Coming out to LA

I got to visit USC on Friday as a potential Masters student. It was kinda cool, a lot different than when I visited as a potential applying undergrad.

As readers of the backlog may know, I have no car. In case you're interested, I'd estimate about 1/3 of the students on campus have a car. So, I had to take the train. Luckily, we have a Metrolink station a few blocks away. And by a few blocks, 20 minute walking distance 5 minute bike ride (downhill). What's really neat is that it only took about 1 hour to get to LA Union station, and the round trip cost me $14. That's cheaper than the gas it would have taken. Plus, I didn't have to worry about traffic or driving myself, I just read my Philosophy of Science book instead. A pretty sweet deal if you ask me. USC also provides a nice tram to get to and from Union station, an extra perk.

The ride itself was also very interesting. In a row behind me a black gentleman was trying to figure out when he would arrive at one of the train stops so that a friend could pick him up. Suddenly, everyone around him was giving him maps and advice and even specific instructions on how his friend will have to drive to get to the stop. As he said, "I'm feelin' the love here." Turns out he's visiting LA to follow up on some job leads. He grew up in Chicago and lives in Florida now. What's interesting is he then started to ask how it's like to live in LA. One of the ladies spoke up and described that there's still quite a big of the gang issues and all that. In fact, she used to take drugs and had been cut up quite a few times. However, she eventually decided to quit and now has kids that have grown up and are starting their own families. There were also talk about the nasty traffic and the smog problem too.

It was weird in a way. I've lived in the suburbs near LA for all my life, yet I know so little about downtown LA. Sure I've heard about the gangs and all that, but it was an eye opener to have someone who had survived through that life talk about it as a personal experience instead of some statistic. Claremont has even less of these gang problems, although we often get all the smog that blows out of LA hanging in our air.

As far as the USC trip itself, it was interesting. I met a person from Boston (MIT) and another who was deciding between USC and Carnegie Mellon. I got to talk with the advisers and the staff there. I even managed to grab a student who gave me some advice. Unfortunately I didn't catch any professors since it was Friday and they were all off-campus.

The campus is the same as you would expect from USC. Really pretty outside, inside is kinda drab for the older buildings (especially where they stick their professors' offices) and there's some really olde stuff. I'm going to do a little more research on the kind of work they're doing and seeing if it's stuff I'd want to do. Apparently about 98% of the Masters students there just do their classes, get their Masters, and head out to a job. It's a 1.5 year, or 3 semester, path.

The other college I'm considering is UC Davis. Professor Bevan Baas is doing some really cool stuff up there. Hopefully I can get into his research group, and he seems willing to let me in. Plus, I can probably rent a room from Michael Braly.

That's all for now. I'm currently trying to slay Clinic as fast as I can, but it's gonna be tough. Not to mention this team is riddled with bad traits. For starters, I'm a lazy bum, tend to over think the problem too much, and yet miss the important detail. Yay! \o/

Secrets Releaved

So, now we know what that secret Rearden company was doing all this time, besides stealing our CS majors for exorbitant amounts of money.

Refresh

I've received word that I might be getting more traffic soon. Something about acceptance letters or something like that. Weird.

Anyways, this is once again late because I am a lazy jerk who doesn't remember to write these things on Friday like I'm supposed to.



Spring Break was... interesting. I managed to cram in 24 Hours of gaming. Well, I actually didn't game all that much since I was organizing and keeping the gaming session going, but I had fun nonetheless. I blame my mom for indoctrinating me to be a good host and deriving pleasure out of making sure others are having a good time. But, that's another story. I then commenced to cram in as much Clinic as I possibly could for the next few days. Thursday evening I went home so that I could wake up at 4 in the morning on Friday and drive to Goleta, CA for an interview with Raytheon. The drive up was actually pretty nice. Two hours of basically empty freeway in the dark of night. The interview itself was pretty fun. I think I impressed them with my awesome Mudd knowledge and ability to problem solve on the spot. I might have to review how I answer questions like "How do you like being the technical lead of your team." To be honest, it's sometimes a very thankless job and I'd rather I only had my own work instead of being the go to guy in the team for help. But, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to make the project work, and I'm more than willing to shoulder the job. Then I had traffic on the way back. So, it took me four hours to get home. Then Saturday I got to watch my brother at his Drumline competition (yeah, he's just that cool). Sunday was church and a nice lunch at my grandmother's for my mom's birthday. Then back to school. And now, more Clinic. Yay!

In other news, I'm in the Shakespeare class. It's a pretty cool class. We get to read several Shakespeare plays, discuss them, and get cool lectures about Elizabethan drama and social issues at the time. For the second half of the semester we prepare and then perform a Shakespeare play. Well, except this year we chose a play by some other dude, but it's very nice olde English. It turns out Matthew Lawson, East Dorm Proctor, my roommate Freshman and Sophomore year, unicycler, LAC supervisor, and in general insanely awesome person extraordinaire is in charge of music. He happens to know I play the flute. So, now I'm learning the recorder. If you have any tips, let me know. I currently sound really stupid. Like, those really bad 5th graders who are being forced to play the recorder and they don't want to stupid. I've been told there is a way to sound really good, and I'd really really like to figure it out.

In yet other news Room Draw is now in effect. Since I'm a graduating senior, I don't have to deal with it. =] Unfortunately, it will consume most people's conversations for the forseeable future. And, being the social guy I am, I'd like to be having conversations with people. I guess I'll have to have topics that are more interesting that the drama of Room Draw. See this post if you're interested.

Anyways, that's all that mattered to me for this post. This is Trevin Murakami, and you've just been filled in.

Recovery Report

Just got back from 24Hr Crack. It was AWESOME. So many games, including a few epic moments. Or, perhaps they seemed more epic due to sleep dep.

I forgot to bring my camera for pictures. Again.

And, since I'll be graduating, I have to wonder who will take over next year.

I sleep now.

Spring Break

Hello denizens of the future.

This is a previously written and stored and posted on Saturday.

Unfortunately, I am not actually here to post it myself. I am sleeping in preparation for 24 Hours of gaming.

=]

Afterwards, I will do more Clinic.

=[

But, hopefully Clinic will get back on schedule.

=]

I also has job interview.

=]]

But, no car.

=[

Someone told me ZipCar would help.

=]

But, ZipCar will cost around 133 for the trip.

=[

But, maybe the company will help reimburse me.

=]

Thought I'd Share This

From Penny Arcade.

Titled "Progress"



Click on the picture to see the full version.

Late as Usual

Sorry I've been neglecting all one of my readers. OK, maybe the admissions department is watching as well.

First some current events. I got to see Watchmen last Friday. I was fairly impressed. Then again, that might be the sleep dep talking and my extremely short list of qualifications to be a movie critic.

It's actually been a really weird phenomenon concerning the Watchmen movie. It is very obvious they were trying to cater to both the Watchmen fanboys who know everything about everything in it, as well as the general populace who have no idea what is going on and the most "human" hero they have is Spiderman going emo. Ironically, every time I see a review people have to preface it with which category they belong to.

I happen to be neither. That is to say, I read the graphic novel, wasn't super impressed, but still thought it was a very high quality piece and understood it all. So, if there were plot holes or anything like that, I merely filled in the gaps. I was however extremely impressed by how much they managed to pack into the movie. They got all the major plotlines and subplots and character development in there. Not to mention the director has finally matured in his use of slow-mo during battle scenes. If you saw 300, you know sometimes the battles just start to take too long due to the slow-mo every time a bad guy gets hit. This time, it was much more tastefully done.

Overall, I'd say it was a pretty good movie and recommend people watch it. Just make sure you don't go in expecting Spiderman. This is a story of a messed up world. This is a look at the people behind the masks and not people with masks rising to fight the giant evil. In fact, a major point of the movie is questioning what is good or bad, or is it all just shades of gray in the end?

Oh, and the soundtrack was awesome. Some of the best music choices I've heard in a long time. The Sound of Silence for the funeral. The Times, They are a Changin' for the intro sequence. So awesome. Not much to rave about on the new music composed for the movie itself. =[


I'm prepping up for the 24Hr Crack party this weekend. For my newer readers, it's a gaming session I started my Sophomore year where a bunch of us try to play games for 24 Hours straight. Of course, we get to break for food and such. I've also been pushing a board game component so that we don't sit in front of computers fragging all day. I'm also in charge of providing beverages, so here's a lovely picture of my room, taken over by the 2 and 3-Liter bottles.



In Robotics we finally got our Chiara robots moving. W00t! Here's a picture of it going towards a landmark. We now have vision implemented and a basic finite state machine.



There are actually robots we got from Carnegie Mellon, the home of several robots. Unfortunately, this robot is still in development so we've been having fun poking around at low level C++ code to get things working.


Two weekends ago was Family Weekend. I gave a tour of the Engineering department. There were five tours and we wanted to partner up, but we had an odd number of tourguides and I'm an experienced one so I went solo. Pictures at the link
here.

Well, that's it for now. Back to working on Clinic.