For this (WI03) quarter: CSE 127/131B/101, ECON 4. I'm also tutoring CSE 80. An actual schedule will be posted in a day or two, via the schedule link (offsite). This quarter will be interesting...
Hooray. I survived winter quarter. Now for another quarter, and possibly even a job, too. We'll see about that. I'm happy. Also became of age a couple of months ago. Funny how I've grown up quite a lot in the space of three months. Lots of networking last quarter ;-). Also kinda amusing that technically, this is a blog, but I rarely feed it anything. Oh well--those who know me best probably don't need to read a blog anyways to know what I'm up to.
I'm in the graphics class this quarter, so maybe you'll see some screenshots of various renderings posted here.
Started work at Sun Microsystems (offsite) today. I'm working in the Enterprise Server group, writing ...something... involving giant computers. Wooo!
Bored. Does this web site make any impact if it gets updated and there's no-one to read it? Including the webmaster himself? I could complain about my life, but that would bore me, so I won't. Maybe I'll just go take a nap instead.
I've rearranged the site layout a bit. Gone is the new photo album. I never finished integrating it, and I never removed the old one, so it stays. UCSDementia is now officially off the air, so it's been moved to the exhibits page.
After years and years of procrastinating, I've finally gotten around to digitizing the photos that I took while touring Italy in 1999 with some friends from school. This online album, unfortunately, lacks the souveneirs that the paper version of the album contains and a few photos that should be kept away from public display. Anyway, enter the Italy album.
My fourth and final year of UCSD has begun. Journal updates will probably become slow again. Suffice it to say, work, school, and investigatiosn of my post-graduation life have begun, and I have very litle time left over.
Last August, my faraway friends Adam and Christina flew out to California. They once went to elementary school with me, but they both moved away years ago, making this meeting quite a coincidence. We went around to San Francisco and spent the day roaming around the city and the Bay; take a look at Christina's Photos or Adam's Photos (offsite).
During last summer, I have been working on jGrid , which is a grid management package for the Java platform. It takes a set of jobs, in the form of Java command objects, distributes them for processing on a grid of Java2-enabled computers, and sends the results back to the original client. The result: instant massively parallel computing in java!
As you've probably noticed, this page looks drastically different from what you've been used to seeing. This is my XML/XSL experiment; what I'm trying to do is to write a web site entirely in XML and XSL. The original content is written in XML and transformed into these dandy (X)HTML pages that you see here. Furthermore, I've finally decided to drop support for the slop that is Netscape 4's rendering engine. XHTML tags have almost no presentation information; all the formatting details are in the CSS style sheets. Better yet, I've set up the stylesheets so that the window chrome goes away when you print the page. Cool, huh? Unfortunately, it will be quite some time until the entire site is converted over to this new format.
Today I found out that I have to file for graduation before 28 November if I want to graduate in March. That's right, a month from now, for something that isn't even certain. That puts things into perspective for me...do I really want to rush everything through *now*? What if I suddenly decide to take another quarter for fun stuff? Maybe I should just do that anyway. My minor declaration needs to be filed _before_ I apply for graduation too. And the CS degree check won't come through for at least 4-5 more days. Ugh.
Went to see a pretty good play with Brian this evening. Also found out what chardonnay tastes like. In other news, my degree check came through without any surprises, so IF I manage to pass CSE166, then I'll be done with CS in December! Now, the big problem is that I have no idea if I can pass the class. In other news, I'm still looking for a research project for the rest of the school year and a real job after that.
jGrid is now up to v0.53! Premiering with this release is a distributed Mandelbrot set plotting program! Take a look at my poorly-colored image here. Like the other example programs, the Mandelbrot plotter splits the process of drawing the fractal into a bunch of smaller chunks (256x256, currently) and sends those jobs out for processing. When the jobs come back, the results are stitched together into the final image. See jGrid, the lightweight grid package that makes this all possible.
Everybody--I will be back home for Thanksgiving the evening of the Nov. 26 through the 30th. The 27th and 29th are already taken. Anybody want to go to Ti Couz or something? Also, I will be home for Christmas Dec 21 - Jan 3, except the evening of the 27th. Please feel free to suggest outings as desired. In other news, the Me section has been completely converted to the new format.
As strange as it seems, I have obtained a free subscription to LiveJournal. This moment of weakness was fostered by the desire to slap comments onto Maddy (offsite) and Clay (offsite)'s journals as something other than Anonymous Coward. In any case, I now have one of my own, which is rather pointless since I've had one here since October '98. So now the question becomes--should I cross-post entries, or abandon one of them? (We all know I'll ultimately abandon both due to time constraints, but I can dream.) See journal (offsite).
Ah, Thanksgiving! The first glut of real food since Labor Day. The food was filling, although I probably shouldn't have played football with my cousins; now I'm sore all over. Downtown San Francisco is aglow with lights on all the buildings, and the air is cold enough to make it feel like it's really wintertime again. I'm looking forward to finishing my classes (two homeworks and four finals to go!) so I can jet back here, and do all the Christmasy things I always do around the holidays.
Two more days until I'm done with CS. Assuming I pass all my classes this quarter. Wow. Never thought I'd actually reach the end of college as I know it...all that's left for the next two quarters is (hopefully) some research classes and other fun random classes that I've been waiting to take for the past four years. And maybe I'll finally catch up on the (two-year-long) list of books that I've been meaning to read. Well...maybe not. In any case, I still have two more finals to finish...bye.
I'M FREE!! I'VE FINISHED THE LAST OF MY CS FINALS! THERE ARE NO MORE MAJOR CLASSES TO TAKE! WOOO! I might mention that I have to _pass_ those classes, and in any case I still have a minor to finish. But I'm DONE! Muahahahahahaaa!
Grades are out. I passed. I'm certifiably done. Hoo-ray! Now if only my mother wasn't dying.
There are some people I'd like to thank, and in no particular order--dad and grandma for keeping this household and mom together, Yvonne for keeping my mother together, the Wilkins for having their silly Christmas tree...the Trainas (and the other neighbors) for their support, Steph and Greg for spending a Saturday with me in San Francisco (or the other way 'round) keeping my mind off this awful situation, Woodley for helping me to change a tire (and providing an escape valve when I needed to get out a bit), Melissa for *carrying* a tire, Uncle Charles and Aunt Vicki for visiting today, Uncle Larry & family for visiting earlier, cousin Nicole for letting me know what's going on back home, and the folks of El Camino Hospital, Manor Care, and Odyssey Hospice for their support. I've probably omitted scores of other people; this is not deliberate; I'm just tired. These peoples' efforts will not be forgotten.
Most of you who are close to me probably already know this, but I felt the need at last to post something on my public web site. Why, I don't know for sure, but it felt good to post something. Anyway, my mother has been fighting breast cancer since August of 1999. Despite a brief remission in 2001, the cancer recurred in 2002, and in mid-2003 we discovered that it had spread to other parts of her body. Unfortunately, one of those parts happened to be her liver. We tried chemotherapy, and for a while it worked...until her liver started to fail. It seems that she had both the fast and slow moving varieties of cancer, and the fast-growing kind took over in the liver. So that brings us to today--she's too weak for anything like a liver transplant, so that effectively rules out any treatment at all. With no liver (and no immune system, either), she will not last very much longer.
Merry Christmas, everybody! I've converted the photo albums to use the new build infrastructure and put them up on the main web site. That means that I'm two sections away from being done with the site conversion! Perhaps I'll even get this whole job done in a short amount of time...and I love listening to the christmas morning music on ClassicFM (offsite).
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