Math Joke

Posted on May 22nd, 2013 by Sammy

A: “What is the integral of 1/cabin?”
B: “log cabin.”
A: “Nope, houseboat–you forgot the C.”


Chivalry

Posted on May 21st, 2013 by Sammy

Benevolent sexism (more commonly referred to as chivalry) is like that thyroid condition that makes you skinny – paradoxically appealing, though ultimately problematic. But can we please just hold the door for everyone, regardless of whether they have a uterus?


Nifty

Posted on May 19th, 2013 by Sammy

…just realized I could pin year-long resolutions to my blog’s widget bar so that I look at them every day and am reminded to work toward at least one per day. Hooray!

Spent last night deploying a default rails app to my server just to see if the process has changed since I last did something like that / also for the future if I decide to make a rails app, just to ensure I can deploy it without resorting to something unseemly like Heroku. Turns out it was a little more annoying than anticipated. I’m not sure what the security ramifications are for a user directory set to 0755 permissions, or for using my user-install of ruby via rvm for passenger. Also I think I have the app set in development mode still. So hopefully nobody hacks me or whatever.

Might try deploying a Django application tonight just to have that done as well, so that if I decide to build an app I have the deployment routine on lock.

Haven’t done much. Had some quality time with my father and brother — went out to get chicken katsu, watched Star Trek: Into the Darkness (it was whatever), cleaned the house a little, made dumplings for dinner, hung out and talked a bunch. Worked on the deployment till 6am because of all the bugs I ran into. Man you’d think the guys at Apache would make it easier to deploy rails apps and stuff.

I wonder if I should switch my entire server to using nginx? The only thing stopping me is how long it would probably take, as I’ve already configured apache to the way I like it. And I don’t get that much traffic so it’s not bad.

Woke up at 3pm today. Not sure what I want to do besides run in the park today, so we’ll see.


Some Final Adventures in Illinois

Posted on May 17th, 2013 by Sammy

Monday: parents left after graduation. I proceeded to work on moon goons stuff.

Tuesday: Moon goons stuff during the day. At night, Kang, Joe C., Linas, and I tried to get onto Foellinger’s roof. We got spotted by a custodian entering an unlocked door, and since then the doors have been constantly secured. In addition, our attempts to prop open the door failed, as they always made sure to keep the doors locked. We ended up fooling around on Krannert Center’s roof (apparently you can climb up this dangerous ledge as I found out that night) & south quad bell tower. Chris Kang is a beast at climbing.

We also saw two streakers running around the quad and it was funny when they slowed to a walk as they ran out of breath from running too quickly.

Wednesday: Moon goons all-nighter to try to get things working. That was abysmal. Took a break around 12am to try Foellinger again with Chris & JPB. Didn’t work, so we hit Smith hall. Doors we tried to prop open weren’t open, so we climbed past a construction fence and through a window to get in. It was pretty thrilling, avoiding custodians and whatnot. Then we played the Steinway in the basement and the organ in the main concert hall. Oh god organ is really fun.

Thursday: At midnight we again tried Foellinger. This time was scary. As we tried to open a door that seemed promising, Chris Kang noticed that there was a guy waiting for us. Like, through the crack of the door as he tugged at it, Kang saw that the man was sitting on a chair and when he heard the noise at the door he got up and came toward it so we all sprinted away and hid in a building foyer in case of cop cars. Then we went into Bevier hall. I think a custodian or a building manager found Kang and escorted him out as JPB and I hid in the dark of a classroom nervous as hell. Eventually when the coast was clear we walked out briskly.

Then we went through the window into Smith again to spend time with our friend the organ. I don’t know if I’ve emphasized how fun it is to play an organ.


Gearing up for graduation

Posted on May 10th, 2013 by Sammy

We got the house! 1115 Boranda Ave. is ours from June 1, 2013 until June 1, 2014! I’m super excited. Close to Castro street, close to downtown Mountain View, gas stove! Gasssss stoveeeeee. << I’m too excited for that.

Kind of excited that for the first time in my life I’m also going to have my own bathroom. I don’t know what that even means!

The past couple of days have been quite fun. On Wednesday, Linas, Julian, and I did a long bike ride to the Urbana Meijer and back. I chilled outdoors with Julian and Carlos for a while, got some beer white horse, got wings at Brothers, then finished up at Murphy’s.

Last night I sat out on the porch and chilled with Julian — then Chris Kang and John swung by. At some point Kang and I went hunting for this huge racoon in the neighborhood. We didn’t find it. Oh well. It was 6am by the time I went to bed. Even out of school I can’t seem to keep my sleep schedule too normal.

Today I got steak at LongHorn w/ Charlie/Jason/Karan for lunch, picked up my cap and gown, and locked down that lease.

Looking forward to tonight. So many graduation parties!


Real-life Rand

Posted on May 9th, 2013 by Sammy

“I don’t intend to build in order to have clients, I intend to have clients in order to build”
- Howard Roark, The Fountainhead

“We don’t build products to make money, we make money to build products”
- Mark Zuckerberg


Donesies

Posted on May 8th, 2013 by Sammy

I don’t know what to do with myself because school’s out and technically I have some programming left for moon goons but I don’t really feel like doing it right now. Also, it’s beautiful out.

Yesterday. I had 3 hours of sleep and went and took my CS428 exam. It wasn’t that bad? But most of my friends said it was pretty bad. So…I dunno. Stopped by Binnys and Walmart with Charlie & KP, then went to CS543 project presentations. Professor Lazebnik bought us pizza! :) Uhgh I fell asleep during some of the presentations. So many quiet introverts trying to present. Gahhh.

Well, to be fair I was also tired. And I never stay awake in long sit-here-and-listen things anyway.

I hope I don’t fall asleep during graduation!

Then Linas made carnitas and the moon goons came over and we filled out NASA forms together because we all suck at life and it was due at midnight and we procrastinate really hard. Finishing that, I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until 10am.

No idea what I’m going to do today. Maybe just hang.


Final final

Posted on May 7th, 2013 by Sammy

Last exam of my formal education tomorrow at 1:30pm. This is it.

Too bad I never went to class, ever. Time to learn 22 lectures and required readings worth of stuff. I’ll make like fat-free milk tonight.

Entertained two of my freshman “admirers” from the business honors class of ’16 with cheesecake and brie — that was a fun break from studying and detecting staplers. Apparently every business major I know thinks living in Urbana is some sort of hipster thing. I guess that makes sense, haha. It’s so far from everything. All the business stuff is in Champaign?

Oh! Yes! Our stapler detector is done! I love LaTex.

I’m pretty pumped for this week. After the exam is done and my CS543 presentation is out of the way, Linas is making carnitas. Emily (& possibly friends??) is coming over too, so we’ll have company again. We’ll chill, then I’ll probably go out with KP & friends, pending how exhausted we are from all-nightering.

This might be my last all-nighter ever! I don’t see myself voluntarily pulling all-nighters post-graduation.

I suppose I might if I help out at a hackathon or something like that.

Ahh I haven’t posted in a few days so here’s a recap: a few days ago, Linas + Julian + I went to Basil Thai for dinner. We then proceeded to bike to the south fields, and then a little westward. We got lucky and stumbled upon an Illini softball game! After watching some pretty sweet plays and chief buck the fuckeyes, we biked home hootin’ and hollerin’ — like I was actually hooting, haha. …actually it was just me doing the hooting and hollering as we biked. But it was super fun. Group riding is really great.

Linas and I biked to Deralds another day and we had breakfast out on the quad when there was nobody there. That was pretty dope. Weather was nice so I don’t really understand why there weren’t more people on the quad.

Dropped by an eco-fashion show, where people in some class created dresses and clothes made out of garbage. Rhea made a dress out of rubber caulk, so that was pretty cool. Actually that’s why I was there, to support a friend.

I don’t really understand the appeal of fashion shows? I feel like it’s hard to judge the pieces models are wearing without judging the model, and that seems kind of unhealthy.

Pulled out my make-your-own music box kit. It’s really well constructed but I think it’d be hard to actually turn it into a box. At any rate, I think I’m going to try to make a Gold Motel strip with a mix of my favorite songs. Then a Strokes strip.


Dar Williamsing and other whatnot

Posted on May 2nd, 2013 by Sammy

Woke up, called Derald’s catering, biked over to the quad to enjoy breakfast sausage egg & cheese on texas toast with Julian, Linas, and Aidee. Kicked it in the beautiful weather for about an hour and then I spent another hour playing piano in the union. Some little kids came up and were watching me play and looked really impressed. That made my day.

Been on a Dar Williams kick recently. Unfortunately there don’t seem to exist any vinyls for her tunes. Fortunately there exists a cassette of her album Mortal City, and I have a cassette deck on my record player! And it’s only $6 incl. shipping!

I didn’t buy it. But I wish I did. I hope it’s still there.

Played settlers at Rhea’s place last night. Unfortunately I had very poor piece placement so I spent most of the game hoarding sheep like a crazy person. Tis a lively crowd. Then tonight we had some pina coladas at her place & headed to the bizho bar crawl pregame (but only the pregame because I have some vision work left to do).

A good amount of fun, nice people I wish I met earlier. I found that the freshmen were really taken with my talk from the honors conference in the fall. Flattered. Also found that nobody recognized me without long hair.

Thank goodness, I hated long hair.

Got into the news for our microgravity research project! News Gazette – UI Students Bring Drones, Science to Stratton

The relevant bits:

One degree of freedom is when an object is constrained to one motion, and in general, degrees of freedom describe how many ways you can move, UI computer science major Sam Liu told students.

She and classmates Gloria Park and Maya Huel, who are also fourth-graders, also liked learning about how drones can use video to detect faces and how the UI students showed them how spinning around with water in the bucket can be done without spilling, because various scientific properties at work.

Boom. Too bad Karan, Onur and I are failing at our vision project. We’re writing a stapler detector. The data is always the problem. Grr!

I hope more people show up to huggermugger before it’s over.

I don’t want to work so I’m procrastiblogging.


Lofi Fitz!

Posted on May 1st, 2013 by Sammy

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