Sic Vita Est

The Thesis OF DOOM!

2006-06-03T17:22:00.000-07:00

jason@jymac.local [~/caltech/thesis] $ svn ci -m "submitting this!!!!"
Sending thesis/draft_final/draft.tex
Adding (bin) thesis/draft_final/submitted_final_draft.pdf
Adding thesis/figures/bad_merge.eps
Adding thesis/figures/good_merge.eps
Adding thesis/figures/good_road.eps
Adding thesis/figures/multi_filter.graffle
Sending thesis/figures/one_scan.eps
Adding thesis/figures/state_machine.graffle
Adding thesis/figures/two_clouds.eps
Adding (bin) thesis/final_pres.ppt
Sending thesis/matlab/@cloud/plot.m
Adding thesis/matlab/@cloudset/compute_roads.m
Sending thesis/matlab/@cloudset/merge_if_feasible.m
Adding thesis/matlab/@cloudset/plot_roads.m
Adding thesis/matlab/@cloudset/recompute_roads.m
Sending thesis/matlab/@ellipse/plot.m
Adding thesis/matlab/@road/dist_to_road.m
Adding thesis/matlab/@road/get_ellipses.m
Adding thesis/matlab/@road/get_score.m
Sending thesis/matlab/@road/plot.m
Sending thesis/matlab/@road/road.m
Adding thesis/matlab/demo_basicspline.m
Sending thesis/matlab/demo_cloud.m
Adding thesis/matlab/demo_computeroads.m
Adding thesis/matlab/demo_diffmerge.m
Sending thesis/matlab/demo_scan.m
Adding thesis/matlab/demo_spline.m
Adding thesis/matlab/demo_uber.m
Transmitting file data ............................
Committed revision 104.

That's all folks~~~!

Fiona:

2006-05-02T23:18:00.000-07:00

(outside during another "let's-try-to-graduate party")

"Jason! Stop eating and work!"

Your message has been sent

2006-04-18T06:21:00.000-07:00

this one, to be exact....

***************************
Hi Professor Zyglidopoulos,

Here is my final paper on Harley Davidson for 4E11. Once it's been
looked at, could you please fill out and return that "Caltech Course
Evaulation" form I gave you on the last day of class? I handed it to
you in an airmail envelope that had sort of red and blue edges; you
might remember it. You don't need to worry about going through the
old papers I've handed in and writing a long summary of my work
(though you can if you'd like :) ), because the professors here seem
to barely glance at the forms we receive.

I would appreciate it if it could be returned as quickly as possible,
as I need to be able to get together everything ASAP for my own
graduation. If it's convenient for you, it would actually be better
if you could just fax the form to our Study Abroad office at the
following number:

+1 626 796 3590

Thanks for filling out the form, and thanks also for the great class;
I enjoyed it a lot,

Jason Yosinski
***************************

...meaning I finally finished my 4E11 paper, after spending far too
much time on something that at most one person will ever read.

Matlab: 1 Me: 0

2006-04-15T19:18:00.000-07:00

Times I've installed Matlab in the last day: 4

R14 SP3 (newer than my SP2)
R2006a (oh look, an even newer one!)
R14 SP3 (oh but now they screwed up X11, better try older one)
R14 SP2 (not old enough yet.. back to SP2...)

and each time... a 1.5G download!

just one paragraph

2006-03-17T07:40:00.000-08:00

is all i'm going to write... then i'll go do my laundry. I think i'll
even time myself...

ok... well it took me 38 minutes... to write actually two paragraphs..
165 words....

so... i have 1000 words now.. if i need 2000 more... that's... 7 hours
and 40 minutes!!!!!!

so much!!! maybe i'll just go to bed now.......*siigh*

while 'doing' my 4e7 paper...

2006-03-17T06:56:00.000-08:00

why is it that right now i just reallllyyyyyy want to do my laundry,
or to pack, or to do any other mundane chore? anything but my paper?
i also remember ealier in the term... actually really enjoying just
cleaning up my room, and now i also am excited to do.... my senior
thesis, my own laser scanner thing, hang gliding, and to find a job.
and yet other times i'm just dead inside, not wanting to do any of
these things... i don't know what the huge difference is... i should
come back and read this next time i'm feeling more depressed about my
whole life.

osh

2005-10-03T17:21:00.000-07:00

soo much to do.... i dont' even know how to make an appropriate todo list..

one of the things is 'import photos'... why don't they make picasa for mac?!?!?!? WHHWHHYYYY!!!??!?!?! i tried importing stuff into iPhoto, but it just sucks sooo much! whoever designed iPhoto should be shot... some mac programs are kind of nice, but sometimes it seems they TRY to make them hard to use... it's not a lack of features so much as things they deliberately ADD to make it hard to use.

i hate computers.

moving

2005-09-03T14:20:00.000-07:00

i'm moving just downstairs to avery 140.. gonna be living with harold for this next year... gosh, it's really hard to fit all my stuff in; somehow it seems like i have even less space here than in the tiny single i had over the summer... oh well.. ryan's living next door at the moment, so i have great wireless ;), though he's moving in a while i guess, so i'll have to find something else then.

next up: get the projector mounted somehow in lower fish bowl, move the couch into my room, get a computer for movies/music in LFB, discuss UCC plans with harold :)

"Advice to a Girl," by Thomas Campion

2005-08-28T10:42:00.000-07:00

Saw this in the intro to a cookbook :)

Never love unless you can
Bear with all the faults of man!
Men sometimes will jealous be
Though but little cause they see,
And hang the head as discontent,
And speak what straight they will repent.

Men, that but one Saint adore,
Make a show of love to more;
Beauty must be scorned in none,
Though but truly served in one:
For what is courtship but disguise?
True hearts may have dissembling eyes.

Men, when their affairs require,
Must awhile themselves retire;
Sometimes hunt, and sometimes hawk,
And not ever sit and talk:
If these and such-like you can bear,
Then like, and love, and never fear!

Adam's Wedding

2005-08-27T22:18:00.000-07:00

The wedding was today.. it' was pretty nice.. we had a lot of fun with it. actually just the last like 2 days have been really fun... so much really good food that i didn't have to pay for at all :)

Should have some good pics of the proceedings... someday...

nark

2005-08-09T22:44:00.000-07:00

well... i worked all day today... and resolved a total of one bug :-D

though, to be fair, it was the "let individual modules log at their own levels" bug.. which was a bit of a pain to implement... i swear, every time i look at my code, i see how i would do it differently next time... maybe that means i'm getting better at it? ;)

one can hope..... one can hope....

dang it worked!

2005-08-07T19:33:00.000-07:00

that was too easy.... :-O

Posting from my new Powerbook

2005-08-07T19:32:00.000-07:00

So I got a powerbook 12" the other day... i really like it so far :). Anyway, if you've never used one, it has this pretty cool thing called a dashboard... basically you push F12 or put your mouse in one corner of the screen and it slides into view... giving you access to lots of little 'widgets' that you download. One of them is a blogger poster that lets you just type in a quick message. Hopefully it works... well if you see this, then I guess it did :)

A Lecture Upon the Shadow

2005-07-26T15:36:00.000-07:00

[one of my favorite poems, by one of my favorite poets]

Stand still, and I will read to thee
A lecture, love, in love's philosophy.
These three hours that we have spent,
Walking here, two shadows went
Along with us, which we ourselves produc'd.
But, now the sun is just above our head,
We do those shadows tread,
And to brave clearness all things are reduc'd.
So whilst our infant loves did grow,
Disguises did, and shadows, flow
From us, and our cares; but now 'tis not so.
That love has not attain'd the high'st degree,
Which is still diligent lest others see.

Except our loves at this noon stay,
We shall new shadows make the other way.
As the first were made to blind
Others, these which come behind
Will work upon ourselves, and blind our eyes.
If our loves faint, and westwardly decline,
To me thou, falsely, thine,
And I to thee mine actions shall disguise.
The morning shadows wear away,
But these grow longer all the day;
But oh, love's day is short, if love decay.
Love is a growing, or full constant light,
And his first minute, after noon, is night.

-- John Donne

This poem elegantly illustrates an often overlooked dynamic of relationships, though recently I've been convinced that there certainly can be more to the story.

bPlanner + Harry

2005-07-23T20:41:00.000-07:00

Well, I started coding the planner... which I've temporarily named 'bPlanner'. I guess the b is for binary, or beams, or maybe backup ;) heh. Haven't made a horrific amount of progress, but getting there... spent a while trying to get some tricky preprocessor stuff working.

Oh, and here's a pic of Harry. Harry and his parents, Brian and Erna Stoltz, live in Avery with me... unfortunately they're moving out next year, mostly because Caltech housing is stupid (that's the abbreviated version).

Oh, and I stole this pic from Fiona.

mmm...sleeepp....

2005-07-16T15:10:00.000-07:00

Yeah, just woke up and took a shower after sleeping for a looong time.... (ok, so like 8 1/2 hours.... but still). Before that I was up for 42 1/2 of the last 45 1/2 hours, so I really needed it.

Anyway, the SURF's going well; I talked to Joel Burdick and John Hall, and they both gave me some really good ideas for the new planner (which still needs a name...suggestions?). I still have to do my first SURF report (which was due a while ago, and now Richard might be getting antsy). I'm almost done - just need a few more paragraphs - though actually I decided that the report should basically be a big picture rather than a bunch of nasty words (nasty words which I'd have to spend a lot of time writing). I'll post the whole thing here later (can you put up ps/pdf files on here?)

Oh, and later today I'm going to Union Station with the Y... I'll let you know how that turns out :)

2005-07-11T01:21:00.000-07:00

update: only 5 bugs now, and they're all timber related. at least i'm done with all the rddfPathGen ones (yay for legacy code, even if it's mine)

millions of buu-uugs

2005-07-10T10:17:00.000-07:00

buuugs for me; millions of buu-uuugs, wish they were free.

Actually only 9 that are mine, and 37 that i need to care about at all.... but still - i think i know what i'll be working on today :)

2005-07-05T23:35:00.000-07:00

yawwnwn... somehow that was a tiring day... didn't do all that much though?

hung out with smaranda for a bit... she seemed a bit distant though... perhaps just hurt.

oh, and i called rach back, and she *somehow* swindled me into getting up early tomorrow to come hang out with her... :)

night world!

$1666.67

2005-07-05T12:48:00.000-07:00

WOOOOOOTTT! Got paid today... boy do i need that money...

should go talk to john hall about splines later today...

I'm Back

2005-07-05T02:02:00.000-07:00

:)

Well, CO was lots of fun, but now I'm back in cali... i know this because my car is fast again, and gas is close to $3.

Anyway, the madness starts tomorrow morning at 11... some sort of kick off meeting for the W4 test. Before I get too busy, I'll try to put up pics from my motorcycling adventure and the formal pics that are still absent....

ok, cya... and let me know how all of your summers are going!

Get blog updates via Atom feeds

2005-06-29T21:34:00.000-07:00

I found another cool feature of Blogger blogs: you can publish them via Atom feeds (similar to RSS feeds). For example, to see mine, enter this URL into any Atom feed... uhhhh...thingy:

http://sicvitaest.blogspot.com/atom.xml

The only thing I use which displays site feeds is gmail... but still, it's kind of nice to be able to see people's most recent posts at the top of gmail instead of those annoying adds... to set it up in gmail, click `Settings', then `Web Clips', then `Add more clips', then `Custom Clips', then just paste the url into the box, click ok or something, and you're good to go :)

Oh, and if you dont' use gmail, you definitly should... but you need an invitation. If you want one, let me know, and we'll have you using 2.3 gigs of storage in no time at all.

Mount Elbert

2005-06-24T15:48:00.000-07:00

When climbing mountains in Colorado, be sure to start early enough to make it to the top by noon. Or so they say. The motivation here is that right around noon is when the clouds form at the top of mountains, and usually it rains and lightnings a bit - generally less than optimal weather to be hiking in.

Enter my family: my dad, two sisters (Kati and Shari), and myself. Two days before, we got it into our heads that we should climb a mountain while I was back from college, and somehow decided on Mount Elbert, the highest mountain in Colorado (third highest on this continent). It seemed pretty reasonable at the time - looking at some info online revealed that it should be an easier hike than Pike's Peak, which I had hiked twice before (once up Barr trail, and once up the back). Super.

I got up at 4, after a decent night's sleep, and got ready. We were supposed to leave at 5, but ended up missing that by 45 minutes or so. The drive was supposed to take about 3 hours, so we were planning on getting there and starting the hike at 8. Then we stopped at the Donut Mill for a while on the way, and got 'lost' for a little bit (because there are two trails up Mt. Elbert, and there was some discussion over which one we wanted). Suffice it to say, we didn't start actually hiking until 10:25 :). Yeah yeah, but it's a nice sunny day and all, and the hike isn't actually that long, right...?

So we start hiking. First hundred feet or so.... ok, not so bad.

Just enough to tempt you to continue. After than it was more like climbing miles and miles of stairs, but without the stairs. To illustrate, here's my ASCII art rendition of Mount Elbert:
Seriously: steep nasty. I know what you're thinking... "Of course that looks steep, because / and \ are really the only characters you can use to draw a hill!" I suppose that's true... lets just say it was a lot closer to a / than a _ .

After two hours or so, we broke the tree line, which was at 12,000 feet. Part of the printout we brought (with directions and stuff) mentioned, regarding this part of the hike "It is at this point you will get your first nice glimpse of a false summit on the horizon. At this point, we would like to recommend that you begin to continually remind yourself about how much fun you are having. You still have over two miles and about 2,500 feet of elevation gain to go!"

(pics - my dad, me, and a really fat marmot)

Yeah... good advice. I'm not sure how to fully describe the difficulty of those last two miles - any words I write would just be an understatement. We'd climb up 200 feet, then stop for a minute, then climb 200 more... stop again...etc... Some three grueling hours later, we made it to the top. It was 2:45 and we were at 14,433 feet. I was pretty happy to have made it, and the view was amazing. All around us were huge snow covered mountains, but the cool thing is: they were all below us. ;)
(pics - some mountains around us; my dad and me; the gps, showing 14.5 k feet)

We got a few pictures, but didn't have time for too many, because of what happened next. The clouds had been gathering for some time now, as you can see in the pictures. At first it started to snow, which was kinda cool, given that this is the middle of June. We got a few more pictures and agreed that it would be best to head down soon, so we wouldn't be caught in a blizzard at the top of the mountain. I started packing up my stuff, when I heard this buzzing sound. I didn't really know what it was - it sounded like a beetle or something, but I didn't pay much attention. Then it started buzzing louder, and it sounded like it was in my hair. I tried brushing it out of my hair, but the buzzing continued. It was then that I noticed my sister doing the same thing, and saying something like "What's with all this static electricity?" I think all four of us simultaneously thought/said "OH CRAP! LIGHTNING!" Well gee, that makes sense: it's snowing, we're in the middle of the clouds that the snow is coming from, and we're at the highest point for thousands of miles around... well NOW I see why Mr. Lightning might have taken a fancy to our little locale.

We grabbed our stuff and started running down the mountain... That annoying buzzing sound on my head, which I now realized was a bunch of sparks, got louder and started hurting... though if I ran with my hand on my head, it made it stop sparking. Side note: running and jumping over rocks in a snowstorm to avoid being struck by lightning is more interesting if you have your hand on your head.

Probably a half mile later we were clearly off the peak, and felt a bit safer. The wind and snow had died down as a result of the lower elevation, and we rested for a bit. It only took us two hours to get down, partly because it was downhill and partly because our adrenaline had kindly invited itself to our little party.

So: Next time you go hiking, be sure to start early, and if you plan on using a metal walking stick, you'll probably want to abandon it a few hundred feet from the top :)

and i am outa here!

2005-06-19T08:10:00.000-07:00

after an exhausting term (year?), i'm finally headed home :) it'll be a long drive (17 hours), but worth it... now i just need to make sure i don't fall asleep. hopefully i'll have some good pics to put up from my trip.

i'll be back in ~2 weeks (july 5th i think)

sionora!

earthquake :)... and MIT sucks...

2005-06-12T11:36:00.000-07:00

soo..."interesting" story.... went to bed last night at 4 or whatever, was woken UP at 6:30, by some nasty annoying beeping....sat in bed for a few minutes, not really sure what was going on. once i was fully awake, i realized that something outside my room was beeping, so i wandered into the hall, half naked and three-quarters blind of course), to find that they cut the power to Avery during construction, and the beeping was something associated with the elevator telling us "OH NO THE POWER'S GONE." and then 1.2 seconds later "OH NO THE POWER'S GONE." and then again.... If you think it's annoying to read that, you get about 8% of how annoying it was to hear it. so i pushed some red button, which closed the fire door over the elevator. but still with the beeping. so...it had battery backup power, or the door wouldn't have closed, but still was whining...stupid "engineers" should never have been allowed to graduate. probably from MIT.

haha... while we're on the topic of MIT sucking (and we were, trust me)...MIT sucks... so a few days ago DARPA had a press release where they...um...'released'.. the list of who qualified for the Qualifiers near the end of summer. qualifying for qualifiers...kinda weird...basically they cut it from 118 teams down to 40. So I'm reading through the list...dum de dum...well WE MADE IT :), ok let's see who else... Cornell got in, Stanford,CMU, Axion (with their infamous 'racing twins'), but lo and behold... MIT dissapoints once again (the first time was their painful excuse of a retaliation prank on us). Heck, even Palos Verdes High School's team made it.

Oh yeah, back on topic.... need to go.....quick summary then: there was beeping , and i couldn't sleep, so i went to sleep elsewhere, and at 9 or so i thought someone was kind of rocking my bed back and forth, trying to get me to wake up or something, but then i was told it was an earthquake. hehe...what a cute little earthquake. it was really subtle.... at first i didnt' feel it at all actually.

ok that was the executive summary version :)

lakjsdflkajsldfkjalskfdj

2005-06-12T03:23:00.000-07:00

yeah, you heard me. "lakjsdflkajsldfkjalskfdj" is the word of the week. been realllly really busy, but now it's slowing down. actually had time to go to the beach today, which was pretty cool. we cooked korean bbq over the fire, which was rather awesome. finals are over, my (horrible) paper has been turned in, and now i just hae 18 units of documentation left to do :) i guess i'll start on that tomorrow....and get timber working.... yeah. tired. going to bed.

friends

2005-06-07T03:55:00.000-07:00

heh... i love my friends... whenever i stop to think about it, i realize that the friends i've been blessed with are really far too good; they just seems so disproportionate to what i deserve.

now that you mention it, i was half-whining to someone just a few days ago about how all my friends these days are so caught up in their own little worlds to actually go have any fun, to the point that i have to *drag* them along (it seems) and force them to enjoy a little bit of life, but then of course they always have fun anyway, but tonight it was me who was "working" on 104, and them that dragged me away, which was really nice. i wonder if if was really nice because it happens so infrequently, or if i just usually don't even notice...

Lotsa pics, beach

2005-06-03T21:37:00.000-07:00

Ok, so there are a lot of pics.... They were actually really easy to post with Hello and Picasa... though if I had a large mass of pictures (like I in fact do) then I'd really want a more organized way of getting them on the web, ala those automatic photo album creating things that so many of my friends have...

But I believe it's time to go work some more on Timber, which needs to be done by....later...tonight...ish. Can't wait to start finals later this weekend... siigh :-P

Ok ok, one more story... So last night, I was "doing my 95 homework" (we've already discussed what that really means), and I've gotta be honest with ya, it was VERY LAME. A wise friend of mine, Alex, reminded me that this set only counted for 3% of my final grade in 95, by comparison, I estimated that I would spend .003% of my life on it. The question then becomes: during the course of my life, do I hope to accomplish more or less than the equivalent of 1000 classes in Applied and Computational Mathematics? The answer wasn't very long in coming, and I decided I'd rather be at the beach. So I talked to Steph, and she seemed to share my opinion on the relative importance of doing math, so we decided to go. I tried to get some other people to go, namely Alex, Geoff, and Fiona(san), but they were apparently too caught up in various riveting problem sets of their own, already too committed to be torn away. Of course I type their names here so that it will be preserved for posterity the horrible choice they made on June 2, 2005.

Once I went to Ruddock to retrieve the Stephanie, she started having a slight change of heart, probably because her 116 final was due the next day. So she decided that we should just drive around for a while, which sounded alright to me. In the end, we went to Denny's, and of course spent just as many hours away from Tech as we would have if we had went to the beach. Somehow I knew it would work out like that, but of course I didn't tell Steph, or she never would have come ;). You really just have to lead people on, little by little...it's like that frog that you boil slowly in the pot of water, or people think that if they just eat lots of halves of pieces of cake, they somehow don't count.

2005-06-03T21:18:00.000-07:00

Aaannddd... a weird looking cactus guy from Huntington Gardens.

2005-06-03T21:17:00.000-07:00

Sunrise, taken from my roof in CO. Good story... actually Steph and I drove from Cali back to Colorado for Christmas, and we were supposed to get in sometime around midnight or 1am or something, but as you can see, that didn't really happen...but the sunrise was really nice :)

2005-06-03T21:15:00.001-07:00

Random cool tree in Yosemite.

2005-06-03T21:15:00.000-07:00

Sunset; taken from my roof in CO.

2005-06-03T21:14:00.000-07:00

My friend Qinzi, looking for a skipping stone at lake Arrrowhead last year. That was a really fun trip...I snowboarded...and all my friends slid down the mountain on their butts, probably because I wasn't a very good instructor?? ;)

2005-06-03T21:13:00.000-07:00

My friend Matt (in pic) and I go to New Mexico every summer, "just because". It's a lot of fun... especially the cliff diving.

2005-06-03T21:10:00.000-07:00

Sunflower in my front yard in Colorado

neeeedd some sleep

2005-06-02T06:17:00.000-07:00

Check in message from 30 seconds ago:

wooot revision 100 ;)
[2005-06-02 6:16:46 am] yeah, it's about that time! but i'm going to bed.
minor changes. majorly tired.

--This line, and those below, will be ignored--
M lab5/SparseMatrix.cc
M lab5/Makefile
....
Sending lab5/Makefile
Sending lab5/SparseMatrix.cc
Transmitting file data ..
Committed revision 100.

good night mary jane.

Why am I in class?

2005-05-31T15:21:00.000-07:00

[2005-05-31 2:24:32 pm]

yawwwwn... in cds 104 now, gotta love how we go over in class what we did on the homework a week and a half ago. didn't really even want to go, but supposedly they're doing some sort of course evaluation or something, and they really wanted us to show up. roight.

need to go get my course credit form for `Module 3F6 - Software Engineering and Design' signed after this, then off to the post office to try (again) to get a passport. which i need by.... tomorrow, june 1. why do i need it tomorrow?, well, the study abroad office wants it by tomorrow, because i'll be travelling in 7 months. makes perfect sense. nonono, thank YOU study abroad office.

plans for the next few days:

do last writeup for hum119, due at 6 pm
go to 95 review tonight at 7
finish 95 (starting tonight, due probaly by thur at 5)
work on logger (and come up with a better name for it... suggestions?)
figure out what the heck i need to do to get the planner to run
actually turn in cs11
start looking at cds 104 final project

siigh....class is boring... though if i ever start a band, i think i'll call it `jason and the supercritical
pitchfork bifurcations'

the 95 blues

2005-05-30T21:48:00.000-07:00

Well, I finally did this whole blogging thing. I remember I used to like writing things "just for the fun of it"... usually funny emails or whatnot....hopefully this'll be a good outlet for that sort of thing.

Why now you ask....welll....I'm doing 95, and by "doing 95" i of course mean "not doing 95".... well now smaranda's here, so i'm not only not doing 95, im' also not actually writing anything.... thank you, salsamander

back to whatever. right...blogs...kinda like journals, where you write your deepest and most private thoughts....but then 7 billion people can read them.... soo....not like a journal. we'll just have to see how it works out.

95 though...really....