keizo/weblog

*12/13/07*
today is exactly one semester since I finished college.
today I paid my first student loan payment.
today I burned my finger on a hot piece of metal. it sucked.

*giving up as soon as I don’t see a perfect future*

h: [my] face feeels like it’s been punched
h: but my husbnd/bf would NEVER dosuch a thing
m: haha, yeah
m: [things would never ever work out for us then]
m: [cause I have this twitch where i punch people in the face unexpectedly]

old — 10/8/07

one hawaiian, one russian, one mexican, one australian, one white, two cambodians, two japanese-haole, and 10 tahitians = the house I live in. I won’t bother mentioning religions.

This title isn’t quite specific enough. First of all, I’ve only known about Unistrut for three days. It’s a metal building system consisting of various struts, beams, and fasteners that allow quick fabrication of all sorts of things — from saw horses to supports for electrical, ventilation, or even a mezzanine. It’s a lot like an Erector Set for real stuff. Honestly, it seems like an awesome starting point for all sorts of projects.

What sucks is that no where on the internet or in any of the catalogs do they list any sort of pricing for the material. I don’t know what kind of people made this decision at Unistrut, but it sucks. Please make prices public. Having to submit a list of materials just to get a price quote is ass backwards and slows down the design process. This is especially critical for a small fast moving company where every day of productivity matters.

“For what it is worth, you were the next application after the cutoff (#21). Thanks for applying. Hope you apply again =)”… ouch. Last fall I applied for Google Summer of Code (SOC) under the Drupal (PHP) open source project. At the time I was taking bunch of courses and didn’t have a whole lot of time. I managed to write a decent proposal, but a big part of my approach was based on modules I had evaluated many months earlier — basically I didn’t complete my homework for the proposal. My fault.

The reason I applied for the Drupal project is because [my website](http://www.ocpaddler.com) uses the software heavily and some desirable features weren’t available, so I figured I would write them myself for SOC. The $4500 was a bonus and would of allowed me to save some money. Even in not getting into the program, I could of written the program I needed, but being first loser kind of killed my motivation. Plus, PHP isn’t that fun.

So for most of June I tinkered programming Python to keep myself entertained. Finally a week or so into July after a messy Drupal upgrade I decided to rebuild my website from scratch. And four weeks later I had a semi featured Drupal clone in Python. User sessions, logins, roles/group permissions, registration, basic node functionality including creating, editing, and display, text filtering, url aliasing, node caching and other things I’m forgetting.

I’ve noticed a whole lot of ugliness in Drupal in the process, some of them mentioned [here](http://20bits.com/2007/02/27/4-problems-with-drupal/). Drupal is database query hungry. I have 15 stories listed on my front page, bang, there’s 15 queries. The total queries is probably something like 30 or 40. My rewrite is down to 6. That is one example and there are others, so I’ve been making design changes as I go, but overall the system is similar. Just better.

Don’t get me wrong though, I don’t really know what I’m doing and there’s tons more to do. Plus I haven’t looked at the code in almost 2 weeks and currently have my hands full with some other things so I can’t say when things will be ready for release. But, if you are interested in this please send me an email. kzo@kzo.net

*from way back in June*

Today I went to the Fremont fair with my sister and her boyfriend. We sat down in front of the river to eat hand dipped icecream bars. I ate mine rather quickly and let out a loud burp.

Sister: Jeez, don’t you know when it’s appropriate and not?!

Me: Sure. There’s naked people running around on the street. What does it matter if I burp!

Boyfriend: He’s got a point there.

*fyi: there really are naked all over the place at the Fremont fair. We also saw Dave Matthew’s roaming around and yelling at Duck tours.*

My most positive experience at Rensselaer has been the class Speech Communication with Merrill Whitburn. It may seem odd to choose a course such as this as my most positive experience, and actually I have a hard time calling it my single most positive experience. However, it was different from every other class I’ve taken in my four years achieving an aerospace and mechanical engineering degree and I would recommend it to every student at RPI that seriously wants to change the world.

As an engineer, most of my classes have been focused on theory and analysis: intro to engineering analysis, strengths of materials, thermal-fluids, elements of mechanical design and so on. These are all amazing classes in which I’ve learned more than I ever knew existed, but there has always been something missing. All of these classes lack any real social involvement with other students or the professor. In Speech Communication this is practically forced on you, and while this can be scary at first, it ends up being wildly fun.

Merrill’s booming voice and grand expectations are rather intimidating for the first few days of class, but it doesn’t take long to realize he’s one of the nicest people on campus. The class involves giving five five-minute presentations over the semester. After each speech your performance is critiqued. Merrill has the talent of utterly destroying any confidence you had in front of people, but then encourages you enough to help you improve ten-fold over the semester. Merrill is not the only one you have to watch out for, the rest of the class gets to rip you a new one as well. The fun part is that everyone has to go through with it — and there is an awesome sense of comradery in that.

Speech Communication is a class that I honestly enjoyed attending every time. My memory is filled with laughter, nervousness, and in the end confidence in my ability to give a presentation. If you have a free elective in your junior or senior year, take this class. It teaches you a skill that most people are deathly afraid of and will likely help you more in your career, life, business or secret plan to start a religion than any other single class at RPI.

*This was my entry to the Union Challenge 10: “Describe your most positive Rensselaer experience ensuring that you focus on how it differed from your normal experiences and how this type of experience might be shared with others.”*

When I was a freshman I would often meet a person and then not see them for a while. A few weeks later I would bump into them and realize I had no idea what their name was. A few months later I might see them in the dining hall and greet them briefly. A few years later I pass these people and think to myself ‘hey I should know that person’. More often then not, they briefly glance at me and then go their own way and I go on wondering if they were thinking the same thing as me. Of-course all these awkward situations are irrelevant with Mark Zuckerburg’s invention of Facebook. So whatever, my largest hurdle as a freshman is fixed; I can at least revel in the fact that I lived in a time before Facebook. The second biggest problem I had with student life freshman year was the overabundance of Internet. RPI should cut the cable.

RPI my take pride as the ‘most connected’ school, but seriously instant messaging people 3 rooms down the hall is stupid. Recently the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Mumbai decided to turn off Internet from 11pm to 12:30pm in all student dorms.[1] The dean Prakash Gopalan was quoted saying “The old hostel culture of camaraderie and socializing among students is gone. This is not healthy in our opinion.” Many students at RPI that don’t find community in Greek organizations or other campus clubs often spend lots of time in their room on the Internet. Turning off the Internet for a significant period of time during the day will force students out of their room and help reduce social awkwardness at RPI.

This would probably cause some people to get nuts and hate the school, but at least students would unite in thinking it’s a retarded policy. It’s not like people don’t complain about the school already — you can’t pass a tour group without someone at least commenting quietly “don’t come here.” Any good parent would recognize turning off the Internet as a good thing. In the end, people would be happier and complain less because now they have to talk to people in the real world, possibly developing friends in the process.

You might worry about students that really need to do work requiring the Internet. That’s not a problem; we all have laptops and could get online in dorm study rooms or elsewhere on campus. Jacks could even be installed in dorm hallways and students can all hang out in the hall if they want online.

[1] [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6459295.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6459295.stm)

*This was my entry for the Union Challenge 6: “Describe the largest hurdle in your student life experience at Rensselaer and propose a solution to the obstacle.” It was satire, but I’m starting to believe it would work.*

[I Never Talk On The First Date](http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/i_never_talk_on_the_first_date)

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I sent this article to my sister: [Growing up with hippie parents](http://www.utne.com/issues/2003_120/cover_story/10954-1.html). Here’s what she said:

>holy crap that seriously applies to us!! hilarious…. i can totally relate. i have to show andreas…. his childhood was very similar. we are always finding things that we had/did the same as kids… growing up on tofu and soymilk, etc. he’ll get a kick out of this… especially since now we are all at the age just like that lady where we are appreciating our upbringing and realizing that it’s in our blood whether we like it or not!! (thus the brilliant idea to quit our jobs and travel and be vagrants!)

I just searched for the book our upcoming commencement speaker Thomas L. Friedman wrote called *The World is Flat*. Apparently rpi only has the audio book. How sad. This confirms: engineers don’t read normal books. I emailed the people on Mr. Friedman’s website telling them.

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9 days of class to go; 6 months of work left to do.

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These guys deserve a link: [end of the tute](http://endofthetute.com/). The Folsom Library can slide down the hill for all I care.