On introverts

Preface:  I'm not exactly sure what purpose this blog has, or if it even has one at all.  While it's not entirely dedicated to all things technology, that's generally been the drift—especially since it started as a CS class assignment.  That being said, I feel like this post is going to depart from the norm just a little bit.  Since I'm fairly confident my "pool of dedicated followers" is relatively limited, I don't think many people will mind.  Besides, as Thornton Wilder once said, "If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good."  I'm not sure if that can be applied here, but it sounds good.

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I've always wanted to be more extroverted.  The first time I took a personality test, I was appalled that I didn't have an ounce of yellow.  I've tried making significant changes in my life to fix this, and I am proud to announce that I am now capable of making what I term "intentionally-spontaneous decisions."  When the brink of decision arrives, instead of my usual process:

analyze each side thoroughly, then make a careful, conscious decision that will likely be most beneficial to myself and my future posterity,

I can now:

analyze each side carefully (what?  did you think I was going skip the analyzing part? anyone who knows me even remotely also must know this is entirely essential), and then make a rash, hasty choice based off some metric I (possibly incorrectly) assume would be most "yellow"

However, I recently listened to a Ted Talk entitled "The power of introverts" (there's my blog's obligatory techie-tack), and it got me to wonder:  perhaps my point of view isn't always off-base.  In fact, perhaps there are times when my non-extroverted way of viewing the world (the painfully analytical way) is actually better.  So, as Susan Cain suggests, I'm going to open my suitcase today, just a little bit.

The topic is dating.  

I've analyzed this one pretty well and have determined that the majority of the complaints lie against the guy.  So let me offer a few arguments "for the other side."

Times are changing.  People are changing.  What was once optional is now a necessity, and what was once considered "cool" is now quite deadly.  So we've got to adapt if we're going to survive. Unfortunately, there are some topics (like dating) that are poised in this weird, quasi-adapted environment, trying to cling to the past but march confidently forward to the tune of what's 

There are many girls who would say (and some quite publicly so) that the "success" of a date rests entirely on the guy's shoulders.  He's done the asking, so now it's his responsibility to "sell himself" to the girl.  He needs to have a plan, a backup plan, and a bag of tricks up his sleeve with which to improvise in the all-to-frequently-occurring case when everything goes wrong.  While I'll admit the guy does bear the majority of the onus for doing the date-asking, let me give you three scenarios where, in spite of all a guy might have done, the date went horribly wrong.

• Scenario 1: The world's worst volleyball date of 2009.  She didn't want to be there.  At all.
• Scenario 2: Boy picks up girl. Boy has a few suggestions for what to do. Girl says, "I'm fine with whatever." Boy decides to eat sushi. Girl is allergic to fish and doesn't say anything until she gets there, and just orders a side of edamame, the whole time dropping not-so-subtle hints about how she really enjoys chicken sandwiches. Whoops. 
• Scenario 3: Boy asks girl what her plans are. "I'm free all night." Boy decides it would be fun to get ice cream after sushi. Girl gets in the car and tells boy she's got to be back by 9 because something came up. Boy realizes he can't even make it to sushi in time, so he panics, calls an audible, and goes to Burger King instead ("have it your way").

A guy's got to have the Renaissance flair suitable for a Jane Austen novel, the modern slick of David Beckham, and he needs to be able to pull out gadgets and improvise like...Tom Cruise.  

But that's not really realistic.  So how does this differ for an introvert?  What do I typically do? I overplan. I'll line up a million ideas of what to do and analyze exactly how each one of them is going to pan out. Unfortunately, what usually happens is I walk to her door (all cool, calm, and collected), and suddenly she fakes an asthma attack and all of my freshly-laid plans go flying out the window.  I'm left in a stupor, consumed with one thought: "Oh my goodness gracious. How is it that the only thing I can think about right now is how I can't think about anything else except for the fact that I can't think of anything to do??"


So here's to change in dating.  To properly embracing the future.  And...to understanding introverts.

I'll be 26 in a month.  Located at precisely 26 Nathan Road in Hong Kong, China is an Outback Steakhouse, attached to the "Far East Mansion."  If this were MASH, I'd have definitely won.

We Real Cool

I love this poem by Gwendyln Brooks.  In fact, it is one of the few things I still remember from the 8th grade. Enjoy.

The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel. 

We real cool. We
Left school. We 

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We 

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We 

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

Oh.  And check it out.  Gwendyln herself telling the story!

When in doubt, ask Google: A Tutorial

A friend and I had a disagreement:  is it "get your goat" or "get your goad"?

The solution (to this and any other similar disagreement) is a simple 3-step process.

Step 1: Type both phrases (in quotations) into the Google search bar.  Look for the number of times each is referenced.  For example, "get your goat" returns approximately 189,000 results, whereas "get your goad" only returns 7,010.  Fairly confident, but still possibly inconclusive.

Step 2:  Visit Google's ngram tool (which tells you the number of times a given word or phrase has been cited in literature since the early 1800s) and produce a graph like the following:

Yep.  Definitely never use "get your goad."

Step 3:  Depending on the results and the stance you maintained at the beginning, either show conclusively that you were correct and your friend was hopelessly misinformed, or firmly assert that it's dangerous to give the power to an Internet search engine to make any sort of linguistic determinations--after all, the computer is not intelligent!

Timing

Two of my favorite experiences happened in the same basketball game.

First, notice #4 on the red team--just behind me with the bald head.  He has the look of "we're down 15 points and I need to block that shot." He never stood a chance, so he tried to undercut me on my way back down.  No harm done, but that's just playing dirty.

"Don't undercut me, 4"

"What are you going to do about it, expletive?"  The game was getting heated.  Plenty of pushing, trash-talking, the works.

4 dribbles down the court, crosses his man over, and goes up for the shot.  And there I am, waiting patiently.  It was probably one of the sweetest blocks of my life--not necessarily because it looked good, but because the timing was so perfect! 

"That's why you don't undercut me!"


Oh.  And the second experience?

We won the game--and the coveted intramural t-shirt.

A- or BUST

In graduate school, sometimes we take hard classes.  Other times, we take classes outside our field of expertise.  Occasionally, we even get around to taking hard classes that are also outside our field of expertise.  Sometimes these classes help us gain valuable knowledge and skills that will forever benefit our skills.  Sometimes they teach us about the frustrations of life.  I think I've had enough of the latter.

The course was Wireless Networking.  The project?  Implementing full-duplex radios in a large industrial (read:  not entirely open-source) wireless simulator.  The problem?  Well, for starters, there needed to be serious changes to the infrastructure of the program including canceling timers at the right interval, sending packets through the correct protocol, etc, etc... But the second problem was just as significant:  I needed to understand the system forward-and-backward just to know what needed to be changed.  

Of course, I didn't start the project until later in the semester than I should have, but the professor made it seem like there would only be "a few small adjustments," and most of the work would be data analysis.  A week before the semester was over, I realized this was far from the truth:  I'd put in a good 20 hours on the project and still wasn't able to perform any "data analysis."  I figured I would just resort to using my powers of persuasion and emphasize some irregularities we'd observed to make a case, but in a class presentation a week before the semester was over, we were cut short by our professor who kindly informed us we were nowhere near finished and would need to complete the implementation by the week's end.

5 1/2 days, 40 hours more (including two near-all-nighters), and still nothing.  I don't think I'm an idiot, and I'm surely not incompetent when it comes to coding in C++ (just ask Smarterer--my score of 612 gives me a "proficient" rating), but I could not slay the beast.  Persuasive powers put to use again, I turned in what I thought was a fairly decent paper considering the circumstances.  When grades rolled around, I got a B in the class.  Not exactly what I wanted, and definitely not what my GPA was looking forward to, so I asked the professor if I could finish the project over the holiday in exchange for a regrade.  She was agreed.

It wasn't until 120 hours later (over my "break") that I finally had something working--and not just hobbling along, either.  I put together a stellar report complete with some of the aforementioned data analysis, and submitted for a regrade.  Within a few days, I got my professor's response:  an A- in the course.

I was thrilled, and so was my advisor (he'd expressed some concerns with my current GPA, but my promises for a higher grade in the class left him satisfied).  I put it all behind me.

Until about a week ago, when I got the following email from my professor (edited for brevity):

I submitted a request to change your course grade to A-. But it was not approved by the graduate office. To be fair to everyone, the graduate office enforced only considering the work done before the end of the semester.

In the past, students informed me in advance that they needed additional time to complete the project due to certain reasons and I assigned them an incomplete grade and was able to change them to a letter grade. Unfortunately, it didn't work in this case since you didn't inform me about the intention to continue the project and a letter grade had been submitted at the end of the semester. 

Sorry that I didn't know about the different treatment in the two cases earlier. If helpful, I'd be happy to write a letter to indicate you did a good job in the course and would be happy to give you A- if I had the option to do that based on the new project submission.

Seriously?  "only considering work done before the end of the semester" unless you have "certain reasons" to ask for "additional time"?  I've heard about this before.  You mess around the entire semester and realize you didn't do anything on your project, ask your professor for an extension, they give you an incomplete and a couple extra months to finish your project.  Apparently, if I would have simply asked for an incomplete and done the exact same work, I could have got an A- in the class.


I'm hoping this isn't the end of the story.  I'm hoping I'll go in and talk to the graduate advisor and he'll push through the red tape.  But I also hoped graduate school wouldn't be so full of drama.

Whatever the outcome, this is strike two against academia.  Why does an institution so "dedicated" to producing scholars have so many artificial barriers to keep you from getting there?


Maybe someday this will all make sense.


That's what I keep telling myself.

Mission: Accomplishing

Every once in a while, Pandora gets it right.  Like right now.  For some reason, it chose to play this song.  I'm sitting here, putting together a rather complex piece of software, and it's going pretty well.  

Suddenly, I feel like I'm in the movies, theme music playing, conquering the world.  

I had to share that before the feeling slipped away.

IEEE Journal Publication

If you're like me, it's relatively late at night and you're trying to submit a camera-ready paper for a conference.  You've used LaTeX so it fits the formatting requirements exactly.  Or so you thought.  Upon trying to jump through the PDFExpress hoops, you get the dreaded:

✘ Error   Font ZapfDingbats is not embedded (40x) 

Exasperated, you search the Internet and find a "brilliant" solution.  It's a couple of steps long, and it seems like it does the trick.  You plug along, resubmit the file, and sure enough, there are no embedded font issues.  But this time, it says some mumbo-jumbo about the file being too large.  Right about now, you start pulling your hair out (it took 90 minutes just to conform to IEEE standards, another 2 hours to find the "brilliant" solution, and it's now 15 minutes past the due date for the conference submission).  Another hour of searching, another step closer to the solution:  Look in Adobe under the "File Properties" menu, under "Fonts" to see if all the fonts are embedded.  Nope.  They aren't there.  There's an interesting article here about changing some of TeXShop's internal commands to try and rectify the situation.  But that doesn't do the trick in your case.

So here's the answer, and you can put your hair back in.

Sometimes, when including external figures/tables/whatever, the figure-producing program doesn't embed the fonts, which are then not embedded in the final PDF.  In my case, I use R to create figures, and the captions or something must be causing some severe issues.  Sure enough, looking at these PDF files individually with Adobe confirms my suspicion.  After a little more digging (thanks A Blog for your genius), I found that you can imbed the fonts using a dirty hack involving changing the file to an eps file and then back to pdf.  This doesn't change the picture quality, but does embeds the fonts.  Here's the code from the website, changed a little bit for Mac commands (I just changed pdftops to pdf2ps):

#!/bin/bash
export GS_OPTIONS='-dEmbedAllFonts=true -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer' cp $1 $1.old pdf2ps $1 tmp.ps ps2eps tmp.ps
epstopdf tmp.eps
mv tmp.pdf $1 rm tmp.ps tmp.eps

Run this program on all your external PDF files (it won't increase the file size significantly—in fact, in my case it decreased the file size), and then re-typeset with your favorite pdflatex editor.  And voila, you run the file through the PDFExpress PDF checker and you get:

Status*: PDF Passed PDF Check; PDF is IEEE Xplore-compatible

That's music to my ears.