Some stuff I did last month

Yeah so... I didn't blog in April. I kept meaning to but then the days crawled past until I realized it had disappeared, last night -- and then I was planning to blog last night but when I got back to my room it was already after midnight and I didn't the opportunity. So, I'm making up for it now I guess. Actually it's a weird thing, to think I didn't skip a month between 2007 all the way until now -- almost like something died or maybe I've changed? It's not a habit I would usually break.

Anyway I guess I'll update on things that happened in the last month, or at least stuff that stood out to me /I can remember at this moment...

Andre Agassi came to give a talk with the Leadership Institute, which was pretty cool. I'm not an extremely avid follower of the tennis world, but from watching Prince of Tennis during middle school I knew who he was and how amazing he was. But I didn't really know his story, and his talk was eye-opening both in terms of finding out more about him and also concerning inspiration for life in general. He's an incredibly modest and down to earth man and I think he's learned a lot through his life and gave a lot of good advice, especially concerning perfectionism -- "not every shot has to be a perfect one, just good enough -- you don't have to be the best to win, just better than the other guy."

Matt Damon also came in the same week -- I was really lucky to get a ticket for this, actually I went at 2.30pm on the day the tickets came into office but they were already sold out @_@ (office opens at 12pm, so you can imagine how crazy that was), but Lucy was kind enough to give me her spare since Jenn couldn't make it :))) thank you Lucy! His story was so interesting, I didn't realize that he wrote Good Will Hunting while in a class here, that actually makes me like it a lot more haha. He's such a nice guy as well :D Anyway there was a showing on the Plaza that night as well which he introduced, but I stayed in to do work so I didn't go see it. 

So this project we've been working on is our final project for CS51, our group decided to implement machine learning in a neural network to recognize authors based on their writing style -- so we feed it blocks of books to train it and then when we give it a block it hasn't seen before from one of the authors, it should be able to guess which author wrote it. I learned a lot, though it was kind of stressful to begin with since we had zero concept of what a neural network even was, and trying to wrap our heads around it while trying to write it was horrible @_@ but we finally got it working!!

Look! :D 91.1% accuracy right now after 200 epochs of learning! It's terrible at recognizing Agathie Christie for some reason though, so we have to do some fine tuning before hand in on Sunday.

Last Friday was also the final exhibition for FACES -- we were a bunch of freshmen who decided to get together and do an art exhibition to showcase visual arts in terms of the freshman experience for Arts First weekend, we ended up doing a showcase inspired by natural disasters, since we had a lot of them this year lolol. I made a paper sculpture inspired by Snowstorm Nemo:

Arthur trying to look like he's a part of this (also being vain as usual)

close up :)

The team! :D minus Sarah who was sick + Dean Dingman

In other news ... I'll be the technology chair on the archery team board for next year, which will be fun. I actually hadn't been to practice all semester because of FACES being on Mondays and Wednesdays at the same time, but this Saturday the admissions' office decided to come film for a while, so I went in to take part haha. They got all the more experienced archers to aim at a target for filming and this is what happened:

I was surprised that they let me aim at this target actually lolol I'm not experienced at all, but at least that random stray arrow on the left wasn't mine :P

What's some other random stuff I've done...? Hmmm... there was SEA night, which I helped out with as part of HVA. Last night I went to my first Hack Harvard talk, initially only about 3D printers from formlabs but actually ended up really enjoying the local company, so I'll probably go back next year. I'm kind of gutted that I didn't go earlier, but I'm really glad I did before the semester wrapped up. 

Finals are coming up -- tomorrow's my last day of classes! And then I have to finish my Expos paper, and final project is due on Sunday, and my final art project will be due on Tuesday as well. And then vacation I guess haha. I will be in Menlo Park (Silicon Valley) this summer working at Facebook from July to August, I'm sticking around Boston at my cousin's place til about mid-June since my aunt and grandma are coming over from Chicago, and then for the last bit of June I haven't really figured out yet, but I might go down to New York to hang out with Ling :)

Also, it's springtime!! 

I'm so happy the weather is getting warmer. 

UPDATE ME ON YO LIVES. Snapchat me or something, or chuck me a facebook message. I might reply slow because of timezones and general busy-ness, but it's always nice to hear from people.