Re-Entry

Um, I'm back in school. Just FYI.

As it turns out, it hasn't been altogether a bad week. Robotics is gonna be awesome and Shakespeare is gonna be awesome. Clinic has carried over from last semester (still on the critical path of you screw up the project fails).

So, the real question is what to do about my 3 Hums. One hasn't met yet since the professor is at a conference for this week. However, I know the professor, and it's gonna be on the Philosophy of Science. The second one is about Asian history, specifically the recent modernization and post-colonialism. After all, that's all we Westerners really know since most of the ancient stuff is still being translated/dug up/hidden by the government. Decisions decisions.

Now, the bad stuff. Mostly clinic. I'm currently figuring out a few new tricks to make testing easier in the future. Unfortunately this is a pain to learn and puts me behind on other stuff. Basically, I've managed to overwork myself again. I stayed up very late Friday morning (sun didn't come up while I was awake, so it's not an all-nighter!) finishing some tests. As par for course, I was the only one to get those tests done, mostly because it's the easiest piece to test and I've been ahead of the rest of the team for some time now. I also have to debug a nasty problem that was mucking up everyone's simulations, so that didn't help everyone else progress either. As I said, I'm on critical path, and just barely making my deadlines means the whole team falls behind.

Also, I can't just mess around anyone. That means stuff like Mass Effect and Fallout3 and learning Japanese are back on hold. =[

In other random news, apparently Nvidia has managed to give us 3D vision from our monitors. Basically it uses the same technology that is used in 3D movies today, but created on the fly from your graphics card. The downside is it requires 1) a 120Hz monitor, 2) a GeForce 8 series or better graphics card, and 3) that you wear glasses. Now, the glasses are apparently not the yellow abominations you return after watching other 3D cinema and are apparently pretty stylish. Plus, the Nvidia team apparently to be doing a good job of letting you know what does and doesn't work. Plus there's the disorientation that you're in 3D now. Especially in First-Person-Shooters where we've been trained to think we're looking at a 3D world already with perspective and enemies behind cover 20 yards away. But, it's supposed a pretty sweet gig. Not gonna change your world or make or break new games, but a nice feature that if you have disposable income to spend on, is kinda cool. I don't have that disposable income handy. =]

Here's to an exciting semester! Cheers!

Speaking to the Void

 

This is quick snapshot of the lovely little doohicky I have on this Blog called Google Analytics. It shows that every day this blog sees about 5-10 viewers. Most don't stay for long, and the majority (over 50%) come from a referring site. I surprisingly am also getting quite a bit of traffic now from search engines. This blog is in fact NOT the top result from searching my name, Trevin Murakami. So, obviously people aren't searching for me. BTW, the HMC page that details and links to this blog are the top hit, just in case you were wondering and didn't want to Google me.

So, anyways, it just goes to prove people (besides you) actually read this thing. And by read I mean not really since only on a few days does the average time on the page creep above 30 seconds.

Um, I head back to school this weekend. Back to more deadlines and such. I think the Verilog I built for the chip is solid, but I haven't gotten a full-on test going yet so I wouldn't want to publish it. I'm now in the midst of building a bunch of supporting schematics so I can start wiring pieces together. The toughest part is getting things straight in my head. There's certain subtitles about the design and some things like ordering can actually matter. For example, a schematic that places objects to the right or left of each other will more likely than not produce a layout design in the same shape. This can be a good thing (good schematics make layout easy) or a bad thing (bad schematics make layouts a living hell). Plus, I have to make decisions about how we're actually building everything, and there's stuff like fixing mistakes others have made.

Overall, though, I haven't been doing that much work. Every night I play games. I still haven't finished off my giant pile of games to play, although I did beat Portal: Prelude which was sufficiently awesome. Also, around 10pm a lot of people regularly are showing up to play DotA online, which has been fun. It's good to learn from peers instead of just playing a random set of players and feeling very angry about stuff. If you play with and without friends, you'll understand what I mean. So, with any random housework excluded, I typically am getting around 5 hours of work done each day. Which isn't too bad, considering technically I'm still on break and stuff is about on the schedule I set. There's always the chance something goes horribly wrong next week and I have to suffer, but oh well. I don't think anyone else is doing work over break, except for grad applications and thank you cards.

Speaking of grad apps, people have been asking me what ever am I going to do once I graduate. First of all, yes I will graduate this semester (unless Prof. Harris holds me over to fix stuff on Clinic). As for what I'm going to do, it kinda depends. I eventually will need a Masters. How I get it is a good question. There's the straight to more school. Short, sweet, about 1 year to do. Then there's work and school, much more economical (work typically pays) but there goes your evenings and it'll take more like 4 years. Or work, then school. Except then you run into the situation 1) will your employers let you go (and pay if you're extra lucky) for a year and 2) you go from positive income to negative income (the usual route, employers typically don't like you leaving for a year). With other responsibilities (family if you're at that point) that can be hard to swallow.

As for where, I don't know. I am applying to USC, UCD, UCSD, UCLA, and University of Texas at Arlington. For jobs, I've been 2nd round interviewed at JPL, but that's about it. A few groups called to make sure I was still in the market, but we haven't had any formal chats yet. And then there's the economy so hires are gonna be slim and late in the year. However, some companies are still hiring fresh grads since it gives them new blood, especially the aerospace industry since all their guys are gonna retire soon and they haven't been hiring new grads for a while.

So, that's where I am right now. As if the anonymous internet cared.

Community Comparisons

Still on break. HMC returns on Jan 19th. So that means one more week to fix all that Clinic stuff I still have to do. Gr....

Anyways, on to the topic of the day: communities. While a loose term, I'm going to reference it in regards to the supportive (or lack thereof) nature of people doing similar things.

Let's start with the DotA community. If you're unfamiliar, DotA stand for 'Defense of the Ancients' and is a WarCraft 3 Frozen Throne custom map. It is also perhaps the single most played WarCraft 3 map, with a huge community, patches, it shows up in competitive leagues, and basically tends to be a big deal. It is based around teams of players each controlling a hero. The goal is to push into the enemy base and kill their super structure, a tree or a throne. As the game progresses, the heroes level up, gain cool powers, and you can buy items to further augment your heroes. The core gameplay though is very micro dependent (fine control of your hero and its actions) as well as team coordination (acting as a team when fighting, allocating who does what, etc.). Team coordination in some ways trumps the micro aspect since 4 heroes attacking 1 hero should win, unless that 1 hero is ridiculously overpowered due to levels or items.

So, here's the crux of the matter. The DotA community is not very supportive of new players. In fact, there are times when people have actually told other players to leave because they were so bad at the game. There's also what are known as griefers, or people who intentionally do things to annoy others. Some of these actions might be intentionally dying to the other team to give them an advantage, or leaving a game in progress (no one new can join and now the team is down a hero). Why? Because people want to win, and DotA is very team dependent, so if you have a bad team people get frustrated. However, in the long run, there seems to be a problem. If you chastise all the new players and get rid of them, what happens? There is no influx of new players, old better players might eventually leave, and now you're stuck with no players. Of course, there's a few really stubborn players who keep playing, and there's definitely some helpful players out there, but in general the community is pretty hostile. Most new players only get better because they are trained by experienced players, usually friends who introduce them to the game. I actually started playing because we have a DotA game night each week at Mudd. I'm still pretty bad.

Now, the HMC community. I tend to cite this as the reason I decided on Harvey Mudd College, and it didn't disappoint. The very concept that it's a high performance school, but everyone lives on campus and the professors are there to teach make an uber combo. Plus there's other perks like the hands-on work and such. At the core, though, I'm a big fan of how supportive the community is. It's a place where if you have questions, someone is bound to know the answer and is willing to explain it to you. I managed to debug and learn about boot failures when my computer went bonkers right before finals week. I've had people explain crazy algorithms to me. I was just interviewing at JPL and explaining what I knew about a CS class that I hadn't taken, and the interviewer thought I had taken the class. I eventually told him that this was just from learning from the CS majors complaining about chunky string and that I didn't know how to fix the problem itself in detail. I've also spent many hours walking others through problems of their own, sometimes in sacrifice of meeting my own deadlines.

Now, it's not all flowers and rainbows. I've mentioned in others posts about the downsides of such a tight community such as if you do something stupid everyone finds out, or that if you're the jerk people end up not liking you can't be anonymous. But, overall, I enjoy the community of Harvey Mudd College. Plus, we have professors who participate in some of the randomest stuff, like dressing up as Santa so we can take pictures with him. Go Prof. Yong!

And now, for no good reason, a video.

The Intelligent Person's Folly

In Dungeons and Dragons, abbreviated D&D, there are six primary attributes. Strength, a measurement of physical power, Dexterity, a measurement of nimble actions and fingers, Constitution, a measure of endurance to pain and body, Intelligence, a measurement of knowledge, Wisdom, a measurement of perception and application, and Charisma, a measurement of physical beauty and nimbleness of the tongue.

D&D explains the difference between Intelligence (Int) and Wisdom (Wis) as the former being book smarts while the latter is street smarts. Also, having a lot of one doesn't necessarily include the other. The example would be an absent-minded professor for high Int and low Wis, or a perceptive idiot for low Int and high Wis. Intelligence is numbers, calculations, lore, and held knowledge in the character's mind. Wisdom is the application of faculties to perceive the world around you by hearing or sight or general insight. Of course, a synergy occurs if you have both since you can take in the situation and then apply your dazzling archives of knowledge to take advantage of it.

This brings us to a common folly about smart people. Being a student of Harvey Mudd would imply that one would have a high Int score. However, not all of them would have a high Wis score right? They should be bumbling morons that only have book smarts and no other smarts. That is where you'd be wrong. Harvey Mudd prides itself on trying to find and admitting "well-rounded" students. I know it's a trite buzz word, but bear with me. They look for smart students, but they need something else. For me, it was a mish mash of music (band), a bit of athletics (tennis and frisbee) and random other things. But in the end, the students aren't complete book junkies. Granted, I'm sure one of my friends being a data miner (especially about politics) doesn't strike people as being less geeky.

Now, for another folly. The folly that smart people have. It's the concept that you're smarter than others. While, this belief isn't necessarily bad, the implications aren't so nice. For one thing, this tends to make smart people think they're better than the not so smart people, which is not true. The biggest problem is that they think they can outsmart everyone. Some, if they were teased or slighted at younger ages for their intelligence, may even feel entitled to the ability to outsmart everyone else. Of course, this doesn't necessarily hold. For one thing, there is always someone smarter. Secondly, which smart are you measuring? Someone might simply be more clever, or accidentally come upon a better alternative.

I personally have had this folly, a kind of hubris that I should win. I recently bought two copies of Blokus, one for my family and one for the gaming club at HMC. It's a game where you try to place as many of your pieces on the board while preventing your opponents from placing their pieces. It's so simple that anyone can play, but a bit of strategy so there's depth. However, it's not so complex as say chess. Thus, there have been a few games where I think I have the winning solution, and if I played it right I would have won. Unfortunately, I screwed around, messed up, and ended up losing.

So, something to think about. What's your folly?