Posts from — April 2005

Agggh… I got passed over for the papacy.

I’m selling the following:
GIGABYTE “GA-K8NS Ultra-939″ NVIDIA nForce3 ULTRA Chipset Motherboard For AMD Socket 939 CPU – Onboard just about everything except video, includes SATA and hardware RAID.
AMD64 3500+ Processor – Socket 939, full retail bundle which includes the (quiet) fan and heatsink (link is to the OEM version, which doesn’t include that).
512 MB DDR RAM – 1 stick
Maxtor 120GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive, MODEL 6Y120M0 – Very fast and quiet.

All of this is in perfect working condition and was barely used. I am selling it because I couldn’t get linux to work well with certain parts of the motherboard (driver issues), but Windows ran fine on it (and blazingly fast). I haven’t set prices yet, so they’re negociable, but the prices on newegg for the stuff I bought is pretty close to the prices I bought them at. Let me know if you’re in the market.

To make a complete system, you’d need to add your own monitor, video card, and case. I can help install the new hardware if you need it. This could be a nice way to upgrade an aging machine.

Dell sent me a 1 page paper letter in a box today. No joke.

“Another way to figure out which fields are worth studying is to create the dropout graph. For example, I know many people who switched from math to computer science because they found math too hard, and no one who did the opposite. People don’t do hard things gratuitously; no one will work on a harder problem unless it is proportionately (or at least log(n)) more rewarding. So probably math is more worth studying than computer science. By similar comparisons you can make a graph of all the departments in a university. At the bottom you’ll find the subjects with least intellectual content.”
- Paul Graham

I’ve been reading a bunch of essays by Paul Graham tonight, they’re pretty good. The one linked to above has advice about grad school, too.

I wrote about the music I listen to while running a while ago, but the tracks have changed someone, so I’ll write about the additions and rewrite about some of the old ones. Not in any order.

Green Day – Boulevard of Broken Dreams – Has taken the place of Under the Bridge as my starting song. It’s not too fast, but had a steady beat that is appropriate for warming up.
The Verve – Bittersweet Symphony – This was on a nike commerical a while back, and I thing it’s generally a good song, but when I listened to it during my last run, it was too slow and just made me feel tired rather than strong. Maybe I’ll try the Moby remix again, that’s much faster.
Red Hot Chili Peppers – Can’t Stop – I’m not going to write about the other RHCP songs I have on the list, but this one stands out because it’s still always the second song I listen to, with a very strong beat to tell me that the warmup is over and it’s time to start moving.
Goldfinger – 99 Red Baloons – This one I added a while back (not sure why it’s not on the old list) and has a good beat so it’s going to stick around.
Squirrel Nut Zippers – Flight of Passing Fancy – This one is a bit too slow, but it’s close to being very good. For slower runs this is a fun song to listen to.
Bloc Party – Like Eating Glass – My favorite Bloc Party song happens to be the best for running so far. The drum beat is awesome and the pace is perfect. I also like Helicopter and Positive Tension for the same reasons.
Radiohead – Electioneering – There’s nothing like some cowbell while you’re running, and Electioneering doesn’t disappoint.
Air – Alpha Beta Gaga – This one is ok for later portions of long, slow runs, but is too slow for anything else. Might be dangerously catchy, too.
The Postal Service – Brand New Colony – This one is slightly too slow, so I’m not going to try again. It’s a good song, though.
The Postal Service – The District Sleeps Alone Tonight – Though this song is slower than Brand New Colony, it actually doesn’t cause a problem. My reasoning is this: if the beat of the song is slightly slower than the running rhythm, I tend to slow my pace to match the music vaguely. If the rates aren’t at all close, there’s no danger of that. This doesn’t eliminate the risk of soporific music sapping my energy, but in some cases this works fine. Same thing with Snow Patrol – Somewhere a Clock is Ticking and others.

If anyone else runs with music, I’d be curious what you listen to. Thanks to everyone who has suggested music of all types to me, much of these I didn’t have a week ago, most I didn’t have a year ago. I’ll eventually write more about music in a more general sense… I promise (maybe).

I’m going to be working with Professor Baird this summer on a research project along with a few other people (that site has a description of his past work… it’s pretty ridiculous). He’s pretty excited about the project, and I am too, it should be really interesting (and hopefully fruitful). Here are a couple paragraphs explaining it from an email he wrote earlier in the week:

“Here’s one problem we might tackle, motivated by the pressing needs of intelligence analysts: given a huge number of images (B&W, color, grey) some of which are of documents (nobody knows which ones), detect the presence of text (handwriting & machine-print), the reading direction of the text, the approximate number of characters/words; also detect signatures, logos, tabular data, scribbles, dirt, etc.”

“We’ll strive to make very few if any assumptions that constrain the images and document types (e.g. they can be in any language), and we’ll try to build classifiers that are automatically trainable
using massive synthesized data (*no* handcrafted special cases), and run extremely fast (e.g at “I/O rates,” as fast as the images can be read….!).”

Hopefully this will be successful and publishable, or at the very least help me figure out what I want to do for a thesis and what I want to do after Lehigh.

When I went in to meet with him today, instead of asking for a resume or anything (he doesn’t really know me much outside of class), he just looked me up online. This made me think that I should probably update my lehigh.edu page to reflect my more recent work and interests. I’ll try to get to that before the summer.

Today I donated $50 to the MS (multiple sclerosis) walk in Pittsburgh. Granger linked to his friend Alisa’s entry since she is raising money for it. My uncle has MS and happens to live in Pittsburgh, so it was especially important to me. I recommend reading Alisa’s story and check out the links in the entry.

Bob Dole was on the Daily Show last night. It’s amazing how much of a nice guy and real person he seems like, especially since he left politics. The sort of guy with whom you could sit on a porch and just chat. I can’t see Bush or Kerry being like that. Strange how he seemed stale and boring when he was campaigning, way back when. Oh well.

After studying a lot for the last three days, including redoing almost every homework problem in preparation for my math test, I did worse on this one than the last. There were 4 questions and I had no idea how to start the 4th one. I did ok on the other ones, but I’m sure I made some mistakes in there. Since there is legitimately no curve in the class, this means I’ll most likely be getting a C for the first time at Lehigh (for the first time in 8 or 9 years, I think). Granted, this isn’t the end of the world, and won’t affect my entrance to grad school nor graduation, it just makes me mad since I studied so much and most of what I studied wasn’t even on there. Sorry if I was in a bad mood yesterday or if I’m in one today.

Coming out of the first test was the first time I’ve really felt like I want to graduate. I don’t want to take any math classes anymore.

I was listening to a live Incubus recording of some sort, and in the middle of the song, the vocalist says “I don’t know the words anymore, my god!”. Later on he just sang “I don’t know the words” to the tune of the song. Needless to say, it was more entertaining than musically interesting.

Maybe I’ll write a bunch about new music this weekend. Definitely not now, I have a busy 24 hours coming up.