(no subject)
A lot has happened in the months since I've last updated so lets get right into that.
There were three New Years resolutions I was working on. As of now, I have completed one and completely abandoned the other two.
1) Bloomsday was finished in an happily unexpected time of 1:28, and the fact that it was on my resolution list is probably the primary reason that I even completed it at all. It took me enrolling in a course to get myself to go to the gym and several weeks to get used to the idea of going every morning. Now I'm looking ahead to preparing for next year, and Jackie is looking to do it with me this time!
The run itself was actually surprisingly easy. I saw early on that I could achieve the 1:30 finishing mark easily so I didn't push myself as I hard as I probably could of. It all started with running the first mile and a half in about 12 minutes. I was very surprised at how easy it was to do this considering my mediocre times at the gym. Note to self: running outside on a cool day is easier than running in laps inside a sweaty gym.
It took me a week and a half to get back to the gym after Bloomsday, partly due to school stress but also because of a lack of motivation. Now that I'm going regularly again, I'm not able to run nearly as much as I was before. This again is partly due to a lack of motivation. I'm going and that's enough, right? Anyway, I'm seeing if working on upper body in addition to running might produce faster results. I'm also messing around with nutrition and food intake to see if I can find a balance between wanting to eat all the time and the desire to eat healthier.
2) Learning Japanese has been placed on hold indefinitely. Come on. Like you didn't see that one coming.
It was fun for a while but I couldn't find anyone interested in helping me out, and learning a language off of cds without anyone to talk to was very discouraging. Also, I stopped driving the full 45 minutes to school everyday so I lost my usual time for playing the cds.
Moving on.
3) I did not get a summer internship, let alone one in Seattle. I can't really claimed that I worked as hard as possible to achieve this, but its tough for me to think even now that the results would have been different had I tried. There's a fellow grad student at Eastern who is far more qualified than I am and has had several teachers on his side campaigning with local companies on his behalf for an internship. Nothing. And he has a wife and kids.
I'm much more fortunate than him because I'm not supporting anyone yet. Also, a summer without a job would not be a waste and in fact, might be considered a blessing. This is because my schedule at Eastern allows me to graduate at the end of this year. That's December. That's 7 months. However, in order to do this, I need to complete my thesis or project by then. That's a tall order, but not if I have a full summer with nothing better to do than work on it. So right now, I'm all but set to go to Seattle to be with Jackie and spend my days at the University of Washington library.
I just was in a meeting earlier today with professors who are part of the MANOME project on campus. MANOME is Eastern's extension of a similar project at Stanford whose goal is to have musicians separated by long distance be able to play with each other and have it seem like they're playing in the same room. The big obsticle standing in the way is the speed of the internet but there's other things to worry about including the time it takes the computer to process the audio signal before sending it out.
MANOME is currently seeking to add video capabilities onto the audio so that musicians can see each other in addition to hearing each other. My project, if I choose to take it, would be to research ideas into letting this happen. For instance, how low of quality of video would musicians be willing to withstand? To answer that would require significant amounts of testing which I think that I would be very good at doing.
In another aspect of my life, I have successfully completed building my own computer. Can't say its from scratch because I used the casing, cdrom drives, and monitor from my old computer. But everything else was bought individually off of NewEgg or Amazon. It was quite the rewarding learning experience, and I am excited to finally have a computer for once in my life that is basically top of the line.
I have celebrated by installing some fun games. Playing old games without frame rate issues I used to have has been really refreshing. For instance, I can actually hear everything that GLaDOS says in Portal, still one of my favorite games of all time. I also got a new game, Plants Vs Zombies, because 3 different blogs I subscribe to, Boing Boing, Ars Technica, and Wired, all highly recommended it. It's totally worth it and its clear from five minutes playing it with Austin that its the perfect game for kids as well as adults.
I also installed 4 different operating systems and left room for more if I desire. One of them is the free release candidate for Windows 7, and I have to say that it's pretty amazing. I've had Vista for a little less than a year now and have never had any problems, but 7 just does everything that Vista does but better. I especially love how the task bar is so much more concise. If only the installation process hadn't written its own bootloader effectively preventing me from accessing my Linux OS until I go in a manually fix it, I would be a perfectly happy customer.
Hmm, I can think about more to talk about, but this post was way too long about 10 paragraphs ago. By the way, if you want more consistent updates about my life, my twitter account http://www.twitter.com/hobbes84k has been consistently updated on a regular basis for a few months now. And that's connected to my Facebook profile. So find me on one of those two and you won't find out all of this stuff about me 3 months after its happened.
There were three New Years resolutions I was working on. As of now, I have completed one and completely abandoned the other two.
1) Bloomsday was finished in an happily unexpected time of 1:28, and the fact that it was on my resolution list is probably the primary reason that I even completed it at all. It took me enrolling in a course to get myself to go to the gym and several weeks to get used to the idea of going every morning. Now I'm looking ahead to preparing for next year, and Jackie is looking to do it with me this time!
The run itself was actually surprisingly easy. I saw early on that I could achieve the 1:30 finishing mark easily so I didn't push myself as I hard as I probably could of. It all started with running the first mile and a half in about 12 minutes. I was very surprised at how easy it was to do this considering my mediocre times at the gym. Note to self: running outside on a cool day is easier than running in laps inside a sweaty gym.
It took me a week and a half to get back to the gym after Bloomsday, partly due to school stress but also because of a lack of motivation. Now that I'm going regularly again, I'm not able to run nearly as much as I was before. This again is partly due to a lack of motivation. I'm going and that's enough, right? Anyway, I'm seeing if working on upper body in addition to running might produce faster results. I'm also messing around with nutrition and food intake to see if I can find a balance between wanting to eat all the time and the desire to eat healthier.
2) Learning Japanese has been placed on hold indefinitely. Come on. Like you didn't see that one coming.
It was fun for a while but I couldn't find anyone interested in helping me out, and learning a language off of cds without anyone to talk to was very discouraging. Also, I stopped driving the full 45 minutes to school everyday so I lost my usual time for playing the cds.
Moving on.
3) I did not get a summer internship, let alone one in Seattle. I can't really claimed that I worked as hard as possible to achieve this, but its tough for me to think even now that the results would have been different had I tried. There's a fellow grad student at Eastern who is far more qualified than I am and has had several teachers on his side campaigning with local companies on his behalf for an internship. Nothing. And he has a wife and kids.
I'm much more fortunate than him because I'm not supporting anyone yet. Also, a summer without a job would not be a waste and in fact, might be considered a blessing. This is because my schedule at Eastern allows me to graduate at the end of this year. That's December. That's 7 months. However, in order to do this, I need to complete my thesis or project by then. That's a tall order, but not if I have a full summer with nothing better to do than work on it. So right now, I'm all but set to go to Seattle to be with Jackie and spend my days at the University of Washington library.
I just was in a meeting earlier today with professors who are part of the MANOME project on campus. MANOME is Eastern's extension of a similar project at Stanford whose goal is to have musicians separated by long distance be able to play with each other and have it seem like they're playing in the same room. The big obsticle standing in the way is the speed of the internet but there's other things to worry about including the time it takes the computer to process the audio signal before sending it out.
MANOME is currently seeking to add video capabilities onto the audio so that musicians can see each other in addition to hearing each other. My project, if I choose to take it, would be to research ideas into letting this happen. For instance, how low of quality of video would musicians be willing to withstand? To answer that would require significant amounts of testing which I think that I would be very good at doing.
In another aspect of my life, I have successfully completed building my own computer. Can't say its from scratch because I used the casing, cdrom drives, and monitor from my old computer. But everything else was bought individually off of NewEgg or Amazon. It was quite the rewarding learning experience, and I am excited to finally have a computer for once in my life that is basically top of the line.
I have celebrated by installing some fun games. Playing old games without frame rate issues I used to have has been really refreshing. For instance, I can actually hear everything that GLaDOS says in Portal, still one of my favorite games of all time. I also got a new game, Plants Vs Zombies, because 3 different blogs I subscribe to, Boing Boing, Ars Technica, and Wired, all highly recommended it. It's totally worth it and its clear from five minutes playing it with Austin that its the perfect game for kids as well as adults.
I also installed 4 different operating systems and left room for more if I desire. One of them is the free release candidate for Windows 7, and I have to say that it's pretty amazing. I've had Vista for a little less than a year now and have never had any problems, but 7 just does everything that Vista does but better. I especially love how the task bar is so much more concise. If only the installation process hadn't written its own bootloader effectively preventing me from accessing my Linux OS until I go in a manually fix it, I would be a perfectly happy customer.
Hmm, I can think about more to talk about, but this post was way too long about 10 paragraphs ago. By the way, if you want more consistent updates about my life, my twitter account http://www.twitter.com/hobbes84k has been consistently updated on a regular basis for a few months now. And that's connected to my Facebook profile. So find me on one of those two and you won't find out all of this stuff about me 3 months after its happened.