CS473 – We destroyed it. But the new assignment is out and doesn’t look pretty. Team KP/Onur/SamLiu is ready to rock and roll again this weekend.

CS421 – Owned MP2. MP3 is out and we have 4 days to get it done. Writing a lexer for a simple subset of Java. Fun.

CS357 – I have no effing clue as to what’s going on in this class but I’ll pretend I understand taylor polynomials and shit like that.

CS210 – Is hilarious and we watched a video that would qualify for bad movie night.

Long story short: CS473 has 3 problems for homework. The first has parts a to g, second and third have 2 parts each. We finished 1 of the many parts of #1 in a few hours. We spent 5 hours (9pm to 2am) on half of the second question. We still have half of the third question to go and it’s due tonight.

CS421 had an MP due at 9:30am today. Onur finished at 4:30am and I finished at 5am. We collapsed on the ground / on the couch respectively and now have 9:30am class.

CS440 had an MP due today in a few hours. None of us have finished it. All of us (KP, Onur, and I — Joel dropped the course last night) are using at least 2 late days on the assignment. We get 7 for the year. It’s the second week of school.

Smallgroup was nice. I like my smallgroup.

I wish I had more time to sleep.

School needs to end.

This week. Monday: missed my CS210 lecture because I thought I was in the wrong section. Tuesday: 6 hours of class isn’t a joke. Wednesday: Hangout with Aaron Perry and Brian Johnson gotta get that bro time in somewhere, right? Finished CS357 assignment. Today: 6 hours of class and house hunting, then CS421 MP1.

Friday: CS421 MP2 (~6 hours), CS210 Weekly assignments 1&2 (4 hours worth of reading / writing). Bible prep.
Saturday: CS473 Quiz (~4 hours), CS440 MP / Hwk (~20 hours)
Sunday: CS440 MP continued, CS473 Homework (~12 hours)
Monday: Both continued. Shoot me now, please. Smallgroup.

Following week: Same deal, except worse. So no winter retreat for me.

Today: woke kind of late because of watching movies last night with friends / eventually self. Missed out on visiting a house but I’m okay with it because Linas knows what a good place is & how to find a good deal. Started doing some CS421 but lost steam and watched Moneyball instead. Dinner, then hid away at Espresso Royale for 4 hours working on catchup with 473. Finally finished the lectures, now working on a quiz that I don’t know how to do because the prerequisite knowledge is from 173 which I proficiencied out of instead of taking.

General summary: CS440 MP, CS421 MP both need working on. CS357 should be throwing a quiz at us sometime in the near future. CS473 has me running scared. IV/Church involvement is probably a bit overcommitted, and I need to spend more time working out and putting rehab on these legs.

Not really time to read GEB, sadly.

Today: Bible prep, large group, study, GEB catchup. We’re even taking the introduction just one section at a time. This is an acceptable pace.

Rico came over and we talked for almost two hours, and it was awesome. Then I sat and talked with Kev / Sarah / Leah until close to 3am, upon which I decided to watch White Collar and Psych instead of starting my MP which was due this morning. As a result it’s 7am and I’m still awake and I finished my MP rather quickly (OCaml, straightforward syntax business) and decided to sit and read more rantings and ravings due to SOPA/PIPA. Can’t decide whether to sleep for fear of oversleeping and missing all my classes today.

Small comfort, because all my other classes are shaping up to be killers.

• CS421 – Compilers – Already an MP to complete, writing in OCaml for this class.
• CS440 – AI – First MP is apparently best done in Prolog but I’ll probably end up writing it in Python.
• CS473 – Algorithms – Written homework already released, making me quake in my [classy] shoes.
• CS357 – Numerical Methods – I think there might be homework due…efff. This class requires writing MATLAB which is kinda a wtf affair.

Other things to get done:
1. Therapy. Call / make it happen.
2. Continue reading GEB.
3. SG Prep on Friday + lots of IV event stuff.

Uhgh. Too busy.

Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have a different outlook on things though, to the extremity of prolonged to infinite lifespans, and space colonization. In light of their views on things, I think I’m really understanding for myself what it means for us (humans) as a population to mine the shallow soil. Everyone’s looking for gold in the easy-to-reach places, but the harder problems take far longer and far greater investment to solve. It’s not as easy as gluing together or building proprietary APIs to complete trivial or mundane tasks e.g data entry and retrieval.

The real gain (and with it, money) is in the hard fields; fields that change the way computers/we think or fields that change the way computers/we interact. It’s not easy to make a good social network, but technologically speaking it’s not anything game-changing. On the other hand, telecom companies make the big bucks because of the heavy investment in early infrastructure that few can ultimately compete with. Physical wire is being strung; it’s actually hard work. It’s why Google Maps has such a leg up on everyone except Microsoft. Hard investment and time.

Investors are looking to make that next *billion* dollar investment a la Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. But just because one of the three was a relatively (technologically speaking) uninspired creation, everyone seems to be digging the shallow, easy soil. We enjoy pursuing pipe dreams of easy riches and we’d like to think that applying what we already know is good enough without giving thought to discovering anything really new.

My personal projection for the technological industry: sound and sight. Computers are receiving input from humans and other computers in an unprecedented volume / frequency. Large industry pivots are going to be made however in terms of how we interact with our computers. The iPad/iTouch is a strong example of this: capacitive touch screens truly changed the paradigm of human-computer interaction. The Kinect is another: people are realizing just how far the fields of computer vision and speech processing have advanced.

Even given computationally challenging tasks (e.g speech to text), with the continuing advancement of hardware, soon these challenges will be stories of the past. Our computers will understand us and each other, and as more devices in our households begin to understand and become controlled by computers, we will experience a revolution in the way we live and in the way we interact.

I think that times call for bouts of both deep technological innovation as well as social innovation that applies the technology to our lives. Facebook is a good example of social innovation that leveraged existing web form technology to create a network of information concerning individuals. On the other hand, Microsoft’s Kinect a good example of deep technological innovation, creating a device that opens up a wide array of new possibilities. It however has not been fully exploited for households and everyday use and can benefit from a good bout of social innovation.

Investors in the valley need to start concentrating on companies that are making deep technological innovations that change the game. My personal bets? I’d put down my own money on QWiki for AI innovations and Palantir for data mining innovations if I had any.

I’m really excited for next fall. I mean, this semester will be kinda whatever, and this summer will be an absolute blast, but next fall is where it’s at. Job applications. Easy semesters. My life in boxes prepared to move wherever life is about to take me. Jetting around to interviews and staying in posh hotels. Writing code that will make my personal life more fun. Man, senior year. Please come.