It's about stuff

10am anthropology of ritual, went over the reading thing

1pm went to senior lab, finished engineering management assignment, went to otafuku and got okonomiyaki+takoyaki (asked if they still had cheese takoyaki and apparently they stopped selling that a long time ago). Ate at the little park area near school that seems mostly inhabited by homeless people and huge flocks of pigeons; I felt very out of place

walked over to radioshack to see if they were selling maker faire tickets this year like they did last year, but apparently not (I later found out they were being sold at Whole Foods but I guess I will go to that some other day), then went over to Utrecht to see if they had any non-photo blue pencils and they didn’t. Attempted to look for the second Utrecht store which I thought was “5th and University Pl” so I walked all the way to 4th st and found out it stopped there, there was no 5th st and University Place (when I got home and looked it up I found out it was actually 13th street between 5th ave and University Place)

3pm took subway home.

Watched a bunch of northernlion’s videos (namely, Borderlands 2 gameplay parts1-3) and also drew some more, trying to start drawing eyes starting with the eyelid and not the iris but it takes some getting used to for me

played some tf2, stickyjumper demoman messing around on a 24/7 2fort server. Not too many snipers on the other team so it wasn’t as fun

10am anthropology of ritual, went over the readings. I like this class much more than the poetry one.

1pm went up to computer center, printed out reading for next week, briefly discussed project stuff

went to financial aid office, they did not have the checks due to some issue with the new system

walked over to utrecht art store and purchased some pencils and a sharpener. Looked for the other utrecht location nearby (to see if they had those blue pencils) but didn’t find it immediately and just gave up and went to the subway

2:30pm took subway home, read some of the anthropology stuff on the way

5pm napped for a bit

purchased comic con tickets

drew some more, also skype chat with @miluda

11am databases, got the assignment for the project, then learned about foreign keys, what happens when a row with a foreign key is deleted, setting constraints, brief mention of transactions

noon, senior lab, read some of the anthropology readings, the Sociability one by Simmel was just like “what the heck is he even talking about”

3:45pm went to 4th floor, got chicken sandwich

4pm back to senior lab, met with group, discussion about senior project ideas. A lot of them have been done already or seem to be too easy

6pm compilers. More on grammar, symbols, Bison syntax, derivations (language-related), parse trees, LL & LR & GLR, action tables, looked at some code and an example of state stacks and associated action/goto tables

9pm went home

10am walked to school, checked humanities office to see classes that were available. There weren’t really any, so I went over to the registration office to see if I could add Graphic Design. Apparently even though I got the instructor’s signature, I had to go over to the art office to confirm. Went over to the art office, and was told they needed to confirm with the professor (who already signed the add/drop form). Was told that they would email me when that happened.

So basically what happened to this point: went to registrar, was told to go to art office. Went to art office, was told to go to instructor. Attended class, went to instructor, got thing signed. Went to registrar with signed form, was told to go to art office. Went to art office, need to confirm with instructor. Oh man.

went to senior lab to wait for confirmation. Wasted time figuring out how to configure turses (multi-column command-line twitter client which is pretty neat), then later (~1:30pm) went to 4th floor and got a chicken sandwich and a soda. Back to senior lab, waited around

went to humanities office, saw that Anthropology of Ritual had 1 spot open, waited for faculty to return from lunch break (2:30pm is a kinda weird time for lunch but I guess they have been busy with add/drop forms). The person right in front of me was also trying to register for the same course, but luckily they let us both do it and the class would just have 1 more person.

Walked over to registrar, dropped the poetry course and added this one. Took the elevator down but for some reason the door didn’t open on the first floor so the elevator just went up to the 5th floor and I had to take the other elevator down again.

Went back to senior lab, wasted some more time. It was already about 4pm, haven’t gotten an email about the Graphic Design thing and the registrar closes at 5pm. Asked friend for $2 because I wanted to buy the Engineering Management textbook (and was short about $1.50; if I’d bought it earlier in the day, I probably would’ve gotten it for $10 less but I assumed I would already have dropped the class and replaced it with Graphic Design). Went down to book fair and bought the last copy. Downloaded dwarf fortress on my netbook and just played that for a while.

4:50pm still no email, walked home. Tried writing a greasemonkey script to make it so that in tumblr’s new layout, the right sidebar thing with the list of sideblogs is automatically expanded so I don’t have to click twice to get to a sideblog. Seriously though, for something that is commonly used and required just one click, why make it take two clicks to do the same thing?

7:30pm? went to restaurant for cousin’s birthday (which was actually like two weeks ago but he wasn’t in the city)

took subway home, worked more on that script but debugging javascript is kinda annoying

9am presence of poetry. Went around and everyone read part of a poem. Professor seems really strict about the way people read poems aloud, criticizing peoples’ reading speeds and their tone and stopping unnaturally on line breaks when the sentence continues to the next line. There was this one person who he kept criticizing and kept saying she was the worst in the class at reading poems. I mean, ok if you say it once, it seems like a joke, it’s kinda funny, but not when it’s repeated so many times in one reading. I’m also not that great at reading things aloud and I felt uncomfortable there, anyway I don’t really like the class very much so far.

11am databases, data independence, transactions, crash recovery, query optimization, entity-relationship data model (and the 6 steps: requirements analysis, conceptual DB design, logical DB design, schema refinement, physical DB design, app&security design. Example of ER diagram using employees and the departments they work in.

noon, went and got pizza. Then went to humanities office to see what other courses were offered, one seemed to fit my schedule decently and the word “Closed” wasn’t written next to it, so I waited for the faculty to come back from lunch at 1pm. Then found out the course was actually full and they just forgot to write ‘closed’ on it. Went to senior lab and started typing up some things about senior project ideas.

2pm graphic design. Initially upon going in, the mac lab was really full but it turns out that chem lab was mistakenly assigned in that room for some strange reason but later they all left (also a freshman asked me if I knew where room 807 was and actually I had no idea, there was an 806 and an 808 but I saw no 807).

Anyway, eventually the class started, the professor had a problem accessing her dropbox because of password issues and had to slightly change the lesson plan, gave us a 10 minute break to go out and find examples of graphic-design. I went to 802 and looked up some images, then thought “technika has some cool graphic designy looking things” so I printed out one of the t2 promotional images. Class resumed, sat around the table and there was some discussion about each thing people brought back. As for the t2 image, it was not immediately apparent that it was a game but some people were able to guess that it was music-related (even though the “DJ MAX” text was too small to read) but now that I think about it, if I didn’t already know what it was, I’d probably also think “what is this even”

Then there was some discussion about typography and the first assignment which was about typography. At the end, we had to fill out a form with info and the professor took our photos as a way to remember who people are, also I got her to sign the add/drop form but I’m not sure if I’ll get into the class because it seems really full. I think the registration office closes at 5pm and it was already about 5:30 so I just went to the senior lab and kinda just sat there, wondering what I wanted to do with my schedule.

6pm went to 4th floor and bought some utz pretzel wheels things and headed down to compilers class. Overview of the course, what compilers are, how they work, with the professor going off on the usual tangents (but unlike some other professors, these tangents are entertaining and also somewhat more relevant). The course project is to write a C compiler (i.e. the cc unix program, not the pre-processor, assembler, or linker). Went over the phases of compilation: lexical analysis, parsing, symantic analysis, code generation. The lexical analysis would be done with flex/lex and the parsing with yacc/bison. Went over what lexers and parsers were, and diagrams about front/back ends of compilers. Learned how the lexer breaks strings into various tokens in a way that can be done by a finite state automata, and regular expressions (and how those can be represented as finite automata). Various examples and rules. Learned the structure of a flex .l file, the 3 different sections separated by %%’s and what happens when you compile it with flex. Learned about the #line preprocessor directive and then the course website and some suggested textbooks (the dragon book!!)

9pm went home. Checked my 3ds and I also got 2 streetpasses and both of them were the second time I passed those people in the past 2 days and the times suggest that they’re people at school so I guess that’s cool, I’ll get streetpasses consistently. Answered questions on tumblr.

watched yuruyuri s2 ep10

3pm took subway to manhattan, read some of the books from that poetry book for class and it was just like “what is going on” and I was reminded of how I don’t really like reading poems because a lot of the time they are just so abstract and artsy and I don’t understand them, nor how I am going to analyze them and write a 7-page thing about a short poem in the future

4pm databases, some overlap with what we learned in Software Engineering. Learned about DBMSes, relational data model, the structure of the course and the project. Some brief history of databases, advantages of storing data in a database rather than a system file. Data models, schemas, relations, an example involving a school database with students, faculty, courses, rooms. Data definition langauge / data manipulation language, conceptual and logical database design, physical schema, views (external schema)

6pm went to library with c and m to discuss ideas for senior project. The second floor used to be the computer room but all the computers were gone and there were just chairs and it seemed more like a general purpose meeting room now.

6:30 went home, caught up with youtube/tumblr/etc

read some more from the poetry book and am still mostly like “what the heck”

well, back to school

11am, presence of poetry class, professor went over what the course would be: reading poems by some poets, have discussions led by students, write two papers about something related to the poems. Seemed generally unstructured. The class was full of people I didn’t know (and had never seen before, I am guessing most of them are not in the engineering school) but most of them seemed to know each other

Noon, walked over to financial aid office, checked current balance. Went up to icelab, looked up some classes, filled out add/drop form.

~1pm Went to otafuku and got takoyaki. Attempted to walk over to Shakespeare&Co to buy the textbook for the poetry thing but I got lost and completely forgot where the store was. Walked back to school, got the add/drop form signed. Went back to registration office and lined up to get classes added/dropped but apparently if I want to take graphic design I’d have to get it signed by someone at the art school. It was already 2pm so I had to go back to class.

2pm senior projects, professor explained all the projects he has supervised in the past, what was good/bad about them, etc. Break at around 3pm, went over to the art school academic office thing, was told to attend the graphic design course on thursday and ask the professor about it. Went back to class, professor finished explaining the projects

~4pm? went to senior lab with c and m, claimed a workstation, then attempted to think of ideas for the project for like an hour. c brought some sweets back from his trip to japan and the one I got was some kind of red bean mochi thing?? it was ok.

6pm engineering management, went until 7:30 (normally it’d go to 9pm). It doesn’t seem as boring as I had imagined but it’s more like I don’t want to stay until 9pm. I was originally planning on dropping it if the graphic design course wasn’t full but I won’t find out until Thursday.

7:30pm took subway home, read some more SAO vol9 on the way, and I am just thinking “wow this new thing seems really contrived” but then again, isn’t the entire series?

caught up with youtube/tumblr at home, attempted to think of some senior project ideas.

11am, circuits 2. The class went to Washington Square Park for an activity about MOSFETs (edit oct19: actually JFETS). It involved using large cloth sheets to model the band gap energy in 3d space. What I learned from those two hours: if you hold the gate voltage constant and increase the voltage of the source or drain (not sure if it is one or the other or either of them), the depletion regions move closer together and when the voltage is too high, there is a pinching effect and the depletion regions are right next to each other and the carriers get sucked in from the voltage difference and the depletion region. And then something about infinite resistance but current still goes through? I dunno.

1pm, dsa2. Finished up Dijkstra’s algorithm, Bellman-Ford algorithm, spanning trees (Prim’s algorithm which is pretty much just Dijkstra’s algorithm with one slight change). Started learning about network flow models, mostly just learning the terminology for next week.

3pm, 1-hour break, went to library and browsed Tumblr and twitter on tablet.

4pm, comm.theory, continued the signal-to-noise ratio stuff. Derived the FOM for AM DSBSC, AM DSBTC, and FM. Also looked at improving performance of FM by using more power at the higher frequencies instead of the lower ones, since the noise power is sort of like a parabola and is higher at high frequencies. Thus increasing the signal power at those high frequencies helps increase the SNR and thus the FOM.

6pm, went home, watched some youtube videos on tablet, then took a nap at about 7pm. It ended up just being a half hour nap (which I didn’t think was possible)

~8pm. Grandmother and uncle came home, ate KFC for dinner, though I think Popeyes’ is better.

Did Japanese homework (the one that required the listening CD), was very straightforward. Spent rest of day on youtube etc.

Typed out a story in the tags but tumblr messed up the order so it stopped making sense. I might make a full post about it later in a read more, I guess.

11am, circuits 2. Spent about an hour in groups attempting to analyze this one circuit with three transistors in it. Then some stuff about FETs.

1pm, DSA2. More on graph algorithms. Adjacency matrices/lists, topological sort, shortest path algorithms (a simple one for unweighted path lengths and Dijkstra’s algorithm)

3pm, 1-hour break, went to jlab to do matlab assignment (for DSP)

4pm, comm.theory. Angle modulation stuff. Carson’s rule, 1% rule, Bessel function, etc.

6pm, went home

Watched Usagi Drop 10. Also I forgot to mention the anime I watched for the last two days; they were BakaTest 9 and Nekogami 9.

8am, digital signal processing. Interestingly, I actually understood (or at least I would like to believe that I understood) what was going on. Learned about the definition of minimum phase (all poles and zeros on the left hand plane for continuous or inside the unit circle for discrete), allpass filters and how they preserve magnitude response but change the phase response, and how allpass filters can be used to make a system minimum phase, with symmetrical poles and zeros cancelling other poles and zeros. Probably some other stuff too.

10am, took subway home. Kept almost falling asleep. Got home, ate lunch.

Played some TF2 (mostly pyro), then played some Minecraft with the 1.8 update beta. I don’t particularly like the hunger system, but the other changes are pretty neat.

Browsed internet, watched some TF2 videos and then thought “why am I watching TF2 videos when I can be playing TF2” so I played some TF2 (mostly demoman). At one point on Coldfront, our team was pushed back to our last capture point and it was back-and-forth for like 15 minutes; I went and killed some people on the second point and captured it, rushed up to mid and somehow killed 9 people with the loch n’ load (they were mostly all crowded in one spot so it was really easy to hit them), and then before I could get to the enemy’s second point, our team already captured the next two points and we won after a long stalemate. It was p.cool and I will remember this and wrote about it because it was so cool.

20k+ keys