Cheer Up, Emo Kid!

Super Emo Death Cab Lyric of the Day:

"Love is watching someone die."

I am thinking that I should take this cd out of my car stereo before listening to it causes me to ram my car into something in an attempt to end it all.

(Besides, the other cd in my car right now is The Brian Jonestown Massacre.)

Ene's Shawl

Hey dudes, it's more knitting content! I decided that the best way to break my knitting curse was to finish the three projects I have on needles right now, in case one of them was some how cursed and ruining all of my knitting. (Um, yes, I do realize that sounds crazy. It totally seemed logical in my head.)

So, this is Ene's Shawl from Scarf Style. The pattern is by Nancy Bush, who also designed the Madli shawl. I started this shawl more or less immediately after I finished the Madli. I was on some sort of crazy Estonian shawl knitting kick.

The yarn is Morehouse Merino laceweight I bought at Maryland Sheep and Wool festival, with a small section of it being a different colorway I bought after I ran out of the original yarn.

Of course, I totally rejected all notions of "swatching" or "gauge" for this project, instead choosing to pick a random yarn and the suggested needle size. I was all, "Why would I need to get gauge? It's just a shawl!" And while I am digging the fact that it's bigger than the one in the book, (68 inches across the top instead of 56), I also ran out of yarn despite having at least 140 more yards than necessary. What I have learned: More shawl = More yarn. Shocking!

This is the biggest shawl that I've made so far, and I'm digging it. I think it's going to be really nice to curl up in once it's a little bit colder. Plus, the Morehouse Merino is totally soft and cuddly.

I chose this yarn for this project because I thought that the varigated yarn would look better with a more regular stitch pattern. I think it turned out pretty well. (You can check out a close-up.)

And, a bonus photo of the shawl with my cat.

Ninja Vs Pirate

I think you are jealous of my new Ninja vs. Pirate shirt.

Two Items

1. Do you think I could convince people to start calling me The Future Dr. Cyn? The only downside I can see to this is that people might start asking me for medical advice, but I could always make up something ridiculous for them to do. ("That rash? Just rub some bacon on it and it will totally disappear.")

2. I am totally enjoying the new Death Cab for Cutie album, despite the fact that it is emo as hell. Check out these lyrics, dudes:

"You'll be loved you'll be loved
Like you never have known
The memories of me
Will seem more like bad dreams
Just a series of blurs
Like I never occurred
Someday you will be loved"

I realize that I am becoming less cynical by the minute listening to this. Gah. I need some sort over-earnest intervention. Maybe I can just pretend it's a concept album. (The concept being "Songs that cause ovulation.")

It's Like I'm an Undergrad Again, But I Get Paid This Time!

My Computer Architecture competancy was rejected. Which means I am now taking three undergrad courses. But it's okay, because the undergrad version of Computer Architecture seems more entertaining, and I didn't want to take that stupid graduate class anyway, okay?

I'm apparently taking the three undergrad CS classes with the biggest project loads ever, the three undergrad courses strike terror into the hearts of undergrads. Plus, I'm doing a lab rotation!

I have decided this is okay, because I am older, smarter, cuter, and have more experience than undergrads. Plus, I'm used to working 8 hours a day. And I have an office.

The truth is, I think I am getting more out of these classes than similar classes I took as an undergrad. I'm connecting the stuff I'm learning both to my vague memories of college, and to the stuff I did in my job. The things that as an undergrad I thought would be really complicated and boring (compilers, operating systems) are actually turning out to be cool as hell. Hopefully I'll still think that halfway through the quarter when I've stopped leaving my house and do nothing but read really boring textbooks. (The compilers class: Interesting & fun. The compilers book: Not so much.)

This Is Even Better Than Attack Dolphins

Video of a Giant Squid!

The future is now, people. And also, it's under water.

Titillating selection from the article that actually has nothing to do with the sucessful squid video:

"In 2003, New Zealand marine biologists laid a sex trap.

They ground up some squid gonads, believing that the scent would drive male giant squids wild as the creatures migrated through New Zealand waters.

The hope was that a camera would squirt out the pureed genitals and a passing squid, driven into a sexual frenzy, would then mate with the lens - a project that, some may be relieved to hear, never came to fruition. "

Does anyone else sometimes wonder about these scientists, and when exactly they come up with these ideas? I am thinking it is during those long, lonely nights in the lab.

I also enjoy that they included this information in the article, even though it was completely irrelevant.

My Computer Talk Brings All the Boys To the Yard

An actual quote from my computer architecture book:

"After a short time of working with the terminology, you will be fluent, and your friends will be impressed as you correctly use words such as BIOS, DIMM, CPU, cache, DRAM, ATA, PCI, and many others."

Maybe your friends will be impressed, Mr. Computer Architect Dude. I think mine will just think I'm an even bigger nerd than I previously was.

There's No Way This Will End Badly . . .

Missing armed attack dolphins.

Does anyone else feel like we are living in the future, and it's surprisingly similar to an episode of Sealab 2021?

A Desk of My Own

Dudes, I am writing this from desk in my office in the shiny new Computer Science & Engineering building. That's right, I've got an office, bitches. Yes, I share it with six other people, but I have two desks and a filing cabinet of my very own! And there's a window & a nice view and it is very lovely.

Today I was only ten minutes late to my discussion session (for my other undergrad class), and that was because I spent twenty minutes being very lost and wandering in circles. I'm sure I was very entertaining to any onlookers, what with my clutching my xeroxed map and frequently backtracking. But I found the building I was looking for eventually. Have I mentioned that this campus is both large and confusing? It is completely unlike the tiny hippie college I attended as an undergrad, and I must admit to have some difficulties adjusting/rampant nostalgia for my wee little three block campus. I never had any problems finding buildings at Oberlin, because we only had twenty of them, and they were all within three blocks of each other in a pretty much straight line. Plus 90 percent of my classes were in the same building, since I cleverly avoided taking classes that weren't computer science or creative writing.

Anyway, I have a desk. Which I am sitting at right now pretty much out of sheer novelty, since I can surf the internet just as conveniently from home.

Uneventful

Well kids, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day, which is to say that I did not do a hell of a lot today. I went to a peace rally in Balboa Park, where I enjoyed observing people's signs and t-shirts and things. In San Diego, the anarchists wear shorts, which just seems kind of wrong.

Other than that, I read some of the New Yorker Style issue, watched some episodes of the OC, and knit.

Surreal Links

Powerpuff Girls rendered in sushi.

Fantastic short Spanish movie. It is awesome and you should watch it. Link via Feanor.

The Moral of This Story Is Don't Attend the Discussion Sections

I got to the discussion session for one of my undergrad classes half an hour late (It's a fifty minute session), carrying a plate of free food I'd scored in the Computer Science & Engineering building. I had my reasons for being late. (I just missed the bus by two minutes, I'd been finishing the assignment for the class (an assignment that's not due until the 28th), I didn't know where the discussion section was, there was free food to be scavenged, I'm kind of a jerk like that.)

After class, I went up to ask the TA the best way to FTP my files to class server, since I'd done the assignment on my shiny new laptop. The TA said, "Hey, aren't you in my Computer Architecture class?"

Hi! I'm the jerky late girl! And you know me, sort of! Also, you grade my assignments!

Pink hair is almost a guarantee of instant karma.

First Day of Classes!

First day of classes today! So far one looks interesting, one looks decent, and one looks intensely boring. I also had a meeting for a cool-as-hell research thing I might be doing this quarter. So all together, it looks like I'll never leave the lab ever again. But that's what grad school is supposed to be like, right?

Also, maybe it's just that I'm taking two undergrad classes, but do we really have to spend the first half hour of the first day of class going over concepts like, "Do not cheat," and "Please attend the lectures"? I mean, we're not five years old.

There are a freakish number of girls in my classes. In some classes, there are probably up to eight of them! Maybe ten! In classes with only seventy people! In my undergrad CS classes, it was me and maybe my friend Claire. But sometimes just me. UCSD computer science grad students are a whopping twenty percent female, and it is sort of exciting, even if sometimes I'm like, "Am I in the right class?"

Also, no one I know is in my Operating Systems class, and they are all undergrads who already have complicated social cliques going on, and we have to do group projects and I am already nervous about who I will be in a group with. Hello! I am old and kind of a loser! Also I am neurotic and have no free time!

So now I just need to buy two books, get my Architecture competency accepted, and suddenly gain the ability to travel in time like Hermoine in that one Harry Potter book. But the good news is that I totally got them to accept my Algorithms competency requirement.

I Have To Go To Classes Now? Lame.

Hey dudes, remember when I used to update my blog and answer my email and stuff? (Okay, I've never actually answered my email in anything like a timely fashion. I was trying to trick you into believing that I am occasionally actually responsible, and that was wrong of me.)

I had four glorious days off in between Science Bootcamp and classes starting, and I decided to take full advantage of them by spending all of my time surfing the internet, drinking heavily, and totally avoiding everything I was planning to do. Getting a bank account? Not so much. Cleaning my room? No. Getting all of the music from my iPod on my Powerbook? Oh hell yes.

Today I'm skipping an orientation panel in order to dye my hair, just so you know I have my priorities in order.

For some reason I am having no goddamn luck getting my spellchecker extension working in Firefox. Why the hell can't they make something that will just spellcheck everything I type, no matter where I type it? Don't they know that the only thing keeping me from looking like the village idiot in most forms of communication is my compulsive spellchecking habits? This morning I tried to spell "foibles" as "foilables."

Also, does anyone know how I can make Mail open links in Firefox instead of Safari?

I've Switched Teams

I am writing this entry on my brand new laptop, paid for by my fellowship.

Now, prepare to be shocked, people: It's a Mac. Yes, that's right, I'm thinking different. Well, actually, I'm thinking the same, since most people in my program use Macs. But it was just so tiny and shiny and I couldn't help myself.

It's a 12 inch power book, 80 GB hard drive, 1.2 GBs of RAM. Plus DVD-RW/CD-RW. Plus massive amounts of sexiness.

I'm still figuring out all of the crazy Apple shit, but so far the user interface on this is shiny and pretty and I feel like my computer is giving me a big hug all of the time.

So, my Mac lovin' friends, I expect you to tell me all about what I should be doing this all this "dashboard" and "widgets" and "control click" business.

It's Funny If You're a Huge Dork

So Much Drama in the PhD

"Your mom circulates like a public key,
Servicing more requests than HTTP.
She keeps all her ports open like Windows ME,
Oh, there's so much drama in the PhD."

I May Have Found My People

I just got into a discussion at one am with five people over the relative merits of recursion versus for loops and whether it's important to be able to pass objects by value as opposed to by reference.

I heart grad school.

Apparently My Life Up Till Now Is Completely Worthless

The UCSD PhD program requires that you take 6 undergrad courses as competency requirements. (Theory of Computation, Programming Languages, Algorithms, Computer Architecture, Compilers, Operating Systems.) I think that I've taken the first four of those courses. Unfortunately, UCSD thinks I've taken the first two. Also unfortunately, I can't take any of the core courses until I've taken the last four of those courses. Which means I need to take 17 courses over the next two years, while also doing lab rotations, etc. At three courses a quarter, and three quarters a year, I can just barely do it without lab rotations. Oh, and that's not counting at least two extra courses I need to take for my IGERT fellowship. So, basically there's no possible way I can finish all my courses in two years.

The really amazing thing is that I completed an undergrad CS major and spent three years programming for a living, and yet apparently I only have two courses that are at all applicable to my PhD.

So, yes, we had orientation today. I hope the point of it was to throw me into a total panic, because it was successful.

Over Using This Sentence Structure: Awesome

From the License Plate Frame on a Mini-Van Advertising "Diva-Dos: Up Do Parties for Little Divas": "Hairdressers tease it until it stands up."

The Best Name for a Machine Learning Algorithm Ever: Perceptron

The Work I Am Avoiding Right Now: Googling how to analyze Color Histograms

Sign That My Knitting Bad Karma Continues: WEBs mailed me the wrong order. But the wrong order included a cone of Jaggerspun Zephr. Sadly, I suspect I am going to have to return it in order to get my actual order.

The 41

My old bus routes in Philly were the 42 and the 21. My bus route in La Jolla is the 41. This is a pleasing sort of coincidence, at least to me.

So yes, I am riding the bus, despite the fact that I am in California and I have a car and I am sometimes the only person on the bus. It is six dollars to park at UCSD, and it is free to ride the bus. Also, I like riding the bus. It gives me time to read in the morning, and I have to walk to and from the bus, which insures that my body is put into motion at least twice a day. I dislike driving, and tend to spend all of my driving time worrying that the car is going to randomly explode and kill me. I realize this is probably due to not driving a lot, and I will get over it, but in the meantime riding the bus gives me some pleasant downtime in which to read The New Yorker.

I do drive when I am going somewhere that is not UCSD, because I am not completely insane and realize that the bus is totally useless to get me most places in San Diego. But as far as commuting to school goes, I am keeping my East Coast style public transit groove on, thanks. Also, I am saving the earth and not contributing to the gas crisis, unlike ALL OF YOU DRIVING PEOPLE.

Transformation Matrix

We got our group project assignments today in Science Bootcamp. I am doing a computer vision project in we look at pictures of coral and try to identify what parts of the image are coral, and whether the coral are healthy or sick. (You can tell by their color.) This is extra interdisciplinary, since we are getting the data from the Scripps institute.

Our task for today: All of the pictures are taken underwater at different depths, which means their light values are all different from each other. However, some of them include a little plastic color chart in the picture. So we sampled ten points on the color chart of two pictures, took their RGB color values, solved for a transformation matrix, applied the transformation matrix to one of the photos, and presto: both photos have the same color values! It does not work perfectly, and it's pretty trivial in terms of Big Science, but I am making photos change color with math, and I think that is insanely cool. Linear Algebra is magic, y'all.

My Day Off

Today I had an entire glorious day off. I slept in until 10, did my laundry, and actually made every meal I ate today. (And I ate all three meals, too, which is sort of rare for me.)

I went to Beverages & More with my roommate. It turns out that they carry beer from Victory, one of my favorite Pennsylvania breweries! I also bought a bottle of the Morimoto beer by Rogue. Apparently my homesickness for Philly is exacerbated by beer. (I'm sure you all are shocked.) Now I just need to find a source for Troegs & Stoudts, and I'll be set. Also, alcohol is about a gazillion times cheaper here than in Pennsylvania. Four dollar wine, you're my best friend!

I also went and watched the Simpson's premier with a bunch of people from Science Bootcamp. I have friends, you guys!

Why Do the Knitting Gods Hate Me?

After spending the last two days getting my butt kicked by linear algebra twelve hours a day (and the three before that getting my butt kind by cognitive science), and getting home today at the relatively early hour of 6 pm, all I wanted to do was sit on the couch, watch my netflix episodes of Season 2 of the OC, and knit.

Every freaking knitting project I tried to work on had something go terribly wrong on it. I'd run out of the Moorehouse Merino laceweight I'm using for the shawl I'm making (Ene's shawl from Scarf Style), and I ordered more in what I thought was the right colorway, but is clearly not. After balling the yarn I realized that it's not only not the right colorway, but I think it sort of clashes with my colorway, so there's no way I can use it to finish the scarf.

I decided to swatch for the capelet I want to make from Loop-d-Loop. My gauge is 7 stitches over 4 inches instead of 6 over 4 inches, I'm using the biggest needles I own, and I already think the fabric it's producing is too loose. And it's supposed to have a Fair-Isle pattern, so messing around with the number of stitches is pretty non-trivial.

So then I was like, I guess I'll just work on my socks, they're an easy project I can't screw up. I take them out of my bag, and I discover that one of my size three needles has snapped in half in my bag. These are my Lantern Moon needles that cost like, twenty dollars. I love these needles, and I almost always have a pair of socks going on them. And now, one of them is totally broken. I might try to super glue it together, but I don't have a lot of faith in that working.

What did I do to get this sudden influx of bad knitting karma?

Student ID

Things you should note about this image:
1. My picture is surrounded by the words "Grad Student." Awww, yeah.
2. That sticker lets me ride the city bus around UCSD (and, by extension, my neighborhood, since I live by UCSD) for free! This is rad, since the bus costs $2.25 each way, and parking on campus costs $6 a day.

Today, someone asked me where a building was, and I knew the answer! I was all, "Bioengeering? Just keep going straight, and then turn right when you're past the buildings."

Also, Science Bootcamp totally kicked my ass today.

The Brain is Weird

Today I learned about this cool-ass brain disorder called "Wernicke's Aphasia." It happens when this place called "Wernicke's area" in your brain gets damaged. What happens is that you can still speak in complete, perfectly gramatical sentences, but you don't make any sense. So you're all "The blue horse went to the store and ate the pig."

Interesting things about this:
1. You can still have this conversation, "Hey, how are you?" "Oh, I'm fine, thanks." So you can still say the things where you don't think about the meanings of the words.
2. You can't count, because counting depends on forming words (numbers).
3. You can do simple math, but only if it's written down and not spoken.

Whoa! Crazy! This gets even weirder when you think about the fact that most people think in words. So these people can't really "think" in the same way we do. But they can still sort of "understand" what is going on a lot of the time, and can still learn non-verbal things. Oh, and also they don't realize they're speaking nonsense.

I also learned about a bunch of other cool weird brain stuff. I might tell you about it if you ask me real nice. (Then again, I also might be in classes all day every day until Sunday.)

I'm A Grad Student!

Today was the first day of Science Bootcamp, and they did not make me wear a funny hat and sit in the corner because of my own stupidity, so I am feeling pretty good. Actually, I am not having any major problems keeping up with the material despite being out of school for 3 years, so big ups to that. I am tentatively not scared of grad school, but am choosing to reserve the right to become incredibly freaked out about it at any point in time.

Plus, this is an interdisciplinary program with both cognitive science and computer science, so there are even other girls there. I even met another computer science girl, although she's a fourth year and was just there helping out.

Today I learned about how the eye works. (Hint: It's not powered by tiny demons, like I previously believed.)

Sunshine

This weekend the pinkhairedparents came down and checked out my new digs. We went to downtown La Jolla for lunch. Downtown La Jolla is different from most downtowns in that there are way more seals and pelicans and cormorants in downtown La Jolla than in say, downtown Philadelphia. So we wandered around and looked at local fauna (including the masses of kayakers) and it was generally sort of lovely.

Have I mentioned it smells nice here? Like flowers and eucalyptus trees.

I think it's a good thing I'm going to be in school all day starting tomorrow: all this sunshine is starting to mellow me out.

At Least I Have Hello Kitty Notebooks

Tomorrow I start "Science Bootcamp," a two week long program in which I will be doing lectures and labs from 8:30 am to 10 pm, Monday through Saturday.

I totally can't decide what to wear. It's my first day of grad school! I have to look smart. I don't have any clothes that say, "I am smart." All my clothes say things like, "I eat babies." What do smart people wear, anyway?

EEEEP! Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life, and I have no idea what I'm doing!

If I'm out of touch for the next couple of weeks, it's because I'm busy learning smart people things, okay?

I leave you with this cartoon about Sufjan Stevens

What Is There To Say?

There's this Mountain Goats lyric that goes, "Our love is like a Louisiana graveyard, where nothing stays buried." That's what I've been thinking all week.

I haven't written anything about the hurricane, because what can you say? I started to write something really angry about it the other night, but then I thought . . . here I am, in La Jolla, where everything is sunny and beautiful and I have a place to live and my entire life and livelihood have not been suddenly swept away. What right do I have to be angry? I guess I can be angry that my government appears to have screwed the pooch on this one in every possible way, at the cost of human life. I can be kind of happy that it appears to be okay to criticize the government again, and that the press is actually doing just that, and it seems like people might actually be held accountable for some things.

Mostly, I think, I feel ashamed of my government. They seem to profoundly not care that people are dying because of their fancy speeches and poor planning. They didn't care about the people dying in Iraq, and now they don't care about the people dying in Louisiana. The people who are dying for this government also seem to be the people who need governmental help the most, and that I think is what we should be most ashamed of.

Bonus Photo

This is a crazy Mormon Temple a couple of blocks from where I live. I think it looks like Disneyland. My roommate calls it "The Spaceship To God."

Foxy Socks

Look, it's knitting content! (This is where every guy who is not Little Sam who reads my blog immediately stops reading.) I know it's been a while, but I was busy having twelve different nervous breakdowns over moving shit. Plus, all of the projects I was working on turned into big, crazy, never-ending type projects. So, here are some socks. They are unusual for my knit socks in that they actually match stripe-for-stripe. Usually I don't bother to sync up the starting color in the knit socks. I kind of like them to be oh-so-slightly mismatched. But these guys really do match (except that one of them has slightly more pink on the toe for some reason), and I'm digging that too. They can be my professional hand knit socks.

I knit these from the sock pattern in my head, loosely based on my memory of the pattern from The Knitters Handy Book of Patterns. They turned out a little snug, but that is a goodish thing in socks. The yarn is Regia Stripe that I bought on sale at Rosie's.

I think the main difference between the more expensive Regia yarn and the cheaper Lion Brand Magic Stripe yarn is that the little black and white bits actually make patterns with the Regia yarn, while the Lion Brand black and white bits just tend to look muddy. So I decided to knit these socks stockinette to show off the pretty little faux fair-isle parts.

Everything's Bigger in California

I went to campus yesterday. UC San Diego has eight times as many students as my tiny hippie liberal arts college. It's big. Campus is not the three blocks and a park that I'm used to thinking of as college. I went, and I stared up at the Computer Science and Engineering building, the huge brand new building that the department just moved in to in July. I stood outside and I thought to myself, "Holy crap, this is really happening," and I felt scared and excited and totally weirded out.

I applied to grad school because I was bored with my job and my boyfriend had left me and I needed something to happen. I liked school. I'm good at school. And I'm a good computer programmer. So I figured I'd go back to school for it. And now it's really happening. I feel like I'm standing on the crux of something. I could do amazing, incredible things, or I could fail miserably. I don't know what's going to happen yet. I have a whole new life, and it's just beginning. It's hard for me to appreciate my sparkling new life, because I loved my old life, and I miss it. My new life has a lot to live up to. I think it just might, though.

In sort-of-related news, Shane MacGowan is getting new teeth.