Secants and Tangents

This past year was a great one. It was full of ups with a huge net positive. The year started with my admission into the Statistics Department at UCLA for graduate school - a dream come true. Eight months separated my admission and actually starting the program, and it was a long eight months. After turning 22, I really started to feel old, and with college graduation on the horizon, I felt like I was losing my “youth.” I was working three jobs: Sunset Rec, grader for Statistics, and a software analyst for a renown psychometrician.

Spring quarter was particularly difficult being inundated with graduation stuff that I didn’t want to deal with. Graduation was a long weekend, but was largely uneventful. I was acknowledged for having completed both Departmental and College Honors which is something I worked very hard towards. As I suspected, I lost friends. I am actually surprised at which friends I am still in touch with, and which friends fell by the wayside.

Me pondering the future. What is kind of strange about this picture was that I thought the courtyard was filled with graduates and their families. In this pic, it looks like there are people playing frisbee, and no graduates anywhere.	Department of Statistics graduation group photo.	In front of Shapiro Fountain.	My dad usually takes bad pictures. This one impressed me.
My home away from home 2005-06, 433 Midvale #209.	The corner of Landfair and Midvale.

The summer was very busy for me, and was kind of a struggle between the “undergraduate lifestyle” and being a grad student. I actually went to more parties this past summer than I had gone to during all of college! I worked full-time, practically double-time. I worked 8am to 5pm with the Psychology Department and began working on a project to evaluate software designed for classification using mixture models. I knew practically nothing about the subject, but started simulating that data for evaluation anyway. Let’s just say I learned a lot from the experience. I was also moved from the office I was borrowing from a professor into my OWN office. Being a grad student with his own office is a rare thing at UCLA. Towards the end of the summer I went camping at Refugio near Santa Barbara. It was a very nostalgic trip because it reminded me so much of UCSB. I can’t say how many dreams I have had of returning to UCSB, and that it had the same same prestige and program as UCLA without the party reputation. As much as I hated the party atmosphere, that one year I spent in college along the beach will be forever in my mind. Camping is a once a decade thing for me…let’s just say I am not much of an outdoorsman. We spent a day in Solvang, which is always fun. Each time I go, the place gets more beautiful. When I got back, I told my parents I will have to eventually buy land in Buellton (next to Solvang) or somewhere along the central coast.

Me resting on a rock near the tidepools at the northern end of refugio beach.	Windmill at Solvang.	The Aniso Trail heading north toward Refugio from El Capitan.	Aniso Trail heading south toward El Capitan.

My feelings toward my job at Sunset Rec became kind of ambivalent and mixed. The recreation center received a new facilities manager, this girl that was like two years older than me. I must say, she was hot, but way too firey for the position. Everything was a huge deal to her, and the drama that ensued with her in power ended up making the job miserable. Towards the end of my stay with Recreation, my boss got married and took 3 weeks off. Apparently she ended up getting pregnant and quit, leaving a lot of stuff unfinished. In the meantime, we got a new facilities manager, this partying stoner that had no college degree, yet was the biggest prick on a power trip. It was time for me to move on. It was a difficult decision, but it had to be done.

Sunset Rec staff at one of many parties.	The going away party for Irving.

Up until that point, the year had been really good, but it would take a dramatic turn even better in September…

After 8 months of waiting, I finally started grad school. It was nice to spend the majority of my day with smiling faces that I shared an interest with. I had some difficulty adjusting to an atmosphere where I am surrounded by the same people all day long, 5 days a week, but I think I have overcome that. We do a lot of stuff together which is really cool. Each week we play poker, and at the beginning of the quarter I participated in the Tom Ferguson Invitational. Tom Ferguson is this old retired professor that just epitomizes grandpa…it is hard to explain. He is probably in his 70s and has an iPod. Apparently he is a world renown game theorist, a relic from the days when Statistics was part of the Department of Mathematics. His son, Chris Ferguson, was the World Poker Champion in 2000 I think. I won a used television set which was really cool. I keep it in my office and we use it during special events (and sometimes Earvin steals it haha). Anyway, we were celebrating Tom Ferguson’s 50 YEARS at UCLA…amazing. We also went on some hikes, and went kayaking. I am happy to say that I will never go kayaking again, unless it is in clean water, like in Cancun or Hawaii or something. Oh yeah, and I forgot about soccer almost every Saturday lol. I also got to see Bill Clinton speak.

One of our Statistics hikes. David took this picture of Me, Brigid and Chris at Eagle Rock in Topanga Canyon.	Stats grad students kayaking at the MAC. Notice the pirate attire haha. Kevin lost his pirate earrings in the marina.	The Tom Ferguson Invitational Poker Tournament.	I won a TV!

At the beginning of the quarter two other Stats students and I would crash Career Center events and get free food lol. One of them was for Marvell, a semiconductor manufacturer that is in the wireless and networking business. It was actually a very interesting talk, and I think I might add them to my list of possible companies. The “head guy” that spoke to us was actually a statistician!!! I would have never guessed they would have sent a statistician to come talk to us about computer science and engineering opportunities. That was awesome. Earvin and I arrived 20 minutes late, right before the end of the seminar. I had just come from playing tennis and was dressed in gym clothes and everyone else was wearing suits and ties. There was a raffle, so I put my name in for the hell of it. Ariana, another Stats student, drew my name and I won a PSP! For FREE! I also won a game, and we all received nice laptop bags for attending. We also got to take home 2 full pizzas to the grad student lounge. A few months later, I would build a new computer containing an Asus motherboard with an Ethernet controller manufactured by no other than Marvell.

I ended the year with a wonderful Christmas and New Year’s Eve at a cousin’s house. I usually don’t like New Year’s, but I enjoyed it since I had something to do. They live in Chino Hills (yes, the place that smells like cow shit) and we don’t see them very often. On New Year’s Day, after leaving the hotel, we stopped by my aunt’s house before heading home to watch the Rose Bowl.

A pretty big change has occurred inside of me. I am the happiest I have ever been. I am so much less stressed out about life and my work. I have my moments, and there are times when I get overwhelmed, but the difference is that I like what I am overwhelmed about so it is much more manageable. And my friends are very supportive and actually understand what I go through. A sense of ambivalence started to come over me this past summer. That is, there are some things in life that I just don’t give a shit about anymore; some things and people are just not worth worrying about. I guess I have learned that the only thing that matters and that is worth worrying about is my education/work, my family, my good friends and my health.

UCLA is so much better as a graduate student. No comparison to undergraduate. But don’t even get me started on UCLA football…

I am a little sad to see 2006 go, but mainly only because of this stupid superstition I have, that the worst years are those that end with an odd number not divisible by 5, and 2007 is one of those. But a trivial calculation yields that 4/10 = 2/5 = 40% of my life by superstition would be bad, and that is depressing so I need to change my train of thought haha. I graduated (good)high school (hell) in 2001, but it was also when 9/11 happened (terrible). 2003 was just a bad year period. Time to break that superstition.

As I write this I am listening to an awesome song, so I will leave 2006 with this lyric, “when darkness turns to light, it ends tonight.”

Well, I have finally started grad school! As soon as I started I already wanted to do research. But what has been tough is the going to class aspect. Two of the classes I am taking are required…well sort of. See, nothing is /required,/ but it is highly recommended that I take these classes so I pass the quals next September. My third class is really interesting and I am taking it as an “elective.” My required classes are Applied Probability and Data Management/Research Design. Applied Probability is interesting because my professor teaches it with a bit of a theoretical and computer science slant. Unfortunately, it is hard to stay awake in there because he has such a soft voice.”Data Management and Research Design” should really just be called “Intro to Sampling and Experimental Design.” Going to that class is like pulling teeth for me. The books are horribly boring and so is the content. Fortunately, I am not alone in my misery. The professor is really interesting outside of class, and he clearly knows his stuff.

Due to my job in Psychology, as well as my classes and personal projects, I usually spend all day on campus. I try to get there by 9am at the latest and leave by 8 or 9 in the evening. The 8th floor of Math Sciences is quite a happy place, and being in my office so long is not nearly as bad as it may sound. Of course by now I can compile a list of frequently asked questions to graduate students in Statistics:

Q: “Hi, where is the planetarium?”
A: “Go down the little hallway and out the door.”

Q: “Where is the library?”
A: “It is on Boelter 8th floor. This is MS 8th floor. The buildings do not connect here. Go down to 7, walk over to Boelter, and go up to the 8th floor.”

Q: “Can I use these computers?” (grad student lounge)
A: “No, this is the grad student lounge. Go down the hall to the computer lab.”

Q: “Can I use these computers?” (first year office)
A: “No! This is a private office…hence all of the personal belongings on the desks. Go down the hall to the computer lab!”

Q: “Where is the computer lab?”
A: “Go down the little hallway and out the door to the Planetarium. Then take the stairs up to the roof of Boelter, go over the bridge and there you are.”

Q: “Where is the Student Math Center?”
A: “on the third floor, you are on the 8th floor.”
Q: “I know.”?
A: “Then what is the problem?”

The people are really fun too. We do a lot of stuff together. In the past month I have played tennis almost every week, played soccer, went kayaking, participated in a poker tournament and went on a hike. There is talk of a snowboarding trip next quarter, and a softball team Spring quarter. I came in 5th place out of about 31 people in the poker tournament, but I attribute that mainly to luck. The most favorable prizes for me were the iPod Nano (even though I already have one), the used external hard drive, and of course the used TV. I ended up getting the TV which I was quite happy about. One of my officemates (another first year PhD student) brought rabbit ears so we can watch TV in the lounge. I am terrible at tennis, but I play anyway. I guess the same goes for soccer, but I was a pretty good goalie. I am glad I finally sucked up my fear of filthy water and went kayaking. I had dodged the bullet twice before and this time I figured I should give it a try. It wasn’t too bad…but the water was so filthy I was panicking when I got on. The only way I will ever kayak again is in Hawaii or somewhere else where there is nice, clean water. I will be posting pictures from these events soon.

Then there is the story about some of us being regular Career Center patrons…but that is for another time. But hey, I won a PSP!

The other day my best friend Dunc sent me this link to an article about George W. Bush. Apparently he and I have something in common - we both think farting is hilarious!

A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior. But he’s still a funny, earthy guy who, for example, can’t get enough of fart jokes. He’s also known to cut a few for laughs, especially when greeting new young aides, but forget about getting people to gas about that. From US News & World Report, Washington Whispers (on the second page)

The President farts to welcome his new aides? I always knew he was full of shit…

My 770 has always had this weird problem where lines streak vertically across the screen, but it has been tolerable. Now that I want to use gpsDrive for plotting with my GPS, this will no longer work as the streaking is out of control. Some screenshots:

The This is what greets me on loading Xterm (command-line shell):

The console window is so streaked that I cannot read it. The keyboard has streaks running through it.

The home screen for Internet Tablet 2006 OS:

Besides the hideous color scheme, there is some orange and gray banding.

The boot screen:

Blue banding “bleeding” vertically from Nokia logo.

Apparently this problem is caused by activating and deactivating Research and Development (R&D) mode on the 770 while attempting to gain root access to the device - the “White Screen of Death” (WSOD). It is the symptom of a defective screen but the problem is exacerbated, or activated when the user enters R&D mode. The only solution is to return it to Nokia for replacement. Not happy.

In my case, CENS has an extra one lying around from a Computer Science course, so I will hopefully be able to swap mine for a working unit.

As a workaround, I installed the Maemo port of VNC Server so I can access the 770 from my desktop PC via wireless internet with a VNC Client. I can see the screen without the streaking. The keyboard keys do not work right (enter key toggles fullscreen mode instead of moving to the next line) and sometimes I have to use my mouse as a stulus on that damned onscreen keyboard pad. Oh well, it is a big improvement.

Technorati : 770, cens, death, internet, it2006, maemo, nokia, of, pda, screen, sensor, tablet, ucla, white, wsod
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Personally, I am so burned out on hearing about the middle-East not being able to get along. Obviously we need to fight for those that died on 9/11, but besides that, I don’t know why we even get involved anymore. I wasn’t overly interested until I read about an incident with an American airliner that occurred due to Hezbollah.

The Boeing 727-231A jet, N64339, that would become TWA Flight 847 on June 14, 1985. It was delivered in September 1974 and was laid to rest, for scrapping, in 2002.
Sources: Frank C. Duarte Jr., airliners.net (photo), planespotter.org (information).

On June 14, 1985, TWA Flight 847, a Boeing 727 carrying 153 passengers from Athens to Rome was hijacked by two men wearing ski masks. The hijackers were part of the Organization for the Oppressed of the Earth and were somehow related to Hezbollah. They were able to smuggle pistols and grenades through airport security.

Ironically, the third hijacker was bumped off the flight by the airline.

Timeline

• 10:10am TWA847 departs Athens.
• Flight hijacked by two Lebanese men.
• Hijackers ordered captain to divert to Beirut, 19 passengers released in exchange for fuel.
• Afternoon: jet departed Beirut and arrived in Algiers, Algeria. 20 passengers released.
• Night: 727 leaves Algiers and returns to Beirut.
• Robert Stethem, a U.S. Navy diver murdered on jet.
• Passengers with Jewish names taken off the plane, but not released.
• A dozen more hijackers board the flight.
• June 15: 727 returns to Algiers; 65 passengers released (48 remain).
• June 16: flight retuns and remains in Beirut.
• June 17: Most hostages deplaned and taken to a secure location.
• One passenger released due to heart trouble.
• June 30: The 39 remaining hostages released, driven to Syria, boarded USAF jet, flew to West Germany.

A Hero Emerges

Uli Derickson, one of the flight attendants, spoke German and was able to translate the hijackers’ commands. In Algiers, airport officials would not refuel the 727 without being paid. Uli charged close to $6,000 of fuel to her Shell Oil card. She also hid the passports of Jewish passengers. TWA later reimbursed her for the cost of the fuel.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_847

Technorati : 727, 847, TWA, airliner, algiers, aviation, beirut, derickson, flight, hezbollah, stethem, uli
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My New Toys

A few months back I acquired a Nokia 770 from the UCLA Center for Embedded Network Sensing.

I also became a lot more interested in wireless Ethernet as well, and the concept of NetStumbling, or Wardriving. In short, Wardriving involves running some sort of daemon on a laptop or handheld device that records wireless access points as they are discovered. Of course if the device is sitting still, this is quite boring. The point is to run the software while on a road trip! For my experimentation I am using a 2005 Gateway computer running NetStumbler. On a trip from Victorville to

I picked up over 200 wireless access points, some free, others not free.

But logging access points is no fun unless you know where the access point was detected. For this I would need a Global Positioning System (GPS). Since I will eventually be wardriving with the Nokia, I decided to go with the i-Blue High Sensitivity Bluetooth GPS. Thoughtfix uses this setup so I figured it would work well for me as well.

The setup:

• Laptop (Gateway 8510GZ)
  

• Bluetooth receiver (BlueTake USB)
  

• iPod Nano (…in case I get bored)
  

• i-Blue High Sensitivity GPS (3 inches long, if even that!)
  

Setting up Bluetooth on my Laptop

The Bluetooth setup on my Gateway was incredibly simple. I just popped the Bluetake receiver into an available USB port and Windows XP Home automatically found it and installed the necessary software for it. No need for the CD that came with the device. As the Bluetake discovers devices, it has a cute blue LED that blinks steadily. It makes me look like a mad scientist when it is running…and when the lid is closed and the system left unattended, it may look like a bomb .

My desktop had a little more of a difficult time loading the device. USB detected that a device was inserted but did not load any software for it. I was also unable to access the Bluetooth control panel in Windows. Once I entered the name of the control panel in the Run box, I was able to install the device.

Setting up the i-Blue

I am not sure this is even worth a section on its own because the i-Blue required almost no setup. The kit that comes in the box with the GPS receiver is quite cute. It contains two AC power adapters, one for wall AC current and one for DC current from a vehicle. There is an extendable USB cord that is used for power. No messy cords! In other words, the cord that carries current from the plug to the device is USB! Charging the battery for the first time took about 3 hours, not bad.

Then came a bit of a challenge…getting the device to lock into a satellite. Since the device is labled as “High Sensitivity” I naively hoped that the device would lock onto a satellite feed indoors, although GPS is notoriously poor at this. At 3:30am I took the device outside. It took about 20 minutes to lock onto a satellite and report coordinates. I am not sure why this was the case, since the specs and other users say it should only take 1 minute to do this. I was a bit disappointed at first. The next morning I tried again, and this time it only took between 5-10, mind you the sky was pretty cloudy.

In Laughlin, the unit locked onto a satellite almost immediately (clear sky).

NetStumbler Setup

NMEA Logging Woes (for route tracking, not NetStumbling)

I was advised on the Netstumber forums that Netstumbler cannot interface with a Bluetooth GPS, only a serial port. Disappointed, I tried to find software that could log the NMEA feed from the iBlue to a file. I turned to GPSGate and paid the $22 to purchase a license.

GPSgate is a miserable failure, and I do not recommend it to anybody. It is so bad I will not even link to it.

GPSgate correctly identified the i-Blue and connected to it, but after following the directions to setup a NMEA File Writer, attempting to record data yields an error message that no file writer was setup. Also, all of my settings always revert back to their defaults because there is no “OK” button in the settings dialog. Very poor programming. And yes, I tried it on 4 computers before declaring this POS a failure.

Fortunately, the iBlue website has software called VisualGPS that users can download for free. It allows NMEA logging to file. The software does not come with the unit, but it can be found on the manufacturer’s website as both a Windows desktop version and handheld version.

What is an NMEA file? (route tracking, not netstumbling)

NMEA stands for National Marine Electronics Association. Files of this type store much information that comes from the GPS. The i-Blue transmits raw NMEA sentences to the laptop via Bluetooth. Below is an excerpt from an NMEA file:

$GPGGA,193847.798,3509.2965,N,11434.0415,W,1,06,01.4,152.2,M,-27.9,M,,*5A
$GPRMC,193847.798,A,3509.2965,N,11434.0415,W,37.77,185.16,020806,,,A*4D
$GPVTG,185.16,T,,,37.77,N,69.94,K,A*7D
$GPGLL,3509.2965,N,11434.0415,W,193847.798,A,A*49

By moving the decimal point over to the left two spaces, I see that I am located at 35 North and 114.34 West.

Getting on the Road

I placed the iBlue receiver on the passenger window sill of a Ford F250 (without the free mount) and powered it on. I powered on my Bluetooth enabled laptop and plugged it into a DC/AC power adapter that was in turn connected to the DC power provided by the truck. I started the NetStumbler and instructed it to listen to the GPS on COM 4 at 115200 baud. My GPS was correctly detected and began logging access points as well as the GPS coordinates where the AP was detected immediately. I enabled logging, and began on my 5 hour trip to Needles/Laughlin.

Now I let the laptop do its work, and I read Ajax for Dummies…

Technorati : bluetooth, gps, netstumbling, wardriving, wireless
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So I am using this new desktop blogging program called Zoundry to post to my blog now. I am hoping this will allow me to post more regularly because I am too lazy to navigate to my site and log in using my username and password. Perhaps I will write a review, but for now I will say that configuration for the Media Repository was not as easy as I would have liked, but only because the settings test is kind of weird.

To connect to the FTP server you must provide the hostname/IP, user name, port, password, and path. As long as the IP, port, username and password is correct, the first check (Connect to FTP server…) should pass, but it doesn’t which seems a bit strange. But once I fixed the path etc. it worked fine.

More in depth review in the future.

Those few readers that remember that way back when I used to have a section “Lyrics of the Week.” For now I am going to include them in my blog.

[cpg_image:41,6,t] Last Thursday night I actually went to a party…and even better, a Sunset Rec party. I got pretty drunk and I had a great time. It was a going away party for Irving, one of the lifeguards. SCRC is a much better place because of him. People like Irving are so hard to find and seem to come into our lives when we least expect them. Quite a few people were emotional because he is that good of a guy. Thank goodness I was drunk, I’ve been enough of a basketcase this week. A shoutout to my roommate Marc who had to put up with my stupor when I returned really late. Sunset is going through a tough transition right now. We lost 4 of the original building supervisors from when I started: Cesar, Jason, Johanna, and now Irving. And that was after it lost 3 or 4 other supervisors right before I jumped on board. The clerks lost Ting-Ting, and even some of the lifeguards are leaving. The good news is that Edgar came back. He and I sit around and bitch about all of the patrons, and about other shit. He’s an entertaining guy. Going to work there always makes me feel better, even if just temporarily. I hope we can all gel together like the last group did, but I don’t know. Anyway, this is how we “roll” at Sunset. Edgar can verify this: Next week I will be starting my position as a software analyst. It looks like I will be working two five-hour shifts per week unless I can figure out another way to do it. Classes are boring, but I am not complaining. I told one of my roommates, Julian that I plan on drinking a lot more this quarter. I need to have a good time. I will also resume my position as a Stats grader this coming week. ——- In retrospect, this past week a lot of cool things happened, but it was rough on me for some reason. I just feel like such a little kid. I am 22 years old, and I should know how to play with the cards that I am dealt, but there are still so many things I have yet to learn, many of which my peers seem to have already learned. Like I mentioned in an entry from May, my brain doesn’t shut up. I am a chronic thinker to the point that it is almost self-destructive. This feeling just caught up with me is all. I guess that is the reason I have been writing so much lately. It is my outlet. Living with 5 other guys, it is my only outlet. I am experiencing my own “Mad Season.” ——- So I got the Stats project that I requested for that consulting class so I am happy. I spent the rest of my time trying to learn Java the hard way. I tried reading a book and got bored, so now I am just playing around with NetBeans. I am stuck at home for the weekend, not really by choice. But it doesn’t matter where I am, I will be bored since nothing is going on. I am hoping to put up the pics from Irving’s party this weekend, …including the video of Michael giving Irving a lapdance… [cpg_image:41,79,n]

This has to be my #2 song. It has so much meaning to me, I feel like I could have written it. Apparently the entire album is about a relationship that has ended, but to me, it has a completely different meaning. The first person is this melancholic character that at times plagues me. Sometimes the “you,” “we” in this song is some arbitrary person, and sometimes it refers to my usual self. And the happy music is the perfect contradiction to the lyrics. If you connect with music, you know what I mean. Mad Season Matchbox Twenty, 2001 I feel stupid, But I know it won’t last for long. And I’ve been guessing, And I could’ve been guessing wrong You don’t know me now. I kind of thought that you should somehow. Does that whole mad season got you down? I feel stupid, But it’s something that comes and goes. And I’ve been changing, I think it’s funny how no one knows. We don’t talk about, The little things that we do without When that whole mad season comes around. So why you got to stand there looking like the answer now? It seems to me, you’d come around - I need you now, Do you think you can cope? You figured me out, That I’m lost and I’m hopeless, I’m bleeding and broken, Though I’ve never spoken, And I come undone, In this mad season. I feel stupid, But I think I’ve been catching on. I feel ugly, But I know I still turn you on. You’ve grown colder now, Torn apart, angry, turned around, Will that whole mad season knock you down? So are you going to stand there? Are you gonna help me out? We need to be together now - I need you now, Do you think you can cope? You figured me out, That I’m lost and I’m hopeless, I’m bleeding and broken, Though I’ve never spoken, I come undone… In this mad season… And now I’m crying, Isn’t that what you want? And I’m trying to live my life on my own, But I won’t, no, At times, I do believe I am strong, So someone tell me why? why? why?… …do I, I, I…feel stupid?? And I come undone, Oh I come undone. I need you now. Do you think you can cope? You figured me out, That I’m lost and I’m hopeless, I’m bleeding and broken, Though I’ve never spoken… Well, I need you now Do you think you can cope? You figured me out, I’m a child, and I’m hopeless, I’m bleeding and broken, Though I’ve never spoken, I come, ohhhh, I come undone, …in this mad season. In this mad season, It’s been a mad season. ‘Been a mad season.

140 sounds like it is going to be pretty cool. My class was combined with Stats 88. We are going to be assigned to teams where the 140 students will basically lead the 88 students through statistical research. We are going to be assigned one of five projects which were provided to us by real clients!

1. Tuna Project…again Hell no am I gonna work on the tuna project again! When I took Stats 88 I had to work on this project and it was more boring than watching the grass grow. I did not put it as one of my three choices, but I am thinking Rob and Vivian might assign me to it since I know the most about it. :-/
2. Alcohol Effects Study for the Ashe Center. This is basically survey data analysis which can be interesting. It is my second choice.
3. Sony Pictures Non-Box Office Revenue Projection. The goal is to do some data mining (my proposed specialization) to determine how grossing certain plot lines are compared to other types of plot lines. Requires a film buff, which I definitely am not. Next…
4. Jewish Family Counseling Survey. Goal is to analyze data taken from three surveys conducted before, during, and after couples therapy treatment. Another survey data problem, but kind of boring because the sample is only n=100. It is my third choice.
5. LAUSD “LA’s Best” Program Evaluation. This is my NUMBER ONE choice with stars and big letters! LA’s Best is an afterschool tutoring and development program for disadvantaged students that live in high crime, low income areas. The program’s attendance has been dropping over the past few years and LAUSD wants to know why.
   • First, the data is all messed up and scattered, so we must use our friend Perl to write a robot or web scraper to get the data for us.
   • Also this project requires heavy knowledge of statistics because the errors in the study are correlated! So the project requires a multilevel regression analysis. Vivian said she feels sorry for whoever gets stuck with this one…STICK IT WITH ME!

120A is, well, boring. I guess that comes as no surprise since I already took 120B and got an A. But I like Rob’s teaching style. It is also pretty funny that I already know Chris, the TA for my class. The two of them are going to make for an interesting quarter. Today we talked about hypothesis testing and confidence intervals. It’s like 11th grade all over again. And here I am, chillin’ with the toddlers.

Stats 130B is also boring. Vivian is an entertaining lecturer, but the class is 3 hours long, and being lectured about how to use computer software is neither challenging to my digestion, nor fun. I wish I could have taken it independent study or something. Oh well. It shouldn’t be too difficult.

It shouldn’t be too hard of a quarter, and I have deserved this break. Unfortunately, the way my classes work out, leaves me with a lot of free time. I guess I won’t be quitting Sunset for a while…

I had a rough morning for whatever reason. I could tell something was wrong due to the way I reacted over a conversation I had with a friend the other day. We talked again about it and it just made me feel even worse about myself because we both overanalyze everything to death. I just had to be like, “stop, I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” But this is for me to sort out; it’s my problem.

It is very important that I say that he is a really good guy and I don’t fault him at all for how I feel, but like I said, having a “heavy heart” sucks. And being a pessimist makes it no easier! I like this quote, and it seems to jive with my 1/10 and 1/9 entries:

Other stuff is on my mind, but it is all a question mark to me, and not worth mentioning right now. Whenever I get into these melancholic ruts everything makes me feel all weird and I end up kicking myself over and over again.

I think 140 has snapped me out of it at least temporarily. I was so messed up this morning I showed up to that class an hour early - the wrong class. I have never done since I’ve been in college. Of course I ran into some more friends that wanted to talk about grad school applications and they started asking me all of these stupid questions…which just made me more upset. It is as if some energy is telling me to “knock it off.” So then I had to go home to take care of something, and then returned to class again.

Aside: I am convinced to improve my vocabulary because doing math for all of these years has really deteriorated it. For some reason I thought “rut” may be spelled “wrut” so I looked it up to be sure, and found this: In colloquial English, “to be in a rut” means to have a monotonous routine of activities or thoughts. But an alternative definition appears to be a “sexual desire or oestrus of…mammals.”

I guess I should find better words.

——————

If it is one person that knows days like this, it is Billy Joel:

Of course, I cannot forget to mention my all-time favorite song by him, You’re Only Human (Second Wind): Lyrics, Story (I was surprised)

I was wrong. Now is the time where I usually start kicking myself for being an ass and come up with some improvement that I know won’t be productive. So as I always say (and never seem to follow thru with), I need to relax.

I don’t know why, but friendship has always been such a difficult thing for me, especially at this school. It seems like everything revolves around it at this place. Why do I surround myself with people whose definitions of friendship are just saying “hi” and “bye” with a smile on their faces? And their empty words: “we’ll hang out [really soon].” They make me want to vomit. And then there are those people that shallowly ask me for my phone number. I so just want to look at them and ask “why? Are you going to call me?” That is a legitimate question because so many people just do it to raise the number of people in their digital phonebook.

I must clarify that there are two types of friends to me. There are the friends that I have made within my major. That is different. In this entry I am writing about friendship independent of school. I will probably remain friends with those people for a very long time, perhaps even professionally, but I will not be at a university forever.

Now that I feel like I might have [a chance at having at least] a couple of genuine friends, we are all graduating. And despite what we all say, we are never going to see each other again, and we are never going to even attempt to stay in touch. We talk about our plans after graduation and mine of course include grad school. Then the question of “what if you don’t get in?” comes up. And it just strikes such a chord within myself to be asked that. As if people, or this particular person, is just waiting for me to fail. I am even being asked what my plans for the summer are! Whoa, whoa, WHOA. Why don’t I just get a lawyer to help me write my Last Will and Testament while we are at it? There was a some type of melancholic song from the early 90s called “How Can We See That Far?” I swear that is my mantra. And what does this person plan to do after graduation? Of course these peoples’ plans rely on their high school friends. It is fucking amazing to me. Had I known that Thousand Oaks High School was going to dictate the rest of my life, perhaps I would have paid more attention…perhaps I would have not been truant all the time. But I have part of it figured out. These people, as pathetic as it may sound for me to say, have something/someone to fall back on. I don’t. I know it is pathetic that I occupy myself with such a stupid thought, but perhaps this is just the sad state of my generation.

That is not to say that I have my own set of best friends from back home. But we are all in different places. And it is doubtful that we are all going to return to Thousand Oaks. Additionally, my life doesn’t revolve around Thousand Oaks High School. And our friendships do not rely on everything being “just like old times” and they do not rely on ALL of us being together at every waking moment. It isn’t the same as with these other people. It is like Saved by the Bell…graduate from college and resume life right where high school left off. I guess my High School Diploma means more than my B.S. in Mathematics. How is that for irony?

Since these friendships of course won’t last they are meaningless and not worth my time. So I must now find a way to sabotage them. I must turn on these people, or I must find some quality about these people that I hate and just go with it and never look back. That way, I will want to never see them again. If I do not sabotage these friendships, I will spend the rest of my time here feeling like shit, or listening to lies upon lies. I can hardly wait for May to roll around.

I know it is not a good way of looking at it, but I do not want to have to say goodbye, especially because I know my bittersweet melancholy will get in the way of the billions of things that I have to do on a daily basis.

But WHY am I not excited at the fact that I am leaving behind such a shallow undergraduate world? Simple. Because I wish I could do it all over again. Pathetically enough, I wish I could go back to 9th grade and start all over again. There is no getting away from high school. Right now I feel like I’ve had a shitty undergraduate experience - both socially and academically and I so wish I could have that back, but most likely somewhere else.

I don’t know why I was given such a heavy heart, but I am stuck with it.

What is everybody’s obsession with high school at this university??? It was 4 years of your life…GET OVER IT. I am so sick of hearing about it. If I hear one more time “I’m hanging out with my high school buddies [even though I am at college and shouldn’t be such a loser to not make any college friends]” I am going to strangle something. If this truly isn’t the case, then please let me know so I can find a new social circle…

One of these days I am going to have to post my spin on the “UCLA Laws of Socialization for Undergraduates”…

First off, thanks to the LA Observer for quoting me in their blog entry about poor Stephanie Edwards getting the boot from the Rose Parade coverage. And a shoutout to BruinWalk.com. Your pseudorandom number generator has good taste!!!

Too funny…here I am trying to help my roommate Marc try to set up both an admin password as well as a WEP key for his “router.” I get it set up and all, and I think to myself “wow, this is a really tiny router you have.” Um…it turns out he didn’t have a router. So…we just locked some innocent person out of their own access point. We are now hackers lol j/k.

So another Winter Break passes by. This quarter I have a bitchin’ schedule. I don’t know what I am gonna do with all of my free time. Get a girlfriend perhaps? Nah. Do more programming? After Winter Break I am pretty much burned out from programming. Although I am still trying to learn Java which has turned out to NOT be one of my favorite languages. I still prefer good ol’ C++ for desktop applications, and PHP for web applications, with Perl floating somewhere in the middle.

It is nice to be back though. I feel vindicated from the hell and horror of Fall quarter. At least I wasn’t the only one that had a rough quarter. This quarter I start my new job as a software analyst with a statistician that has written a psychometrics/Item Response Theory software package. I have left my job with the Math Department after almost two and a half years. It just wasn’t any fun anymore, and the classes were way too big.

My classes seem like they will be pretty cool this quarter. Regression Analysis uses this cool project called Moodle which is an academic equivalent of a combination blog, wiki, and forum that has additional functions like grade reporting. The pre-lecture is even a Podcast!!! The Stats Department is so 2006 .

I shall end with a quote from one of my theoretical math impaired friends:
Dunc: yeah, you made a total 360 between jr high and hs.
Me:…that puts me back exactly where I started…unless I started on a branch cut of course…
Dunc:and u wonder why u r single.
Me:*expletive*

Next time: Class update, and my Statement of Purpose…FINALLY!

If it’s one song that I hate it is Auld Lang Syne. How shallow is this? “May all acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind.” So I guess I am supposed to forget everything from 2005 just because it is a new year. Well, according to Sylvia Browne, 2006 is supposed to be a great year for Scorpio! Well, I hope it is true, lol.

If New Year’s Eve is any indication of what is in store for 2006, there’s no doubt that this is going to be a “weird” year, whatever that entails. Perhaps I am just being superstitious but here are some reasons why:

• Dick Clark, the voice of New Year’s Eve in Times Square, can hardly speak since suffering a massive stroke.
• Regis Philbin was no better as none of their microphones worked.
• The first live performance in Times Square in years was MARIAH CAREY. Yuck!
• Stephanie Edwards, the queen of Rose Parade hosting, was ousted by some ugly boring drone on KTLA. Stephanie had to sit down in the pouring rain and do absolutely nothing during the parade since her parade program containing all of the trivia was destroyed by the rain.
• “Rockin’” New Years Eve was boring as hell.
• Rose Parade was held on January 2nd because January 1st fell on a Sunday.
• It POURED on the parade for the first time in 50 years.

So if we assume there is a 1/50 probability of rain on the Rose Parade and the Rose Parade lands on a Sunday with probability 1/7, we won’t have to deal with such a shitty parade until 2356.

As for resolutions? I have none. Resolutions are overrated, and so is New Year. But as always I am working on not being so hard on myself or others…just not today.

I spent New Year’s Eve day at Sunset Rec where of course the building sup didn’t show up to open the facility, so I sat in my truck until somebody showed up. I could not believe how many people came to swim on a cold and rainy holiday. I had a furry friend with me too - a squirrel. He sat on the ledge outside of the window during my entire shift.

At one point he got brave enough to run through the window into the office and snatched one of my cookies and ran outside to eat it. After that he snuck into the office a couple more times and got stuck on the floor of the office once until I returned. He got so scared he jumped from the floor to the desk and out the window.

Anyway, I am off of my bitch bag now.

Long entry because I haven’t written in a while. Most of it is me rambling.

This week I had my Senior portrait taken. I thought it was so cheesy that my mom was making me do this…but it is the least I could do. As soon as the photographer put all the paraphernalia on me (cap, gown, cord, sash), I felt different. I realized that a chapter of my life is coming to a close. Sometimes when I look back I feel like I have accomplished nothing during my College career. But I now realize that it is because at this point in my life, I cannot yet accomplish my dream: to get a doctorate. This Bachelor’s degree means more to me emotionally than it does academically. It represents all of the sleepless nights, all of the hours spent in offices with TAs and professors, all of the struggles, all of the heartaches and tears I put into this career.

My college career has been about improving myself and teaching me a new way of thinking and looking at the world, more than teaching me anything academic that I am ever going to seriously use. I cannot say that I knew how to prove the Cayley-Hamilton Theorem before I came to college, but material like that is water under the bridge.

Adding Statistics as my second major is the best thing I could have done. I got to discover a department that actually cares about its students. It has made my college career so much more enjoyable…and normal. This last year in college with the Stats Department so far has proven to be more rewarding than the last 3 years combined.

On the Grad School application front, things are going well. My grades are good, especially in both of my majors. My GRE scores are really good although I will probably retake them because I think I can do better. I was freaked out taking a Computer Based Test (CBT) (there is an entire branch of psychometrics [my interest] dedicated to this). I have secured three letters of recommendation from professors that think very highly of me. They have been amazingly supportive. That support I could never ever get from the math department and its faculty. The only thing that I have left to do is write my Statement of Purpose which I am hoping to do this weekend. I need to write about why I want to be admitted to Grad School, why Statistics, and why UCLA. I feel so strongly, and so passionate about this opportunity, I can probably write a very strong statement on the first try…and then read it over and instead lament over it for days. My proposed specializations are Psychometrics, Pattern Recognition/Machine Learning, and Data Mining. They all have their pros and cons, and are all very fascinating subjects to me. Psychometrics (measurement) is a branch of statistics that deals with psychological and educational measurement: how tests and scoring metrics are constructed. My interest is educational testing as opposed to psychological testing but the concepts are all the same. Last year I wrote a paper about a metric I conceived that measures educational growth over a grading period called R******’s Combinatorial Growth Metric. It was fun to write, but there are horrible flaws in the theory and I would never attempt to publish it because even I doubt its purpose. Although I was scared to death to take the GRE, I was fascinated at how much more convenient it is, and how much more accurate and concise the testing and scoring is than the paper-based test (again, psychometrics). My second interest, pattern recognition and machine learning is perhaps the most theoretically math intense branch of statistics. Researchers in this field study how to detect patterns in data (data is much more than just a “rectangle.” It can be a picture, a sound, an energy, a map, you name it) and model those patterns to extract their meanings and make meaningful predictions. Signal processing falls into this category. It is possible to, for example, take an audio sample of an auditorium clapping, and pinpoint one person’s applause. Pattern recognition is also used in face and fingerprint recognition. Eventually I will summarize face recognition theory and how we all come from a small basis of faces: eigenfaces. My Optical Mark Recognition project also relies heavily on pattern recognition (image processing) and Bayesian statistics. Machine learning relies on pattern recognition. Some examples of machine learning are robots, and computer based testing (such as the GRE General). Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning are an exotically beautiful mesh of theoretical mathematics (especially combinatorics and linear algebra, my favorites), theoretical statistics, and computer science. Data Mining is the most applied of the three fields. It is basically a combination of statistics and computer science. It basically studies how to obtain data that are not in a “rectangular” form and how to visualize that data so that the layman can understand it. My OMR project can also fall into this category.

I have also turned 22 since I last wrote. I feel old. My birthday was awesome though. I hate cake, so instead my mom made me a bunch of cupcakes in the shape of a cake and put candles in them. It was perfect. For my birthday I got a new phone (LG VX8100) that does all the cool new things: realistic music ringtones, ringback tones, picture/video messaging, cameraphone, speakerphone, and I can even send the pictures I take over the internet to an online photo album. I also got an iPod. I said I would never, ever, ever get one, and well, I finally said “what the hell.” It makes the long 20 minute walks from MS to my place faster, and makes grading less boring.

Working three jobs has taken its toll on me. Grading 200+ papers a week can get very frustrating and infuriating at times. Grading for Statistics has been great though. The classes clearly understand the material and put in effort into their work. Linear Algebra is a totally different story. I don’t know what this professor is teaching the class. But I can clearly tell you what he is not teaching them. It pisses me off that in week 8 there are still students that cannot row reduce. I have never graded a class where so many of the students put so little effort into their work: skipping half of the problems, showing NO work, cheating, not stapling their 10 crumpled pages, not putting a name on the paper, turning in homework late (repeatedly). It is insane. And the fact that the professor allows his students to turn in their homework late (repeatedly) for every damn reason is even more infuriating. Sunset is still a great job. So clearly, the sore spot is the Department of Mathematics.

There is something else that has taken a toll on me but some things are not worth discussing in great detail. What I will say is that I never thought four (actually five; the fifth I don’t even know) men in their twenties could be so low, so shallow, so selfish, so idiotic, that they would let somebody do something so evil to me…and then not tell me about it. To make it worse, these guys were so spineless somebody else had to relay the information to me. The story is that it is a joke gone horribly wrong but I am still suspicious that the whole thing was intentional, and I am pretty content with that feeling, and I am confident in my personal accusation. What seals my suspicion is the fact that I never even got an apology, and their reason for not telling me was beyond pathetic. I am proud of myself for how I handled it when and after it happened, and quite frankly, I’m pretty surprised at how I handled it. I was never even close to caving in and so they should get it through their thick heads that I will never cave in, especially not to them. And this is the reason why they are now pissed off at me. And that makes me proud. I was right about them, and I have no reason to ever question that feeling again. I want to thank my coworkers at Sunset for their support when this happened. As they say, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. But now that I have put my feelings in writing, I feel that I can finally move on, and not need to write about this again.

Classes were very rough but now that I have dumped Artificial Intelligence I have had more time to dedicate to Pattern Recognition and Statistical Programming. The problem in Pattern Recognition is that up until now I have been taught frequentist probability which is the old and conservative way of doing things. This class requires understanding Bayesian probability which to me is a totally different language, but fascinating nonetheless. The theory required in the class is amazing. We have concepts from Analysis, Combinatorics, Linear Algebra and even Topology. I had a very difficult time understanding methods of dimension reduction such as Principal Components Analysis at first because it is very difficult to even attempt to visualize a d dimensional vector space containing data. This is where the eigenfaces come in, and my project that can best be described as a disaster. Then we moved into non-parametric methods of probability distribution learning such as using Parzen windows and the nearest neighbor technique to classify data into 2 or more mutually exclusive groups.

That’s the latest. I am hoping to post my Statement of Purpose when I have it done because it should be interesting. Thanks to Wikipedia for making my blog interactive .

A cool comic from FoxTrot. Thanks Sean!

Source: http://www.foxtrot.com