Htam::Diary

This Thursday, at night we had CCF Obscure Songs recording session again.  We recorded only three (3) songs.  Afterwards, I went to ping pong class.  I played with John Liu again.  Our level is quite similiar, making us good practicing partners.  Today we reviewed forehand looping, and also practiced underspin serve and forehand loop return.  We were the only table playing cross courts today.  I am very, very tired afterwards.

This Wednesday, Ruddock House has its house meeting.  RSG got cancelled.  I started doing Ay1 set due this Friday.  Also, some more work on the CCF website has been done.  The roster is now online, and the main layout has been modified to accomodate the needed width.

This Tuesday is quite rainy.  However, I made a few appointments on campus when I had no class, so I had to walk in the rain to the appointments with the professors.  It overall went pretty well, and then I got food on campus and came back.  In the afternoon, I attended my first and only class today at 15:00.  The material presented today in graph theory is more illuminating than the past, and I am glad.  At night I went on campus again for Ma121c office hours.  Since the set is due next Thursday, we get cryptic hints instead: exactly what I hoped for.

This Monday is a long day again.  Morning one (1) hour, afternoon three (3) hours of classes.  Today I finally get to meet with Garrett Mizuo, my Syzzygy partner.  We talked over lunch today.  I think we will be meeting every Monday now.  We actually have 108 together.  After classes, I went with Kenneth Heafield to UGCS lab and looked at donut, the server.  Today is actually my first time physically looking at the server, after being the admin for over one year and effectively being the only official and active member of donut devteam.  It is quite impressive how almost everything can be done remotely.  Today we checked out the motherboard, we are considering buying more RAM for donut.  It is paging right now.

This Sunday, after church, I went with Scott Hsieh to buy some groceries.  The items count was 47!  (Not factorial, just exclamation mark.)  Afterwards, I played table tennis with Adri again.  This time he decided to practice chopping, so it was perfect for me to practice looping.  We decided that my backhand looping is actually more powerful, and he taught me to exploit it.  He also tried to teach me how to chop, but I had not much success.  Today was really fun, and I enjoy playing with him more and more now.

This Saturday I got a Pasadena City Library Card.  I attempted this last year when Cindy Chen drove me to the library.  However, they would not let me acquire a library card with my MSC mailbox.  They require a street address with proof of residency.  This time, with the suggestion of Jon Seitel, I brought my dental insurance that says Caltech's street address with my name above it.  This worked and now I have a library card, yay.

This Friday I did not watch any TV at all!  I ate lunch on campus, and stayed on campus since I had a class at 11:00 and classes in the afternoon starting at 13:00.  For dinner, I was talking to my two roommates about a puzzle a friend of mine sent me.  Here it goes:

You are locked in a cubic room with width 50m which sits on 100m stilts.  There is an open window at the corner of the room, near the floor, with a strong hook cemented into the floor by the window.  So if you had a 100m rope, you could tie one end to the hook, and climb down the rope to freedom.  (The stilts are not accessible from the window.)  There are two 50m-long rope, each cemented into the ceiling, about 1m apart, near the center of the ceiling.  You are a strong, agile rope climber, good at tying knots, and you have a sharp knife.  You have no other tools (not even clothes).  The rope is strong enough to hold your weight, but not if it is cut lengthwise.  You can survive a fall of no more than 10m.  How do you get out alive?

This puzzle made Scott and I get to ABSK late.  But we have about three different working solutions now.  Some are more technical and less satisfying than the others.

This Thrusday, I attended the combinatorics seminar, which conflicts with Psy15.  Therefore I have decided to not give the class a second look and go ahead and drop it.  Afterwards, I had my only academic class of the day: Ma121.  It is still quite enjoyable.  I found out my Putnam score.  It is, as expected, not as good as last year.  I got 25 (rank 360) this year.  Last year was 39 (rank 208.5).  Oh well, I have two more tries.  At night, I went to play table tennis.  It was really fun.  We practiced looping today.  I played with John Liu almost the entire time.  He is getting quite good.  We had many people so we were all practicing cross-court.  Later we played doubles with Kevin Lui and Ning Bao.  I was with Ning and we won 3-2, it was a pretty close and fun game.

This Wednesday I had three classes.  Afterwards, I spend more time working on the CCF website.  I have plans for putting the roster online (in a restricted network).  Later we had RSG's first meeting.  We sang some songs and they prayed for one another.  It is a pretty good way to start the term off.

This Tuesday is the second day of classes.  I have no morning classes, so I worked on the CCF website.  In the afternoon, I went to Psy15.  I like PS12 a lot more, both the style of the course and the subject matter.  I will go to one more class just to be sure, but I am almost made up my mind.

121c is more organized today, perhaps the instructor was really just nervous yesterday.  We also receive our first set today, yay!  It is due in two (2) weeks.  After class, I discussed some things pertaining to donut with the ASCIT President Todd Gingrich, at his request.  I will be going to the BoD meeting tomorrow to clear some stuff up.

Also, today I spent many hours working on the CCF website.  I cleaned and migrated the Fishline section, it should become fully operational once Fishline proper picks up its pace.

This Monday is the first day of classes of the third term of my sophomore year at Caltech.  In the morning I have Ma108c with Malabika Pramanik.  From my first impression, she is a very clear and good lecturer.  The topic is no longer real analysis but complex analysis.  This might brighten things up a bit.

After a whole Mongolian grill for lunch, I went to PS12.  This is my attempt to choose between PS12 and Psy15 as the other intro social science I will take (after Ec11 last year).  PS12 sounds promising.

Ay1 is my menu course of choice.  We now have weekly sets, as opposed to prior years.  I might actually benefit from this change.

Ma121c is my third class in a row, all coinciding with Yan Zhang.  I think I have not had so many classes in common with people after frosh year when we were all on core.  I think the lecturer is a bit young and inexperienced and nervous.  I do not doubt his knowledge on the subject, yet his presentation on the first day is not as good as, say, professor Wilson.

Four hours of classes is a lot, but since I still do not have work to do, I went to CCF large group tonight.  Possibly the last large group I will attend, as I shall try to make the FBM's instead.

This Sunday, after not playing table tennis on Sundays for more than a month, due to Shakespeare performances for a month, and then injured ankle for two weeks, I am eager to be back and active.  Today, as expected, not many undergrads showed up.  In fact, I was the only one.  I played with Adri.  He is one of the better players here.  I am surprised that I can actually play fairly well with him, even after a 1.5 month of hiatus.  Today I am extremely tired, possibly due to the fact that I have not played for a while.  It was very enjoyable, nevertheless, and I am more certain I will try to make it to practice every week whenever possible.

My roommates have returned, signifying that school starts tomorrow.

This Saturday, I decided to visit an old perl script of mine.  It is supposed to display in correct grammar how many years, months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds an event is from now.  However, due to the variable number of days in a year and a month, the script always caused trouble with long time distances.  I have modified it so it now calculates correctly, by dropping "months" and calculating years differently than simply dividing the difference in seconds by a large number.

Today is the last day before the last day before school starts.  This means it is the last day I have to myself.  My roommates will be returning tomorrow.  I do not think I am as ready for school to start as by the end of Winter Break.

This Friday is the last day of Spring break.  Granted, we still have the weekends, but every week we have the weekends.  Therefore today I tried to do as many tasks as I possibly can, for I do not believe I have ample time left.  Compared to Winter break, Spring break is rather short.  The day before Winter break ends I said "This time, I shall say that I am quite ready indeed for the beginning of another quarter of adventure at Caltech."  I am uncertain whether I can be as ready this time.  I worked on CCF's website, and my laptops, and cleaning my room, and a bunch of other small tasks.

This Thursday, I worked more on the computers.  I have swaped functor and vector, restoring the purpose of vector to be a backup server and letting functor be my playground.  This is mainly due to hardware concerns, as my functor is bulky and has a broken screen, yet has a better CD drive, suitable for installing OS's for fun.  I also worked on donut and fixed some SQL queries.  The Newsgroup section does not take 15 seconds to load now, it should now be almost instantaneous.  Today, I also got my external hard drive to work with my Linux laptop.  I can actually read more from Linux than from Windows, I am delighted.  I think I am beginning to know more about how hardware connections for Linux works.

This Wednesday, I did work.  I finished recycling, I went on campus and got my graded sets and exams back (Praise the Lord!), and I got some food.  In the afternoon, I cleaned the bathroom counter and bathtub.  I also worked on donut and clubs.  I installed mailman on clubs and configured it.  Donut Directory now has search by email capability.

This Tuesday, I finished trying most of the online games in A Complete Waste Of Time.  Consequently, I updated my games section to include more games that I found interesting.  However, I must say that this was a complete waste of time. ;-)

I continued to work on my FreeBSD laptop.  I familiarized myself with the ports framework and updated the entire collection, I installed apache22, mailman, and wget as well.  Apache web server works fine, but serving a mailing list mechanism requires correct MX records in DNS, and I also need to deal with the fact that my laptop is behind a router.  But all in all it was a success today.

I found the Caltech Recycling Center and recycled some of the recyclables that have been piling up in our kitchen.  I also spent some time singing songs, mostly from Les Miserables, reminded by June's email.

This Monday, as promised, I gave functor a serious job to do.  It will now be responsible for making daily backups of my main laptop ideal.  I installed rsnapshot (through ports) and configured it successfully.  I also installed mrxvt through ports and now I can ssh in once and then use mrxvt for multiple shells.  However, I keep on getting some X errors when using vim after su.  Oh well, I can just use vi.

Later I created a ccf user on clubs.caltech.edu and migrated the current CCF website over.  There are still work to do, like porting server side includes to PHP, but the mundane tasks should quickly cease.  I will be faced with the roster dilemma soon.

This Sunday, after church, Hou-En took me to 99 Ranch Market for a much needed replenishment of culinary ingredients and nutritional supplements.  Did you know my roommate Scott Hsieh had to use soy sauce packs to cook on Saturday because we ran out of soy sauce?  So embarrassing.  My functor has been running quite happily now.  I will probably give it more work tomorrow.  For now, I play some games.

This Saturday, I downloaded the ISO image of FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE for i386.  I burned the installation CDs and then installed FreeBSD on functor, one of my auxiliary laptops.  I equipped functor with a 40GB harddrive and a PCMCIA ethernet connection.  The X server seems to only let my screen display in 1024x768 resolution.  Oh well, I will most likely be using it as a server that I SSH into anyways.  I will be hosting some functions of matrix on ideal, my primary laptop, and some other functions on functor.  I am of course still going to look for the reason of matrix failure.  I used to utilize vector for backups, but it is quite loud and my roommate does not like it.  This burden might now fall on the BSD functor, however, I really want to keep a playground laptop.  Therefore this role might now switch from functor to vector.  For the time being, tensor is going to stay as a Micro$oft machine serving my occasional need to use Windows software.  Today is the first time that my four functioning, networked laptops are all running different operating systems: Fedora Core 4, FreeBSD 6, RHEL 3, and Windows 2000.  'tis a day for rejoicing.