Brettia

So although I really don’t have time for it, I’m writing today in the interest of preventing this blog from becoming too stale. It’s amazingly sunny and warm outside this afternoon - 34 degrees. T-shirt weather, I think. Of course, as always, it will be short-lived; tomorrow and Tuesday we’re set to get five inches of snow. Wonderful.

It’s been two weeks now since my two-part “bandwidth saga,” and I’ve really been enjoying my new freedom. My seven-day usage total peaked around 30 GB and has now backed down to around 20 GB. It really is nice to not have to check the bandwidth meter every other minute to make sure I’m not in danger of getting dialupped.

The main reason for my silence recently is that I’m in the middle of midterm season, which looks like it will extend through the whole semester since the exams are so spread out that it takes nearly three weeks to get through them all. My classes this semester are definitely harder than they were last semester, though I guess that isn’t saying much since last semester’s were so easy. The hardest (and least interesting) by far is Math 240, a required course for CS that talks about logic and the math behind sets and trees and such. Though I understand that it could be beneficial to have a mathematical understanding of various CS concepts, I really can’t see myself applying that knowledge very often.

For example, last week we talked about algorithms and big-O notation, both of which I had plenty of experience with in my data structures class last semester. The professor went over some common searching and sorting algorithms, writing them in some crazy Pascalish pseudocode. (Pascal, seriously, in 2008?) Then, in talking about big-O notation, which is used to express the complexity of an algorithm, he proceeded to talk about the exact definition of big-O notation, and how you can prove that a polynomial is O(whatever), and so on. I guess this would be cool if I had any liking for math whatsoever, but mostly it just seemed confusing. Big-O notation is a simple concept. If you had the following code:

<?php

function loop($message, $times) {

    for($i = 0; $i < $times; $i++) {

        echo $message;

    }

}

?>

You would say that the function loop is O(N). N represents the problem size, which in simple cases is dependent on one variable but can sometimes be dependent on two or more. The function contains two major statements, the for loop and the echo statement, which prints the contents of a variable to the browser. The echo statement occurs in what is called “constant time”, or O(1), meaning that no matter what the value of $message is, the statement will take the same time to execute. The for loop, however, is not constant because the number of loops varies depending on what $times is set to. So the problem size N of the function is controlled by $times ($message doesn’t matter), and the function is O(N) because the for loop only contains constant-time statements. O(N * 1) is still O(N). If the for loop had contained another loop of some kind, also dependent on $times, the function would be O(N²). If the inner loop were dependent on something other than $times, the function would be O(N*M).

Going back to the Math 240 lecture, if you have a polynomial time function g = 2N² + 8N + 1, representing it with big-O notation is easy. You drop all terms except the highest-degree one (2N²), and then drop that term’s coefficient. So the function g is O(N²). In Math 240 though, we take it further and prove exactly why that function is O(N²) using the definition of big-O notation. It’s rather abstract and confusing, and I really have no idea when I’ll need to know it in the real world. So far, this has been one of my problems with the CS program here in general. It feels very traditional, very by-the-book. You take classes like Math 240 because that’s just what CS majors do, not necessarily because there is much reason for it. It isn’t completely bad; it just feels like the curriculum is a little out of sync with what is really going on in the software world. You learn Java and C++, there is only one web programming course to take, software engineering concepts don’t seem to be taught much at all (or at least not officially). And yet people wonder why CS grads are often so woefully inadequate when they become software engineers….

The problem is that computer science is a massive and ever-expanding field. There really is no other field that is experiencing the kind of growth that CS has had for the past thirty years or so. And because of all this growth, it really doesn’t make much sense to have one giant umbrella CS major anymore. Instead, universities should have a separate school for computer science, where you could major in software engineering or computer graphics or assembly-language programming or whatever. At the very least, CS majors should be allowed to concentrate in one area. Trying to teach everyone everything just doesn’t make sense anymore.

Some would respond that the point of a college education isn’t to train you for a job - college is supposed to be more about abstract, foundational things that prepare you to be better in the long run. This may work for business or history, but in computer science even the basic things change pretty rapidly. In the past five years, we’ve seen a shift to multi-core processors able to run many instructions at once and superpowerful GPUs capable of doing far more than just generating 3D graphics. Programming either of these requires a very different manner of thinking that isn’t being taught today, and understanding them in an abstract, low-level way won’t be enough.

Hopefully I will be proven wrong and I will graduate with a great understanding of computers and software engineering, well prepared for the advancements to come. But, just as with the University of Wisconsin in general, I feel uncertain.

I got an email today from the Division of University Housing:

Dear University Housing Resident,

Recent upgrades to our ResNet infrastructure allow us to remove the quota that limited your bandwidth use, effective Monday, February 11, 2008. Students using ResNet are no longer subject to bandwidth caps, and any previous warnings or violations for exceeding bandwidth will be restored to normal speed.

We are pleased that this change will provide you even better service. This increased access will be helpful to you when using legal online video streaming services that have recently become available, such as NetFlix online delivery of paid movie rentals.

(…)

Best wishes,

Sathish Gopalrao
Director of Information Technology, Division of University Housing

Problem solved. Pretty strange that I should get that email only two days after writing about how annoying the bandwidth cap was. Woo!

At Wisconsin, students in university housing are connected to the Internet using a service called ResNet. Generally it is blazing fast: 18 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. For comparison, decent residential DSL service is usually about 3 Mbps down and 768 Kbps up. This means that in a perfect world I could download an MP3 in about two seconds or a DVD in around an hour. (Of course, most websites are on 100 Mbps connections shared with a bunch of other sites, so real speeds are maybe half that.) That’s pretty awesome, though Internet users in Japan or South Korea would probably laugh at the idea that 18 Mbps is fast in the United States.

One thing that is not awesome, however, is that I am given all this glorious bandwidth with a few caveats. If I exceed 10 GB in any 7-day period, my bandwidth usage gets limited. Severely. It becomes dial-up. I have to turn images off so that pages load faster. Streaming audio and video is impossible. I can’t Skype with my boss in Arizona. I can’t realistically load more than one page at a time in my browser. It’s crippling, and it sucks. The limits come off after a few days of frustration and pain, and then I realize just how different the Internet is with a broadband connection.

Why have a bandwidth cap like this? I would guess that about 50% of ResNet users never come close to exceeding the cap. Things like Facebook, the iTunes Store, and the occasional YouTube video consume next to nothing. Another 25% might use more than 5 GB in a week every once in a while. You could call these people power users, knowledgable users, but not exactly hard-core users. Another 20% are in the category I’m in: they’re deeply interested in technology and the Internet, and always on the hunt for high-bandwidth content (and I don’t necessarily mean illegal stuff - even tech-unsavvy students have discovered the awesome HD episodes of LOST on ABC’s website). Along with using Skype, the iTunes Store, ABC.com, YouTube, and NFL SuperCast (last semester), I download Linux distros from time to time, new software or updates to installed apps, and large files related to my job. There is probably no day in which I use less than 500 MB of bandwidth. Multiply that by seven days, and I’m up to 3.5 GB of bandwidth per week no matter what. In a heavy-traffic week I might hit 15 GB.

But that is nothing compared to the final 5%’s bandwidth needs, the users who work with scientific data or produce video or download a lot of movies and music over BitTorrent. The majority of these people are probably abusing the network, and the bandwidth caps are in place because of them. At Case Western Reserve University, which my friend Garrett Singer attends, it was found in 2006 that 34 students were consuming 73% of the bandwidth allocated to all students living in residence halls on campus. That’s pretty insane, and it’s no wonder Wisconsin uses caps to thwart these kinds of users.

However, 10 GB is too low. According to the ResNet bandwidth usage policy, 10 GB is “a very large amount of data.” It was a very large amount of data. Two years ago 10 GB would’ve be fine. But online video has exploded over that period, as has VoIP calling (sometimes with video). Considering that the 18 Mbps connection speed is a tad excessive currently, it doesn’t seem like it would be such a big deal to lower the speed a bit and increase the cap to 20-25 GB. Then, people in the power user group would have more than enough bandwidth (you could sit on your computer for every waking hour and download 200 MB each hour continuously without breaking 25 GB).

As it is, the cap is annoying and inconvenient, but not impossible to work with. You can reset your usage total twice each semester (I used both resets and got throttled once last semester), and with time you get skilled at keeping yourself just under the cap. I cannot imagine what it would’ve been like last year though, when the cap was at 5 GB. I would’ve died.

Feesh.

Update: Two days after posting this I learned that the bandwidth quotas had been removed! Crazy.

I am pretty shocked right now.  The New York Giants just majorly upset the New England Patriots in my lovely semi-home state of Arizona.  I don’t know what to think.  The Patriots didn’t lose a single game in the regular season, the first team to do so since the 1972 Dolphins, who went undefeated before the NFL changed to a 16-game season.  Ironically, the Patriots got their 16-0 record at the expense of the Giants in the last game of the season, when the Giants nearly beat them.  But the Giants, who were huge underdogs in their final two playoff contests against Dallas (13-3), and Green Bay (13-3), the top seeds in the NFC, had the last laugh.  I honestly cannot believe it.  In some ways this was a much better ending than a Patriot win, because it was so unexpected and incredible.  But at the same time, to see a team go 18-0 and lose the only game that really matters - that is painful.  Oh well, I suppose the Patriots have won enough Super Bowls for this decade anyway, though they could easily be back again next year.

My own team, the Kansas City Chiefs, was pretty terrible this year, going 4-12 and ending the season with a streak of nine losses.  I was able to see most of the games thanks to a service from DirecTV that lets NFL SuperFan subscribers watch them online.  It launched this season and luckily my parents already had the SuperFan package, being crazy football fans themselves.  Unfortunately most of the games were too painful to watch.  The defense had improved a bit, but the offensive line remained porous.  Star running back Larry Johnson was out of shape after missing training camp and got injured in week 9, and Damon Huard, the aging quarterback who played incredibly well after Trent Green was injured early in the season, couldn’t find his groove while being constantly roughed up or sacked.  Around mid-season, the team was 4-3 and nearly beat the Indianapolis Colts during that team’s mid-season slump.  From there things got progressively worse, culminating in a painful loss to the Jets, another terrible team, in the last game of the season.

The team does have some talent.  Brodie Croyle, the young quarterback who coach Herm Edwards hopes is the future of the team, has shown some signs of greatness, though it is hard to evaluate him when he has to play behind such a terrible offensive line.  Larry Johnson, who rushed for 1,749 yards in the nine games that he started in 2005 and 1,789 yards in 16 games as a starter in 2006, still has the potential to be one of the league’s best running backs.  Dwayne Bowe, the rookie wide receiver who showed his skill in an upset of the playoff-bound San Diego Chargers, could be incredible with a solid quarterback passing to him.  And tight-end Tony Gonzalez, easily the Chiefs’ best player, had a record-setting season last year and probably still has two or three more seasons of play left in him.  On defense, the Chiefs are doing pretty well, with defensive end Jared Allen recording 15.5 sacks.  The team has potential, but the run defense needs to improve and the offensive lines absolutely must be reworked.  Before Edwards became coach ahead of the 2006 season, the Chiefs had been an offensive powerhouse, setting the record for rushing touchdowns in a season in 2003, their best season since 1997.  However, the Chiefs’ defense was terrible.  Now the defense is decent but the offense is malfunctioning.  If Edwards can somehow recover from this bottom and get the offense and defense to improve in sync, the Chiefs could be in the playoffs next year.  Otherwise, next season could make 4-12 look like a fairly good year.

In other news, I spent the afternoon importing entries from my old blog into WordPress.  I’m not quite finished yet, but they’re all in and they seem to be uncorrupted.  There may be quite a few broken links though.

Profound title, I know. It’s no secret that Wisconsin winters are harsh. But this winter has been a little strange. It snowed lightly on Thanksgiving Day. In December, we had about twice the snowfall we did last year. But instead of sitting around and accumulating as more storms passed through, the snow would melt off almost completely on warm days before being replaced by a new six-to-eight-inch blanket. I came back to find about four inches on the ground, and more snow last week added another couple of inches. This past weekend, the unthinkable happened - temperatures rose above 35 on Sunday and nearly reached 50 on Monday. It was warm enough to wear shorts! This morning, it was 43 outside before the sun was even fully up. Unfortunately, the temperature dropped from there. And dropped. And dropped some more. At around 2:30 I found myself caught in a hailstorm while trying to get home from class. After about a half-inch had covered the ground, the hail became snow. By 5:00 it was 23 degrees and the slush on the ground was beginning to freeze. As you can see, it is now 3 and will hit -12 overnight, a 55-degree difference in 24 hours.

Like 100 million other people, I’ll be watching Super Bowl XLII (in which the New England Patriots will destroy the New York Giants) on Sunday. As a proud semi-Arizonan, I can’t wait to see all the coverage of the Phoenix area and the beautiful desert surrounding it. I’ll just close my eyes and imagine the warm sun beating down upon me.

Sorry to bore you with a weather report, but I just needed to write something.

Savor this, because it might be another month before the next one. I am not really sure what I want to talk about right now. I’m not as bad a blogger as I seem; I’m constantly planning new entries in my head - they just never end up getting written down. I often wish I had some way to just plug myself into my laptop and let it read my thoughts. (And let it be remembered henceforth that I was first to welcome our future sentient computer overlord.) I need some sort of light, low-tech, readily available recording device. I think it might be called a pencil and paper. One day I will remember to carry it around. But then again, the idea of hand writing something in the age of keyboards and word processors seems so painfully slow. Plus, my handwriting, once so perfectly formed and girly, has begun to devolve into a much more masculine scrawl. Now you see both why my ideas don’t usually make it to the database and just how completely disorganized this entry will be.

There is a girl walking around in my hallway and the nearby stairwell talking loudly on her cell phone. Normally I wouldn’t be one to eavesdrop, but when the talker shouts her conversation to the world I can’t help but listen in sometimes. Unfortunately, the girl is just spouting gob after gob of mind-numbing drivel. Probably her victim has already hung up and she’s just talking to herself at this point. (Wait, she just walked by again and I could hear a voice at the end of the line…I pity the poor soul having to listen to her.)

I have found that the level of maturity here is lower than I would’ve expected. Keep in mind that I can only contrast my experience here with my two months at Stanford, and maybe that’s a flawed comparison. At Stanford, most of the students in the summer program were between our junior and senior years, and plenty of juvenile things happened there: citrus fights, nutball matches, mattress parties, etc. However, kids’ actions were for the most part carefully controlled - they did childish things for fun sometimes, but they weren’t childish by nature. When you talked to someone individually and seriously, you found them to be responsible and intelligent, even if they didn’t act that way in social situations.

At Wisconsin, instead of high school students acting like adult college students, there are college students acting like childish high school students. The girl in the hallway (who after about 45 minutes has finally ended her call) is a classic example, talking about all kinds of random, insignificant social “events” (”this cute guy let me borrow his jacket!”) and sounding exactly like one of those brainless popular girls from high school. Similarly, many of the guys here seem to have no purpose in life beyond partying, drinking, and getting laid as much as possible. Whereas at Stanford the idiocy of high school was superseded by simple, joyful, intellectual camaraderie, at Wisconsin kids just do everything they couldn’t get away with (publicly) in high school. Everyone drinks fairly heavily - for some, the weekend starts Tuesday night; on average, it begins on Thursday. The hallway often smells like alcohol, sometimes with the scent of vomit or urine mixed in. The bathrooms and lounge can be worse. Academics are always second to partying, an annoying barrier to having a good time. Nerdiness or geekiness is looked down upon. At Stanford I told a number of people about my web design hobby, and most seemed to think it was cool or at least mildly interesting. Here, I’ve gotten enough dumb looks and blank stares that I generally don’t even bring it up. Not being from Wisconsin is looked down upon too (”coasties” generally cluster together in private dorms and get made fun of by the natives for their low tolerance for the cold). Originally I would mention that I’d graduated from Oconomowoc but also had ties to Arizona; now I just say I’m from Oconomowoc whether I really feel that I am or not.

Of course, there are exceptions. I’ve met some people (unsurprisingly, none from Wisconsin) who are much more intellectual and mature and less driven by alcohol and parties. There’re many shades of gray. I’m only describing things as I feel them from where I’m sitting in room 201 on the second floor of Witte Hall, tower A. From what I’ve heard, there can be a very different vibe depending on what dorm you live in or even what floor you’re on, and my dorm in particular has a reputation for craziness (”gettin’ shitty in Witte”). There were differences between the houses at Stanford too: Eucaliptolites were a little quirky and liked to goof around in weird, random ways; Granadans seemed a bit more rebellious; Ujamaa was rowdier; and so on. I might find next year that things are completely different.

Even so, the immaturity - and especially the culture of alcoholism - seems pervasive here. I sense it in the snippets of conversations I hear in the Southeast dorms’ central cafeteria. I can’t go into the Walgreens on State St. without hearing someone talking loudly about their drunken exploits the night before, or about how they can’t wait to start drinking “around 4:30, when class is over.” I see and meet ditzy girls like the one in the hallway all the time. Even some of the more levelheaded upperclassmen that I’ve met get taken in by it, though they certainly don’t seem to plan their lives around it like some of the kids in my dorm. It’s like Wisconsin’s party-school reputation (we’re #1 on the Princeton Review’s “Lots of Beer” ranking, and some years we’ve been high up on the “Party Schools” list) is an excuse to go crazy. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t have a problem with partying - with or without beer - but it’s not my favorite activity either, and I tire of it quickly when I’m surrounded by it as I am here. To some kids Wisconsin would be a dream school - finally they can do everything they did in high school but always had to hide from their parents or teachers or the police. Here, authority is pretty loose, especially in dorms (RAs don’t care about the drinking and, in the rare event someone gets busted for it, they don’t really get punished), and kids get away with just about anything. At Stanford, anyone caught drinking or smoking was flown home immediately. That’s a pretty draconian policy, but not caring about it at all is similarly extreme.

Faced with the situation here, the logical question for me to ask is, “Are all colleges like this?” I would think not, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe college is all about being stupid and pushing one’s body to its limits by eating badly and ingesting illegal substances. And it’s all okay because I’m just a young adult learning about life through “experimentation.” Maybe being passionate about academics doesn’t matter, and I should just concentrate on socializing as much as possible and graduating…eventually. Maybe my problem is that I am too rigid, too reluctant to change myself and embrace the partying and the binge drinking and the shallowness.

I was never very sure about coming here. I knew this school’s reputation, I knew that it was huge, and I knew that it wouldn’t be quite like Stanford, though I hoped that it would at least be similar. I had the chance to go to Pomona and potentially have a much more Stanfordesque experience, but attending the school wasn’t really possible financially. Now I begin to wonder if I traded happiness for in-state tuition, some scholarship money, and a lenient transfer credit policy. I begin to wonder if by coming here I continued my rather mistake-prone tradition of ignoring my gut in favor of my mind. Hopefully by the end of the year I will feel better about my choice.

It reached 33 degrees outside today and I can’t believe how warm I felt.

Until next time (which could be quite a while, sorry)….

This entry is meant to introduce you to me. Being a self-centered person (not a good thing, I know, but at least I can admit it), this shouldn’t be a hard one to write. But I’m still hazy about who I am and who I want to be. I guess that’s something I’m supposed to figure out in the next four years or so. Maybe I’ll never be sure. For now, I’ll just talk about what I’m more sure about, saving the uncertainties for later posts.

First, the basics. I am an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Wisconsin, majoring (probably) in computer science. Along with computers, I like English, Spanish, linguistics, history, and philosophy. I hate math, but I’m still not too bad at it. I don’t have that many hobbies because I’m usually too busy to cultivate them, but I like reading, writing, listening to music (who doesn’t…), playing video games, developing websites and software, and watching football. I have two jobs right now. I work as a web developer for a small company in Phoenix whose website is too ugly to be worthy of linkage. One day we’ll get around to redesigning it. On the side, I am the webmaster for the ASM Student Elections Commission. We’re the group that plans and runs elections for the university’s student government, and I keep our single web page up-to-date. It sounds boring, but it’s a lot less stressful and more fun than my main job.

Now, some history. It is strange to say, but I’m not really from anywhere. I was born in Springfield, Missouri, and most of my extended family lives around there. My family moved from Springfield to Salt Lake City when I was eight. We only spent two years there, moving to Phoenix in 1999. After adjusting to the desert heat, I grew to love it there. I found a band of friends who were almost as geeky as me, and we hung out together all through middle school and the first year and a half of high school. In about 7th grade I made my first website, and in 8th grade my friends and I spent much of our spare time posting on an online forum I’d set up. We’d set aside some of those nerdy habits by high school, but the friendships remained tight - the summer before freshman year, my two best friends and I went to Europe together. As you can imagine, I was surprised and crestfallen when I learned in the fall of 2004 that we would be relocating to either Boise or Milwaukee by the end of the year. Eventually, my parents decided on Wisconsin.

At first, I tried to be positive. While I didn’t want to leave my friends or the life I had in Arizona, I figured that perhaps starting over wouldn’t be so bad. It wasn’t like Wisconsin was another country or anything. My optimism didn’t last very long. It snowed about a foot the first night we were here. I had to spend a miserable month cooped up at home because my school’s second semester didn’t start until the end of January. When school finally did start, I felt like both a ghost and an alien at the same time. Since the year was already half over and classes changed after each term, most people just assumed I’d been there all along and didn’t pay that much attention to me. If I mentioned that I’d just come from Arizona, I’d usually get a confused look that meant, “Why the heck would you want to move here then?”

People in general were different - more family oriented, less open, very traditional. It wasn’t all bad; they were also not as materialistic or judgmental as Arizonans. My first eight months in Wisconsin were a dark and depressing time for me. I became very quiet and reserved, going entire days without uttering a word. I kept my grades up, even though my Wisconsin high school was significantly harder and I was continuing to take AP European History with my Arizona teacher via email. I made a few friends, but none were very close, and some of them I didn’t really like that much. I didn’t hang out with anyone. I didn’t understand the things that most Wisconsin kids are into, like hunting and hockey and ice fishing. For some reason, though my unhappiness was deep and sometimes a little dangerous, no one seemed to notice. I felt like a machine that did nothing but go to school and do homework, like an emotionless, thoughtless robot. I knew that I was as much a victim of my failure to adapt as I was a victim of an untimely move, but I didn’t know what to do to dig myself out of my hole.

Things began to look up in my junior year. I began the IB Diploma Programme, which is similar to AP but more comprehensive and with more meshing between courses. At first, not much changed. I was still quiet, and I still didn’t have any good friends. Then, in mid-October, I was tasked with writing a short essay on my definition of success. Instead of turning them in, the teacher surprised us by having us read our essays aloud in class. I was mortified. In Arizona, I was a bit of a teacher’s pet. I asked questions and gave answers all the time, and I enjoyed being smart. That disappeared after the move. I never wanted to say anything. And so the thought of putting my work out in the open for twenty other minds to appraise was terrifying. When my turn came, I somehow read my essay without stumbling too much, even though my heart was racing. There was a long pause after I’d finished and everyone’s eyes were on me. I was grateful when the teacher finally asked the next person to read. Later, I got the graded essay back with an A+ on the front and a comment on the back that said something like, “You are an excellent writer, and the whole class was hanging on your every word while you read this. Please share your thoughts in class more often.” I felt encouraged, but the damage of the previous year would take a while to undo.

The school year moved on, and I became the lead design editor of my school’s newspaper and a tutor in the writing center. I did a few things with my church’s youth group but never got too into it. Two other papers, an English one that my teacher copied and used as an example for everyone else and a history essay that I had to read in class, cemented me as one of the brightest in our little group of “IB kids.” But while I had the others’ respect, I didn’t really have their friendship. And though I was no longer so sad, I still wasn’t very happy. It was a transitional period.

In the summer of 2006, I spent two months taking classes at Stanford University. It was, without a doubt, the most incredible experience of my short life. It was eight weeks of near-complete freedom. I spent my weekends on day trips to San Francisco, Monterrey, Marin County, or Palo Alto, my weekdays programming games in Java or learning about word roots, and my nights goofing around in the dorm or throwing oranges at people or snuggling with girls (!) at mattress parties. I met my best friend at Stanford. For the first time in a long while, I felt alive. It was difficult to leave, and even more challenging to return to high school in the fall after having that little taste of college.

The first half of senior year was much like the year before. I was unhappy again, vexed by the huge difference between life at Stanford and real life in Wisconsin. School was harder than ever, and I had a bunch of IB exams in May to look forward to. My social life improved a little. I went to a couple of parties in December with two IB-kid friends, and I played Guitar Hero for the first time. I began eating lunch at school again, having abandoned the practice sophomore year as I lacked anyone to sit with. I finally had my driver’s license. I was reborn a little.

In May, it felt like all of my efforts during the previous two years came to a climax. I chose a college, spent three weeks skipping school in order to study for and take exams, and I put a huge amount of effort into making the final issue of the newspaper that I worked on the best of them all. Freedom came in June, and it was sweet. I went to some graduation parties, and a few party parties. I had a birthday party with my friends. My parents gave me a MacBook Pro. Things were looking up a little bit. I spend the second half of the summer in Arizona, since my family was moving back. I got to hang out with my old friends again, though Arizona no longer felt like home.

Fast forward a few months, and here I am, nearing the end of my first semester of college, feeling far away from and yet still similar to the timid Brett that left the desert for the hinterland three long years ago. I apologize for the crazy length of this entry, but now at least I won’t need to keep going over this stuff in future entries.

It feels so good to be blogging again.

Hi. If you’re reading this, you’re one of a very small number of people that still visits this site. Probably you once had my Atom feed in your reader and you wondered why it suddenly stopped working a few months ago. My web host, Joyent, upgraded its servers, and the change in configuration broke my site. It wasn’t really a big deal; this blog, the only remotely active part of the site, had lain dormant for months, and much of the information on other pages was out of date. So rather than spend a few hours updating things and fixing the code that was no longer working, I decided it was time to start over. While I took pride in the fact that my site was completely powered by a CMS of my own design called Langosta, the code wasn’t the best and I could never really find time to add all the features I wanted.

So now I have a fresh installation of WordPress, and it does everything Langosta did and more. When I began writing Langosta in the summer of 2005, WordPress felt unpolished and immature, but it has evolved quite a bit since then. Plus, it has a huge user community and a variety of user-contributed plugins and themes. And, though I’d never used it myself, I’ve installed and customized WordPress for others a few times now, so I was more familiar with it than some of the alternatives, such as Movable Type. Obviously, the default theme leaves something to be desired, so I’ll be sure to change it as soon as I am able. For now though, I’m just happy to have something that works.

With the new CMS will come some changes to the content of this blog. Historically, it has been very me-focused, with a smattering of entries about philosophy or programming or events on the web. For the most part, I will continue to adhere to this formula. I know that most bloggers pick a particular subject to focus on, but I enjoy the freedom of being able to write about basically anything that comes to mind. However, I’ll make an effort to reduce the amount of “me entries” from 95% of the content to a less annoying 50%. I still think those entries are a valuable way to self-reflect, but I understand that they probably aren’t very useful to anyone else. I’ll also try to keep entries shorter and more focused.

Eventually, there will be more to this site than the blog. I plan on adding a link blog of some kind, a portfolio of my web design work, and perhaps a photo gallery. I also have some ideas for a new design that I may discuss in a later post. If all goes well, everything should be done by the end of January.

I’ll leave you with a list of upcoming entries to whet your appetite:

• An introduction, in which I describe myself (probably coming tonight or tomorrow)
• A review of Mac OS X and thoughts on my experience as a new Mac user
• A post about video games I play
• A post about my college experience thus far
• A discussion of the problems in the web development field
• A summary of my latest philosophical musings
• A very tearful postmortem for the Kansas City Chiefs’ 2007 season

Until next time….

It’s been an unbelievably long time since I last wrote anything substantial, and there’s so much to talk about. I’m not really sure where to begin. I wrote my last entry in which I covered what was going on in my life way back in January, and it would be an understatement to say that things are very different now from the way they were back then. I could try to remember things, go back and summarize it all, but truthfully, most of it doesn’t really matter all that much. However, I guess there are some more important events or changes that I should mention.

The most important one, of course, is the end of high school, and of the IB “experience.” I could feel things starting to draw to a close as early as the beginning of May, when the IB exams started. I had an exam every school day for two weeks, and all homework and assignments pretty much ceased. I skipped class many times in that period, sometimes so that I could do some last minute cramming, other times just so that I could lay around and not have to think about school for a few hours. I suppose I wasn’t really “skipping” anything, since I always had a parent call me out of school and usually the classes I missed were IB ones that were all but over anyway. My senior year was not nearly as glorious and enjoyable as everyone says it is supposed to be, so I guess maybe I was entitled to some laziness toward the end.

There is no question that my last school year was a difficult one. Taking IB Math HL was a huge mistake. The two other IB students in that class (it was combined with AP Calculus BC) had both had a semester of high-level math before that class. I had been denied that semester because of my tight course schedule, and originally I was going to take calculus at Stanford to make up for it. But my advisor at Stanford told me that it would be a waste to take math there just to prepare for a high school math course, as the credit I would earn at Stanford would be the same as the credit I would get for IB Math HL. In other words, I would be earning the credit twice. Not wanting to waste money, and wishing even less to pollute my wonderful pre-college experience at Stanford with the ugliness of calculus, I took a Greek and Latin word roots class instead. Compared to CS 106A, that class wasn’t really very exciting, but it did appeal to my love for languages. Unfortunately, when I started IB Math HL at the beginning of last year, I found myself woefully unprepared. Though I usually did all right on quizzes, I rarely scored higher than a B on a test, and sometimes I was lucky to get a C. I’m still not entirely sure what my problem was. Before that class, I had always done well in math, though I never really liked it. I guess the combination of ill-preparedness, increased workload in other classes, and apathy on my part was enough to doom me to failure. There were times when I really did want to learn the material, and I berated myself for my laziness. I spent a weekend or two doing nothing but math in an attempt to catch up. But nothing ever seemed to work, and I always felt like I was a half-step behind. Eventually the class was reminding me too much of IB Physics, in which my labs never seemed to be exactly right and my grade was always right on the edge of being a B+. It was frustrating, to say the least.

If the class was unpleasant, the IB Math HL exam was torturous. It was not just difficult because the problems were hard, but because in many cases I had never even seen the types of questions they were asking before. The class was three terms long, and the whole time we basically followed the AP Calculus BC curriculum. We did two IB math projects on the side, and we were supposed to be doing problems from the IB Math textbook every week or so (though we only got about halfway through the book). In the last term of the class, the teacher gave us some practice tests he’d found online, and it was then that we knew we were doomed. I say “we” because the other two IB Math students felt the same way I did. The main problem was that we simply hadn’t covered most of the IB Math curriculum. Unlike AP Calculus BC, IB Math is only about 30% calculus. The rest is a jumble of geometry and trigonometry (which would seem easy since I had already taken geometry and trigonometry classes, except that IB Math takes it to a whole other level), logic and reasoning, and a huge chunk of statistics and probability. So the exam was a completely horrendous experience. I left more than half of it blank, answered many questions with bullshit answers, and once I even gave an answer that had nothing to do with math, something like, “The probability of Sally sending text messages to her friends from 5:30 to 6:30 is zero, because her family eats dinner during that time period.” Even worse, the IB diploma criteria doesn’t allow for failing a higher-level class, even if taking that class as a higher-level one was an option (I could have done Math SL, but I was told it would be really easy). As far as I know, my grade is calculated using both my exam score and my scores on the math projects, so there is at least a tiny bit of hope that I will get the three out of seven necessary to still get my IB diploma. The scores aren’t released until July 6th, so I get to wait until then to see if my bullshitting was good enough or not.

The other exams really weren’t too terrible. Biology was perhaps the hardest, mainly because the second-semester teacher was disorganized and didn’t really make it through all of the material. I learned a lot from cramming the night before the test, though…so maybe that helped. In some ways the exam period was fun - I felt like I was in college: skipping class, going to late-night study groups, trying desperately to find and organize notes from years ago, etc. When I finally came back to school for the last two weeks after the exams were over, I was struck by how dumb high school seemed after that little ordeal. All the idiotic rules and immature drama…so pointless, so stupid. The final days were somewhat enjoyable, but somehow I still had a lot left to do. The last issue of the newspaper was scheduled to come out on the seniors’ last day, May 31, and I had to work on it almost non-stop for a week in order to get it finished. The toil was worthwhile, though - it was easily our most polished issue in the past two years, an achievement crowned by two distinguishing features: full-color printing and a two-page “Senior Destinations” spread where we put all the seniors’ names on a series of maps to illustrate where they planned on going to college. I got compliments on it from dozens of people, from classmates to friends’ parents to random kids in the hallway.

Though May 31 was the last day of classes, I still had to go to school the next day for a senior awards assembly, after which we had a barbecue and played ultimate frisbee. Finally, the four long years of high school had come to an end, and I couldn’t have been happier. Graduation came on the following Sunday, and my grandparents from Missouri as well as my grandma from Colorado visited and watched me receive my diploma. Since then, life has been pretty laid back (maybe a little too laid back) - I’ve worked on websites, watched a lot more TV than usual, gone to a few graduation parties, slept for nine hours almost every night, showered twice a day for no particular reason, and played an occasional video game, though I find them to be less and less entertaining lately.

I finally feel as if I have overcome the terrible lack of motivation or confidence that I suffered from after the move from Arizona. Since December, I’ve been to numerous small gatherings with some friends I met through the IB program, usually involving the game Guitar Hero, which I’m abnormally skilled at playing. While I’m still no social butterfly, I at least feel as if I have some semblance of a life outside of school again. I even find myself craving social interaction on days when my friends are busy and my IM buddy list gray and empty. While I still have a long way to go before I could call myself socially skilled, I’m not totally inept anymore, and it feels good. Something that hasn’t changed, though, is that I don’t require all that much to be happy with people. Some kids seem to only want to go to a party if it’s massive and alcohol is somehow involved, or they only want to hang out with people if there’s some fun activity planned (Six Flags, water-skiing, shopping, etc.). But I find myself not caring all the much about what I do with my friends…the important thing is just being together and enjoying each other’s company. Some nights we’ll just sit at someone’s house not really doing anything at all - talking or watching a movie or whatever. But sometimes those moments are better and more substantial than any wild party could ever be.

I don’t think there’s too much more left to talk about now…I guess I should mention that, for all my efforts to go elsewhere, I’m still going to college at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Don’t get me wrong, Madison’s a great school, perhaps one of the best public universities in the country. It’s just not exactly my dream school. I applied to a lot of places, many of them probably out of my reach academically, and some of them surprised me by putting me on their waitlists or even offering me admission. Two schools that I didn’t even apply to sent me letters offering admission and a full-ride scholarship for being a National Merit Scholar. In the end, I had three options: Pomona College, UW-Madison, and the University of Texas at Dallas. I was surprised to be admitted to Pomona because less selective colleges had rejected me; Pomona only admits around 15% of applicants and, though few people have heard of it, it’s one of the top colleges in the country. UT-Dallas was one of the schools that offered me a full-ride, and their offer was tempting. I visited the campus over spring break, and I was pretty impressed by the experience. They have a large and growing computer science program and strong ties to local industry (North Texas, I guess, is sort of like a Silicon Valley for the Midwest), and they offered me enough money to cover basically all of my college-related expenses. However, I was worried about the strength of their non-computer-related programs, and I wasn’t really sure I wanted to live in Texas all that much. Also, though certain aspects of the campus were really nice, such as the student apartments (four students to a suite, only two students per bathroom, kitchenette, laundry room, swimming pools, etc.), it just didn’t seem like a traditional college campus to me. Many students commuted to campus, and it was located in the middle of a suburb where there were mostly houses and few shops or restaurants. I eventually decided that UT-Dallas just wasn’t right for me, though not without much deliberation. The more difficult decision was choosing between Pomona and UW-Madison. Really, there wasn’t really much of a choice - it was obvious that Pomona was better in almost every possible way. However, when I started looking at the financial aid package I had been offered, I found that accepting the admission offer was almost impossible. Even in the best case scenario, I would leave Pomona with about $50,000 in debt. So I basically chose Madison for lack of any other viable option.

Although things didn’t work out as I imagined they would, I’m still excited for college. Finally I will be completely on my own and free to do what I want. Madison is a really neat town, almost like a San Francisco or Denver but plopped in the middle of the Upper Midwest, and the UW campus is right next to the downtown area. I’ll also have the prospect of going home to Arizona over breaks to look forward to, as my family is in the process of moving back this summer. Though a year ago I was almost certain I wanted to study computer science and eventually become a software engineer, now I’m not so sure. While I love programming and building websites, I am somewhat different from the average programmer in that I enjoy writing code because of the language aspect of it, not the mathematical or logical aspects. I like reading and writing in English and Spanish about as much as I enjoy reading and writing PHP or Java or Ruby. And I’ve always loved history, too, probably because it is so closely tied to language and the interpretation and analysis of language from many different sources. And there is the more recent addition to my list of favorite subjects: philosophy. (Perhaps you see now why I was so enthralled by the prospect of going to a liberal arts college like Pomona even though I want to study computer science.) I think the best possible academic scenario for me would be some sort of double major in computer science and one of those other subjects. Hopefully I’ll also get a chance to work on few research projects of some kind, and maybe study abroad. Assuming that I get my IB diploma, I’ll have about 25-30 credits before I even start college, so I should have some extra time for such things. It does seem as if IB will at least count for something at Madison - most of the private colleges only take IB credits if your scores are near-perfect, so the diploma just helps you get admitted, but Madison seems to want to reward IB students pretty handsomely.

Before I post this I have one final, wonderful announcement to make: after many years of frustration and suffering on the Windows platform, I have made the switch and am now a proud owner of a MacBook Pro. I needed a laptop for college and Macs are finally not so horribly expensive as they once were, so I took the plunge. So far I’ve been pretty impressed, but I’ll save my experiences for another entry. Until next time…adios.

We have an HP Photosmart 2610 printer, one of those all-in-one thingies. It does really well at printing Word documents and photos, but it has a tendency to be temperamental when it comes to printing anything made in InDesign or Photoshop or other programs like that. Today I was printing 100 copies of a brochure that I made in InDesign for a class project, and it was going horrendously slowly. My “brochure” is a double-sided guide to “safe and secure computing,” and the printer was literally taking over a minute just to print one side of it, even when I was using “Fast Normal” mode, which on my printer is a step below Normal 600 DPI resolution but a step above saves-ink-looks-crappy FastDraft. I printed the first set of 50 copies for one location where I’m distributing it (a requirement of the project) in InDesign, and it probably took over two hours altogether. When I had finished that set, my mom suggested that I try exporting it to PDF and then printing it using Adobe Reader. I had never thought to do this before, though we export PDFs of the Cooney Crier to send to the printing company each issue. I exported my brochure using the same PDF settings, opened it in Adobe Reader, told it to print 50 copies of the first side, and voilà! Now it prints a side in about 20-25 seconds, which still isn’t nearly as fast as a Word document but is far better than before. So my new recommendation when something just won’t print correctly or won’t print at all is to simply export it as a PDF using whatever program you made the document in, or if you’re using Word, there’s a nice open-source program called PDFCreator that installs a special printer on your system that will output PDFs of documents instead of actually printing anything. You can use that to export PDFs from pretty much any program that allows you to print, even if the program doesn’t export PDFs on its own.

End random blurb.