Well, it was fun while it lasted.

Wait, I don’t think I’ve ever told you guys what I was actually studying. So, I guess I better start there, especially since I have a better idea of what I was doing now that it’s over.

The REU (Research Experience for Undergrads) was based in Calpoly, with a focus on robotics. My particular project’s long term goal was to track/follow sharks with multiple AUVs, with the short-term summer goal of tracking/following a boat with one AUV. In short, we (research team had 4 people in it, with two of us ending up branching towards some very different target) failed pretty miserably at attaining that goal. If you don’t mind, I’m going to rant a bit on why that happened, instead of blabbering about the details of the project, which aren’t that interesting anyways.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that speed is incredibly important. It’s not a very good mantra for a plethora of reasons, but didn’t have the raw speed to make up for our other shortcomings. For instance, I only knew rudimentary opamp theory going into the REU, but I spent the better part of a day learning what I needed to know. Now, spending a day learning 30-minutes of information is bad, and that sort of situation happened over and over again. Sometimes it was inevitable, like learning to use Eagle taking two days. Much of the time, it wasn’t. Generally speaking, I was working full time on a series of problems, and once days started to slip by with token progress, I should have known something was up.

Another problem I’m going to peg our failure to score a goal on is the agonizingly slow start we got off to. Now that it’s over, it feels like if we started with what we knew at our 3rd week, then we could’ve really done some damage. Not doing homework before getting there was a problem, certainly, as well as the closely related problem of not pounding our advisors with more important questions. I don’t even think the problem was well-defined in our heads until a few weeks in, which in retrospect was a very, very big problem, and probably why we didn’t know what we were doing for the first two weeks.

A comparison might be handy: it was very much unlike the MCM, where we had a concrete goal and a very short time period in which to do something about it. Our project stayed undefined for a while, and stayed murky, and we had a relatively long time in which to do something (bad, since I only pulled my requisite all-nighter (of course! it’s not an REU if you haven’t pulled an all-nighter) on the last night (I do not recommend pulling it the night before a presentation, though). It feels like motivation goes way down when there’s too much time: much stricter goal setting and goal meeting insanity on my part would have ameliorated this somewhat).

So I guess I’ll end my rant here. It was a very valuable experience, and I was glad I got to do it. I just wish…

No. I’m really ending my rant, and going to go do something cool. Hopefully I’ll have something to show by the end of the week.

My gosh, so much happens in a week.

So, I got evicted (not my fault, although now I know that I have to keep tabs on the people I rent from, too), started really whaling on my internship (partly why I haven’t been posting lately), and played out in public. Granted, I sucked, and I’ve been out of practice for about a week (and my god, why can’t they leave a grand where I can get to it, and let me at it when I can get to it?), and there wasn’t anyone around to hear it, but it’s the thought that counts! Right? Right…

But since real life is boring (at least until I start finishing projects, which are all in varying states of incompletion, aka don’t expect anything soon), I’ll be talking about something that I’ve slowly come to realize. It’s been a feeling that’s been with me around a year, starting as something innocuous, but I’ve only recently figured out what it actually means (I know, it’s kind of late, so my word-smithing is somewhat off. Do forgive me).

I realize just how cool of a place UPS was, and I wish (in a way) that I could’ve stuck around for a little longer, or maybe gone back and done some things differently.

Of course, I only realize that UPS was a delightful place to be when I’m leaving it, as such things are apt to happen. In this case, the relationship is not entirely coincidental: getting to know how other schools do bureaucratic work gives me an appreciation for the close knit-edness of us around UPS. For instance, I just need maybe 2 days to a week in a machine shop to finish the mechanical bits of my Mendel. The fact it’s not finished doesn’t mean that I’m lazy, just that it’s nearly impossible to get permission to wrangle around in a machine shop here at Calpoly. I can see why (not a student, summer quarter, safety up the wazzoo (although I think that everyone should adopt metrix:createspace’s liability release, hehe)), but it’s frustrating to be right in the middle of an engineering school and not be able to engineer something. So, I’ll have to use up part of my week back home to hack at it, or figure out how to navigate Columbia quickly and get access to a machine shop there.

But so what? No one cares about how Universities handle machine shop access. Rather, it is indicative of the larger ways and methods of how things are done, and it is with regret that I now know I haven’t been using my professors as much as I should have been. Now that I actually know that, I fear that Columbia is going to be a much different sort of place. Maybe not quite so different: professors that are enthusiastic about teaching are everywhere (the converse is also true, unfortunately). However, Columbia is big enough to have TAs teaching classes, rather than having professors teaching every single class, all the time. Time lost getting to know the actual prof.

Then, there’s the geekiness factor. But Nathan! you may be thinking, Isn’t that one of the reasons you didn’t like UPS? Because geeks that you could engage with were few and far between? True, but not being surrounded by geeks means that I’m not completely cut off from the larger world, that I can have a direct impact on the world of those around me just by being geeky, especially being enthusiastic about being geeky. Of course, I missed this sort of chance to really engage people, although I really wasn’t quite geeky enough most of the time back then… so I guess I’m only partially off the hook. Cause, you know, a real geek would have already been geeky enough.

And there’s some of the usual suspects: leaving behind friends, a familiar place, a familiar admin system, and a campus small enough to sprint across in less than 5 minutes. That last one was still causing me trouble up until last week; this last week of work has been me coming in and working until I get too hungry for dinner, so I haven’t been strictly keeping tabs on getting to work on time. Gonna have to fix that before I get to Columbia.

So, didn’t know what I had until it’s gone.

Mind you, I’m really anticipating a different flow in New York, a new chapter in life, and a whole lot more learning, so I’m not going to change my mind about moving. These are just some thoughts about what insights hindsight has given me concerning the past few years.

Enough rambling. Guy is still playing with his flash editor on the couchahemmy bed, so I guess I’ll get him to move.

So, not 20 minutes ago, I decided something. I was very confused, and probably didn’t make the best decision. Nothing life changing, mind you (in the way that you don’t expect significant life changes from the mundane), but importantly character revealing.

Have some background: I am still in SLO (San Luis Obispo), which is between LA and San Fran, which also means it is essentially in the middle of nowhere (comparatively: it’s still California after all). I’m doing a robotics internship at Cal Poly, and our professor suggested we check out some of the labs over at Stanford. Plans were made, and while a bunch of us research dudes were going to Yosemite after checking out Standford, a couple of us just wanted to get home after poking around San Fran and San Jose. Since I’ve been to Yosemite before, and know just how long the drive up there is, I wasn’t too keen on the idea of driving all the way up there and then climbing half dome, especially on a minimal amount of sleep. So, we plotted about how to get home from San Fran, since cars were in short supply among us. Coming home by bus seemed like the most attractive option, although it left San Jose at around 10PM.

So I wake up this morning, earlier than usual in order to get ready to go. I get out to the pick up point, and then I find that the rest of the guys skipping Yosemite had flaked out, effectively leaving me alone for the 2nd portion of the trip. That threw me into a slight panic as I tried to figure out what I should do, and I eventually decided to flake out, too. After I spent some time on top of a toilet contemplating what just happened, I finally figured that I should have gone. But then, my butt was parked on a toilet, and the caravan was already 10 minutes away.

So what’s the big deal? I missed out on a day trip to a larger city, so what? I’ll soon be parked in the middle of one of the largest cities in the world, for at least 2 years to boot. What I think is the big deal is that while I came up with the right answer to ‘What is my utility for going to Standford?’, I came up with it much too slowly (while sitting on the toilet no less). An event that I hadn’t considered (the rest of the non-Yosemite team flaking out) blindsided me and (I’m guessing) temporarily overwhelmed my utility function, causing me to make a decision that I didn’t want to make in retrospect.

It was also clear in retrospect that I should have seen it coming, and then pre-cached my thoughts about it (humans think relatively slowly, so we (probably) cache a whole lot of our thoughts to keep up our mental quickness. In this case, trying to come up with a 30-second utility evaluation wasn’t so stable). The guys I was going to be coming home with have had a history of flaking out, and the time/cost investment of the trip would only have raised the probability that they would flake out. In retrospect, it was so obvious that the probability was going to be high that I can’t figure out how I missed it entirely. And if I can’t catch obvious branches like that, then what else am i missing?

So maybe this episode wasn’t character revealing; oh well.

Now I have an entire day ahead of me. Wiped empty. Well, better get to filling it.

Oh, hi. I’m in California now, and it’s been way too long since I’ve made a post that wasn’t a story, and I’ve been in Cali for almost 2 weeks now and how can I call myself a blogger when I can’t even post when I dump my life upside down for two weeks? Hell, my internship thingie is almost 2/9ths of the way done, and I haven’t made a blog post about it. Okay, so I’ll quickly attempt to remedy this dire situation before going to sleep.

So, first things first: I’m in cali, but in the middle of nowhere cali. Okay, that’s not a very nice description of San Luis Obispo, but when you consider the neighboring cities of San Fran and LA, then SLO seems very much like the middle of nowhere. Even if it is the middle of nowhere, it’s a very nice middle of nowhere: there’s maybe been one fully overcast day, and yet the air is cooler than cucumbers. Get something of a tan (I’m indoor much of the time, so I’m not really being exposed to this famed Californian sun, but I guess I get enough from just walking around) while not roasting: I like it. I managed to score an apartment that’s close to the school and some shopping places (realizing in retrospect just how far all that other housing was: Google maps seems to do the distances less justice than it should). Note: walking everywhere is a pain in the butt (walking downtown to the farmer’s market… good berries, but it took a while). I’m still wondering if I should get one of those collapsible bikes, although it might translate to a literal pain in the butt…

Okay, so that’s where I am: but what am I doing? Well, we’re not sure, so I’ll hold off on explaining that. Although, I’ll comment that I’ve found use for my optimization class: it might involve very nasty non-linear optimization, but that’s even better! Now, if I can figure it out before my 9 weeks is up is a good question… Also, the pace of doing 9-5 research is much slower than the MCM. I have a feeling that the MCM is going to be my benchmark for frenzied progress from now on…

Since I have an aversion to breaking up posts into consecutive topic posts, I’ll just mash on some thoughts to the end of my update.

So I don’t think it’s the context switching that’s causing me problems (ref. 5 posts back): at least, context switching isn’t such a big problem as compared to others. For instance, just dicking around instead of doing things. Again referencing my previous post, I came up with this ginormous list of things that I want to do: it turns out that I have no will to do those things. More rigorously, it turns out that I have limited will to do those things while I’m working on research for around 8 hours each weekday, and I have a pretty strong compulsion to screw around and waste time rather than do something I’ll remember and have use for twenty years down the line.

Exhibit the first: I got a nice idea to work on an introductory video for git when I realized that no one teaches scm, at least in your usual comp sci curriculum. You have dozens of blog posts detailing why you should care about git (or hg or svn or w/e), and plenty of videos detailing how to do things, but nothing that just introduces the basics about why you should be interested in using a s(ource) c(ode) m(anagement) system like git. So, using Ignite’s (argh! I just remembered that SLO’s ignite night was tonight! argh! again!) slogan ’enlighten us, but make it quick’ I set out to put together a short and sweet video animating the principles behind git.

So, I allocated myself a little more than an evening to finish it, reasoning that if I used some sweet icons from the Tango icon set, I could stick this thing together reasonably quickly. Well, now I’ve been sitting on it for more than a week, and I think I have all the blocking nicely done. Yup, blocking. I haven’t even thought about how to do the custom music track I was planning on doing.

Looking back, it’s glaring how obvious positivity bias (I’m pretty sure this isn’t what it’s called, but I don’t want to dig through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality just to find it: I won’t sleep all night if I try it) was present in my time allocation. So am I really that bad an animator? Well, not really: out of most of the days in the past week, I’ve maybe gotten less than an hour in working at the video, mostly because I wouldn’t let myself have at it until around 10 o’clock (Which reminds me, having a regular sleep schedule does not work wonders). Sometimes it’s because I’m context switching around and trying to get some reprap stuff done, or otherwise, but all this incidental work + dinner should take a maximum of 2 hours. The other drains are from surfing around the web: I would hate to see my productivity if I hadn’t blocked reddit, digg, and slashdot, although I still tend to stare at the screen and mentally scream for those mental sinks.

I wonder if it’s a withdrawal effect: if so, it’s a pretty long lived one. I’ve ditched most of those social aggregators a while ago, although I suppose it’s more like developing a taste for candy: you might go back to chicken n’ rice, but you never forget the taste of people catering to bored dudes on the internet.

In the end, I just want to make and know things. Please. Come on, mind, you should be able to pull this off. I think we can put aside our differences. For science. You monster.

I’ve been getting too much sleep.

Sounds strange, no?

Well, once you know that I’ve been sleeping through half the day (little less than 12 hours), then it’s not quite so strange. I’m sleeping way too much, and if I was getting 4 more hours of wakefulness into the day for a nice balance of 16/8, then I would probably be much more productive. I probably wouldn’t be as sleepy, and damn, 4 hours is a long time, especially once you multiply it over 2+ weeks.

The only reason this is a problem is because my REU is fast approaching (1.5 weeks): ignoring my lack of housing, I also need to prep for the project, which means reading a lot of material. When you consider that a large chunk of my day is taken up with overhead, those 4 hours could increase my productivity dramatically. Now, figuring out how to change my sleeping habits is going to be difficult, but man, does it need to happen.

Okay, time for me to stop screwing around with facebook, wordpress, and whatever other social networking sites I’m hanging around and to work. Fun.

First, I got into USC’s combined plan program.

Second, I got into Columbia’s combined plan program.

Third, PROFIT!!!!!!! (or extreme dancing)

I’m pretty stoked right about now. I don’t have to go to USC, and I got into Columbia’s combined plan program for computer engineering (rather than the saner choice of electrical engineering).

The only problem is that Columbia has the power to force me to take another programming course, since I haven’t taken a computer science course at UPS (really, optimization and discrete mathematics don’t count). This may or may not interfere with my research at calpoly: I hope it doesn’t, but I’ll need to send a bunch of emails and sort it out.

Well, here’s to things working out.

I got into Cal Poly’s Robotics REU program!

I’ll say it again!

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Damn, I’m happy. Happier than winning the MCM (which is saying something). The MCM took only 4 days out of my life: this is going to put me in California, working with robots, for an entire summer. I’ll say it again.

God DAMN I’m happy.

Now it’s time to finish this lab so I can work on my reprap the rest of the week!

Well, well, well: guess who’s MCM team got a finalist designation! Meaning that we were in the top 1% of the MCM teams; unfortunately, I think that the lack of graphics in my section might have contributed to our failure to attain outstanding (right, so I’ll stop with the self-blame and try to maintain a better self-view). But at any rate, I’m pretty stoked about the whole high-percentage thing, and we’re gonna have a quick little celebration. Additionally, I spent a fair amount of time in the machine shop, possibly the first time I’ve put in time on a Monday, and I don’t see anything that’s stopping me from doing so the rest of the days of the week. Life is pretty good.

Well, except for homework, an exam, and a big paper. Those are a bit less happy; also, the fact that I’ve made about zero headway into the BAP problem, anim3, and the app app are somewhat depressing. Also, I only have 2 REU’s left to hear back from: cross the fingers and sacrifice the pigs! It’s gonna be a couple nail-biting days/weeks.

So I didn’t get around to updating last night before going to bed at 3:30, but I’m getting around to it now. You should notice the site overhaul: I still have a garish gimp flame-plugin thing, but I needed some green, and making something by hand just wasn’t working out. The color scheme is based on brown, just because it is? I tried it out, and it worked, so I ran with it. Also, I brought back the side bar.

More important news: it is spring break for me! It’s partly why I spent an afternoon screwing around with my blog style, and I hope that I’ll get a load of things done this week ‘round. As I said before, I’ll hope to grab pretty much everything else that I’ll need to finish the reprap before the heat death of the universe, and if certain professors are around, I’ll stick around and cut some more parts. That in itself would be a pretty good use of my break, but I’ll also be looking at describing and improving my algorithm for the BAP problem I’ve been talking about: keeping people in the dark about what I’m talking about is no fun. I’ll also clear out my old list of draft posts, make up/set up an image manager that isn’t crappy, and work on EZLO. On top of this, I do need to finish the homework profs have assigned over the break, finish applying to REUs, and save the world. Oh, and anim3 needs some serious work.

Well, I think it’s about time to get started on these things. Stay tuned.