Random Crapola
Well, now it’s been two weeks since my last entry about what I’ve been doing at Stanford. I’ve thought a lot about writing in the past few days, but things always come up and each entry takes at least an hour usually and I just didn’t have the time. Now, I still don’t really have the time, but I’ll continue with my usual habit of writing when I shouldn’t be just because that’s what I’ve always done. Yeah.
Anyway, my weekdays aren’t all that interesting as they’re filled mostly with just eating, sleeping, going to class, and being a “hall whore” (or if you prefer, one who lacks the desire to sleep in one’s own room and instead camps out in a random hallway with some friends in a kind of hobo sleepover). Most of the fun and important things happen over the weekend, which here is from Thursday afternoon to early Monday morning because most of us don’t have classes on Friday. Last weekend (which, conveniently, occurred just after the fourth of July, when I last wrote about life at Stanford), I didn’t do much of anything on Friday, choosing instead to work on Sangre/Gabo. On the next day I got up early and went on another day trip to see Pirates of the Caribbean 2, which I thought was a pretty good movie with the exception of the cliffhanger at the end. I didn’t know beforehand that they were going to stretch the story out into a third movie, so I came expecting a conclusion and was a bit put off when there wasn’t one.
By the evening after seeing Pirates of the Caribbean 2, I had slept about four hours on average over the past few days, and I “accidentally” slept in the next morning and missed the trip to the art museum in San Francisco. I can’t say I was really all that sad about it, as I’m not really that interested in art in general and I like artwork with historical meaning more than the modern art I would have seen had I gone. Instead, I spent my Sunday sleeping and finishing up a CS homework assignment that was due the next day. As you can probably tell, it wasn’t nearly as eventful a weekend as the first and second ones.
Last week was slow in terms of actual things occurring but somewhat stressful due to a new CS homework assignment that I had to work on, which was to program the game “Breakout” in Java. This proved more difficult for me than I had thought it would. So far, we’ve gone over a lot in the class, but not really any programming concepts that I don’t utilize already in my PHP programming. (However, this is not to say that I haven’t gotten anything out of the class - the level of sophistication in my code has increased substantially, and I’ve worked out most of the nuances of the Java language and gotten over the fact that it’s strongly typed, a big difference from PHP.) The problem is that the class is meant to teach both experienced programmers and people who have never programmed before, and we’re kind of expected to stay within certain bounds of sophistication and complexity that novice programmers don’t cross very often. For the first two assignments, one of which was in the extremely limited Karel language, I was a good little boy and didn’t stray too far from what the rest of the flock was supposed to be doing, mainly because I was explicitly told not to and the assignments themselves were too simple to allow for much innovation. But on this third one, which is due on Tuesday, the limits were removed completely and I was set free to do whatever I wanted within the constraints of the Java language. At first, I just concentrated on the core functionality. I programmed a working version that did almost everything that the assignment had asked for, but then I realized that the code was fast becoming difficult to read or maintain because I had attempted to write the entire game as a single class. This was what we were supposed to do, but unless I stuck with the bare minimum feature set, it wasn’t going to prove to be a scalable method. So I wrote up another of other classes that the main game class (BreakoutGame) would use to run the game. There was one to manage the ball, one to manage the paddle, one for the bricks, one for game messages, one to represent a turn, et cetera. As I wrote the code, I found myself employing methodologies that I had snubbed or been too lazy to employ in the past, such as Top-Down Design, heavy object orientation, component-based design, and others. And each time I wrote a section, if I finished it and found it lacking, I’d rewrite it again. Some parts have been rewritten three or four times, yet the core logic of the code is basically the same. But now I have a much better platform to build off of, allowing me to add some nice new features in the hope of earning the coveted ++ grade on the assignment. We’ll see if that happens or not (there’s still a lot of work to be done), but I’ve learned a lot from all of the refactoring I’ve done. I think I can now write Java almost as easily as I can write PHP.
So Monday marked the beginning of a long week, in which I spent way more time than I wanted to working on homework for my Latin word roots class (as you may have noticed, I’m really just in this for the programming - I want to figure out if I really want to be a software engineer or not as soon as I can because it will probably impact what college I choose to go to). On Monday night there was a little meeting at the student union about the college admissions process and financial aid, and I left feeling slightly more optimistic about my ability to afford going to Stanford were I able to get in (they cover 100% of students’ demonstrated financial need). Tuesday night featured a group photo (yay?) on the steps of the Cantor Art Museum and a meeting with the Spanish Club at the student union, where we ate nachos and had a debate (en español, de acurso) about whether or not the SAT was a good thing for students. Wednesday night was the first Book Club meeting, where we discussed the first half of Old School, by Tobias Wolff, though I had to keep quiet most of the time because I’d already read the whole thing in a frenzy on Sunday night (it was difficult to put down). There was also an Intro to Engineering seminar meeting, a weekly thing that I signed up for at the beginning of the summer session where a few kids meet in the main Lagunita lounge and listen to a guest engineer talk about their job. The first one was a pretty cool mechanical engineer who works to improve the efficiency of engines, and the second was a medical R&D engineer who develops equipment for surgeons like drug-coated stents and catheters and such. Eventually there’s going to be a computer engineering guy, and that of course is the one I’m most looking forward to.
On Thursday I went to Green Library in search of books to help me in researching the Battle of Lepanto, a naval conflict that occurred in 1571 and has been termed one of the most decisive naval battles in military history. It turned out to be a good idea to do my research here; I found six books on Lepanto in English and several more in Spanish that I might check out later if I’m ever feeling really zealous about my research. Sure, I had to traverse the inky depths of the Bing Wing basement to get a few of them (scary, but would be such an awesome Counter-Strike level), but I emerged alive. Thursday night was uneventful except for an “extra discussion section” for CS that we now have to go to weekly. I wasn’t very impressed by the first one, nor was I impressed by this latest one. Basically, students just ask questions about concepts that were taught in lecture and we do a few simple problems on a chalkboard. If I could easily skip it, I would, but the section leader is the same guy who grades the homework, so I guess I should probably try to stay in favor with him.
On Friday (yesterday), I slept in in the morning, worked on some code, and then spent the rest of my day with my grandparents from Colorado, who came out here to visit my aunt and uncle who live in downtown San Francisco. They picked me up at about 12:30, and then we went out to eat at the Cheesecake Factory in Palo Alto. The food was great and it was kind of nice to be off campus and with family for the first time in three weeks. Afterward, we went back to Stanford and I took my grandparents on the grand tour of the main quad, the engineering quad, and the eastern part of the campus, where the libraries and student union are located. They dropped me off at Lagunita (my dorm) and left at about 5:30, at which time I was ready to veg for a few hours before diving back into my code and watching a really strange movie (Mulholland Drive, another movie with a fair amount of erotic scenes that are just too weird to be entertaining in the normal sense) with a few friends. I went to bed “early” (around 1:00) so that I could get up early for today’s trip, which was to Monterey Bay Aquarium.
I didn’t get up quite as early as I had hoped; I woke up at 7:02, just in time to throw on some clothes and grab my hat, wallet, phone, and key so that I could meet the rest of the group out in the courtyard at 7:00. (Yes, that means that I either got ready in negative two minutes or that I was about five minutes late - I like to think that the former was true, because I’m just special that way.) Monterey is about a 90-minute coach ride from here, so we watched 10 Things I Hate About You on the way (it was a nice coach). Once at the aquarium, I ended up with a group of two fellow Eucs (Garret and Ashley) and a girl from Ujamaa who I didn’t know that well. We kind of rushed through it, but I saw most of the animals that I really wanted to see (jellyfish, sharks, sea otters, etc.). I think we might have spent more time in the three different (yet the same) gift shops that we visited; one rule of thumb that I have learned since coming to the Bay Area is that one shalt not expecteth to not shoppeth if one placeth thyself with them of the female sex(eth?). But plush stuffed-animal manta rays were a lot better than yarn (why, oh why did it have to be yarn?), so I was okay with it.
After about two and a half hours at the aquarium, my group wandered around Monterey in search of things to do. We ended up at a Mexican restaurant (no one was particularly hungry for seafood after being lectured at about marine conservation at the aquarium) right on the ocean, which would have given us a wonderful view if it weren’t for the fog and the depressingly small waves and the little marshy seaweed/rock formations and the old men swimming. I guess I was too busy dealing with the utter euphoria brought on by the arrival of good Mexican food to pay attention to the ocean anyway. All of the food had a little more cilantro than I was used to, but it was great anyway. We talked for a while at the restaurant after our meal, and then we left to go back into Monterey and see Cannery Row, which is a slang term for “go shopping in the quaint little tourist trappy shops along what used to be a historic street.” As you may have gleaned from my entry about going to Chinatown in San Francisco, I’m not a big fan of tourist districts, and it was no different in Monterey. I endured it anyway, though shopping/driving rusty nails through John Steinbeck’s long-decayed heart was made much more enjoyable by my friend and fellow CS student Garret, who entertained the girls and myself by wearing women’s sunglasses with floppy tourist hats while clutching an “authentic” Hairy Otter stuffed animal.
Our last stop on our whirlwind shopping tour of Cannery Row was the local Starbucks, where I got my usual Strawberry-Banana Créme Frappuccino and was sucked away once more into a euphoric wonderworld where whipped cream clouds floated across a pink, blended strawberry sky and little green mermaids fed me frappuccino after frappuccino using a turkey-baster–like device. Having had my two great loves, Mexican food and Starbucks, in the same day, I decided that my existence was complete and that there was no longer anything worth striving for or achieving. My foot was tapping with joy; it annoyed my group, I think, but I didn’t care. By the way, the Strawberry-Banana Créme Frappuccino isn’t a normal Starbucks offering; you have to ask them to blend together half a Strawberries and Créme Frappuccino and half a Bananas and Créme Frappuccino in order to get it. I consider it to be perhaps the best thing ever conceived by mankind.
After I had come down from my sugar-and-bean–induced high, we walked back to the aquarium, hopped on our buses coaches (sorry, have to be proper), and went home, watching Mean Girls on the way. For being a Lindsey Lohan film, it wasn’t all that bad, pretty funny in some parts. We reached Lagunita at about 6:30, arriving late due to some slow traffic on the way. I ate a quick and late dinner (though I wasn’t very hungry), watched a kid from my house play SimCity 4, one of my favorite non-gory games, while the Bulgarian kid, Z, talked about how he had kicked a drunk guy in a graveyard a few nights ago (I told him he should have head-butted the guy in the chest). Then I made a few plans with my uncle for tomorrow, when I should be taking the CalTrain up to San Francisco so that we can cross the Golden Gate up into Marin and Sausalito. And now I’m here, in the cluster, writing perhaps one of my better entries in the past few months. This feels a lot more like the Brett of two years ago…the not-so-complainy, not-so-depressed Brett. Dare I ask if this might mean that the dark period following the move to Wisconsin is finally, completely, over, and Brett has finally rejoined the world as a semi-normal person? We’ll see. Unfortunately, though I wish I could stay here forever and simply go to college as if I were a real undergraduate, I still have to go home in August. Sigh. (I know, I always end my entries on such an upbeat note.)