As Things Wind Down

The end of the semester is in sight. A short sprint to the finish line. The evening before Christmas. Readying to touch down after that long flight. One last all-nighter...

Speaking of all-nighters.

So last Sunday John and I had a CS project due at midnight (soon extended to 9 am the following day). Let me get one thing straight right now: I had not been putting it off. I actually did everything except for one small--well, I didn't think at the time that it would take too long--part of the program. Hence you can't blame this one on procrastination.

It was somewhere around 3 am when I realized that I would not be sleeping. By this point I had been working nearly six hours straight (after having worked three earlier Sunday afternoon) and was still getting odd errors the likes of which I had never seen. Now, I could rant about the inadequacies of C++ as a programming language. I could also rant about B-trees, though their implementation is not too bad. But I'd much rather make it known that, after many trials and tribulations, I received a perfect score.

Following a day of falling asleep in my classes, I then finally went to bed at 11 and woke up at 7 the next morning, with my cell phone in my hand*. Yes I was confused. Yes I felt slightly better.
I was still fighting sleep in my Mechanics class today. Probably need to sleep more.

What remains is one day of class and six exams. Three on Saturday starting at 7:45 am. Do wish me luck, I'm pretty sure I'll need it.

Oh, and research will most definitely be interesting.

*I have no recollection of getting a phone call, much less picking up the phone and conversing. Felt like I slept through everything.

The Joys of Spring

Aside from allergies. They are having their way with me. And it is nothing like fun. *runs off in search of tissues*

Much more better.

The worst part has been the pace at which I'm going through boxes of tissues. I bought one less than a week ago and it's half gone (and I'd only gotten allergies on Wednesday!). It's gotten so bad that, in order to conserve my precious supply, I've resorted to using napkins, paper towels--the bathroom kind that hurt--and just about any sort of paper short of inflicting papercuts. This has just 'caused much irritation on mine and my skin's part.

I have to say, one hellishly productive Saturday just passed. Watched Gurren Lagann*, played Half-Life 2 Episode Two (my roommate can again say he woke up to gunshots), watched more Gurren Lagann, did over half of my CS project, and also finished watching Gurren Lagann. That anime was beyond excellent; I would put it nearly on even grounds with the Ender's Game series, even if they're in different categories. The CS project, eh. Simple for the most part, I'm just down to creating a b-tree that is stored in a file. That part's not too bad, just a lot of maths and working with C++ streams.

Now onto slightly less nerdy matters.

The semester is slowly drawing to a close, with an excruciating month left between me and sweet sweet freedom. Well, at least a vacation in Puerto Rico**. After that it's all up in the air right now, which is actually really annoying. I'll most likely be staying at Tech for most of the summer, given that I can find an apartment or work something out on campus. And I really want to, as I'd get to do research (more on that later) and most likely get paid to do it too!

That's it for now. Just a short one. Tune in next week when I wrestle a boar!

..but not really.


*This is epic. It will change your life. Watch it. 'nuff said.

**You know, someday I'm gonna have to sit down and explain that.

A Linux Fetish

Oh come on! Once the title popped into my head I had to. Plus, I absolutely adore the word fetish. It's one of those good* words.

Warning: There are somewhat technical terms used in this post, though I did my best to keep them to a minimum. But do try to trudge on. For Mandrake's sake.

Three years ago or so, I remember James mentioning how he wanted to try out Linux on his computer. At that time, honestly, I had only the faintest idea of what he was talking about (that Gabe knew little about computers). Hence, I did what any curious high schooler would do: I googled it.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

Fast forward a month and some change and I had my first Linux distribution--distro for short--burned onto a CD, ready to install. What distro? Mandriva Linux (formerly Mandrake, not to be confused with Mandrake the Magician). The reason for my pick was that it was supposedly the most "newbie friendly" distro** and it was also one of the largest. So I hoped that things wouldn't be too bad.

And I could not have been more wrong. Must have spent a good eight hours one weekend racking my brain and stalking for answers in forums before giving up. I could not get the graphics working so all I had was a beautiful--although admittedly bland--black screen with grey-ish text. From that interface I had no way of accessing the internet (okay, so I didn't hear about Links or Lynx 'til just last year) and was constantly switching between Mandriva and Windows XP. At that point, having no real clue as how to fix my issues, I scrambled around the intarwebs looking for a way to "uninstall" Linux. *sighs* Oh how little I knew.

That was on the family computer, the one my dad and I had built together. To put it lightly, my first venture into the world of non-Microsoft operating systems had ended in failure (unlightly would involve painful acts which I shall save our younger readers from hearing). Anyway, after this defeat I decided to stick to the familiar.

Freshman year of college was when I really got back on the saddle (I'd dabbled a few times before). More experienced. More dedicated. This time, I got openSUSE running with relative ease. But, I barely used it. Didn't really have a reason to. Though the idea of SSH did tickle my fancy..

Enter Arch. Once more this was James's fault. He randomly brought it up in conversation and all of a sudden I just had to try it. Ignoring the fact that this distro was for "experienced" Linux users and that James hadn't downloaded let alone tried it himself. *shrug* Oh well. So I dove right in, downloading, burning, installing. And immediately hit a huge roadblock. This was even worse than the stab I took at Mandriva. See, Arch Linux goes by the KISS (also not to be confused, but with a band this time) principle. As a result, you get the base system and then install whatever you want on top. Something I was most definitely not ready for.

Fast forward--good phrase--again a month and I had me a working desktop. I loved it. From that point on my only reason to use Windows was primarily scholastic, as we were forced to use software not available on Linux. However, I did so with much chagrin, for I had one of the greatest toys on another partition.

Eventually this led me to dual-booting multiple Linuxes and even triple-booting. Though, quite honestly, that's a whole 'nother matter.


*When I first found this thread it did not require you to register to read. But you really should as Koala Wallop is an excellent forum. Or at least to read the thread, trust me, it's worth it.

**No Ubuntu back then, you lucky kids. And my xorg.conf actually had to be edited, and it required twice the settings it does today!
...*rambles*..uphill both ways...

Under Construction

Please excuse the mess and all that. I will be spending the next I-have-no-idea-how-long working on the layout of the blog. Blogger's nice because it lets you choose templates and then change them, but it's also a little annoying since you're forced to read through all this code. At least it's rather straightforward. Moving on..

The other night Alex (the one back in Ashburn) and I were having a nice chat as usual when he brought up an interesting bit of news. The fact that a quarter of teenage girls has some sexually transmitted disease. I hadn't heard about it when he told me, so I was beyond shocked. But of course, Alex always puts in a twist to things:

Alex: So my friends and I have started doing this thing at school.
Me: ??
Alex: Whenever we see girls in a hallway we count.
Alex: "One, two, three.."
Alex: and then
Alex: "..STD!!"

Oh Alex >.>;

"Research" or "How I Got To Do What I Love For Credit"

This past semester I took a class titled "Thesis Proposal" dealing entirely with that thesis that I'm supposed to write by the end of my senior year. The one for Honors*. It only met twice a week for the first half of the semester, still, it got me all worried about getting started on some research.

Therefore:

A few weeks after the class ended, and after several trips to VTURCS, I was sitting in a professor's office in front of its occupant. It was an informal interview of sorts, just so he could see that I was as competent--hopefully more--than a quick email from me led him to believe. The topic of research was virtual machines, which I had been playing with on and off for the last year or so. The professor decided that I seemed qualified enough, meaning that I at least knew what I was talking about, and thus I became part of the Synergy group!

So, how did this all begin?

My first two years at Tech I began playing with different operating systems on my laptop. Mainly Linux, but there was attempts at OS X and others. It was a terrible addiction wherein I would accidentally "break" my laptop whilst in class, rendering it completely useless. Nothing like sitting in the front row of your engineering class, where a computer is required, and shutting your laptop since it no longer boots. For example.

Well, by this point I was just getting over my habit of installing a new operating system on my computer every month or so. Be it a new Linux distribution or the latest OpenSolaris, perhaps I'd broken Windows again. The point is that all that experimenting required large amounts of partitioning and repartitioning of my lappy's hard drive. With a slow 5400 RPM drive, doing almost any sort of partitioning takes an afternoon. No good. Luckily, there was hope to be found. *cue choirs of angels*

I learned of a nifty new thing called a "virtual machine" nearing the end of my first year. Namely VMware. In essence it allowed me to run an operating system within another operating system; no partitioning, rebooting, or migrane required! A novel concept for sure, hence I quickly began looking into the details, soon finding plenty of other software that did the same thing--more or less. QEMU, KVM, VirtualBox.

Obviously, then, as I blabbed on about how much I loved virtualization, my professor could see my enthusiasm. Hmm, more like couldn't help but be hit by it. And, for once, playing around and having a child-like interest in things actually paid off! Who'd've thunkit.


* I'm still not entirely sure what the benefits really are at this point.

RE: The Fragileness of Faith

In reply to Tim's latest post.

Telling somebody that you have lost faith could mean a million things. Perhaps you've lost faith in the American dollar, or in your favorite basketball team, or in your chances of winning the lottery, or in getting that girl to go out with you. Could be just about anything.

But when all you say is "I've lost my faith," then it's implied that you mean religiously. Or at least philosophically.
And that is, for the most part, just what Tim's post covers.

The biggest issue arises with definition. What exactly does "having" faith even mean? Well, for the purposes of this post--a more in-depth discussion may come up in another post--I'll give a simple meaning. With the presence of faith comes a belief in some form of higher power. Whether that power be the Judeo-Christian God, the many gods of Shinto, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't matter. Whatever cream-cheeses your bagel, really.

Anyway, I think Tim made a great point: faith is of great importance to humans. Nearly a necessity across the board. He approaches this from his struggle with losing a friend and, quite importantly, from a Christian background. And that last part makes a big difference. From what I can tell, he seems a devout believer and so the period of doubt he went through must have shaken him greatly. But, as he mentions, he was able to move past this doubt with the help of friends. And so his struggle for faith was, like most, troubling at the time. For him, luckily it was brief.

For me, however, things didn't go so smoothly.

It was over the span of three months that I lost my faith. For good. All of it beginning with a book titled Ishmael, which we read in my English class junior year of high school.

Actually, no, it began earlier. In the period leading up to reading Ishmael. Since I was born I had been raised a Christian. And for more than seven years my family and I had been attending a Baptist church. It was around this point, after all those years, that I had a great revelation: God was the most important thing in life. His being meant all who believed would go to heaven and live eternally. So I would devote my life to spreading the word and to trying to convert those who would listen. However, things never got to that state. I procrastinated and felt guilty. Adding to the already existent guilt of being a sinner, never living up to the standards that my church preached. Trying harder seemed to do nothing, and after failing in "converting" a friend, I was left disheartened.

And that brings us to Ishmael.

For those of you too lazy to read yet another valuable Wikipedia article, I shall give a quick synopsis (mmm, fun word). A man sees a newspaper ad of a teacher seeking a pupil with "an earnest desire to save the world." From here, the man is lectured to by a telepathic gorilla--Ishmael. And that's about it. The important part, though, is the subjects the lecture covers, things from society to God to many things we take for granted of civilization. While it may not be the most groundbreaking book ever--and while I doubt most would agree with its statements--it is highly thought-provoking. If you know me in the slightest, thought-provoking books are my favorite. So from there I went on to read My Ishmael and The Story of B.

It was Story of B that really got me thinking. The last book of the series that I read--though technically the second in the series--was the one that undid everything I had believed as a child. A character in the book, named B, speaks with our protagonist, Jared Osborne, bringing up simple doubts of the Christian faith. And by the time I finished, laying on the top bunk of one of the bunk beds in my family's cramped cabin on a Norwegian Cruise Line cruise, all I could do was think (actually, I had a lot of time to lay around and think on that vacation). Think and evaluate my faith.

The next couple of months I struggled with myself back and forth. Previously, I had been trying to become a "better" Christian, yet now I found myself questioning even being a Christian. Questioning God's existence, similar to how Tim did. But unlike him, I did not turn back.

This was the most difficult step. Whereas before, I used to pray and talk to God every night while I lay in bed, then I could only say, "What's the point?" And it was troubling. There was that feeling, that need, to look up and know that something was staring back down, watching over everything. I had to know that there was more to life after death. That the good would prevail in the end, the evil punished. That things in life--tumbleweed and déjà vu and goldfish and duct tape and toilet revelations and lightning and love and limericks and packing peanuts--had a meaning. That my existence had a meaning.

And that all of it fit snugly into some sort of grand plan.

This need, this feeling of requirement, slowly subsided in those months. Afterwards I was able to truly take in The Story of B. My way of thinking on the topics of God and religion changed drastically. No longer was God a concrete being whom I prayed to and talked to and knew I would meet after my physical death. No longer were religions--namely Christianity--these infallible bodies of knowledge and authority. Instead, god was an idea. Instead, religions were to be used as guidelines for one's philosophy and theology, readily questioned when conflicts arose.

What remained after all this was me. Slightly jaded yet with a long path of possibility set ahead of me. Not exactly a blank slate, but close enough. And from that state, I happily--but much more importantly, willingly--thought about religion. What it meant to me, not what I was told it was supposed to mean.

I learned god is not required to: be a good person; have hope in life; find happiness. And so, at that time, I became an atheist.

Lost my faith.

Honestly, that's not the end of the story. Probably in some later posts I'll cover the rest, including what I believe now and how I got to do so. But, for now, I've covered the points I wanted to make.

April Fool's

The day of Poisson d'Avril. Or so my mechanics teacher says. The Japanese one that I'm quite sure speaks better French than he does English. But yeah.

Not a bad day. Hell, it's a rather good week so far. Little work in comparison to the last few weeks in addition to numerous amusements. This morning, in between the aforementioned Intermediate Mechanics class and the ever-loathed Public Speaking class, I got to witness the VT Flash Mob's latest event. Walking to class afterwards, the small group of newspaper-wielding students scurrying off in the distance, I could only smile.

Public Speaking was spent paying little attention to people's speeches whilst slipping in and out of daydreams. And from there I had my usual lunch break of sorts, lasting just under two hours. I spent the first half checking out a technology showcase being held in Squires (our student center) and got to see and play with lots of muchly nifty gadgets. For one, the MacBook Air, in all its thin multi-touch goodness. For two, a Dell tablet computer which not only supported pens but could be used as a touch screen! What I expected for the first, surprisingly cool for the second. Also, John's parent company, Sun Microsystems (get it? 'cause his dad works for them), was next to the Microsoft booth--highly disappointing, as one would think--so I got chat with the guys there. Didn't really learn much, but still, always good to meet new people.

Lazy day from there on. A seemingly short class (data structures, so easy stuff) and then the rest of the afternoon was spent in Tim's room. Mainly watching John and him switch off on Call of Duty 4, which is actually as good as everyone says. If you are in any way a video game fan do yourself a favor and buy it. Seriously. Even I think it's good, and I'm rather picky about games.

*phew* right, with that endorsement behind us, let's continue.

So in my free time--hah! so much of that this week--I've been reading Ender's Shadow* and finishing up that long blog post I said I was doing. After nearly two weeks of writing I finished the post, though some editing remains (do watch for it in the coming days), whereas after three days I'm a little over one hundred pages from the end of Ender's Shadow. And boy, I'd almost forgotten just how much I absolutely adore that book. It's been years since I last read it and that time has definitely made it a better read. Going through I can really appreciate the logic and psychology and "battles of wit" that go on constantly. Very much my kind of book.

That's all for now. Actually, I shall leave you with one last thing: penguins take flight!

*Part of the Ender series, including Ender's Game which, if you haven't read, go out right now and kindly do so.