Not Harvard Med

Onward

2010-09-16T11:15:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed that I haven't been posting even though I've been back at school for weeks. Well, this blog has been a lovely place for a while. It seems, however, that the blogging format for Mudd is going to change to an everyone-shares-a-blog system. Which sounds kind of fun, really.

I'll try to get back into the habbit of posting on my other blog, Giraffe Crossing (http://czanda.blogspot.com/) which will be about whatever the hell I feel like talking about. And maybe someday, when I have a camera, I'll put pictures there, too. Or maybe on wherever else I'll be blogging.

There may be one more post here about where the new blog will live. Until then, peace out.

AH

2010-07-27T20:25:00.000-07:00

I forgot to post before I left. I had my last week of work. T'was nice. This means I'm home now and not particularly useful as far as Mudd blogging goes. So I shall be hush for the next month or so. Adios.

Clumsy

2010-07-15T10:58:00.000-07:00

I really need to stop dropping things on my toes / running into things / get scratched by walking too close to sharp objects. Hobbling is not my cup of tea.

This week has been all sorts of special at work...the CS Staff is all on vacation except for two of us freshmen. This includes our boss, the sysadmin. So unfortunately, when things break, we often are unable to figure out how to fix them. But we keep trying!

Also, this past weekend was pretty awesome, what with the visiting mother and sister. Less awesome, perhaps, due to the snake that was loose from Thursday through Saturday in our suite. But still pretty awesome.

Maaaaaan I'm sleepy. I think this will be another day fueled by caffeine and cute animal pictures.

Silly

2010-07-08T10:57:00.001-07:00

So last night I was heading up to bed at a later hour than intended...I had gotten sort of carried away showing off the music I like to some buds. And I stopped at one bud's room so I could take his longboard on a lap of Sontag courtyard to see if I liked it (it is either the model I'm looking at or a very similar one) and...I put my laptop down outside and forgot about it. And this morning, when I realized my error, I walked down the stairs and there it was.

I have regained a tiny bit of confidence about the lack of theft on campus. However, I don't think I'm going to space out and leave my laptop out again. That was dumb.

Let's see...shenanigans de la semaine. July 4th was fun, as was the 5th...yay days off. And this week has been nice and chill at work, though last night I did a "woo! panic!" thing about our web server failing at updating the nsscache; fortunately, we have a genius staff member who advised me on how to fix it, and then all was well! Take that, terrifying and unintelligeable error messages!

So life is pretty good. I'm feeling moderately chipper, enough to do silly things like walk to the practice rooms with a snake wound around my neck and to practice all half a dozen songs I've gotten written this summer. I need to run them again tonight so they're smooth. Should print out lyrics, too. That would help on the music drilling.

Laaaaaaaaaaa.

Chat Dans La Gorge

2010-07-01T16:45:00.001-07:00

So I've got a sore throat today. I'm not fond of sore throats at all...constantly clearing one's throat and having a half-human, half-gravel voice is not the most charming of situations. Mais c'est la vie.

This week...stuff happened. Let's see: I seem to have gotten good enough at navigating with a longboard that I managed to ride through the place I fell when I was first learning, no problems. My bud and I spent some time practicing boarding last night after dinner, as he is attempting to learn (and doing pretty well), at which point I discovered that a. the terracey area near Sprague that they just finished is awesome as an obstacle course and b. luging is fun on a longboard. Mind you, I didn't take any sloped areas with the board, as I didn't have a helmet with me...might try rolling from Sontag to Ac End with a helmet and kneepads this weekend.

I have been chilling a lot with said bud of late. Some of his friends came into town to visit him so they might all go together to EDC, the spiffy techno carnival in LA, so I enjoyed participating in their shenaniganery this past weekend. Also, said bud and I have ambitions for delicious dinner tonight involving steak. And salad. I'm taking care of the salad part, thankfully, though said bud seemes to be a bit picky on the veggies...still, real food is good. Especially if it's tasty. Like steak.

Ooooooh so we started a D&D game earlier this week. Tuesday night, I think. Actually, Tuesday was awesome because I first watched Doctor Who, then played DnD, then talked to my sister for a while. A fabulous evening...until I realized that hey, I'd taken our dear Snakey out (his name is actually Snakey) before I went to watch Doctor Who, and it was 8 hours later, and it looked like I had never put him back. So that resulted in a frantic search for a while. An eventually successful search (he was hiding under my roommate's bed), but still, I'm not taking Snakey out again for a while. I mean, he couldn't hurt a fly...I think they'd startle him too much...but it's still bad form to lose a snake in a suite of people. So that wasn't good at all.

Well, I should bug my friend about steakmaking. And maybe I should hit the practice rooms later tonight for some music-doing. (I've written two songs this week, but I have yet to write any happy lyrics this summer, and I told my sister I would...) Should be a good evening. As many are.

Something Cooking

2010-06-24T21:39:00.000-07:00

I...am finally gaining some ambition in the cooking department. This is momentous for me. Except for a few family cooking things that I've picked up, I have always been sort of limited to the ability to make pasta and microwave meals. So, going grocery shopping today both hungry and with aspirations of actually making big-person food managed to land me with a piece of salmon. A piece of salmon, ladies and gentlemen, which now sits in the fridge marinating in teriyaki sauce so tomorrow...there shall be salmon dinner. Boo-friggin-ya.

Life has been quite nice and easygoing...though I need to get back on the wagon for practicing piano (and unicycle!) I've been having good chill times with friends. Also, my roomie has been catching up on How I Met Your Mother...so I've been watching a lot of that. A lot a lot. As in it's persistently playing in the background when I am not at work so I hear the theme song in my head when I go to sleep and OH LORD HELP ME...

I'm managing to be ever the more useful at work! I now can actually spend several hours trying to do something and failing as opposed to just spending several hours contemplating how I would even begin trying to do it. Which still isn't super productive, but occasionally there are breakthroughs, and that's what counts!

Also. I got a haircut. This may have partially been influenced by chilling with two buds (one on Skype, the other in person) and switching somehow to playing Truth or Dare until late Sunday/early Monday. Somewhere in there I got dared to cut some hair off, and having learned since 3rd grade about the consequences of cutting off hair other people can see, naturally, I cut some hair on the back of my head that no one could see. However, the next day, the knowing...the feeling the back of my head with the patch of far-too-short hair...it was too much by Wednesday, so I got the hair a-cutted. Which I had meant to do for a while. So it ends happily, and I learn yet another lesson that I should have figured out many years ago but that college enables just fine.

Rolling On

2010-06-17T16:26:00.000-07:00

I appear to be back to something approximating good health...my fatigue probably has more to do with me staying up too late in the piano practice rooms than anything else. But I seem to be having minor successes with recording, so that's something.

In the meantime, I've gotten this longboarding thing working pretty well. Having borrowed a friend's longboard on a whim last week, I'm pleased to say that I can now actually get from Sontag to work with reasonable dexterity and not too much falling over. I am now somewhat more motivated to work out this unicycling thing starting this weekend, now that I have reinforced my faith in my balance and my ability to learn how to deal with wheeled man-powered transport.

Work has gotten somewhat more interesting since I stopped being too scared to actually try to solve any problems in which there was a greater than 1% chance of me breaking the system. I think I have yet to do anything particularly clever, but I'm beyond monkey levels of competency with UNIX, which is more than I could say some weeks ago, so good for me.

I did manage to check off one of the things I meant to do this summer yesterday. A few of us went to the Libra Complex (the hallways connecting all the buildings at the basement level of the academic end of campus) late-ish last night, borrowed some wheeled office chairs from one of the CS labs, and went "chairing". This primarily involves finding the gently sloped portions of the hallways, sitting in an office chair and rolling down said hallway, being careful to perform some basic steering to avoid collisions with walls or other chair-ers. Much fun was had.

It does now occur to me that I seem to be at around the halfway mark on the 10 weeks of summer hereabouts (well, 9 weeks...one week was elsewhere) and I'm still not entirely sure what I'm doing when I get back home. I mean, I'll have a month of...chill time. How bizarre. I mean, it will be nice...but bizarre nonetheless.

Heh, oops.

2010-06-12T09:22:00.001-07:00

I forgot to post on Thursday. What insanity is this? I always post on Thursday unless I'm not here / have a very good reason to disappear / don't think I'll be interesting! The fabric of space and time has ruptured! Egads!

Work this week has been all kinds of special primarily because I've been fighting off this evil illness with the magical power of making one completely exhausted and incapable of functioning at early hours of the afternoon. In the first half of the week I was reduced to returning to my room often. By yesterday I managed to take a nap IN THE CS LABS in the afternoon, only to wake up and attempt to do work without apparently the capability of touch-typing any more nor any recollection of basic shell commands. Thank goodness Skye is a patient person.

On Tuesday night I told about three people "Just so you know, Friday we're going to frozen yogurt after dinner. No, no, you have no choice in this. We're going." So it turns out the invitation propagated a bit, so about ten of us departed yesterday to treck into the village for banking and froyo eating. It was a lovely time. Quite relaxing.

Right now, I'm playing piano ALL THE FRIGGIN TIME. It's craaaaazy. I never could keep a steady practice regime when I was younger and the rest of my life was regulated time-wise...but now that everything's all free up, I've been practicing piano from 11 PM to 12 AM every night, plus or minus about 15 minutes on either end. It's a good feeling to know I'm actually sticking with this for the first time in a long time. Yaaaay.

Okay, there's paintball this morning, so I should probably go make myself faintly presentable for that. Toodles.

"Play Out the Play" (Henry IV Part I, Act 2 Scene 4)

2010-06-03T10:28:00.000-07:00

I'm quite enjoying the plays in Ashland at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It's been quite relaxing, though the two-plays-a-day thing can get a little exhausting after a while. Fortunately, today we only see one, the Merchant of Venice. Yesterday was Hamlet for a matinee and Henry IV Part I for eveningtimes; the day before, Well (not a Shakespeare play by any stretch - a very modern mind-bending piece) for the afternoon and Twelfth Night for the evening.

None of the plays have been bad thus far, though I regret that while I was quite fond of this production of Hamlet, the demographic of the audience pushed it so towards a large number of students that the whispering behind me during my favorite monologues came as some distraction and might have inspired violence were I not aware that I, too, was once so disruptive an audience member.

Also, some thrift store shopping has taken place; I managed to purchase some shorts to help me endure the heat of the desert during the summer at work (though they're somewhat useless when I'm working in the well-air-conditioned basements) as well as a lovely sweater. I'm no shopped, but I'm still decently satisfied with my purchases, and now must simply consider the pros and cons of purchasing a lovely blue wig from there.

Watching these shows with my grandparents has been most interesting; there is certainly a generation gap there that makes modernization and bold theatrical choices somewhat uncomfortable for them. Our Hamlet production, for instance, had the players as a hip-hop troupe, which might have suited the 400 students in the audience (well over half the house) but did not cooperate well with the older demographic more often gracing the audiences here.

This post has nothing to do with Mudd, for which I apologize. I will tend against putting further posts here, and instead keep them (in more frequency, too) at another blog on this same account.

Also, can I just say that I wish I had heard people speak well of Henry IV Part I before? It's a brilliant play, especially when well-acted as might be done here.

Machinations

2010-05-27T17:23:00.000-07:00

Life continues in a peaceful fashion. I am finally moved in to my summer room in Sontag, which is lovely...we have a kitchen! A real kitchen! I love kitchens. They let me make food and stuff, and not having to go off-campus for food means spending half of my lunch break taking a nap. Which is nice, I would say.

I've been having moderate success in my efforts to figure out shell scripting, etc. on the servers at work, which is good. We're getting stuff done now. It's quite nice. I keep poking around at files and finding new things to look up, which mention new files that I find...the cycle continues. Today fortune -o was the most fascinating discovery. The random funny quote program on our server apparently has an "offensive" option if you look for it. That was fascinating to find.

Let's see...grades came out, and I did okay. This is nice. And tomorrow, my sister and mother are picking me up in the morning to bring me to Disneyland, which I think is pretty freaking cool. I haven't been there in a long time. And then I'm going to try to get some work done Saturday so I don't have to worry about missing over a week of work consecutively, as next week I'm off at Ashland watching Shakespeare plays and the like. Oh what fun. *squee*

I will likely have internet next week such that I can post, but that is still uncertain, and I may simply not want to say anything. So if for some mysterious reason there exists a reader out there who would miss seeing a post from me about nothing in particular, I apologize.

Sweet summertime, summertime

2010-05-20T17:22:00.000-07:00

Well, the semester ended. I believe I passed all of my classes. And now comes the joyous time of Mudd summer, in which the thinned-out campus takes part in Summer Research and Summer Math, a special program designed to knock out a semester of math in 3 weeks. Many of my friends are in Summer Math. I am not seeing them often due to the strenuous workload of two half-semester classes crammed into a three-week period. Ah well.

Right now, I'm actually working on the CS Summer Staff. Thus far it's been pretty quiet...we've cleaned out some of the library, read a lot from the books we have teaching UNIX and Linux, and wandered around on terminal windows logging in and out of servers and poking around to see what was going on. It's been a little dull now and again, but once we've been educated enough to actually get some proper work done it should be awesome. Also, through the work of junking some of the old CS equipment, I found two wonderful things...one, a three-button Logitech MouseMan M-S38 from the '90s and a Wacom ZC-100-00 mouse that has no apparent means of connecting to the outside world even after having been pried open with a fork in the name of science (I'm not in possession of much in the way of tools, but I had to know). Carl (I named the MouseMan Carl) didn't watch the brutality.

Without the semester's work, life is quite quiet. I'm doing a lot of walking to and from food (quite a lot...I have no place to store food until they let me move into Sontag nor any method of preparing it, so I address food on a meal-to-meal basis minus a store of bananas, apples and mini-bagels in my room) and a lot of chilling in my room during non-work hours, sometimes reading from the manuals I have, sometimes doing next to nothing. It's creepy how quiet it is, though. When it switches from being mostly Summer Math on campus to mostly Summer Research, it might liven up a bit simply because Research people don't have to work off hours as much.

Anyhoo, needless to say, with all this empty time I should be able to update at least weekly this summer. That will probably end at the end of July when I no longer have Muddly things to say due to my return home. But for now, enjoy, ye few readers that I have. And comment away. I like comments.

OH OH OH AND UTTERLY RANDOM THING...if you have 3 hours to kill and a fondness for Shakespeare, this is for you.

Some Observations

2010-05-13T15:33:00.000-07:00

Okay, if you know me or are regularly on the Harvey Mudd Class of 2014 site, you've probably already seen these. But school is not quite finished with kicking my behind, and thus if you want a post this week this is what it shall be. If you haven't yet seen these, enjoy.

1. Math teachers are extremely attached to their colored chalk, to the point where they will bitterly complain if they have to use a whiteboard.

2. No matter how late you are up working on a lab report, no matter what hour it is that you decide to go to the LAC lab to use KaleidaGraph, there will be someone else there working on the same lab report.

3. Dodds will give you an extension. Just ask. Other professors will, too, but Dodds requires barely any notice.

4. Friday afternoons are for sitting in the middle of the quad soaking up sunlight. Friday nights are for coping with the sunburn.

5. The worse times for staying awake in class are 8:00 AM and 1:15 PM. They are also the times when professors with monotones are most likely to be teaching your class. 8 is especially challenging post-all-nighter.

6. Play music in Chemistry lab. It will temper your sadness at being inside on a beautiful day.

7. Much as you would not think a desert in Southern California would call for it, you will not regret having a pair of rain boots. It rarely rains, but that one time it does, you want to be able to wade to class.

8. Telling yourself you will wake up in the morning to finish the assignment you did not finish last night is only lying to yourself.

9. If you have time to snooze, you will. If you don't, you probably will anyways.

10. No matter what your professor tells you, if you are going to sleep through a class, it is better to sleep through it in your bed than in their classroom.

11. Regardless of what your distraction may be, if you are starting your homework after 12 AM the day it is due you are doing it wrong. That being said, you're going to do it wrong. A lot.

12. Your best friend has a name, and that name is Wolfram Alpha.

13. Hum 1 papers were designed to be started the day before they are due and finished the morning they are due.

14. The only real holiday is Cesar Chavez day. All other national holidays are null and void.

15. If there is not calculus, then it is not a science.

16. Mathematicians are incapable of counting and should not be allowed to do so.

17. There should be no surprise when sparks are seen flying high into the air or explosions are heard emanating from the west. That's West. They do that.

18. As loud as the Platt coffee machine is, as much as you hate the taste of the coffee and even though it burns your tongue every time, it seems like the best thing ever at 2 AM when you spent your week not doing your lab report.

19. There will always be a Physics assignment due. Physics never rests; nor should you.

20. If you have homework to get done, do not under any circumstances let any upperclassmen show you a short YouTube video they thought you'd like. The amount of time wasted as a result will be an order of magnitude larger than the length of that video.

21. In the morning, when you attempt to seek out breakfast, don't be fooled...the smoothie is worth the line.

22. Take Team Sports or Floor Hockey. You will enjoy it.

23. If North is throwing a 5C party, it will likely be totally awesome. However, after about midnight it is highly recommended that you watch your step in that vicinity.

24. Don't flex out after 11 on Saturday night at Jay's. Everyone else had that idea, too. Either try Friday or try the Coop.

25. Board and card games are better when combined (e.g. Flux Bang, Settlers of Bang, etc.).

26. The East hot tub is very warm and nice, but you should be careful a. not to scald yourself, b. to bring water and c. to take a shower afterwards because that tub becomes people soup in a short, short time.

27. (courtesy of Naked Man Frosh) The correct way to complete a take-home exam is to subtract the time allotted for the test from the time the test is due in class, to go to the classroom where you will be turning that test in and to start such that you will complete the test at the start of class. This only works for the first class of the morning in that room, though. **NOTE: this is a very unhealthy thing to -actually- do, funny as it is**

28. Learn very early which is BK B134 and which is JA B134.

29. Love your rhinoceri even when they are revolutionaries going at v = 4/5 c through guillotines.

30. Awkward hours are for naps. You won't get anything done, so stop fooling yourself and catch up on some sleep already.

yawn

2010-04-29T13:44:00.000-07:00

Well, we're almost done with the school year...I have one class tomorrow and then we're into the sweet relaxation of Reading Week/Presentation Days/Dead Week. My, won't that be nice. Due to having a pretty awful weekend, I didn't get enough of my work done before tonight, so I doubt I'm going to get enough sleep tonight. But this weekend...man, will I sleep this weekend. So much sleep this weekend.

We have Summer Room Draw on Sunday. That should be cool...I have a roommate for the summer, and presently we're attempting to decide on where we want to live, as East is unavailable for remaining in and she doesn't want to live in Linde during the summer (where she is right now...next year she'll be in East). We're thinking maybe Sontag, maybe South. Having a kitchen this summer would be nice.

This week has been fun for Team Sports if exhausting for every other class. We were going to play soccer until the end of the semester, but we've actually spent our last two classes playing inner tube water polo...which it seems I've gotten better at since Fall. Unfortunately, it's gotten me sunburnt...again...but that's okay, it's worth it. So much fun.

I'm looking forward to not feeling sleepy all the time. Those will be good times. I'm going to attempt to keep posting through the end of the school year, maybe after (I am here during the summer, after all). No guarantees, though. I'm sorta sick with some sort of extreme-exhaustion bug, so if it turns out to be stress-related and wears off in the next week, then it'll be great, but if not, I might let it go for a while.

I've made it through a year, pretty much. How odd.

April Showers

2010-04-22T10:04:00.000-07:00

There's been a decent amount of showering people lately (new officers, people with April birthdays, etc.) If I haven't already explained this, showering is an activity for special occasions, i.e. someone's birthday or the end of a dorm meeting, in which the fortunate people being celebrated are forcibly carried to a shower which is then turned on, drenching their clothes and making them somewhat irate. But it's all in good fun. Those not on the No Prank List can shower and be showered, and it's all quite entertaining, but the flailing some people manage in attempting to escape can cause minor physical injury to all involved. That combined with a couple soccer games has gotten me a little battered and bruised this past week. Worth it, though.

Man, April is stressful. Right now we're doing our last homework assignments and projects for the semester. A week and a half from now classes end; then there's Presentation Week, after which we have Finals and then IT'S OVER. I will have passed (I believe) one year of classes. Just yesterday I had my last Chem lab EVER. That's just crazy.

There's a lot of talk these days about things to do over the summer. Personally, I'm sticking around to work on CS staff, while a bunch of my friends are doing other CS research and a smaller (but still substantial) group of people I know are doing research here in other fields. Woohoo, go post-froshlings in research!

Recently, as a result of the sort of crazy amount of work a lot of us have had these past couple weeks, there's been a sudden influx in the viral dissemination of YouTube videos around these parts. "Baman Piderman" clips have been the popular one for my sister, but education also on "Look Around You", some incidental videos with celebrities ranging from David Tennant to Christopher Walken, and other strange things have been occurring in my vicinity in the past week or so.

Good luck, those of you who have to take AP tests soon. We'll be taking tests at the same time. We feel for you.

Woohoo

2010-04-15T10:02:00.001-07:00

Woohoo! About 4 1/2 weeks until academic summer begins! Actually, classes end in 2 1/2 weeks, after which there's reading week and then finals, but I'm sort of looking forward to starting my summer job, so I'm going to count the end-of-school-proper date. Not that I have a lot of finals or things to do during those last two weeks...those should be niiiice.

It was nice to see all you admitted students at the Admitted Students Program this past weekend. Yes, that's right, I know some of you read this now. I met a few who have since indicated through keeping in touch that they were blog-readers. You shall remain unnamed, folks, but you're my heroes.

Let's see...Funball is tomorrow. That should be awesome, although the amount of going places and getting groceries between now and then is a bit daunting. But there will be a ball pit and a bouncy castle and lights and music and all sorts of groovy, groovy things. I'm pumped.

All sorts of election-y things are going on right now - we finished ASHMC (that's the name of our whole student body, folks) elections and now we're doing dorm elections and suchlike. Currently, our dorm only has one contested position, that of president...I'm enjoying the luxury of running unopposed for social rep, due to my apparent fondness for Funball preparation. Woohoo.

Burnnn

2010-04-08T09:58:00.000-07:00

A word of warning to all you students from northern-ish places who wish to go to school in southern places (like here): Just because you live here does not mean you automatically develop sun tolerance. I sat outside for a long time last Friday and am now suffering the sunburny consequences. Woe is me.

It's strange...we're within sight of the end of the school year. This semester went by remarkably fast. We're taking midterms in the half-semester classes, which marks about 4 weeks 'till the end of those classes. And, while I'm going to be here doing stuff this summer (yay CS Summer Staff!) it's still weird to see a school year wrapped up. I mean, I've survived nigh a year of college! I did stuff! I didn't crash and burn! Woohoo!

Drop day for classes is next week, which also means Funball! I'm excited...this semester I get to help plan, so I've been enjoying putting up posters and planning stuff. It probably could have arrived on a better week, as this one is fraught with tests and devilish homework, but so it goes, I suppose.

There is a video up now for the Rube Goldberg Machine that went up around campus some weeks ago. You should watch it. It's pretty cool. Click here to go see it.

Klutzy

2010-04-01T15:35:00.000-07:00

I'm going to keep this post short, because it's been a pretty awful few days for me (I'm in a self-perpetuating funk). Cesar Chavez weekend was fun; San Diego was nice and it was all quite relaxing. I also got the chance this weekend to purchase a lot of guy's clothing, perpetuating a theme of cross-dressing on this blog. But oh the comfort, oh the usable pockets...I love thee so.

Room draw insanity has been rampant across campus, but fortunately that wraps up tonight. Fortunately, too, my roommate and I got pulled into a suite in East such that we'll be cohabitating about two doors down from where we live now. Hooray.

I'm really excited about Admitted Students weekend...there will be tons of prospective students around! Oh what fun. Actually, if anyone reading this blog is going to ASP, you should come find me...it's been somewhat of a mission for me to actually meet anyone who's read my blog before meeting me.

Ack...I keep losing and dropping things and hurting myself and this is just an unfortunate week. Not to mention there was a Physics midterm this morning. I'd like the stress to end soon...but it looks like freshman year is almost over, anyways, so I guess such wishes will soon be granted. I'll probably miss it, though. Oh well, life moves on.

On Holiday

2010-03-25T10:24:00.001-07:00

You may have noticed my lack of post last week. See, last week was Spring Break, and on the Monday thereof I got all four wisdom teeth out. In spite of my recently derived lack of wisdom, I did still know well enough not to post any blog entries while on prescribed painkillers.

This week has been a little bit stressful due to the impending shadow of room draw. I shan't get into the details of it, but campus is a bit crowded and it's taking some work for the sophomores to get into their ideal places to live for next year.

Also, this Friday is Cesar Chavez Day, which happens to be one of the few holidays we celebrate by not having school. Thus my roommate, her boyfriend and I shall be departing this evening to go visit her old theatre group and to see them do their current production. I'm pretty excited, but this means I have to finish a bunch of homework in the few spare hours extant today. Oh well.

I counted up the number of professor's I've seen teach - whether for a class regularly or as a substitute - over the past 6 months. It comes out to about 28 plus 4 teaching assistants. Craziness.

Sleepy

2010-03-11T10:41:00.000-08:00

Oh my goodness...I am so exhausted it is CRAZY. Due to a lapse in judgment on time management stuff several weeks ago, I'm currently still pulling late nights trying to keep up. So it goes, I guess. Spring break will be a nice rest.

Actually, that's a lie. Parts of Spring Break will be a nice rest, but those will be the parts in which I'm not in pain due to my wisdom teeth being removed. I'm a little distressed about that. It sounds scary and painful. Oh well…apparently I'm going to be drugged up enough from the surgery that it will all be good. I'm hoping I don't get sick or something before then, though.

Ooh ooh ooh! I got a job with the Harvey Mudd CS Summer Staff this summer. I'm pretty excited to learn about sysadmin-y stuff. Good good times.

Ahhhh…the end of this week will be a wonderful thing. I plan to spend a very large portion of break sleeping off the sleep dep I've been accumulating.

"Seems arbitrary, you say? Such is the universe." -Prof. Lynn

Kilty Pleasures

2010-03-04T10:41:00.000-08:00

This week has most definitely been on the stressful end of the spectrum...I have homework that was due yesterday that I need to finish, a presentation tomorrow, and an impending sense of doom for what I need to get done this weekend.

Yet all of this panic and worry dissolved this morning because the black utilikilt I ordered has shown up.

Right now, I'm wearing it, and I'm thrilled to bits about it. It has more pockets than almost anything I've ever seen (I've lost my phone in it a few times already this morning) and considering it's effectively a wrap skirt, it's nigh impossibly masculine. Fortunately, I'm not presently feeling the compulsion to dress in any feminine way.

We've made it about halfway through the semester...it's been a bit panicky this week as a result, but a little bit of sleep dep doesn't hurt too much. And soon it will be spring break, at which point (joy of joys!) I get my wisdom teeth out. That will be fun, I'm sure. My twin sister and I are getting them removed at the same time, though, so at least we can commiserate in our consumption of blended food.

That's still a week and a half away, though. So for now, life is good. Tiring, but good.

Harmony Now

2010-02-25T10:41:00.001-08:00

I'm going to talk about music this week. I like music. I tend to start singing to just about any music I hear, whether or not I even know all the words. Actually, to my sister's chagrin, I tend to attempt to harmonize, which (considering my limited choral and musical theory experience) tends to not always be successful. Sometimes it's really cool, though...my roommate and I can sing harmony on "Falling Slowly" by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, for instance, so when her computer starts playing it we tend to stop doing our homework and to start singing instead.

I used to listen to music a lot while working on homework. Somewhere along the line, my tendency to do that has diminished...I think I know the music too well, because I tend to just sing along. I tried to get some programming done the other night and mistakenly set my computer to play not one, but both recordings of Sweeney Todd on my computer...the rough product of the ensuing 2 hours was about 5 lines of code, but the singing was fun.

Mainly, though, listening to music while doing homework has been replaced with bringing my laptop to lab classes so I can turn on some music while we're working. I've been waiting to see if someone would complain, but actually, everyone in general seems pretty cool about it - my Chem lab prof came over the other day to inspect what artist was playing. There was an incident with the TA for a Chemistry workshop asked after about an hour "Just checking, because sometimes I just hear things...is there music playing?" But over all, it seems to go over well. It makes the classroom a little less quiet and the 15-minutes-of-stirring periods a little less dull.

Of course, the taste in music varies around here. If you walk past West, there's anything from country music to metal to smooth jazz playing; North can have daft punk or rock. Professor Van Ryswyck starts every class with some of his music - it's usually acapella covers of various classic (in the sense of the 1960's, not the 1760's) songs, but we've also hears some Firefly soundtrack and some Cake.

The music love around here gets expressed in a variety of ways. There are many people with minor-to-major Rock Band/Guitar Hero addictions, as that game seems to have both good music and strongly addictive properties in that it remains fun after extended playing. We have lots of people in the Concert Choir and Chamber Choir and various orchestras and acapella groups...there are people with guitars they take out on sunny days and violin music occasionally wafting down the hallways and just some pretty cool stuff.

A little over a decade ago, some of the musical energies of the college were directed to producing some very...intriguing parodies of Beatles songs and the like in order to describe the core curriculum at Mudd. The albums "FroshChem", "Mortal Kalculus" and "Stems Test" are the ones I have on my computer, which include such hits as "Puff, The Magic Rhino" (who ran at 4/5 c), "You Don't Need Sunscreen" (which describes all the basic truths we need to understand to survive at Mudd), and the favorite of all upperclassmen who like to annoy the frosh by blasting things over the speakers while we're studying for our first Chem tests, "I Love Frosh Chem" (one of the most repetitive and least melodic songs in existence - if you've ever heard "I Like Traffic Lights" from Monty Python, it's that with different lyrics).

I've actually been working on writing a song in my spare time lately. It hasn't been going spectacularly, but it's starting to actually working, and ducking in to the piano practice rooms late at night on weekends seems to be helping somewhat. We'll see whether that will get in better shape this weekend. Right now the melody seems pretty solid, but the lyrics are of fail. We'll see if there's any time to spare.

I've Got Sunshiiiiiiine

2010-02-18T10:17:00.000-08:00

The sun has made a stable return for the time being! It's a wonderful thing, it is...I actually got sunburnt the other day. Which doesn't necessarily sound like the best of things, but considering I'm from Seattle, the pride in being able to get a sunburn in February far outweighs the itching that ensues.

I have survived through nigh all of the mid-midterms that seem to have cropped up over the past week or so...just one more due Monday and I have a few weeks of no tests, which should be quite nice. In CS, we've stopped using Scheme and switched to Java, which makes me very happy...while I've never used Java, it makes way more sense to me than Scheme did, so the programming goes a little faster. We had a super-cool visiting prospective student earlier this week who was both a twin and of the same full first name as me...talk about cool. And in other exciting news, we finally moved the scary couch so that we can walk through our room. It's pretty exciting stuff. Yeah...my life's kinda boring right now, guys, cut me some slack.

Recently, I've been taking more advantage than usual of the power of the study group to get homework done. Not until this semester had I really ever gone with a crowd of people to Platt to sit at the spiffy tables in the back with whiteboards, trying to piece together how to do a particularly rough Chemistry problem. I don't know why I haven't gone much before. I mean, there's free coffee and whiteboard space and clusters of people stuck on the same problem as the one on which I'm working. It's been helping me to get work done a little faster, as I seem to have somewhat more this semester. Heh.

Other news...working at the Homework Hotline has been pretty cool, in spite of the lack of calls in general on these recent Sunday nights. It seems that the Pomona and Claremont school districts are in the midst of a series of long weekends that have relegated the "Oh shoot I need to finish my homework" time until Monday night. It makes it nice and peaceful for us for now, but it would be nice someday to actually get a call. But that will happen sometime soon, I'm sure.

Next week, hopefully I'll have interesting things to say. See ya guys.

A Function of Time

2010-02-11T10:20:00.000-08:00

This past week has been quite exhausting for me. I was lazy on Monday, and sadly the beginning of the week has only enough hours in the day for me to finish all the stuff I need to do for the next day...thus the Monday lazies managed to force me to stay up late up until last night, when I elected to stay up late for my own reasons. Oh well. The stress has faded now.

Last weekend was pretty cool...some North freshmen threw a party called Mudd Goes Madd, which involved cool mixed music and a heckuva lot of blacklight paint. My Battle Tye-Dye shirt from last semester has gotten even more colorful as a result, not to mention several pairs of pants that I lent out to brave the paintfest. Ahhh….good times.

Right now I'm having a lot of fun getting to help plan a party for this semester, Funball. I think I mentioned it last semester, but it's thrown every semester at East on Drop Day (the last day to drop classes) and involves a lot of sugar and candy, a ball pit, a bouncy castle, a lot of pretty lights and techno music for dancing. Unfortunately, most of the people who know how to set up this party are seniors, so the sophomore who knows what to do is leading my roommate and myself in planning this semester such that we'll know what to do for the future. It's pretty cool...I like having something to work on, though I think it's made me a bit bossy with regards to getting everything done.

Ooh! One of the things I'm super-duper enthusiastic about is that recently, I've been talking to one of my friends in French a bunch. He's from Switzerland, so he speaks French natively, which gives him a bit of an advantage with regards to actually speaking coherently, but considering it's been many months since I've been in a French class, I think it's quite an achievement that my ability to speak it has not just survived, but improved!

The weekend's going to be pretty exciting, I think. Parents are visiting, Friday night is ITR games, Sunday is Valentine's Day...it's all good stuff. It's a little odd that, being only a few weeks into the semester, a number of thinks labeled "midterms" have already cropped up...but it's working out okay so far. The end of pass-fail seems to be less painful than anticipated. Yaaay.

Board

2010-02-04T10:43:00.000-08:00

It's 2 1/2 weeks into the semester, and life is already getting a little hectic. Not in a bad way, necessarily...but weekends are stuffed with activity and homework doesn't end until late at night right now. As soon as I get into a better routine - and get less sick - that might improve somewhat.

I surprisingly have very little to talk about right now. How weird is that? I guess I could talk about our whiteboard...on each door to a dorm room, there's a nice whiteboard on which we can write whatever we like. It can be pretty useful for leaving notes for people who aren't in their rooms, keeping lists, taking surveys, etc. One board tends to have full poems transcribed on it. Another is currently listing the number of grad schools to which the room's occupants have been accepted. Another still has some nice drawings of Kirk and Spock.

My roomie and I tend to use it as a log of all funny quotes said in the general vicinity. Usually, if a conversation goes on long enough, someone will say something strange, at which point one of us will get up and head out the door to the whiteboard so we can write it down. Of course, when we're at the Hoch eating dinner, it's a little more difficult to remember the quote, so I tend to enter it into my phone so I'll remember it later.

It was quite depressing, really; when we left for break, my roommate and I erased our board, which had probably at least 20 strange quotes, inside jokes, etc. collected on it. There were drawings from my sister, too...she likes doodling with whiteboard marker on anything that can erase, so our mirrors and windows and the front of our microwave usually have a little bit of added pizzazz.( Right now our microwave says "Mmm...toasty!" Of course, as my sister recently discovered, the side of the microwave doesn't erase as well as the front...we now have two faint disembodied arms drawn there.)

Back to the subject. When we left for the winter, our board was emptied. So, when we got back, it was depressingly without quotes or other such oddities for a good week. But fortunately, my classmates are wonderfully strange and happy people. I'd say that by Sunday our board was back to its normal level of insanity.

What else, what else...right now I'm pretty excited about starting work with the Homework Hotline on Sunday. A bunch of my friends are starting clubs that I may talk about next week. I'll be more interesting soon, I promise.

2520

2010-01-28T16:58:00.000-08:00

I will admit that this has been a less-than fantastic week. I have been sick, which has been sort of trickling into the rest of my life for how things are going. I'm still really excited about my classes (well, except Chem lab, which was kind of exhausting yesterday) but I am so energy-deprived right now that getting through assignments at all has been difficult, so I've been making silly mistakes everywhere. And that's just frustrating.

On a happier note, my first-year advisor, Prof. Benjamin, was on the Colbert Report last night. If you don't watch the show, you should look up the episode on www.colbertnation.com and go watch it. Prof. Benjamin is a cool, cool guy. A good chunk of the student population of Mudd gathered in the LAC yesterday at 11 PM to watch the show, and much fun was had. Also, I showed some Doctor Who. Sadly, the combination of those two events, a pounding headache and CS homework, I missed Obama's State of the Union. So that was unfortunate. Oh well.

I'm excited for tomorrow. I have a mostly free afternoon and I intend to sleep off this illness during it. I'm hopefully going to do an audition Saturday for a cool acting thing occurring in conjunction with the Queer Resource Center here, so that should be fun. Oh! And there should be ITR Games this week! That will be nice. We'll see if I'm awake.

I had my first active day of Team Sports today. It's amazing...it's like a textbook example of a high-school PE class except for 94.4% of the students are Mudders, so we all are equally teased by our coach, not just some subset of nerdiness. And it sounds like something you'd theoretically avoid, but it's so much fun to do the whole fail-at-athleticism thing in good company with friendly banter and teasing all around.

Y'all are awesome. Keep it up.

Warts and All

2010-01-21T13:19:00.000-08:00

Right now my roommate and her engineering lab partner are working on disassembling a toothbrush and I'm dying a portion of my hair blue. It's raining ridiculous amounts right now, resulting in our little patch of desert being a bit of a swamp. Doesn't happen often, this much rain, so it's interesting to watch.

My classes this semester seem pretty cool. But that's not what I'm going to talk about. I'm going to talk about warts. Warts are awesome. We have them on all our buildings, if you aren't aware...they're the blocks of concrete sticking out of the pillars and the edges of the buildings around here as decorations. However, they have many, many purposes, as they're really fixed well onto the buildings. They're frequently used to hold our modes of transportation, such as scooters, skateboards, longboards, and unicycles...there's even a little plaque on one of the warts specifically marking President Klawe's skateboard-holding wart. Our mascot is Wally Wart for a reason.

Of course, this is just the popular use for the warts. Warts can also be used to climb; if you want to, say, stick a poster to the ceiling of one of the covered areas outside, you can climb up the warts. It's even possible for the stronger among us to make it to the second story of inner dorms via climbing the warts below the outer rail. I saw somebody today using one as a drinkholder while she opened her umbrella (a two-handed operation)...it's quite impressive.

Anyway, my hair is blue-ish now, the toothbrush is in more pieces and I should get around to homework at some point. Keep your awesome!

OOH OOH OOH something else to add...I've created a page at http://www.formspring.me/heraldicsandfox where you can ask me random questions and stuff! Check it out and ask me something if ya like!

Back to school!

2010-01-18T12:25:00.000-08:00

It is quite a joyous thing indeed, being back at Mudd. I get to see my friends again (though I did see some over break), I'm going to be in cool spiffy classes this semester, my roommate and I are considering reorganizing my room...and most importantly, I have reason to post on this blog again! What frabjous glee this causes me!

This week actually looks a little more dismal than most weather-wise, though it seems exciting in all other respects...it's supposed to rain all week. Fortunately, I remembered a jacket and rainboots when packing this time, so I am prepared! I still feel a slight indignity with regards to using an umbrella, as by being from Seattle I should theoretically do no such thing, but I like umbrellas and so I'm happy to have an excuse to get some use out of mine.

Let's see...my break was good, though I didn't do the coding I had intended. Turns out it's way over my head. I sorta knew that, though. So it goes. I primarily spent break sleeping, eating, beading, and chilling, though in the last week or so there was a sudden spike in actual social activity. That was nice.

I have almost concluded the interesting process of acquiring textbooks through a combination of buying and begging...I just need the Physics books and then I'm all set. I'm pretty thrilled about getting the Milton books, though...I'm taking a Milton class this semester along with my roommate and a bunch of friends, and I've heard awesome stuff about the prof, so it should be a lot of fun!

That's all I've got for now. Maybe I'll post again later this week. We'll see.

Sweet, glorious freedom

2009-12-17T16:42:00.000-08:00

I just finished my last final. This means that I have ended a semester. This is a magical, magical thing indeed, for soon I will be home and sleeping in my own room and spending all day doing very little (besides hopefully coding my 4d minesweeper...need to work on that). That sounds like good fun.

As far as finals week has gone...it's been some of the best fun I've had while I was here. There was no homework, so all we had to do was study and take on average about 2/3 a final a day. That's not too bad at all. Plus there were noisy minutes...I now have a battle tye-dye Grace Hopper shirt to treasure forever.

I'm probably not going to post much during break, just so's ya know. Talk to ya guys when classes resume!

1/8

2009-12-10T12:55:00.000-08:00

Finals occur next week...thus, this post will be short, as life's a bit crazy right now. I have a Humanities portfolio due Friday along with a CS project that my partner and I have almost finished prettying up. It's weird...pretty soon, I'll be home again. I don't know what I'm going to do for a month.

This weekend will probably prove to be nice, though. Friday night is Eastmas Eve, which should be nice and festive, followed by Saturday noon's Eastmas celebrations and Saturday night's Casemas party, in which there will be SNOW. I'm excited. It's going to be fun. Plus, hopefully I'm going to get a chance to go climbing this weekend. Sometime in here I'm going to study and take finals as well, but I'm feeling okay about classes right now. Physics seems potentially scary, but that's about it.

I'm sort of excited to see how next week turns out. We don't have a study week before finals, like the "Reading week" at other colleges, but we do have Quiet Days over the next week...that is, during the next week dorms are not allowed to be noisy at all, due to the many tests being taken and the studying occurring. However, restricting us to be noise-free 24/7 would be both sad and illogical, so we have "noisy minutes", or 15-minute periods every day in which great amounts of noise are produced by any means necessary, such that we won't go insane with the quiet.

I'm frankly intrigued by the amount of quiet spare time I'll have next week...I have one final each due Monday and Tuesday, one in class each on Wednesday and Thursday, and I'm not leaving campus until Saturday. Should be nice. But I'm sort of already anxious to start second semester, as I'm super-happy about my schedule. Hmm hmm hmm.

Scooter

2009-12-03T10:14:00.000-08:00

I hope everyone had a nice break and ate well and had a good time with family. My break was quite nice, but it’s nice being back at Mudd.

This week has actually been reasonably light homework-wise…I’ve managed to stay ahead of assignments enough that I’ve been able to show my friends Kill Bill 1 and 2 without having to stay up particularly late to make up for lost time. Mind you, the light homework this week is probably connected to the larger projects due next week, but that’s all dandy.

Tomorrow is pre-registration for spring semester for me…I’m simultaneously excited and a bit scared. See, Mudd has a very large core curriculum, meaning that freshman schedules are pretty much out of our control for the 1^st semester. However, next semester we have 2 types of electives we’re required to take – one PE and one humanities/social studies/art class. Unfortunately, the way our schedules turned out makes it very difficult to find a lot of classes that fit, and seeing as freshmen are at the end of the line for registering for classes, I’m assuming that a number of the humanities electives I like are going to be full when I get there tomorrow. Oh well. It will work out somehow.

What else is new…oh! I have a new form of transportation! See, my goal previously was to learn how to unicycle reasonably quickly once I got to Mudd, and then to use that to get between classes. Unfortunately, unicycling is rather difficult and not a super-efficient means of transport. So, knowing my sister brought a Razor scooter that she didn’t seem to be using, I asked if I could borrow it. The glorious thing about using wheels to get to class is that there’s a slight downhill from the dorm end to “ac end”, or the classroom end of campus. Thus, one can pretty much just get on the scooter, and with a few kicks you can get up to a pretty good speed. It’s been making me extremely happy, as it seems to cut my commute from my room to class down by half, meaning more time for breakfast! Also, I like scooters. There has been frequent giggling and shouting of “WEEEEE!” in my traverses of the campus.

The calendar year’s almost over, guys! Good luck all of ya with whatever’s on your plate.

Edit: I may have spoken too soon about the scooter. On the way to Physics, I faceplanted due to the poor approximation of the ground that wearing pumps gave me. Fortunately, a friend saw me fall and got me cleaned up for the most part. But I need to negotiate this whole balance-with-strange-shoes-on thing.

Warm Turkey

2009-11-26T16:15:00.001-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Eat lots of food and be grateful and stuff! Here's a post I wrote up yesterday - enjoy.

-

I just have to give a brief tribute to how much Math 11 blows my mind. Right now I have Prof. Jacobsen, who teaches us Calculus. I will admit that I already like math quite a bit…I took what I thought was a lot in high school (though it turned out to be the bare minimum at Mudd) and generally liked learning the concepts. It more or less made sense.

That was before this class. Now, not only does it make sense, it's ridiculously awesome. We started this class with no idea of what anything was. We invented the idea of limits, and then derivatives, and then integrals. And one class period we just defined the natural log function as lnx = the integral from 1 to x of dt/t.

Today, we didn't have much material to cover, so just for kicks we did some stuff with complex numbers. That is, we proved Euler's identity that e^iθ = cosθ - isinθ, then went on to show e^iπ + 1 = 0, and then made polar coordinates for imaginary numbers make sense, just for kicks. To clarify how happy this makes me, I have to tell you that right now, in Quantum Physics, we're using imaginary numbers ALL THE TIME and up until a few weeks ago I had no idea that Euler's identity even existed. And then, with a brief flurry of chalk and a spoken explanation, it all makes sense. It's fantastic. I feel so happy.

Oh, and that's not even bringing in to this point how cool it is to have Prof. Jacobsen as our prof. I think that usually, with regards to math at Harvey Mudd, Professor Benjamin gets a bit of a celebrity status because of how dynamic he is and his ability to do "mathemagics"…he's quite a character, and pretty much everyone on campus knows who he is. Prof Jakes is less known, but I would say that he's a prime example of how nice it is to go to a college with professors who care. Whenever we finish a large proof, he asks, "Ca va?" (French effectively for "Is that okay?") and we all respond with a loud "Oui, ca va bien!" ("Yes, that's good!"). He's eccentric and fun and makes me look forward to morning classes, which is a formidable feat for a population experiencing continuous mild sleep-dep.

Right now, our professor is drawing a diagram of an airplane wing to introduce multivariable functions. And I think somebody just mentioned a multidimensional chicken. I love this class.

Party Time

2009-11-19T12:37:00.001-08:00

Well, it's approaching Thanksgiving…tests and quizzes are occuring, and classes are starting to wrap up a bit. We're writing our last paper for humanities class, for instance. Mine currently contains 600 words about Albert Einstein's hair, so I am pretty thrilled, as you can imagine (don't worry, it's a legitimate topic, and his hair provides suitable evidence for my thesis). Also, we're soon starting upon our CS final project, for which I'm suuuuper excited. Physics is very quantum, as it should be.

This weekend there are going to be two fun parties rather than one…usually there's about one thing per weekend going on major-event-wise. Tomorrow night, there's Funball, which involves a lot of candy, blacklights and techno-music. That one's hosted by East. Then on Saturday night, there's a fancy-dress party called Long Tall Glasses taking place, which should be nice. I even got a dress! It's shiny! Yay.

If I haven't mentioned this enough, I really, really like Thursdays. I got to sleep in until 11:20 today, meaning I got over 9 hours of sleep. While it is perfectly possible to get a nice amount of sleep here with the right amount of applied effort, as I've said before, I will admit to averaging around 5-5 1/2, so that much sleep is a rare commodity for me. It should be helpful for Chem lab today, as it means I'll be less likely than usual to totally muck up our experiment through my own clumsiness. Ever since I toppled that one flask in the ice-water bath…

It's been a long week. A long several weeks, in fact. I'm looking forward to going to see family for Thanksgiving Break. Mind you, I feel a little sad missing out on Eastgiving, the Thanksgiving celebration held by East for those trapped on campus during break. But seeing family is rare and nice. It's a good thing that I've ended my vegetarianism in time for this holiday. Bless you, buffalo wings that broke my will power against meat.

Progressing

2009-11-12T18:43:00.000-08:00

We're getting to the middle of the second half of the semester…we're beginning to have midterms and such. It's all very exciting. I've been quite enjoying the classes. We're now taking Quantum Physics, which is quite exciting and complex, literally, as we seem to be exciting particles to get photons and developing probability amplitudes with complex numbers. In the meantime, there's CS, which is always fun, Math 11, which involves taking everything we learned about calculus in high school and proving it, and Chemistry has been pretty dandy.

Today, in fact, Is particularly cool with regards to chemistry. In first year chemistry, one of our labs is Lead Lab, where we take soil samples from a nearby elementary school and test them for lead content. Not only that, we get the elementary school students to help us take the samples; they get to learn about how to graph data, what hypotheses are, and what this lead stuff is anyways. Today, my lab group is going back to the school a final time to present our findings on the samples we took. The sad thing is that our group's hypothesis was wrong. In fact, it was completely wrong…we have a ridiculously high level of certainty statistically (99.9999% for those who like stats) that the alternate hypothesis of which sample site has higher lead content is actually opposite of the theorized one. But that's not the point. The point is that we got data with significance. Lots of it. I'm looking forward to convincing our students that being this completely wrong about our hypothesis was the coolest thing that could possibly happen…we were wrong and learned something super cool anyways! Now I just have to figure out why there was so much lead in the soil right underneath a tree in the middle of a field.

We've had a lot of prospective students visiting campus these past few weeks. Which would be super-cool for us (my roommate and myself) if it weren't for the fact that most of them are boys…it's hard to get to host a visiting prospective student that's a girl. This past week, though, some girls visited, and we got to host one, which was fun. So, if you're reading this and you're a girl interested in attending Mudd, I highly recommend that you visit here and say hi.

Everyone should keep leaving comments and emailing…and if you leave a comment, check back, as my blog won't tell you if I reply to your comment.

Birthday

2009-11-05T12:52:00.000-08:00

November 4th was my 18th birthday, and it was an awesome one. The following things occurred:

0. On Tuesday night, I was "kidnapped". See, there's a special antiquated law around here that says that taking any person under the age of 18 across county lines without parental permission constitutes kidnapping. The county line is maybe a mile away from us, and a little past it is an In-n-Out. Thus, after watching Dr. Strangelove for Humanities class on Tuesday night, I was carried to my friend's car for a kidnapping. A kidnapping involving a strawberry milkshake and fries. Not too bad.

1. At 12:00 AM a large group of people arranged for my twin sister and I (did any of you know I have a twin sister? I have a twin sister. She goes to Mudd too.) to be showered - a.k.a. picked up and carried off to a shower in another person's room and put in the shower fully clothed and momentarily drenched by said shower. Naturally, knowing that they were going to track me down and wanting to at least put up a good fight, I found a place to hide - under my desk. And it was a good hiding place, too, until SOMEONE told the horde exactly where I was hiding. My efforts proved fruitless, and I was indeed showered.

2. I finished all my homework due Thursday (today) in advance of yesterday, so I did not have to do any homework yesterday. I would just like to point this out because I've had a few messages asking about whether the homework load is as terrifying as it seems from some of the blog posts written by myself or other bloggers. The answer is yes and no. Yes, sometimes there is a ridiculous amount of homework here; yes, you'll probably end up staying up very late sometimes. But it is possible to manage it, as long as you do your homework before the night before it's due sometimes. At least for freshmen. I can't speak for other years much. The point is, I stayed up until 2 AM this week a bunch, but had I wanted to, I could have fallen asleep at or before midnight every day. I just didn't want to. So don't fret.

3. At around 4 PM yesterday, after class and a brief nap, I was told to go to East courtyard. And, after standing around with a bunch of people wondering why everyone was gathered in the courtyard, a singing telegram sent by mother was delivered. It should be noted that the deliverer was dressed up as Dr. Frank N. Furter from Rocky Horror Picture Show. There was a pretty good-sized crowd including the by the end of the…performance? It was about 20 minutes of oddity involving some singing and some general embarrassment of my sister and myself. We both got teddy bears, though. Actually, it was pretty awesome, albeit weird.

Many more fun things happened, including watching Firefly, procuring cake, getting a super-cool shirt from a friend (it says "It's ON like a PRAWN who YAWNS at DAWN" and depicts a prawn holding a coffee cup), and generally having a good day. Class was also attended, for the record. And my dad's visiting this weekend. Over all, life is pretty peachy keen.

Miss SWE

2009-10-29T11:07:00.000-07:00

Nobody ever told me before I got here how much cross-dressing takes place at Mudd. At this point, we've had more men in dresses in our room (4) than women (2) in the time we've been at Mudd. And then there's Skirt Day every month at East. It's quite funny, actually.

The reason why I bring this up: Every year at Mudd, the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) puts on an event called Miss SWE. It's a lovely little pageant in which students from Mudd dress up in ball gowns and vy for the title of Miss SWE, the lovely and talented lady to represent the ideal of both femininity and scientific prowess. Of course, naturally, all the competitors are male. Eight gentlemen participated in this pageant yesterday, each modelling a particular talent and a dress and answering questions posed by the MC, Prof. Lyzenga, my Physics recitation professor. There was singing, lighter tricks, prancing, sandwich-making (it's a talent) and dancing. To "Single Ladies". Twice, in fact...props to the Proctors for their excellent dance moves and terrifying unitards.

Life has gotten somewhat relaxed here since midterms...the homework level is slightly lower than usual due to classes just getting into swing, and Halloween's coming up, so people are planning various celebrations to accompany it. And it's just beginning to get cold...I believe that it went below 50 the other day. Mind you, it's still sunny 90% of the daytime, but considering it's almost November, it seems about time for fall to begin.

Say hi or ask questions if you like. If you want a direct response rather than one just posted on the comments page here for whatever reason, feel free to email me (xanda underscore schofield at hmc dot edu).

1/16th

2009-10-23T00:42:00.000-07:00

As of this week, I've completed half a semester of classes. WOW does it seem like forever. I'm beginning to pick up on some basic important lessons, and I'm aware that I'm going to learn a few more when I get some grades for the first half of this semester over the next couple of weeks. Mainly, I'm finding that AE (Academic Excellence, our tutoring program run by upperclassmen) is a magical thing. I didn't take advantage of it much at first this year, but believe you me, when you're sitting at your desk working for 2 hours on a problem that makes no sense and many more hours of pending homework and a sunny warm day outside and people frolicking and an overwhelming sense of jealousy at all those not plagued by one stupidly long math/chemistry/physics problem, the correct answer is to seek help.

I think this applies in high school, too, but my guess is that if you're a high school student reading this blog, you're likely one of the people who didn't need to ask for help, who could sit for a bit and work out what was wrong and get the right answer in the end. That's how it was for me for a good chunk of high school, and it's lovely and satisfying and nice. That doesn't mean it's a good habit, though. When I started AP Physics at my school, I got pretty bad grades in my first month completely out of the blue, simply because I wouldn't ask for help learning simple concepts, wouldn't study them, wouldn't do anything except expect that it would make sense the next day. Oddly enough, that didn't work so well. And having not worked so well with high-school homework, you can probably imagine that when rhinoceri are moving at 3/5 c and all hell is breaking loose in what should have been an ideal gas, assuming it will make sense some time before you have to take a test is the wrong way to go.

Okay, off my soapbox now. It's been a pretty fun week...I'm almost not sick, we had Monday and Tuesday off, I don't have too much homework, I don't think I failed too badly on my exams, and some strange shenanigans the likes of which I cannot describe due to being sworn to secrecy about them have made this week (particularly today) interesting. Would that I could tell you, beloved readers...I guess you'll just have to go to school here and find out about stuff yourselves.

Singing in the Rain

2009-10-15T12:25:00.000-07:00

Miraculously, it actually rained this week. Over the course of multiple days, in fact. Aside from a mist that one could almost classify as rain a week or so ago, I hadn't seen much of any precipitation here at all, so the cold and humidity were actually quite nice.

We're almost to Fall Break at this point, which means we're in the peak midterm season. Thus far, it hasn't seemed to kill anyone…people are getting a little less sleep than usual, but not that much less. Life is periodically exciting due to interesting events cropping up everywhere, not to mention the occasional fun of having prospective students appearing at random intervals. Seriously, if you're not planning to visit, come visit us! It makes our lives fun.

Let's see…what's been going on. More illness has been spreading about campus, and I'm sad to report that I seem to have caught the second bug going around. It's Coming Out week this week, which is nice, because I got to help paint a mural this past weekend and stuff. I'm going to an Intervarsity Christian Fellowship meeting this evening, I think, too, which should be exciting. Also, there's some volunteering stuff going around campus right now…tomorrow I'm going with a bunch of people to buy shoes for a shoe drive, and on Saturday there's a beach cleanup trip happening in the morning. Life's pretty good.

Right now, my sister and I are trying to mess with the Special Relativity lecture by sitting in the front row with shirts saying "I can't remember…am I the good twin or the evil twin?". Many of the questions in Special Relativity problem sets focus around checking two clocks in two different reference frames, which tends to correspond to the presence of twins checking them. We figure that in about an hour of physics lectures using examples, it's inevitable that Prof. Townsend will eventually use us in a problem. The material today isn't exactly perfect for us to test this today, but it's the last Special Relativity lecture, and we had to try it sometime.

Keep commenting, people! I like hearing from you…and check back to see if I replied, because the reply option on this blog doesn't seem to be very helpful or even existent.

Waiting for a Solution

2009-10-08T18:22:00.000-07:00

Presently I am sitting next to my lab partner watching a solution stir itself. It reminds me how far technology has come, making us almost irrelevant in our own experiments. It's very stirring. But I'm going stir-crazy waiting for the stirring to end, so I guess I shall blog now.

Grace Hopper was good fun, as I said before...I got lots of free swag and new knowledge and ideas about places to work this summer. Honestly, I think I'm going to do Summer Research at Mudd if I can help it, but it's good to look at other options for internships-y things, I suppose.

This week has been a mite bit hectic, what with the grading of some midterms, the presence of others and the shadow of the impending Physics and Chem midterms. We're almost done with Special Relativity and about to move on to Quantum Mechanics in Physics, and as for Chemistry...I really don't care for thermodynamics. At all. So I'm grateful to be moving to structure as opposed to energetics. Goodness me, the core has a lot of half-semester subjects in classes!

As far as student life, next week is Coming Out Week at the Claremont Colleges. It should be super-fun...we're painting a mural and doing cool events-y stuff and what have you. I'm going to a meeting tonight about that hopefully, and then attempting to tackle a desperately large amount of Linear Algebra. It is a small miracle that I've made it through the homework this week in spite of missing two days of class, though arguably the fault is my own that it piled up so much. But the week is almost over, and I'm presently very happy with classes and such. And my solution is done being stirred.

Amazing Grace

2009-10-01T20:44:00.000-07:00

Tuesday East won its first water polo game. Alas, I was unable to play because I gave blood that evening, but it was fun to watch, and I got some photos with my roommate's camera that I'll attempt to post soon. I'm off at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference. In recent years, Mudd's been sponsoring a number of female students (especially freshmen) to go to the conference, and I'd like to major in CS, so I signed up.

It's quite exciting, actually, in so many big and little ways. First off, the conference in itself is a massive amount of technological women in one place. That does not happen often enough, in my opinion. Second, there are cool talks on robots and teaching and things. Third, there's lots of swag (I got two USB drives and a hub, a lot of pens, a coloring book, a stress ball, sunglasses…). Fourth, we're at a SHINY RESORT where I'm sleeping in a large comfy bed with a large bathroom with ONE DOOR and a BATH. Fifth, there are all these people with shared interests and connections in all sorts of interesting ways. I went to a super-cool lunch today with LGBT women in computing, and we had fun chatting about what it's like to be out in college or in the workplace. Sixth, our nametags have cool ribbons on the bottom (mine says UNDERGRAD and BRONZE UNDERWRITER and LGBT). It's been a little weird, as this is the first conference where I've actually been a meaningful, effectively adult participant. I've always gone with a parent and just followed said parent around, grabbing free pens and things as they talked to people. Here, I'm scouting around for internships, and MY GOODNESS there are a lot of them. Seriously, if any girls reading this are interested in finding connections in the CS world, this is a good place to go. Plus there's dancing in the evening.

It was super exciting yesterday - I actually finished all of my homework in time to get on the bus to go. The profs were super supportive of all the frosh going to Grace Hopper (and there are a lot of us - the entire female population of my humanities section went) and changed some deadlines and things, so that was easier to accomplish than usual, but I'm still rather surprised that I managed all that, especially as my roommate and I hosted a prospective student on Monday and Tuesday and thus were quite distracted for the day.

Enough of my rambling. I'll post sometime next week, as I think I'll be a busy be until then what with midterms and such. Ask me random questions about things in the meantime, though. Pretty please. I like answering questions.

Work time

2009-09-25T21:40:00.000-07:00

We're reaching the half-midterms right now, if you will - all classes that take only half a semester for part of the material are giving us midterms. Fortunately we have a spiffy honors system which means take-home exams of longer length rather than short, panicked in-class exams. That's always nice.

In spite of my best efforts to end this week with a decent amount of sleep, though, I seem to be failing. You see, here, as I've mentioned before, studying and working is a community thing. I mean, it takes up most of your time anyways, so why not make it social time AND work time? So we tend to work in groups so we can talk if we get stuck. But early in the morning, when the special relativity still makes no sense and the paper has 873 words to go, concentrating gets hard. And someone inevitably breaks out YouTube.

It started out small at first. The first week, we had finished our homework, the door was open, and an a dorm prez stopped by to show us a little funny clip of talking animals from the BBC (here for your enjoyment). And we thought it was funny, and laughed for a few minutes about the talking animals. The next time it came up, somebody mentioned another clip, so we looked up 2 or 3 "Walk on the Wild Side" episodes, the source of the original prairie dog. At this point, we've probably watched about half an hour's worth of these videos and scarcely a day goes by in which a homework session doesn't devolve into showing the one person in the room who hasn't seen the videos a couple of clips and then yelling out "Alan! Alan!" repeatedly.

Also, late-night homework produces some of the best quotable moments. Our whiteboard keeps having to be emptied so we can get more of the strange things we say to fit. Right now it has a drawing of a lion speaking in secret code, "The JESTER will find you," "I don't understand spoons. Oh wait. Yes I do.", "Lambda the Vampire Slayer", and some other things of equal randomness that may not bear repeating. All I can say is that any absurdity deficiency I had in high school has been quickly remedied here.

I'm super excited that the blog is finally live! Yaaaay!

OMG BOYS

2009-09-23T16:56:00.000-07:00

Today has been a pretty swell day, if I do say so myself. I got to sleep in an hour due to having no chemistry class at 8 AM for the rest of the week, which is always nice and meant that I could wander over to the Hoch for breakfast. Linear Algebra made sense today, we got 19 people around a table that should by all rights fit about 7 for lunch, and CS was fun...because computer science is always fun.

My roommate and I have been having an amusing time figuring out what to do about everyone studying in our room. It's really cool often, because we end up procrastinating (DON'T DO IT) and thus have homework to do at 2 AM, and if it's 2 AM and you don't understand an assignment you want someone equally tired and sympathetic to help explain it. However, our room is not the most spacious location ever...though we have seating for 6 and floor space for more, it gets kinda crowded and there's a lot of using ladders and climbing around to navigate the room. And then there's the whole bit about my roommate and I sleeping now and again. While we're perfectly happy having chosen to keep our room open to other people a lot of the time, it's a bit awkward to be flossing in the middle of a study group, even in one's own room. We've decided to institute some no-Y-chromosome hours as a temporary resolution to our problem, as most of the people who study in the group are guys.

Which leads me to a brief discussion about the ratio here. If you're reading this for information about Mudd, the male-to-female ratio here is about 2 to 1, which is reasonably common for an engineering and sciences school. However, having been in an all-girls school for eight years now, I was a little more than scared about it. I mean...BOYS. EVERYWHERE. It's a big change for me. But you know what? It's not so bad. I mean, sure, suddenly rather than being in a small cluster of girls talking about random stuff, I spend time in a small cluster of primarily guys talking about slightly different random stuff...but it's not a huge difference, really. I can imagine a bunch of people reading and thinking "well, duh," but really, it's odd how normal this seems. One gets so used to being around a bunch of boys that only in the wee hours of the morning after finishing Special Relativity homework does it occur to my roomie and me that hey, it's 3 AM and THERE ARE BOYS IN OUR ROOM. And they're not doing anything stupid...they're smart people at a good school who follow the honor code. So it all works out okay.

But we still have to sleep sometimes. So no boys between 3 and 8 AM. And I'm off to go get Hoch dinner.

PS - if I offend any boys by referring to you collectively, I'm sorry. You're all very special unique individuals.

A Funny Weekend

2009-09-20T21:11:00.000-07:00

This post is being written in the midst of a number of homework assignments which I probably should not have left for Sunday evening. This is the first of three evils this weekend, which are as follows:

1. Excess homework done in the wrong order
2. Losing ID card
3. Window

The blame falls on me for all three of these problems, of course. I was doing homework earlier this weekend - in fact, I got my math done several days early. But, while it is good to work on assignments ahead of time, I have discovered that choice of assignment to work on should be made based upon what's due first (e.g. first CS, which is due at midnight tonight; then Humanities, due tomorrow morning; then Chem, due tomorrow night).

As for losing the ID card - I was at blues dancing on Saturday night, when I discovered that the pocket which had my ID card in it was vacant. I actually snapped my card into two earlier in the week accidentally, though I'm not sure how, but if you have all the pieces of your card, the replacement's free. But losing ID cards is different - those cost money. Only $10, but still. Furthermore, the office doesn't open until Monday, so I had to find another way to secure food for the remainder of the weekend. Which I managed...but it was a bit of a pain, and it was with great relief that my sister told me that someone had put my ID card back in my mailbox. Thanks be to nice 5C people who return card.

The final impressive moment of the weekend was today, after a meeting for the etc. players. The etc. players - Extremely Theatrically Challenged players - are a super-cool Mudd group that puts on short plays, that's trying to get running again this year. I am very much a fan of this idea and excited for this to start, but that's not what I'm going to talk about. When I was leaving the meeting, I was heading for the 2nd story LAC door. Interestingly, the window next to the door looks a lot like the door. So, naturally, being the space-case I am, I ran into a window. Not in a sort of head-turned-slightly-embarassing way but in a head-first, nose-made-into-accordian way. My head has been in pain ever since, but it was funny nonetheless. But to caution everyone on campus...focus when you're leaving the LAC's 2nd story. FOCUS. Pick the DOOR, not the window.

Holy Relativistic Rhinoceri, Batman.

2009-09-16T19:29:00.000-07:00

I've been having a lot of fun working on homework with other East freshmen. I mean, the homework in itself can be a bit fun in and of itself, what with the sun exploding on a regular basis and rhinoceri moving extremely fast, and a very interesting problem we found today regarding an astronaut going at 4/5 c and giving birth to a baby 3 years and 9 months later while in space. But the really nice thing about homework here is that it's almost never solitary. My roommate and I tend to leave our door open when we're doing homework, and in this way we've gotten pretty large groups of people working together until 2 in the morning on physics and helping each other.

Leaving a door open in general is a good idea. In this manner my roomie and I have gotten all sorts of cool invites to fun events (e.g. blues), homework help from upperclassmen, and a broken futon. See, an upperclassman stopped in front of our room when we were doing physics and asked, “Hey…do you guys want a couch? It looks like you have space for a couch.” Now, the statement that we had space for a couch was only technically correct, as the amount of space left for a couch is the space required to cross the room. But, being somewhat mentally unstable due to a massive amount of special relativity semi-literally warp-ing our brain, we agreed.

Thus, with some help from a few people nearby, we proceeded to move a rather old generally dusty and very broken futon into the center of our room. The futon cover itself was so disgusting that we elected to take the cushion out of the room for the time being – it presently sits just outside our front door. The frame, in the mean time, seemed disgusting on its own, but in our efforts to clean it, we discovered that we had nothing in particular with which we could clean a futon…excepting a very large supply of Purell that we obtained from freshman orientation. So, naturally, neither wanting to continue physics homework nor wanting our newly-acquired couch to infect our room, we Purelled the entire couch.

Since getting the futon, we've acquired sufficient fabric to cover it but have yet to actually sew the couch cover, so the fabric is just wrapped and pinned around it for now. We now can seat about 6 people in our room - 10 if some people don't need chairs. All because we leave our door open. Good times.

print 'Hello World'

2009-09-12T19:33:00.000-07:00

This weekend is shaping up to be pretty awesome. I practiced unicycling, auditioned for a capella choirs, and ran around yelling, wielding a piece of rolled up paper covered in duct tape. I'm really getting to like this place, no matter how late I've had to stay up to finish homework.

I'm going to guess that this post should probably have some introductory elements - so hi, I'm Xanda, I'm a freshman living in East dorm on campus, and I'll be keeping a blog of whatever the heck is going on here - which, from my two weeks on campus, tends to be pretty interesting. If you're curious about anything I'm talking about or just want to ask a question about Mudd, post a comment and I'll get to it as soon as I can. I should be posting something like twice a week, time permitting.

Now, to talk about dancing, because this is really interesting me. I've spent a long time being sort of half-interested in learning how to dance - that is, I wanted to be able to but didn't think I could and didn't want to take lessons. By the time I applied to Mudd, I was pretty convinced that dancing was just not going to happen.

And then I got to campus. And EVERYONE HERE DANCES. Okay, perhaps not everyone, but at the 5Cs - the five Claremont Colleges for those unaware of such abbreviations - there are weekly meetings of groups for swing dance, blues dance, salsa dance and probably anything else one could devise as a form of dance.

I was attempting to avoid all the invitations for these, as - like I said before - I don't think I can dance. But last Saturday, a number of people in East said I should just go along with them if I wasn't doing anything else, and we went to Blues Dance. It met outside, and the two people running it taught a few basic moves and then started DJing blues music, and we danced. And, while I did step on a few feet, I got to learn to dance a bit. It was lots of fun, being a follow; occasionally a really good blues dancer would ask me to dance and suddenly I'd be spinning and flying all over the place without really knowing what was going on.

So, tonight, I'm going blues dancing again. And the moral of the story is that, in spite of massive amounts of work and a high concentration of geekiness*, Mudd people can and will do cool stuff.

*I want to clarify - I don't think of geekiness as bad. I have always considered it as dedication to a particular interest, usually focusing around things that not everyone likes or understands. Take, for instance, people who really like solving Rubik's Cubes (as there are plenty of people here who do that). Solving a Rubik's Cube is not an easy thing to do, and it takes some dedication to do it...but it's good dedication. You have to be smart and to be able to concentrate. Succeeding at being a geek seems to me to be a virtue. I'm proud when people refer to me as a geek. Just so it's understood that I mean no harm.