime. The next thing is ACS, the chemistry competition, then Skyping, then Mabi, then cleaning my room and doing what my mom tells me, then listening to music, and finally, schoolwork.

I’m not dissing school or anything. It’s just that it serves relatively no use, neither as entertainment or mental-stimulation, as anime can do with its thought-provoking movements, nor as college-application page-filler (as long as you get an A, nobody cares how much you learned). It’s the truth of the matter, and I am free to complain about it as much as I would like to on my personal blog with an audience of about 5.

So Tuesday was United States Physics Olympiad semifinals.

Continue ≫

The March 2011 Trilogy:
thinly veiled apathy
gravitation
coming soon!

Somehow, Today Was a Bad Day

February 22nd, 2011

It just was, despite the fact that most of the things that happened today were good. On another note, today I was marvelously thoughtful. Meaning, I thought about a lot of random, irrelevant things today during school. Of course, as do the contents of a dream, the contents of those self-conversations escape me. But it was simply entertaining to hear myself think such interesting thinks (as Dr. Seuss would say). I think I thinked an especially brilliant think during Orchestra today, but I can’t remember it for the love of God.

I had an unproductive weekend. It was unproductive compared to, say, the weekend before, when I read 10 chapters of E&M in two days, basically a semester of material. And then (not implying that this was a direct consequence) I caught the bug, and was laid up in bed (read: watching anime) for three days. That was a pretty horrible experience.

***

Oh, I also have to relate something that kind of perturbed me on Thursday. The day before was Bay Math League, and I have nothing fun to say about that particular event. I was sick that day, and came after school specifically for the contest. Dealing with Hank was particularly strenuous. But again, during fourth period (that’s Jenglish) I got a interesting yellow call slip (I seem to be getting those very, very often these days). “Come to the assistant principal’s office,” innocuously beckoned the note. “Come now!”

So there I was, face to face with Mr. Finn in his office. It was a really nice office, being in the new administration building and all. And getting there was a simple trip down the stairs from the top floor. Of course, I was bundled in about five layers of insulation, being that I was still affected by the cold (every now and then pausing to sneeze or perform the unseemly chore of squeezing some mucus out of my nose), and my face probably wasn’t quite as handsome as I would quite like to imagine.

“What’s your name?”

He flips through a stack of carbonless-copy forms. The white-yellow-pink pattern flashes across his thumbs. His eye catches my name. He pulls it out of the stack, and pushes it firmly onto the desk.

“Do you realize you were absent on January 28th?”

Yes, I probably was. I happen to be absent a lot, after all. I probably was absent on that day. I mean, it’s not like I keep track of when I decide not to come.

“You’re supposed to turn in a note when you’re absent.”

I always do. In fact, I type them myself. I have a Word template for them. I can print one in less than two seconds.

“You didn’t turn in a note.”

Before I could cut in, he continued.

“You were truant, and have been assigned Saturday School.”

Again, I tried to open my mouth.

“Are you listening to me? Can you understand me?”

Completely surprised, I replied with the affirmative, after a short pause.

“What ELD are you in?”

This line cracked me up. It didn’t crack me up at the time, but now, thinking back, it cracks me up. I’ll always remember the assistant principal calling me a “D”-student fob who speaks no English, ditches class, and smokes in the bathroom. The perfect reply would have been, “No, I’m in AP English!”

Unfortunately I’m not. Damn. I regret dropping AP English now. Just so I could say that to him.

After hearing my reply in fine, perfect, melodious English with no accent, I’m sure he may have been stunned. But he continued shortly thereafter.

“You’ll have to sign here, and report at 8 am this Saturday. Bring the signed form with you, and report to the counseling desk in the administration building.”

Hold it. I’m not truant. I’m never truant. I just get sick a lot, and happen to have a lot of orthodontic appointments scheduled during school hours. It’s true, I swear.

“Bring work to do for four hours.”

Oh. That’s not so bad then. I thought Saturday School would involve some combination of torture, writing “I will never ditch school again.” on the board continuously, and maybe some good ol’ coloring worksheets a la Dr. Pal thrown in for good measure. If we get to bring our own work to do, this Saturday School thing could work out to my benefit: I’d get work done. After all, if I didn’t have Saturday School, I’d either oversleep until 2pm or watch anime all day. Or both. Likely both.

So, walking back up the stairs into Jenglish, I weighed my options. I’m sure there must have been some sort of error, because I’m very punctual with my absence notes, and there’s no way I would be truant. Actually, I think my thoughts were bordering more on “Life Sucks (TM)” and such, but we’ll glorify my character for this moment. Oh, but that’s right. Don’t they give you a readmit slip when you turn in an absence note? I always keep those. I have a stack of them that’s thicker than my thumb.

Unzippering my front pocket and unpaperclipping the four paperclips holding the stack together, I thumb through and find it. January 28th. Ben Li. Ill. See?

Do I bring the readmit down and demand my freedom, justice, and liberty? Or do I sit there and take on this punishment, and get some real work done while I’m at it? It was a hard decision, I’m sure. I bolted back down the stairs.

It felt kind of awkward passing by the same people again. Other people were getting call slips to come in for their Saturday School notices too, and watching them unknowingly ask directions to the assistant principal’s office from the same people I asked was unwitting. They all knew what the children were being sent to Mr. Finn for, but when the girl in front of me asked what she had been called for, I felt a knowing smirk flash across the desk attendant’s face before she gave an ambiguous, innocent reply.

This same attendant was very helpful though. I showed her my readmit, and she directed me to Attendance. The attendance lady totally should have given me an “oh, it’s YOU again” glare, but she didn’t, and never does. I respect her for that, and her general kindness. I should learn her name. She probably knows mine.

The attendance office actually keeps every absence note in a manila folder. I’d imagine that would be a lot of notes in a lot of folders. It took a while, but she found my note for the 28th, and cleared my truancy. All set! See, Ben, aren’t you glad you stood up for yourself instead of quietly attending the punishment camp for delinquents and other assorted losers?

To conclude, guess what I did on Saturday? That’s right, I slept until 2pm and watched anime the rest of the day.

***

So, that was all last Thursday. That’s like, a week ago. Why am I blogging about things a week after they happen? That’s not right. I need to post more. So what was this post intended to be about?

Right. So today, a lot of good things happened to me, yet for some reason I was unhappy during school today. Well, I’m not allowed to be unhappy in period 6 as per Galloway’s class rules or something, so make that just one through five.

I got depressed by a lot of random, not-really-pertinent things. People always tell me I’m too thin-skinned. Onion-skinned. I get offended and hurt very easily, they say. Example: Mr. Lee. If anyone has any bright ideas on how to cure this flaw of mine, please do speak up.

So tomorrow I’m commuting to San Marino to take the AMC B contest at (wtf r u srs) 6 in the morning (crazy San Marino people… but I’m grateful for the testing spot!). I asked Ms. King in what was probably a very rude and incoherent manner to “not mark me absent tomorrow” because “I’m taking the AMC B tomorrow”. It probably sounded very stupid and offensive. So for some reason I was really offended by her saying “no”. Maybe it’s just that I’m too used to teachers all liking me that I get queasy when a teacher is annoyed at me. Such a spoiled child am I.

In Orchestra (besides thinking lots of interesting thinks), I hadn’t memorized any of the songs, so that was rather depressing too. Jenglish is always rather morbid. Having dropped from AP is awkward at best, and my clumsiness in social interactions probably exacerbated that awkwardness to a large extent. It was extra-awkward because the other day I was making up a test in Jeng at lunch, and I always seem to stutter and annoy people.

In Chem, we did a lab (spectrophotometry… it sounds cool enough). I got negative values for absorbance (optical density, if you prefer), and I never decided to ask Mrs. Young. After I took a look at it, negative absorbance is totally impossible, and now I don’t know how I’m going to do my lab. I’ll ask to copy Hank’s data I guess. And in history, we watched atomic bomb explosions. Yeah, seriously. It was fun. We had to use Google Video though. Youtube is blocked.

The bad things didn’t just end with school. It turns out that CSF applications were due on Friday. But the CSF forms weren’t out until like the last day… I checked the ASB website practically daily for them. That wasn’t fair. I’d complain more, but I just realized that I saved five dollars by not turning it in.

Also, the semifinalist results came out today. My mom (!) called me afterschool to tell me about them. So three people from Arcadia got into semifinals (out of like 300 nationwide, that’s pretty impressive!), and I decided to send out an email to the people who got in. The third person was “Yi Li”, and I thought that was this was one girl in Physics Team whose last name is Li, so I included her in my “Congratulations!” email. It turns out that “Yi Li” was Vincent’s Chinese name. I think I must have hurt her feelings, I mean, she seems to have tried really hard for this competition, and here I am emailing her about her NOT making it, and even saying “congratulations” as if I were mocking her. See, this is why I’m single (and not looking for a partner).

***

Of course, good crap happens, but nobody cares about good crap happening. You never see newspapers headlining good crap. Damn, this last section was stupid. Why didn’t I end it with my Saturday School story?

Maybe I’m too self-aware. Perhaps if I stopped caring about what other people think about me, people will think better of me. Or maybe it really doesn’t matter, and I really don’t need to care about what other people think of me. Ms. King, Ms. Young, that girl in Physics Team… maybe I shouldn’t care about what opinions they may form of me. That’s what they tell you. Be original. Be yourself. But I do need to care. I need to take care that Ms. King has a good opinion of me during officer elections, and when she writes my letter of rec. I need to care that my lab group is depending on me. I need to care about what girls think of me as a prospective partner. Well, I’m not so sure on that last one. I could care less. It’s my kind of lifestyle, or prospective lifestyle. I wouldn’t like some kind of less-interesting-than-me lady watching over my bank account, taking what she wants, and arguing with me every night. I think I’d be the kind of person who would be a professor at some university and study Superstring Theory for the rest of my life. Alone. Or maybe this particular view of myself has been forced upon me by my peers. Perhaps it’s just other peoples’ impressions of me rubbing off on me. So I do need to care what other people think about me, because it influences what I think about myself? That’s queer. That’s just… twisted.

Aaand my tangental stream-of-consciousness rant ends there. The first half of this post is far more advanced than the latter half. I really should have split this into multiple posts.

***

To conclude, I really like narrative storytelling. In fact, when I was in elementary school, my prospective occupation was probably “creative author” or “novelist”. It’s an interesting way to author a blog post. I haven’t reread my Saturday School account yet, but I felt that dialogue, description, and my internal commentary added flair to my writing.

Thoughts on any of the issues, events, topics discussed in this post? Narrative writing, what-do-I-care-what-others-think-of-me, my thin skinned and easily-moved-to-tears personality, my brief anecdote, or anything else? Remember, kids, always keep your readmits.

Sadie’s Matrix of Fate Results

February 1st, 2011

READ PREVIOUS POST FIRST



Direct from Hanning’s computer…the reveal of destiny… (Color coded for your convinience):

timL will not be asked
hanning will be asked
calvin will not be asked
andy will not be asked
alfred will not be asked
hank will not be asked
justin will not be asked
timC will not be asked
ben will not be asked
dun will not be asked
kevin will not be asked
paul will not be asked

Epic computer results FTW.


If anybody cares…here’s the code.

import static java.lang.System.*;
import java.util.Arrays;

public class Test
{
 
 public static void main(String[] args)
 {
  /*Test1 test = new Test1();
  out.println(test.method(2));
  double data[] = new double[5];
  Arrays.fill(data,5);
  out.println(Arrays.toString(data));*/
  double timL = Math.random();
  if(timL<=1.0/5)
   out.println(“timL will be asked”);
  else out.println(“timL will not be asked”);
  double hanning = Math.random();
  if(hanning<=1.0/7)
   out.println(“hanning will be asked”);
  else out.println(“hanning will not be asked”);
  double calvin = Math.random();
  if(calvin<=1.0/8)
   out.println(“calvin will be asked”);
  else out.println(“calvin will not be asked”);
  double andy = Math.random();
  if(andy<=1.0/10)
   out.println(“andy will be asked”);
  else out.println(“andy will not be asked”);
  double alfred = Math.random();
  if(alfred<=1.0/20)
   out.println(“alfred will be asked”);
  else out.println(“alfred will not be asked”);
  double hank = Math.random();
  if(hank<=1.0/25)
   out.println(“hank will be asked”);
  else out.println(“hank will not be asked”);
  double justin = Math.random();
  if(justin<=1.0/30)
   out.println(“justin will be asked”);
  else out.println(“justin will not be asked”);
  double timC = Math.random();
  if(timC<=1.0/40)
   out.println(“timC will be asked”);
  else out.println(“timC will not be asked”);
  double ben = Math.random();
  if(ben<=1.0/50)
   out.println(“ben will be asked”);
  else out.println(“ben will not be asked”);
  double dun = Math.random();
  if(dun<=1.0/60)
   out.println(“dun will be asked”);
  else out.println(“dun will not be asked”);
  double kevin = Math.random();
  if(kevin<=1.0/65)
   out.println(“kevin will be asked”);
  else out.println(“kevin will not be asked”);
  double paul = Math.random();
  if(paul<=1.0/150)
   out.println(“paul will be asked”);
  else out.println(“paul will not be asked”);
 }
}


If you notice any coding errors, well, too bad, fate compensates for java errors.


Ok, now that you guys know the result of fate, I ran it a few times on my computer. These are not what will happen, as destiny gave the results above. But yeah, here are the next 5 runs of it…

The Alternative Result

timL will not be asked
hanning will not be asked

calvin will be asked
andy will not be asked
alfred will not be asked
hank will not be asked
justin will not be asked
timC will not be asked
ben will not be asked
dun will not be asked
kevin will not be asked
paul will not be asked


The WTF Result

timL will not be asked
hanning will not be asked
calvin will not be asked
andy will not be asked
alfred will not be asked
hank will not be asked
justin will not be asked
timC will not be asked
ben will not be asked
dun will be asked
kevin will not be asked
paul will not be asked


The Logical Result

timL will be asked
hanning will not be asked
calvin will not be asked
andy will not be asked
alfred will not be asked
hank will not be asked
justin will not be asked
timC will not be asked
ben will not be asked
dun will not be asked
kevin will not be asked
paul will not be asked


The “I swear, we did not rig this” Result

timL will not be asked
hanning will be asked
calvin will not be asked
andy will not be asked
alfred will not be asked
hank will not be asked
justin will not be asked
timC will not be asked
ben will not be asked
dun will not be asked
kevin will be asked
paul will not be asked


The Realistic Result

timL will not be asked
hanning will not be asked
calvin will not be asked
andy will not be asked
alfred will not be asked
hank will not be asked
justin will not be asked
timC will not be asked
ben will not be asked
dun will not be asked
kevin will not be asked
paul will not be asked


[2:19:56 AM] Hanning: “can i get an extension for my packet because I was trying to code fate”
[2:20:00 AM] Hanning: lololol
[2:20:43 AM] kc32815: lol
[2:20:48 AM] kc32815: that’s the best exuse ever
[2:20:50 AM] kc32815: she has to accept it
[2:20:50 AM] Hanning: haha

Sadie’s Matrix of Fate

February 1st, 2011

Hanning and I are currently calculating approxmiate odds for people getting asked to the Sadie’s dance, which occurs in 12 days. Hanning will then plug the odds into a java program (because as you guys know, I can’t write code) and we will see what the results are.

For those of you that don’t know how horse racing style odds work, they’re in the form of x-y, where x and y are integers > 0. (Yay, math) So for every y dollars you bet, if you win, you would receive x dollars. So for something very unlikely to happen, such as Ralph Nadar winning the election over Bush and Gore, the odds would be about  500-1, meaning for every 1 dollar you bet on him winning, you would win 500. This is a high payout to lure people into betting on something that seems unlikely.

On the other hand, something with a high chance of occuring, such as Heath Ledger winning the Oscar for best supporting actor for The Dark Knight (because he had an excellent performance, and also died of an overdose, increasing voters chances of wanting to memorilize him) the odds were 1-50, meaning you would have to bet 50 dollars for a payout of 1, so that bookeepers wouldn’t lose much money on something so likely to happen.

So yeah, here are the odds…


Tim L: 5-1

Hanning: 7-1

Calvin: 8-1

Andy: 10-1

Alfred: 20-1

Hank: 25-1

Justin: 30-1

Tim C.: 40-1

Ben: 50-1

Dun: 60-1

Kevin: 65-1

Paul: 150-1


You guys are free to bet on this until Friday before the dance…and coming soon are going to be the predictions of Hanning’s java simulator thing. It will be run exactly once. Not zero times, not twice, 5 times is certainly out of the question. Once, to determine the future.