Brian's World

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Much to talk about. Not much time to do it in. My alarm clock is set for 06:30am tomorrow and I have class at 10:00am. I don’t have a completely full list of things to do, but I would like to work on a few bits and pieces tomorrow morning. I greatly wish somewhere was open for breakfast at an earlier hour like 7:00, at least for getting bagels and stuff. I have hypothesized that I could buy a bag of bagels, some butter, and a carton of orange juice and make my own breakfast.. but my dorm room doesn’t make a very good kitchen. I have a problem using my one desk to do physics hw and then prepare a bagel. Those are separate activities that belong in separate spaces.

In other news, I guess its good news… I succedded in securing a single next year in BARH. I calculated the odds beforehand and I identified a 125% chance of getting one… so I would have been very upset if I didn’t. Its not like anything super great, it still has a shared bathroom.. but it is near the laundry which is good. I like laundry. Maybe there will be room for me to create a spot where I can cook a bagel some mornings, since it looks as if I may have class at 8:00am everyday. I’m continuing on my mission to take classes that interest me, and next semester continues to be pretty boring. There isn’t much room for “variety” in my schedule, and the “variety” offered in the Computer and Systems Engineering department here isn’t very varied. So I’m taking Operations Systems (aka Op Sys). I have no clue what it entails, but Prog Lang occurs at the same time as Circuits, so I couldn’t take that. I really wanted to take more courses about the web, like Web Science or Writing for the WWW (to fufill that stupid requirement) but they do not fit into my schedule because circuits occupies the most desired timeslot everyday. Stupid circuits.

I also upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5 today, its pretty wierd. Even if you’re on the edge of technology like I tend to be, this upgrade was a little out there. I can barely find anything, but plugins upgrade themselves which is neat. The whole interface is different and “cleaner” which I don’t always like in a website. All this white and light blue’s make me feel like I’m interacting with a cloud… my blog is certainly not that.

There are a few things in life that frustrate me when I see them, and there are others that frustrate me when I interact with them. Lately there’s been a visual thing that frustrates me, and its difficult to explain why. Maybe someone is beating me at my own game of unwavering optimism, but the tense doesn’t match the future… it implies the past. Now given, this wasn’t written by promoter, but I assume a direct connection because of the duration and quantity in which its been used. If it made sense, or had any direct application at all I would be ok with it. Or if it was compleletely random I would be ok with that as well, but this foggy connection is what annoys me. I can plug the line in any which way and it might work. A deeper analysis is required.

Good night moon.

Request for Mentor

Things have been going well in the life of Brian, at least decently well. I continue to struggle to iron out the last few efficiencies in my schedule and routine, most of which involve waking up. I can tie this partially to a lack of motivating factors, as well as a race it seems that takes place. Concerto has “debuted” here at RPI, and everyone with a valid RCS id is encouraged to login and check it out. Unfortunately or fortunately, this doesn’t mean that development has stopped. We drew a line and said these are the features required for rev 1, and thats pretty much what we’ve got. There are lots of additional features that we plan on rollout out over the next few days and weeks, and those should all prove to be very exciting.

Looking back and evaluting what goes well and what doesn’t is always effective to a point I feel. Some people spend too much time going back and not enough time moving forward, but others completely forget the past and trudge along making no improvements. I think its time I take a step back and evaluate my social life and how I’ve been doing in the past few months and weeks. It would certainly not be true to say I’ve been the best friend or companion lately, and I could see how that can place a toll on relationships. I’ve been quick to draw the conclusion that this is because I’m busy doing x or y or z, but I’m not 100% sure thats the complete cause. I think there may be something larger at play, where I’ve reached a point where I lack knowledge of where to go from here. Like I don’t have enough data to tell me what steps should be taken next, especially after keeping in mind the limits and boundries I place on things.

This week is submission week to Google Summer of Code, and so far I’ve submitted 2 proposals. One is kind of run of the mill I found a mentoring organization and choose a project on their list that I’m interested. I would be really excited if I got that, but I’m not the expert in the code base and I haven’t spent years writing special plugins or anything for their product like some of the other entrants have. The second proposal I submitted was a little bit out of the park. It didn’t make much sense to me, and it still doesn’t, but I choose ‘Google’ as the mentoring organization. For anyone familiar with GSOC, choosing Google as your mentoring organization is probably one of the dumbest things you can do. They accept under 15 projects, completely random, that they feel are worthy but don’t fall under the umbrella of a larger mentoring organization. One string attached: you need to provide your own mentor. Doh! I had completely missed this on their FAQ page, and as such I got a comment back from Google today telling me to supply a mentor. I don’t believe I have a mentor in the current point in my life, especially when it comes to programming. There is no old wise guy I look to when I’m facing a challenging task or a difficult concept… I hash it out with myself or my peers.

So heres the deal. If you, or anyone you know, might be interested in mentoring me for a project that probably won’t get approved by Google, please contact me ASAP. Like today, right now. Shoot me an email @ bmichalski@gmail.com and we’ll get this thing rolling. if you want to know what you’re signing up to mentor me on… well its super top secret. Of course I’ve uploaded a pdf of my application to Google which describes the concept and the big picture, the very big picture. Here it is: gsoc_concerto.pdf You don’t have to be old to be my mentor, you don’t even have to be that wise.. though I’m sure you are. You should probably know a little bit about program, a little bit about databases, and a lot about data.

In lots of representations of college there seems to be this representation that students have a professor that they are close to, who they seek advice from, etc. I don’t have such a person. I know RPI tries to foster this with its “Academic Advising” program, but it doesn’t work well. Advisors are assigned based on major, not interests.. and are there to serve one purpose to you, check a box in SIS and allow you to register. This GSOC mentoring thing would have been ideal if there was a professor or person I felt close to when it comes to programming or something, but alas there are none.

Time for bed.

Goodnight moon.

Moderate Friday

Today is “Good Friday”. Mine hasn’t been super good, so I’m calling this blog moderate Friday, because so far I’m having a moderate day. For once I would like to focus on all the great and good things that are going on in my life, I think a positive and uplifting blog would be a good one. Well that blog won’t be this one, I’ll have to save that for the time where there are a few things going on in my life that classify more in the “good” category than in the “1-good” category.

Today was Friday, which means a weekend is coming up. This weekend is Easter, and of course RPI has no days off to celebrate such a holiday. While I’m still collecting data, a significant amount of students go home at some point to participate in holiday events. I will not be one of those students. My mom decided that I shouldn’t come home since I was just there last weekend ya know.. wouldn’t want to stay too long.. then I might feel like I live there or something. They were kind enough to send me a card in the mail. I really want to send cards back, but I never remember too. I think when I’m older I’m going to go out like once or twice a year and buy all the cards I’ll need for the entire year. Then when I’m bored I can fill them out, maybe in advance of the event, and keep them in a file that tell me when to mail things. I think it will be very effecient.

I get annoyed at some things rather quickly. Sometimes I get pre-annoyed, like I know something that will annoy me is coming so I get annoyed before it even happens. I don’t think this is a good thing. But it happens, and I usually just say ok or some passive answer because I’m in no position to get into a heated debate over it. Its not like a moot point or something I’m not qualified to answer.. I detect those and reroute them quickly. Its things that I am qualified to deal with but I just feel like its not my place. I’ve never liked it when people ask questions when they’re really just telling you something. A good example is “Can you walk to the dog?” Well you can’t say no, because the dog certainly isn’t going to walk itself. You mind as well just agree and go along for the ride. You can clean up the damage later right? If the question “Would you like to walk the dog or should I do it tonight?” was posed it would be much more pleasent to answer. I might be more inclined to say yes without putting up a fight because the question was asked in such a manor I felt I had the choice. Thats something I like a lot, having choices. I dislike it when people feel that leaders have to assign tasks to other people, or tell someone what to do. Thats no fun is it. Sure, its easier for the person in charge but its more fun to give people choices… and as a leader your mission is to connect their choice into your desired product.

That got very far off track… my bad. GSOC 2008 released a list of organizations you can work with.. I have 2 in mind I might apply for. Who knows what will happen. I recently calculated my odds of getting a single in BARH next year via intrahall squatting. It was like 120% which is either very good, or I didn’t take some factors into account. We’ll see on 3/30.

If I were to say one thing, I think it would be this: Your eyes are made of swiss cheese, yet you percieve the world into your advanced neural network.