"work" log - june 9

The rain told me this morning was made for strong Starbucks coffee, not my tea of the past few days. By the time I got there it was not raining in the Dow Jones complex, so I shed my green nylon high school track jacket and made the parking-lot walk wearing heels rather than my rain shoes. (They actually look just like this except with navy coloring in place of the green.)

During the morning I tried stubbornly to make my kind-of-not-working visual design "work" (which means "look good"). I do think it might be on its way to a state of "possibly usable". We'll see if I can fix it up well enough tomorrow.

In those few hours I waited for a text back and never got it. So I gave over a small piece of my mind to worrying about that. I should remember he's got a life too, though. I didn't know exactly when the guys (my friends from last year) were going to lunch, so I kind of gave up. It can't hurt to catch up on hours by eating at my desk anyway. I took maybe 15 minutes of time doing things not related to work on the computer and hoped no one walked by and asked why I had Twitter on the screen.

Later Yuriy came to my rescue, YAY! I emailed to ask how foosball had gone since I assumed I had missed it. He called me up at my cube and joked that I didn't need Matt's permission to come play. Then he said I must come to the 3pm game session. I was so glad for the break so I wouldn't be at my desk for the entire day straight. When I got upstairs Yuriy told Dimitri and Dean that the most important player was there and we could go...haha, right. They said we were going to play shuffleboard (table version) today and I made a face. I figured I would be no good at it. Yuriy and I lost the first game but totally won the second, with some good rounds. I was excited. In the third game, with Frank(?) in place of Dean, I think all my rounds were 0 or only 1 point. Oh well. Then we just had to play one foosball game although the rods don't spin well at all in the table in that room. I do believe Dimitri and I beat Yuriy and Frank. Yuriy then walked back with me and so now knows my location in the bottom floor corner. Oh right, what were we doing? Yeah, working...

Bonus: At the end of the day I discovered that Jason (the guy I'm working for) used to play DDR and Stepmania - haha awesome. He apologized for being a geek...so funny because there is absolutely no need.

-

I need to redesign this blog's design. Eric Fisher told me so.

bits & pieces

the other night:
allegro's at 1am
blueberry beer
fmylife.com
music sharing via youtube (and some figure skating, for the old days' sake)
comfiest blanket ever??
ignoring responsible life crap that matters

and another night before that one:
indian foooood...is really good
tea
that same blanket
relationship stories and later just really talking about them
(there was prolly some youtube in there too)
...this is what makes college really meaningful to me.

different night:
salsa.salsa.salsa
i really can't balance when i spin (usually)
everyone is sooo nice...yay
friend&guys
i think i love bachata
must go social dancing [a lot] more
i'm kind of a sucker for when guys dress nicely...
steaks on south//i can't contribute to conversational topics about the world??

totally different:
i love climbing, and i don't exactly know why
seems like everyone there is nice (helpful) as well
good place to be female? O:-)
conquering top-rope routes is .. awesome
argh need to get belay-certified

i'm a geek:
cuz i'm excited to set up a mysql database ahaha
and want to swallow php whole


wanna:
go dress shopping
go shopping for clothes in general ...(ok, so i'm such a girl sometimes)
be good at dance
go social dancing...hopefully to more of a variety than mainly salsa music
go climbing like all the time hah
be with friends; i'm running out of college time

i wish i had joined PLBD in freshman year. largely so i'd be kinda good at dance by now, but also cuz i'm starting to really see how these groups bond. i don't have that - not in band, not in dance (at this point anyway, but i don't think it'll change that much), not where i live nor where i lived, not amongst my major. this doesn't mean i don't have friends; i do and i love and appreciate them. what i wish i'd experienced is group friendship (mine are all scattered from various "sources").


(2:12:50 AM) Tory: i just thought of something
(2:12:56 AM) Tory: maybe cuz of the impracticality of it all
(2:13:01 AM) Tory: it wouldn't relaly hurt to tell him
(2:13:02 AM) Tory: heh

Stepmania + perception/attention is crazy

As is somewhat obvious from the previous post, I play Stepmania. To keep the history short for now, I've played for awhile, and I'd say I'm pretty good at it. I've often noticed a quite interesting phenomenon involving the interaction of two factors - perception and my level of attention - and the resulting score/grade on whatever song I'm playing at the moment. In the case that someday someone reads this and doesn't know what Stepmania is: it's DDR, played with fingers on the keyboard - which means, a stream of arrows (each one is up, down, right or left) moves towards the top of the window, coordinated with a song, and as they hit the outline of arrows, you must press a key on the keyboard. You don't need to use the arrow keys though; I started with that, but typically you'll move to using more comfortable keys: I use e, f, j, i in correspondence with the order of the arrows in the line at the top.

Now, as one gets better at this game, the intuitive thought is that the harder you concentrate, the more you focus your attention on hitting the keys at exactly the right time, the more accurate your key hits will be, and the better your score for the song. Well, I started noticing that this wasn't happening. Actually, if I relaxed just a little, and didn't try quite so hard to read the arrows, but rather let the stream fly by as if I might be just about to let my eyes glaze over, I found that I did better. I could hit a stream of keys more accurately and score better overall. (Quick disclaimer...this discovery did not cause a sudden major improvement in my skills. I don't always get the attention level just right to make it work; it's a little more random.) And someone pointed out the key to me one time: muscle memory. This makes sense and sounds rather obvious, but it's still intensely interesting to me. It might also mean that I play the same songs a very large number of times. hahaha.

The strongest and most interesting example of this occurred over winter break. My younger brother came by while I was playing what I think is a pretty crazy song and stepfile:



(Note that this video makes it look a little harder than it does when I play it. I set it to space out the arrows more, and they move faster to compensate for that.)

So there I was, telling my brother to hang around and listen to this crazy song. And he thinks it's not even a song; he's going on with this analogy, narrating the song as sounds of a computer breaking down... I'm laughing at all of this cuz I love him and it's pretty funny the way he's saying it, so definitely I'm not really able to give full attention to the game. It's even possible my eyes were starting to tear because that happens really easily for me when I laugh, which would mean I couldn't even see the screen totally clearly. Somehow, with these combined reductions in rapt attention, I ended up getting some kind of personal record score (like my second best, or something) on the song. Insane! It means I'm perceiving the arrows, this information is flying through my brain, all the visual system, the recognition stuff, and then my brain's processing which arrow is which and commanding the corresponding finger to hit the key - ALL happening before I can realize the arrow-finger-key combination. Becoming cognizant of what my body is doing is slower than my body doing it. (Actually hmm when I word it like that, it seems to make sense...) It's just that usually, we think of the process as: first we decide we want to make an action, then we do it. Here, the action is done before I know what it is!! Woahhhhh. This is really awesome. And it's my psych class on perception in real life. :D

This is addiction.

i love this song - My Red Hot Car, by Squarepusher on the album Go Plastic:



^ [player courtesy of Fruitunes]

i love the step file someone wrote for it. it may be my absolute favorite out of all songs i have played. i also play too much stepmania...



and i actually do love the little red civic my family has...

ps: a friend's interpretation (thanks David)

FIREFOX 3!!

Yeah yeah I FINALLY updated to FF3. I was holding off for awhile cuz it kept telling me "these 5 add-ons of yours aren't going to work in FF3" and I am pretty attached to most of my add-ons, didn't want to lose them... But hey now it's winter break, I'm just realizing I don't have to worry about work anymore and I have time to do stuff I want to do, and I thought you know, I'll go through my add-ons and individually check out their compatibility. Turns out nearly all of them are good to go with FF3 and the ones that aren't I can do without. So at last I upgraded!! Immediately I loved it, cuz it even RELOADED ALL MY TABS!!! I'm so impressed it preserved that across version installation haha. It also upgraded my add-ons :D (except for two, which I did "manually", and it was fine). It also saved my settings as well as (I think) my add-ons' settings. Oh and I'm kind of excited for the add-ons manager thing, since now supposedly I can search for and find add-ons right within it... The new interface (icons, mostly) are pretty, though I think I might look into themes, which I've never done before, but as a DMD major, I don't think I should be blamed for being curious, haha. The only con I've felt so far is that I am a little overwhelmed by the new features....honestly I probably won't make use of all of them, considering how far I scrolled to read the whole feature description page. The tagging thing and the uncategorized bookmarks are both dangerous for me, since I already hyper-over-organize my bookmarks. This dual tag/folder organization reminds me of my considerations on Thunderbird vs. Gmail, since Thunderbird is folders-based (and I have... SO ... many) and Gmail is all about the tags (makes me nervous, but intrigued); I'm afraid that having both systems might make me crazy, and I'm already feeling a tendency to avoid the tags completely. Plus what will I do about all my existing bookmarks; I really don't think I want to go back and tag them ... that would take forever, seriously... :P

New stuff I did

It seems like even though this year at Penn is just getting going, I've already done a bunch of new things that I've never done before. Therefore I'm going to start a record (in approximately chronological order lol) and update it as I go along.

• August - purchased a bunch of appliances for my room which I didn't have last year - toaster ($12), microwave ($35 I think?), coffee maker (like $20). They are all turning out to be useful so far. The toaster is surprisingly popular :)
• August - purchased a set of pots/pans, which came with a bonus collection of spices, with rack, which I'll probably never use...
• August something - really practiced bass clarinet. It's awesome, but hard to "get" the sound above the break; really hard to get good tone on that. And it needs SO much air!
• Again, towards the end of summer - I wanted some tea, and Dad drinks it all the time, so I asked him to make a cup for me. He gave me chai, and I ended up really liking it. (Ok, so it's not my first time ever drinking tea, but my first time trying chai.) I got a box of chai to bring to Penn.
  
• 8/31 - watched Anchorman with Rebecca, Becca, Eamonn, and Ben. Part of an initiative to see movies that apparently everybody except me has seen. Opinion: it's not my kind of humor, definitely. I guess some moments were funny, but it just often feels ridiculously overdone. (Obviously this is the point, though..)
• 9/3 - Saw Dan for the first time this year and was totally shocked by his new much shorter haircut (also not parted in the middle anymore) and switch from glasses to contacts (!!!!!)
• 9/3 - Purchased food from food carts/trucks. Last year John got me a sausage-egg-and-cheese from Bui's but this was the first time I ever bought anything myself. Dan and I went to Hemo's for lunch; I got a grilled chicken pita. For dinner Simone, Tatini and I tried to go to Magic Carpet but it was already gone, so we went to The Real Le Anh (Le Anh is across the street haha), and I got cashew chicken. Two discoveries: it's really good, and really cheap!!
• 9/3 - I guess a couple of FNAR courses I've taken have been cross-listed as grad courses, but CIS 460 (Computer Graphics) is definitely the first CSE/CIS course I've taken that's cross-listed. It was a bit intimidating, realizing all these quiet students were probably graduates... hence the invention of the DMD Undergraduate Row :D
• 9/4 - First class where I don't have cell phone service (I think). This is because it's CIS 262 down in the basement of Skirkanich (kinda like a dungeon hahaha). Probably all for the best - I should seriously pay attention in that class.
• 9/4 - First ever class I'm taking on databases. woooot
• 9/4 - First class in which I might be the only student who's not a music major. A little intimidating. =/
• 9/5 - Cooked a dinner dish by myself! It was meatloaf, and it was good! yayyy
• 9/5 - Attended Rodin bingo, and actually won a round! I got a gift card to Gap. Yay shopping!!
• 9/6(?) - FREE LAUNDRY!!!!! Most unfortunately I had to go up 2 floors to the 14th floor since the machines on my floor were all occupied.
• 9/7 - Discovered I did not make wind ensemble on bass clarinet... first year at Penn that I won't be in it, but that also means I can go to the music program's Third Thursdays now :)
• 9/7 - Played DDR (via Stepmania) with my own pad in my room at school. (I actually had the pad with me last year in Stouffer but never took time to play.)
• 9/8 - Taking a class in Linux :D
• 9/8 - Taking a class being taught entirely (as far as I can tell) by a computer science student in my own grade - the aforementioned Linux half-credit class. I feel like I should be feeling extremely inferior or something, but I don't. Zach's friendly and a good lecturer and definitely knows a LOT. Which is awesome :) . I think he was even in my 260 class haha...
• 9/8 - First job at Penn: mentor for CIS 110. We had our first meeting and it was a friendly gathering. We even talked about who had which lab shifts and office hours, as I was rushing out for band, lol.
• 9/9 - Met Danny's sister Laura - she's awesome! The three of us went to Cosi for dinner :)
• 9/9 - Salsa lesson at the Penn Latin and Ballroom Dance info session. It was sooo embarrassing but SO MUCH FUN!!! I decided I was definitely going to the lessons and began trying to convince friends to come...
• 9/9 - Tried iscribble for the first time, with John. I actually plugged in my mouse (finally) cuz there's no way I was gonna draw with the touchpad.
• 9/10 - First lab as a 110 mentor, with Ryan as the TA. I have to get there late, cuz it starts at 2:30 but I have 460 till 3. Luckily I made it in time for introductions and I even answered a bunch of questions which made me useful, yay!
• 9/11 - Played ping pong with Danny and Carlin in the lower level of Harrison - good times!!
• 9/12 (technically) - went to Allegro's around 1am with Carlin and Danny and had .. chicken and broccoli pizza? Or something like that. It was good, lol.
• 9/13 (or late night 9/12) - Installed Linux (Ubuntu) on a virtual machine on my computer!! Now I really want to install it "for real" (on a partition on my hard drive)
• 9/13 - Went out to dinner with Menghan and ate Thai food! I had drunken noodles hahah but it was really good AND I have leftovers!
• 9/13 - Went to Penn PM karaoke event with Erica, held on the Stouffer patio. Thanks to Erica I actually went up to sing; we did Beat It together. Michael Jackson's voice is way too high for my range (whatever limited range I might have), so next time I'll definitely be picking something else :P
• 9/13 - Uploaded pictures using Google's Picasa. It's got captions and some kind of tagging of people and reordering, and I was even able to include videos (though I had to actually download Picasa for that, rather than just using the web service). However, it seems that unless you upload through the Picasa client program, you can only upload 5 photos at a time..? This seems kinda ridiculous, especially considering how on Facebook you can upload a bunch all at once - I think it's a Java application actually.
• 9/14 - Played clarinet at church for the 10am Mass. This went pretty well, considering I got the music last minute. I had to skip a couple things, but overall it sounded good!! (And this is despite my clarinet not playing very easily, which is a fluctuating thing.)
• 9/14 - Right after Mass I went to the "hospitality" thing - like "Doughnut Sunday" at home, but on a much smaller scale.
• 9/14 - PLBD social lessons!!! Salsa and tango. SOOO MUCH FUN hahaha I cannot wait to go back :D (this really probably deserves a full post to itself)
• 9/14 - Lost my band pants (somehow by mixing them up with a pile of laundry on top of a machine) -> realized this, hours later -> panicked while trying to do my Graceland assignment for music 150 -> emailed Neil, who included my plea in his email to the floor -> received my pants from someone who found them mixed among his laundry by accident -> I've never been so glad to see those pants hahaha
• 9/15 - Ate a cookie and a brownie from Cosi (at cis 1xx grading system learning session); they were so good that I took another cookie for the way out haha.
• 9/15 - Used Dreamweaver in the Rodin computer lab - the version was old enough that it was still Macromedia... (2002 or 03-ish? I wonder why it's not updated.)
• probably September - Web design (9am-12 on Tues/Thurs) finished early enough for Grace and I to go to Wawa before 262. I got Wawa coffee for the first time and it is AMAZING. (Also much cheaper than Starbucks...I should keep this in mind and shift some of my coffee habits to Wawa...)
• 11/24 - arrived late to a clarinet social gathering which included watching Zoolander. I've never seen it before since it's not the type of movie I would typically like. (I usually don't find that kind of humor funny.) For some reason I was intrigued by it though, and although I didn't plan on staying long, I ended up interested enough in the movie that I stayed for the whole rest of it, to find out how it ended. I didn't love it and still thought it was pretty silly, but liked it enough to surprise myself.
  

geek-out moment :D

i'm up at 4:42am and for once it's not just because of facebook or other things (seriously i don't even know what i'm doing when i stay up late on the computer...). for my linux class the first thing we have to do is get access to linux somehow, either eniac or install on our own computers. well it'd be even more awesome if i could repartition my hard drive and actually install linux, but i think i'll save that for later. (i did actually spend a bunch of hours one time researching this possibility but was a bit nervous about actually doing such things to my hard drive.) so instead i'm using virtualbox to run a virtual machine on my laptop and install ubuntu on it. so basically i dl'd ubuntu as an iso image and mounted it into the virtual machine's cd-rom drive, then "installed" linux to a virtual hard drive on my machine (the "host" machine..gotta have my terminology down :P ). while it was installing i even did some online banking, downloaded music (REO Speedwagon... John mentioned some lyrics to me and I listened to one song on playlist.com and decided to download some and check it out), and started renewing my ruckus licenses. woot for multitasking!

after it finished installing, i mounted the iso for the "guest additions" thing from virtual box (which adds a bunch of ease-of-use features, like increased virtual box screen resolution and options for "capturing" the mouse on the guest vs. the host) and ran my first ever linux installation via commands in the terminal!!! i wish i'd taken a screenshot, however.... i did save it as a text file (gedit is the text editor) ANDDD since i have the guest additions installed, i can now copy and paste to and from the guest and host!! so here it is!!

To run a command as administrator (user "root"), use "sudo ".
See "man sudo_root" for details.

tory@tory-vmlinux:~$ ls
Desktop  Documents  Examples  Music  Pictures  Public  Templates  Videos
tory@tory-vmlinux:~$ cd ..
tory@tory-vmlinux:/home$ cd ..
tory@tory-vmlinux:/$ ls
bin   cdrom  etc   initrd      lib         media  opt   root  srv  tmp  var
boot  dev    home  initrd.img  lost+found  mnt    proc  sbin  sys  usr  vmlinuz
tory@tory-vmlinux:/$ cdrom
bash: cdrom: command not found
tory@tory-vmlinux:/$ cd cdrom
tory@tory-vmlinux:/cdrom$ sudo sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run
[sudo] password for tory:
Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing VirtualBox 2.0.2 Guest Additions for Linux installation............
.................................................................................
.................................................................................
...........
VirtualBox 2.0.2 Guest Additions installation
Building the VirtualBox Guest Additions kernel module...
Building the shared folder support kernel module...
Installing the VirtualBox Guest Additions...

Successfully installed the VirtualBox Guest Additions.
You must restart your guest system in order to complete the installation.
tory@tory-vmlinux:/cdrom$

...THIS IS SO COOL!!!