FHead's blog

Personality disorder test

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 05:30:00 +0000

I don't know what this is for or where this is from, but I've seen a friend taking this, so I think I might give it a try...

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid Personality Disorder:	Low
Schizoid Personality Disorder:	Moderate
Schizotypal Personality Disorder:	Moderate
Antisocial Personality Disorder:	Low
Borderline Personality Disorder:	Moderate
Histrionic Personality Disorder:	Moderate
Narcissistic Personality Disorder:	Moderate
Avoidant Personality Disorder:	Very High
Dependent Personality Disorder:	High
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder:	Low
-- Take the Personality Disorder Test -- -- Personality Disorder Info --

Avoidant personality disorder? Hmm...

Clicking the link, there is some explanation:

"Avoidant personality disorder is characterized by extreme social anxiety. People with this disorder often feel inadequate, avoid social situations, and seek out jobs with little contact with others. Avoidants are fearful of being rejected and worry about embarassing themselves in front of others. They exaggerate the potential difficulties of new situations to rationalize avoiding them. Often, they will create fantasy worlds to substitute for the real one. Unlike schizoid personality disorder, avoidants yearn for social relations yet feel they are unable to obtain them. They are frequently depressed and have low self-confidence."

and symptoms:

Social inhibition; retreating from others in anticipation of rejection
Preoccupation with being rejected or criticized in social situations
Fear of embarrassment results in avoidance of new activities
Poor self-image; feelings of social ineptitude
Desire for improved social relations
Appear to others as self-involved and unfriendly
Creation of elaborate fantasy lives

And about depedent personality disorder

"Dependent personality disorder is characterized by a need to be taken care of. People with this disorder tend to cling to people and fear losing them. They may become suicidal when a break-up is imminent. They tend to let others make important decisions for them and often jump from relationship to relationship. Dependents often remain in abusive relationships. Over-sensitivity to disapproval is common. Dependents often feel helpless and depressed."

Symptoms:

Difficulty making decisions
Feelings of helplessness when alone
Suicidal thoughts upon rejection
Submissiveness
Deeply hurt by mild criticism or disapproval
Unable to meet ordinary demands of life

It's pretty accurate and not just some random psychological texts. Maybe I do need some help. Let me try the recommended books in the links first.

Some advice to computer programming

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 19:51:00 +0000

Computer is more and more important nowadays. Even if you're not doing work directly related to computers, it's still useful to have the tool ready. It speeds up a lot of things. Before you dig into programming, these are a few general things that I wish I had known when I started learning how to program, and I want to share with you.

The real challenge (and fun) of programming is to think about how to distribute resources between different parts, and how to "speak" an algorithm in a comprehensive way to both computers and humans.

Efficient programming is an interplay between development cost, execution cost (how long the program runs) and maintainance cost. It's not good for any of them to be too time-consuming, especially maintainance, which is usually overlooked in classes that teach you how to program. For new programmers, they will probably be struggling with making the code work. But once you go past this barrier, usually what you will find is a lot of little tricks that are either cool-looking or those that make execution cost a bit lower, while leaving the code hard to read. This is one big trap for inexperienced programmers. Unless you are writing programs that have a tight time budget or memory budget, it's usually a good idea to exchange a little bit of execution efficiency for readability and easiness for maintainace. Take C++ for example, there is this code fragment

int x = 10; // x and y are two integers

int y = 35;

x ^= y ^= x ^= y; // "^" is xor operator

The last line is nothing but swapping the content of the two variables. If somebody hasn't seen this trick, it will be hard to understand what is going on. And imagine several hundred lines of this kind of stuff. After a few months even the programmer himself will have a hard time understanding the code.

Adopt a coding style and stick to it. This includes the format/spacing of the code, choice of variable names, remember to release memory, etc. Avoid incomprehensive variable names. Make the variable names speak for itself. The size of the source code might differ a bit, but it's already 21st century. A few kb is nothing, and it doesn't make any difference once the code compiles. But it makes your code a lot easier to read. Sticking to a coding style can also decrease your debugging time.

Use comments to document what you wrote. It might take some time to write the comments, but it will ultimately save a lot of time in code maintainance. One good strategy is, before actual coding, write down the flow of algorithm in comments, for example a list of things to do in the order of execution. Then fill the code in between comments. It's usually more efficient this way as you don't have to keep all the details of the algorithm in your memory.

Spend most of the time thinking about what to do rather than going into coding directly. Write a short summary of programming plan if needed. Most of the time, the inefficiency of coding comes from not knowing exactly what to do. It's also more error-prone if you're not completely sure what you are doing. For example, you can start by thinking about what the big parts in the algorithm are. How should one present the idea in terms of code? Then you can try to think how to break the process down to simple pieces. There are usually some parts that are used again and again, and it's good to have them as a separated function. A pretty nice way I found is to write a function for each major part of the code. Then in the main function it might look like the following. (Don't care too much about the syntax if you don't know C++, but just get a feel of how one could approach programming.)

int main() // program starts here

{

ReadData(....); // Calls a function that reads in data

Initialize(....); // Calls a function that does initialization

while(CheckIfDone(....) == false) // if not done....

DoOneIteration(....); // do one more iteration

PrintResults(....);

CleanUp(....); // clean-up the memory

return 0; // end the program

}

This way you won't get a "spaghetti" code which has everything in it in a long stream of codes. It's pretty self-explanatory too. And note the empty lines between codes of different functionality. It's an example of the coding style that makes things easier to maintain. Of course you still need to implement the functions, but it's much better to focus on one thing at a time.

Learn some basic algorithms, and familiarize yourself with some basic graph theory. And think a lot. There is a good website (http://train.usaco.org/usacogate) that helps you develop basic algorithmic knowledge. It will be some solid hands-on experience. The reality is cruel. A good algorithm can run a lot faster than mediocre algorithms. It could easily be thousands times or more. The more you know, the more efficient you can command the computers to work.

Be familiar with the tools that are available. This includes the standard libraries that comes with the compiler for example. It's not only a problem with rewriting codes that are already there, the point is that the tool you use determines how you will think about a problem.

I hope this helps, even if you don't get everything rightaway. I won't say that these are the exact guidelines, but they are certainly things for you to think about. There is some chance that you will work on a larger-scale project, and these kind of things will start to really pay off. It's good to have the habit of better-quality coding. And before you know it, you'll like programming instead of cursing all the time why your code is not working.

--FHead, 2009 Aug. 20 at Geneva, Switzerland

Rather depressed lately....

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 23:01:00 +0000

Data-taking phase of the experiment has ended, and now it's all analysis. Which means that I have to sit in front of the computer the whole time. It's fine by itself, but over time it can be annoying if one continues to do so continually.

The progress....is not so good in my opinion. A lot of work has been put in coordination in software (nothing to do with physics in this part), and it took way longer than it really should. Now finally the real analysis starts rolling, and I got some preliminary result. Only preliminary. And it's been more than 3 weeks.

A bigger problem is probably that I don't know how much work is okay. I keep advancing, but I don't know whether my progress is considered, by other, slacking off or not. And since most of the work are groundwork to setup for analysis, I don't really have anything big yet. It makes me nervous.

Another thing is that we don't have a clear analysis plan. I was told that the plan was forming, but then, now, after three weeks, all I got is some suggestions of the things that might be interesting to look at. I feel like I'm walking in the dark. I can't really see where to go, yet I try to find something useful. And lately I've been feeling burned down, so exhausted that after work the only thing I want to do is get some rest and do literally nothing.

So, the things I wanted to do over the summer in my free time have been stalled for a while. I can't just waste time here, but really, I feel like I'm kidnapped and don't really have a choice. And I got an email just now, "FHead can give a short update on very interesting analysis". Sigh. I want a break. And please let me accumulate more stuff before making me give a presentation.

On top of all that, the relatively simple environment gives me a good amount of time facing myself. There is a big portion of solitude in everyday life. Working, eating, sleeping, and repeat. The busy work doesn't make it better. I hope it did, but instead it just makes me feel more lonely. Just like the old days when I just started undergraduate study. There are things that you think are gone already, but in these moments when you are all by yourself, they will come back and haunt you.

Maybe I should just take a couple of days off and go travel somewhere. There are tons of places I wanted to visit. Really, I can't just waste time burning myself with work and work alone.

One episode of life at CERN, random scribbles

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 20:35:00 +0000

Day 1

I'm at the CERN main site. Never been to the Prevessin site before. Looking at the map, it appears to be not far away. Let's walk. 30 Minutes later, I'm still not there. Did I walk in the wrong direction? Let me return to the main site and look at the map one more time.

Day 2

Tatiana is drilling holes to make the structure to hold the motherboards. Halil and I are working on the power cable. It seems that the cable is too short, so we have to make longer ones. Tom and Paul are testing the motherboard. Some key functions of the motherboard do not work. They are trying to fix the problem. Not too much luck. It's late already. Let's go home and resume tomorrow.

Day 5

Luckily the problem is fixed. There are more problems, but we don't have time. We do some quick tests until midnight. Now let's move to the experiment site and install the system.

It's four in the morning and the installation almost finished. Time to go home.

Day 7

We've taken some data the previous day. For some reason the data plots don't look quite right. Let's look at the data more closely.....and.....oh no. We've got a problem. There is a serious bug in the data unpacking code. Fixed it. Resume data taking.

Day 8

Our names are on the shift table for some reason. Who signed us up? Well, it's us who will be taking data, so I guess it's fair. The only problem is that the shift is from midnight to 8 in the morning. Hmm. No sleep tonight then.

Day 8 midnight

The new settings of the electronics worked miraculously. We don't know exactly why it worked suddenly, but since it works right now, let's don't take risk to reinitialize the system again. I have to stay awake. Guu! More coffee. At around 4am, Chris kindly let us two go back to sleep, and he'll try to grab the other two students for the next several hours. Zzz....

Day 9

There isn't really much to do today. Data taking is done. All we have to do is to disconnect part of the system. In the evening there's the Hardronic festival. It's so geeky. One have to buy baryons (tickets) to get food. Played some frisbee. Had some beer. Had a way-too-spicy sandwich. It's not good at all. I'm very sleepy for some reason. Let's sleep all day tomorrow.

CERN Saint-genis hostel

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:46:00 +0000

It's a nice place, by first sight. After a few days, I started to notice a lot of inconveniences.

Severity	Item
Light	No vending machines around the building
Light	Bugs at night.
Light	30-minute walk to CERN
Light	Can't eat or store food in room, only in kitchen
Medium	No elevator. Moving in/out is a pain.
Medium	No cable internet, wireless connection extremely unstable
Medium	Hot, no air conditioning
Medium	No noise after 10 pm, ie. no shower, no laundry, etc.
Medium	No lid on toilet. No seat either.
Medium	Reception opening hours is short.
Severe	No trash can anywhere in public area in the building. This includes kitchen, toilet, etc. (ps. One has to take the trash out of the building immediately after cooking.) (ps2. I live in 4-th floor)
Severe	Washing machine is expensive!
Lethal	Single washing machine (and dryer) shared by 80 people. (This, combined with the 10pm thing.....)

C'est la vie.

(ps. the internet connection almost make me lose this article. Good thing that I copied the text to gedit as I type)

First couple of days in Geneva~

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:54:00 +0000

So, this second time I got on the flight without too much trouble...but there are still some. First in the line comes the flight to Zürich. It was an 11 to 12 hour flight. I couldn't possibly sleep for that long, so entertainment is important. Luckily, every seat in the plane is equipped with a small screen where we can watch movie, play video games, et cetera. The good thing about it is that the starting time of the movie is not fixed; it's not broadcasted from some place, so we can enjoy the movies any time we want. The unlucky side of it is that shortly after I sit down, the screen fell out from the back of the seat. I believe that it's not supposed to happen. Then it got a quick fix:

after a while, the fix got upgraded so that I can watch a movie:

The upgraded version was not tight enough, and it fell out again later:

as a result I only managed to watch the first half of a French movie (called "the other one")....

The second flight got delayed for some non-obvious reasons, and it was more than half an hour late. And so I missed the opening time of the reception of the hostel I'm going to live in. By two minutes. Oops. "They're closing 5 minutes earlier anyways," I was told by Chris from the same group, who kindly came to the airport and picked me up, "it's France." As a temporary solution, I was placed in the USCMS house, where they have an empty sofa and some empty-looking rooms. "Wait until the evening and see if anyone is using the rooms." If not, I can sneak in and sleep on one of the beds. I don't like to be surprised at midnight so I slept on the sofa in the end.

The next day, I got an email from my advisor. "You cannot do that." The waiting list is huge and if I didn't show up on time (the day before), chances are that my room will be given to somebody else. Meow! After a while (walking back and forth), I finally checked in with the guard at CERN, and got the room key. It's a pretty nice room:

though it would be better if they have cable internet access.... There are more to come in a later post about the hostel. Settled with housing stuff, now it's time to do some (boring) paperwork and to take some radiation safety courses~ And hopefully I can start doing research early next week.

(written on Sunday with no network connection)

And so the dust settles....

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:05:00 +0000

I am traveling to Geneva in the summer. Here are a list of FAQ for reference.

Q: Why are you cleaning the room?
A: I'll be in Geneva for more than two months, and I don't want to pay rent here.

Q: It's not a big deal.
A: Yes it is. It is a big project and very time-consuming. I have way too many things accumulated over the course of 5 years in the USA. If I pack everything into 18'' cube boxes, it can be well over 25 boxes. I can't just put everything in the boxes since that is essentially just postponing the packing to a later date. I have to deal with it sooner or later.

Q: Oh no.
A: Luckily I finished my second qualification exam last year, so I had some free time to take care of them. Human-powered sorting is hard. I really hoped that I had a robot to take care of everything. The room is small, so I spent a lot of time playing Freecell Solitaire to help learning how to pile things up while sorting through my stuff.

Q: Is that why it took this long?
A: Let's move to the next question.

Q: Why are you still on campus? Aren't you supposed to be gone by Monday?
A: I was supposed to go from here to Montreal, and then from there to Geneva. Unfortunately I didn't realize that I needed a transit visa, even though I just stayed in the airport for a few hours. They say that it depends on the airport. Some airport (like the one in Toronto if I'm not mistaken) allows traveler to move on without needing a transit visa. This is my first time to apply for a transit visa, and it just didn't dawn on me that I would need one. I certainly didn't apply for a visa in Japan numerous times in the past.

Q: So you can't board the plane. What happened afterward?
A: I went back to campus from the airport, and did a lot of things all in one day. The flight was early in the morning, so I didn't sleep the night before. I really don't know how I can stay awake the whole time. Let me provide the list of things I did.

Went to housing office to move check-out time to a later date. If I failed to do this early enough in the morning, my room will be cleaned and locked since officially I have checked out already.
Check the website for estimated processing time for the visa if I'm going to get one. 1 to 28 days. What.....
Went on to notify people in the lab. Explained what happened and searched for alternative plane ticket. It's expensive!
Another person came, so I explained again. She tried to see if I can still get on the same flight in another date, and it looked possible. The only problem is that I need to get the visa. Through phone call we can't really get any information, so I have to go to the consulate in person. She provided me a plead-for-help letter.
I went to the consulate. It's not as far as the Swiss consulate, but it's still around downtown area, and therefore took more than one hour just to get there. The visa section was closed, but the gentleman over there said that I can get the visa the same day I submitted it. Woo-hoo~ I also got a checklist for visa application.
Now I just need the plane ticket so I hurried back to campus.
It's almost 5pm, nobody will be around after that time. From the checklist I need to go to the international students office to get a signature. Done.
It's closer to 5pm than before! I hurried to the lab and found out that the lady in charge of booking plane tickets has left already. Oops. I'd have to wait until Tuesday.

That was the day before dinner. It was crazy.

Q: So you went to sleep early in the evening?
A: Not really. After dinner with friends, I'm studying with a friend for her qualification exam on Tuesday until late in the evening. Afterwards I was preparing the visa application forms.

Q: Do you get a visa today (Tuesday)?
A: I was going to apply for it, so I went to the lab and tried to book the ticket with the lady. Unfortunately I can't postpone the original flight, so we have to find another flight. And as a result I don't need the transit visa anymore. I should've slept more the night before.

Q: That would cost a lot of money.
A: Thanks to Betty, who told the airline company some kind of sob story and we got most of our money back. Incredible. If it was me who was negotiating, I probably would end up losing the money. Well, it's a flight ticket where you didn't board. I wasn't expecting that we can get back anything at all.

Q: What's next?
A: So the new flight is on Thursday, before when I have to somehow decrease the weight of my luggage. It's currently overweight by 5 kg or so. But, finally, I can sit back and take a rest....

Transformer (IMAX)

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:17:00 +0000

I went to see the popular Transformer movie last evening with some friends. The movie is famous for its special effects, so we watched the IMAX version. The screen is large, and the audio effect is great. The only thing is that we came in too late, and there's only seats in the front row left. And this, causes my experience last night to be extremely bad.

The camera is shaking like crazy all the time, and if I tried to stare at the screen for more than 5 minutes in a row I felt as if I was going to vomit. What makes things worse is that the front row is way too close to the bottom of the screen. For somebody sitting in the left half of the row cannot possibly see the top-left corner of the screen without hurting his/her neck. I was fortunate that I didn't sit in the center (of front row). I figure that the top center part of the screen must be more important. And so, as a result, whenever the robot is transforming, from vehicle to whatever it is, I can't see the whole thing. Plus it's shaking randomly. The theater should really reconsider the design. Every screening, more than 30 people spent their money to enjoy the movie only to find that the back seats are full and their money wasted.

I did follow the plot, more or less. Luckily I wasn't expecting too much. It's more or less the standard storyline one usually see in animations or somewhere else. If not for the special effects, I won't bother to see the movie.

There is also something that bothers me a lot. I didn't read the original work on which this is based, so I might not know the right way to do this, but how can one tell which robot is from which side when a lot of them are battling against each other? I just saw a lot of metal objects flying around and crashing on the ground. The design of the some of the robots also bothers me. They look like a bunch of random metal things joined together to form more-or-less human shape. I remembered that we had transformer toys some 10 years ago (or more), and all of them looked cool, even in robot form.

From my experience last evening, I won't recommend watching it. Don't waste your money. It could be good though, if I sat in a better seat....but I doubt that it would change anything.

Norton Simon Museum

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 04:48:00 +0000

I finished the qualification exam on Tuesday last week, and there are a couple of weeks for me to do visa stuff and preparation for the trip to CERN. It requires me to be around, but it certainly won't take the whole two weeks to finish them. And I searched around the area and found the museum. It's really close by. Why haven't I been there before? It must be like one of those things: people living around a tourist attraction don't visit the place usually. Well, let's give it a try.

I have to admit that I'm really uncultured. I don't know many artists, apart from the extremely famous ones. I don't know how to describe whether a painting is good or not, either. If you want me to write an article about a single painting, I'll simply give up. All I know is whether the work attracts me or not.

Surprisingly, this work by Edgar Degas caught me eye, and made me stand there for five minutes or so. I don't know why, but it is magical to me. Maybe it is the composition. Maybe it is the way the dancer's movement is extended. Then, just a few meters to the right. I really liked this painting, too. In the next room, there is this painting by Claude Monet. Again I was out of words.

Really, I have no idea why it didn't occur to me to come visit the museum before. Maybe it was the illusion that in southern California, one can't go anywhere without a car, and I don't have a car.

I like the place. I will visit again soon.

Essentially done....

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 21:02:00 +0000

Done with my two presentations. The first one went by pretty fast. It's just a lot of math, and there isn't much happening conceptually (thanks to my joint representer, who covers all the conceptual points), so it's easy. The other one is way too vast, and the best I can do is to give an half-an-hour introduction to the field. The lecturer added comments here and there, totalling about 20 minutes, so the 30 minutes became almost an hour. As a result, the original plan, which was to have 4 speakers spending 2 hours, become a bit more than 3 hours in total. Oops.

I'm glad that my part is over in any case. The additional one hour or so is not a big problem.

Officially what's left for me to do to end this term is the final in the neural system class. But since I'm a physics major, I don't really care about the grades in that class. The goal of expanding my horizon has already been achieved. So I'm taking it easy. Maybe reviewing a bit, but I won't go to extremes to memorize everything.

It's party time!!?? ......not really.......qualification exam is coming. #$%@@*#$$#@. It's in a sense more important than everything else. Luckily I've passed one already, so there's only one to go.

Travel arrangement and visa application are also coming. I still need to pack my stuff and put everything in the storage room. I certainly need more time.

Final presentations

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Mon, 25 May 2009 00:25:00 +0000

Although I knew this all along, I'm still overwhelmed by the presentations. Partly due to the fact that I didn't do much work in the past two weeks for some personal reasons, and, now, I have to prepare both presentations in one week. One of them is 15 minutes, and another one half an hour long.

Let's leave the longer one aside. For the shorter one, I didn't have any idea what I will be doing until Wednesday the past week. Fortunately I picked a topic, and the one I got looked really simple when I walked through the calculations last evening. Now the only question is that how I could fit that in 12 minutes or so. (The remaining few minutes are for questions and transitions). It shouldn't be too hard. At least it is manageable. Phew. Suddenly I felt like I removed a heavy stone from my backpack. But there is a bigger one.

The other presentation is/will be a killer. In the beginning I picked one topic that looked manageable from the list provided by the professor. But that one was taken already. I then selected a random one. It looks really interesting, though it's hard to gauge how difficult it is from the title. And, as it turned out, I hit the jackpot. It is one of the hard topics on the list.

The professor then spent about an hour explaining to me what the important aspects are. There are some interesting phenomena, for example, thermal noise, which usually destroys order, will actually induce order in this model. I think I got the big picture, though I'm not sure if I'm able to understand everything in one week. "Normally it could take 3 to 4 lectures to explain the model in detail." Wait, then why do you put this one in the list of topics? Even if I managed to understand everything, will I be able to explain everything in 30 minutes? "You probably will only have time to explain XXX, XXX and XXX." I knew it. I guess I still need to learn everything though. "It's a whole new world in this topic." Okay, I'll try.

On goes my quest to learn things in one week and put everything together in a 30-minute presentation. Starting from the two journal articles given to me, I quickly found a few more articles that I will have to read. Most of them are online and I can easily download them and study. Except one. It is online, but our school doesn't have the subscription for the volume. A hard copy of the journal is in the library, luckily. According to the online catalog, it is located in the subbasement. I need to borrow the key to enter. And....

...there ain't no books here! The door over there is locked, and I don't know where it leads to. It's kind of creepy here. Let's get out of this strange room. "Try again tomorrow," the person in the counter says. What? "I'm not sure where the books are, but the library staff should know." Oh, okay. He's only a student working part-time there. And it's in the evening already. So, I tried again the next day. "It should be upstairs, we moved it a while ago." Dude, please update the online catalog. Seriously.

Now as I read the articles, more and more references keep popping up. I really don't know if I can finish everything in time. Maybe it'll be better if I stop writing this blog post and go back to study. Ahaha. Wish me good luck.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Sad news

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Tue, 19 May 2009 08:16:00 +0000

It stroke the campus pretty hard. One undergraduate student left the world, appearing to have committed suicide. I personally don't know the student, but I know the feeling of people who know him. In my high school days, the class a year above me suffered loss of more than one classmates (out of 40-ish students) in three years, and that was suffocating.

May him rest in peace.

Let me spread some words. My friends, if you ever feel depressed and want to attempt suicide, please don't. Try to talk to somebody, or if there is no one around, I am happy to be the listener. I at least know how it feels to want to disappear from the world without anyone noticing. At least I know how it feels to be depressed for a long period of time but were forced to act as if everything were fine. Maybe I won't be of much help, but at least I think I can understand how you feel. Please, please don't attempt such desperate things. People around you will feel sad. And, even without anything, your heart is pounding. Put your hands on your chest and listen. You are alive.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Birthday

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Sun, 17 May 2009 06:52:00 +0000

It's a bit late, now, to blog about this, that half a month has passed since my birthday.

But nevertheless I think that it's a good idea to write something. I would like to say thank you to everyone who came. The cake was good~~, although it's not well cut~~. The main problem is that there is a layer of mango (?) in the cake, and we only got a soft plastic knife. Unfortunately I wasn't expecting this and didn't have my camera with me, so the above photos are taken by cell phone with lower picture quality. Guu.

My wishes? I sincerely wish that all my friends can be successful and live happily. I wish that I can advance substantially towards my dreams. I wish (*cough*)....this one is supposed to be secret, and I won't say it here.

A lot has happened since then. Something that might turn my life upside down. It has already a huge impact on me, but I don't regret having done so. I am just trying to be true to myself, even though what I did might be terrible to some people. I really don't know. I hope not. But in either case time will clear the fog eventually, and I'm sure things will be fine.

It's such a strange beginning of my new year. Really. I wonder what god has in store for me next.

Sophomore physics lab

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 23:55:00 +0000

The experiments are really interesting. Most of the hard work (designing, building, making sure what you see is what you think you see, etc.) in the experiments are done already, so the students can just enjoy the most rewarding part. So, although the experiments might seem intimidating at the beginning, they are not hard at all. Plus there is a lot of Mathematica programs to help analyzing data, which make things very easy. Just press the button and the program works perfectly.

I really hoped that there are some equivalent introductory lab classes back in my undergraduate days. We didn't have to take lab classes until the third year, but then all of a sudden we had to learn everything. It takes time to figure out what is going on; it certainly isn't ideal this way. We had to learn the basics of data analysis and at the same time learnthe theory of the experiments which requires quantum mechanics, which, most of us are still taking.

It's nice to be a student. Being a TA, it's not that nice. In the first half of the term, we have to learn all the experiments before the students do them. And in the other half, novelty wears off. It's just a matter of repeating the same thing again and again. Fortunately the equipment works fine, generally. There are a couple of old computers that might be worrisome at times. One of the experiments need a computer with win98 installed, and we run dos programs on it. Since the computer is old, not all the hardware is compatible with it. If one do certain operation (as advised on screen), the computer will just freeze, and we have to restart the whole thing. Yet another one is an old computer with MSDOS as the main operating system. Network is not working. To retrieve files, one have to use a 3'5'' floppy drive (usually known as the A:\ drive) to copy the files to another computer. I wonder if they have seen floppy disks at all. And then do the analysis somewhere else. It's kind of fun to see the antiques working properly.

What a week

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 20:49:00 +0000

Weekend. Email from potential research advisor. Finally. Possibility of going to Europe during summer. A 128-page paper to read. And some more shorter ones.

Monday. Term starts. I received an email about the change of teaching assignment. Surprise. Anxiety. What? A dozen experiments in two weeks? Later in the day. Syllabus of a class I'm taking. What? Dissection of sheep brain?

Tuesday. Morning. Class. Announcement about presentation towards the end of term. Totally unexpected. Anxiety. Afternoon. Teaching meeting. Setup a bunch of TA training sessions. I don't know that my schedule can be squeezed to fit in so many meetings.

Wednesday. Morning. Class. Announcement about presentation towards the end of term. Totally unexpected. What happened to this term? Both classes were normal (homework, exam, without student presentations) the last two terms. My head hurt. Nothing can surprise me anymore. Done the first experiment. It went fast.

Thursday. Afternoon. Class. Announcement about the two presentation spread out in the term. Surprised. Sign-up sheet. Oh man. Late at night. Done the first half of the second experiment. Got out of patience. Back and sleep.

Friday. Today. Nothing unexpected has shown up yet. I wonder what will come.

----

Everything is far from what I expected. This is not going to be a term I thought I would be. Might be more fun this way, but I certainly need to get used to getting surprised.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Teaching schedule

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 03:12:00 +0000

I was told, today at noon, that I was assigned to a new class. It's still a lab class, but with a more advanced set of experiments. As a TA, I need to master all experiments before the students do them. First class is tomorrow by the way.

Nice.

Luckily the agenda tomorrow is organizing the schedule; there's no real lab section until next week. But there are more then 10 experiments, which means that I have to do all of them in one week, where each of them take 3 hours. And this does not include time for figuring out random device malfunction(s).

Sweet. There goes my first weekend, where things are supposed to be the easiest.

---

Okay, enough of complaining. At least it's not within-24-hour notice, and I still have some time to digest some stuff before the class.

The experiments are actually pretty interesting. And here goes the chance for me to stroll in to the lab anytime in the day, anytime in the week, and play with them until I'm satisfied. The first couple of weeks will be like hell though. But it will be fun, and now I'm more grateful than irritated to have been given the chance. How strange.

Let's just hope that they don't do this to me again in the future.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

It's time to clean my room

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 03:15:00 +0000

It'll be a big project d:.

It's more about facing the stuff I accumulated over the course of a few years (as an undergraduate student) than simply reorganizing my room. By the end of next week (which is accidentally the end of the super-short spring break), I would like my room to have a new look, and potentially lighten the load when I move to other places in the future.

ps. this post is written using "Deepest Sender" add-on. Will it work smoothly?

No, it won't. I ended up copy & paste to blogger.

A few notes on quantum field theory

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 09:29:00 +0000

Contradiction often means integration at a higher level.

The introduction to the field in the class I took last term starts with a problem to solve. After introducing several tricks, we come to a seem-to-be-the-right answer, only then discovered that some part of the answer is infinite. Then we are introduced the concept of "renormalization", which modified the initial question to cancel out the bad parts of the answer (pretty much out of nowhere). Plus there are multiples ways to do this. So we will get different answers. It was kind of fishy, I used to think. A problem is not solvable, so we change the problem itself to make it solvable.

Then, after a while, I started to discover that the task is not to solve that particular problem, but to find the solvable problems in a family of similar problems. Why didn't they just say this in the beginning?

Now the real mystery is.....why does quantum electrodynamics perform so well? There are many ways of renormalization, and each of them will give slightly different answers. Do we just pick one using experimentally measured values? I haven't got to that part in lecture, so I guess I'll find it out before the end of the school year.

Passage

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 05:02:00 +0000

Before reading my comments below, please go to http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/ and download the game to play. You don't need to install anything, and the game only lasts 5 minutes. Control: 4 arrow keys to move, and q to quit.

(Mouse-select the text to read)

The first time I played it I went straight down to explore the maze, found quite some treasure boxes, and received some points. After a while, I noticed that the hair of the protagonist starts to decrease, and only then did I notice the real nature of the game. I tried to go forward, but soon the character becomes a tomb. Time's up.

Then I tried a second time. This time I went right almost all the time, and also got married. With the wife, a lot of places that were accessible, weren't anymore. The family has become an obstacle from time to time. So I can not go much down anymore, and I kept moving forward. After a while, the wife died, and the main character died shortly after. The score is much less this time, but who cares. No matter how much it is, 5 minutes later, the score lost its meaning.

This is a new category of game, a lot different than traditional games. It is more of a poetic experience than a gaming experience. And afterward, the game makes you think about several basic questions of life. One can either go down by itself and look for treasure, or go right to advance forward for a smooth life. Or anything in between. However, no matter what the choice is, the time limit is the same.

Russian

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 12:28:00 +0000

I have been studying Russian by myself for a while now. My goal is to master major languages and go traveling some day.... the very reason I picked Russian first is that I know somebody who studied Russian in university. It's more fun this way. Imagine a few years later when I'm trying to learn Thai or Arab. There won't be anybody I know good enough around. Well, things will straighten itself out, I believe.

Back to Russian. This time I went back home, met her, and learned an astonishing news: she is really going to get married. Now it's kind of awkward. Should I continue to learn the language? Should I stop? Either way doesn't seem quite right to me. Should I switch to another language and come back later? Hmm.

It's been a while....

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 11:56:00 +0000

I've been lazy again with updating my blog ^^" How have you been doing?

I went back home, stayed for two weeks. After adjusting the jet lag, I came back to do it again. Now my sleep is not regular. Sometimes I just can't sleep at night. I don't know why, but my heart just kept pounding, no matter how I tried to relax. It's really frustrating and disturbing. So I'm posting this blog in an attempt to switch gears.

This new term I picked up a couple new courses. One of them is introduction to computer graphics research. It's goal is to introduce the students to recent literature in computer graphics. Yesterday, no, actually the day before yesterday already, we introduced seam carving as a way to change the aspect ratio of the image while keeping the content less distorted than old ways of resizing. And the homework is, of course, to implement it. I haven't code for centuries, but it feels okay yesterday when I wrote the bulk of the program. All that's left is some user interface cosmetics. I should be able to survive....but the term is going to be fun. I have to take some more random courses before settling down in a research group :p Afterward it is even a question whether I am allowed to take physics classes. So, some neuroscience classes next term?

All other classes are regular physics classes which you would expect a lot of first-year graduate students to take, nothing special about me taking them.

I wish that I can learn a lot this term. This is what counts in the end.

Qualification exam coming....

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 05:57:00 +0000

The qualification exams are offered twice a year, and new students are expected to take the first try within the first year of study. One can officially try up to the third time without any trouble. Normally incoming students take their first try in June just after school ended, but I am feeling lucky and decided to try it in two weeks. Well, I'm not going to use up all three chances anyhow, why not testing the water temperature? It's not like I'm going to go there barehanded though. I'm trying my best to do practice problems recently.

Today, after doing a dozen problem in succession (which totalled a few hours/20 pages of answers), I felt like thowing out. I think I need more sleep.

One thing that strikes me is that the solution is sometimes not the best way of doing it. It is simply not intuitive and makes things unnecessarily messy. I am fortunate that I underwent IPhO training, and have more experience in a lot of the topics. However I can imagine a normal student struggling to understand why the solution utilized such a strange way of solving the problem.

There is still a lot to learn though. I've found some weak points that I've been unconciously avoiding before. Now is the time to correct them ^^".

I hope I can pass the exam in the first try.

Orientation starts, but....

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 07:42:00 +0000

Today's the start of pre-orientation. The new students go there, have some free food, and listen to presentations. In the afternoon there are some "games", which supposedly make us less sleepy while getting to know the environment.

This afternoon we had one little hunt in which we should group up in teams, go to a few designated spots, pick up question sheets and answer the questions. The questions are related to the campus of course. The three groups with highest points will get a secret prize.

So we ran around in campus, answered most questions, and turned in the answer sheet two hours later. We weren't one of the highest three teams unfortunately. Instead, we got the special prize for the most creative team name. It seemed like walking under the sun for two hours was kind of empty.... We could've filled out the sheet and turned it in right away and still got the prize. It's nevertheless a nice program. I visited the gym and health center for the first time today for example.

Just as the new term is going to start, my battle with the boxes is in full swing. They arrived last week, and I've been fighting with them since then. The boxes contains stuff I accumulated over the 4 years during undergraduate time. Most of them are usable living necessities, clothes and notebooks my parents send me, but I never got a chance to use them. In other words, they take a lot of space, but I can't get rid of them. (Look at the pile of stuff on the ground). (Sigh). Well, life will work itself out. I'm sure I can find some good ways out.

Deco online frontier PV

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 01:45:00 +0000

I found this on the web the other day. Somebody made this promotional video, and it is very hilarious. (ps. Deco online is a free MMORPG game)

「DecoFro-ダンスPV「一発かましたれ」」のビデオ
powered by ＠niftyビデオ共有

Well, I went on to try it myself. First kill the monsters that are wandering around, but don't get too close to the big one. I would get killed before I know I was attacked. Then, switch to different clothes, and dance....

Bunny suit

Swimsuit

Another swimsuit shot. Why isn't my character dance as good as the two guys in the clip?

I wasn't paying too much attention to time, and, unfortunately, the monsters are back....

....and then I was killed. The defense point is too low :(

Javascript animation

noreply@blogger.com (FHead) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:34:00 +0000

I've been playing with js for these couple of days. It's quite interesting. Compared to flash, which I feel is kind of heavy, I like this pretty much. The only downside is that IE browser behaves different compared to others, and tuning can be a hassle. A primitive version is here with no decorations yet. I'm still trying to create a satisfactory theme.