29 May 2013

how to pass the summertime

Here I am again, on a bus from Boston to New York. The third time this year. By the time I return to school, I'll have seen it in the 4 seasons. Isn't that kind of sentimentally nice? I suppose so, even if the result of negligence on my part.

So the summer began; with a hard last week of packing everything I own into boxes and helping friends move out, empty rooms were all that were left of our freshman year. It was tinted with a little sadness and shock over how quickly the year went, though I suppose if you calculated, we were only really in school for 7 months.

Other highlights from the last few days include playing Starcraft with Jason and Luke in the enforced quiet area in the basement Lamont Library lololol. Things we do for fun. Also our grades came out. I'm so glad I managed to pull an A- in Expos lol. Though CS51 really shouldn't have released how they calculated the grades because I realized that if I'd gotten 2 more points in the final I could have gotten an A in the entire course =_= why do these things happen. I'm happy with an A- but geez it was just so close.

On the last night, Tony took us up to the observatory above the science center and we watched the stars and looked down on campus for a while. It was a nice peaceful way to end a somewhat hectic year and semester. The next morning was full of frantic last minute moving for friends (ofc I'm organized and had it all sorted by Tuesday the previous week #onlytwofinals). Then we had our goodbyes and hugs and set off on our separate ways.

Alex and I grabbed iced bubble tea from TeaLuxe and then went to Yamato for lunch, where we consumed 76 pieces of sushi, a handroll and a seaweed salad between us over the period of 2 hours. It was a great meal. We is fat.

The first order of many

Over the last week and a half at my cousin's place then, I suppose not that much has transpired though I've tried to keep myself entertained. Although, the second day I was there my mom called and we ended up reorganizing the head end of my summer, and a totally unexpected 2 week trip home is now underway. Unfortunately the weather is horrible and everyone is about to sit exams, but eh these things happen. It gives me a good chance to sit my full licence test, and catch up with some friends if only for a short while.

We went to Costco and I stumbled upon Dan Brown's new book, which I gladly bought and finished the next day. It's kind of crazy how his formula works so well in keeping you hooked. I really enjoyed this one compared to The Lost Symbol. It was also kind of surprising that I didn't even know he had been writing one until I saw it in stores lol, turns out it only came out 5 days prior.

Also I've been playing with my cousin's two month old baby, who is super duper adorbs :)

The last three days were spent walking around and taking photos of things, since I decided to get a better camera (not that my Leica was lacking, it just didn't have a lot of the features I wanted, although its crazy zoom will definitely be missed). I ended up getting this bad boy:

[taken at MIT's architecture school]

And we have had much fun together ever since. Check out our adventures on Flickr :)

Other things I have been up to: trying to get back into digital art (lasted a morning, haven't touched it since. Go figure), doing some coding, doing some web design, playing plastic league sc at 1am with Jason's Canada friends, playing with photo filters.

Oh also this was my lunch yesterday. It was amazeballs and we got complimentary macaroons afterwards. Probably the most expensive meal I've ever consumed, maybe when/if I  ever have money falling out of my ears I'll go again:



It's okay to be jealous, really.





14 May 2013

summah mutha f****s

As of Saturday, I am finished with freshman year. It's pretty scary how fast it all went, not to mention the thought of the long summer and then sophomore year -- I wonder how much will have happened by the time I come back to campus. I'm currently in my semi emptied room, having finished packing away all my things into boxes, with only my suitcases and stuff I'm leaving at my cousin's place left to store away.

The American year is kind of weird. I'm used to the end of year feeling extremely conclusive, which is what you get if it aligns with the end of the actual calendar year. The year is complete, you go home and have Christmas and celebrate New Years and new beginnings, and start again after the rollover. No such thing here. It's randomly May and it doesn't really feel like the end of anything at all. It's like everything is some kind of continuous spiral that keeps going, with winter breaks being our traditional end of calendar year, so it doesn't feel like it's super new when we go back to school since it's still the continuation of the school year. I'm not really sure which way I prefer. I guess this way there's less of the refreshing feeling I get from a complete restart, but it's also easier to build momentum and continue with whatever I was doing before as well. Then again this kind of thing shouldn't ideally affect me since time is continuous in either case anyway.

I met so many awesome people in the last 8-9 months! It's so weird to think that before then I didn't know anyone here. Also everyone is leaving and it's sad. I don't know why I am so affected by stuff like this haha.

Plans for the summer? I want to get back into digital art, since it's hard to do big traditional stuff while travelling (Actually it's a huge pain in the ass, especially when packing up my stuff, I can't take anything with me at all =.= I have to destroy the big stuff I did this year because there's no sense in trying to store it. Ugh this is why people have basements).

I want to read some books. I have to at least get through The Great Gatsby. Otherwise I'll feel like an illiterate uncultured loser who can't even get through a book in 3 months.

I want to try some photography (buy a hipster camera???) -- again more to develop aesthetics in a compact way.

Do some random programming stuff on the side probably, to learn more and practice. Trying to dl mySQL right now, I want to test some wordpress layouts but I actually have no clue what I am doing lulz.

I'm enjoying having the freedom and time to do whatever I want right now though. I'm not exactly sure how long this will last before I get bored tho haha. I kinda had some feeling that I wanted to go home for a month at the last minute, so much so that I even looked up flights, it would only have been about $1650 return! But I wonder what I would have done back there. Also the weather. Also 24+ hours flying. Also new immigration policy. Ew so much disincentives to flying home (lol I'm so lazy).

In any case.

CAN'T WAIT TO LIVE WITH THESE BEAUTIFUL GIRLIES NEXT YEAR C: thx for photo pong


01 May 2013

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.