shaving
well, my trusty braun 5428 electric shaver got a small hole in it’s foil during my trip to seattle, wasn’t really a problem until the blades tore it into a rather big hole, making my it rather dangerous to use. when reading about replacement parts, i discovered that it’s recommended that the foil and cutter block every 18 months. this is funny because i have had this razor since around 7th grade and have only replaced the foil once in that whole time (it got a hole in it…).
i remember when i got my razor…sometime in 7th grade my peach fuzz started to become a bit dark and i was like “yo dad, you need to teach me to shave or something”. i think he delayed me that night and in classic dad style he had an electric razor the next day and was like “you’re a smart kid, figure it out”. that marked my passage into manhood. or something.
anyways, i was looking around and into perhaps getting a new razor, one that’s cordless and waterproof, and i realized i wasn’t going to buy it without seeing it, so i just ordered replacement parts for my 8 year old electric razor, maybe i’ll get a new one this summer. i cant believe the blades on my razor still cut anything, that’s some quality product right there.
now that my razor is on the IR*, i’ve borrowed a non-electric razor from my room mate, this is going to be exciting, i’ve never shaved with anything but my braun 5428…in 8 years of facial hair.
* IR= injured reserved

phil sucks
fifteenhex (2:04:32 AM): and not a girl to be seen, for miles....
Phil (2:04:38 AM): miles?
fifteenhex (2:04:46 AM): maybe not miles
fifteenhex (2:05:07 AM): probably could find someone's girlfriend within 100 yards, but you get the picture
Phil (2:05:22 AM): yah
Phil (2:05:42 AM): come to mcgill
Phil (2:05:54 AM): you will die
fifteenhex (2:06:07 AM): you suck
fifteenhex (2:06:11 AM): heh
Phil (2:06:14 AM): they are like chickens at a farm
Phil (2:06:21 AM): excpet they are all really hot
Phil (2:06:23 AM): chickens
Phil (2:06:27 AM): with boobs
Phil (2:06:32 AM): in tube tops
fifteenhex (2:06:39 AM): isnt it cold?
Phil (2:06:42 AM): and crotchless jeans
fifteenhex (2:06:47 AM): what?
Phil (2:06:52 AM): haha
Phil (2:06:54 AM): heh
Phil (2:06:56 AM): sorry
Phil (2:07:08 AM): yeah, a little cold for the crotchless jeans still
Phil (2:07:22 AM): maybe will always be a little too cold
Phil (2:07:27 AM): anyway
Phil (2:07:40 AM): there is a huge deficiency of guys
Phil (2:07:57 AM): so all the girls are all horned up
Phil (2:08:00 AM): it's springtime
Phil (2:08:05 AM): pheromones man
fifteenhex (2:08:18 AM): shut up shut up shut up!
Phil (2:08:34 AM): all the montrealers w/ their crotchless jeans!
Phil (2:08:39 AM): it's become quite the trend

interview last week, decision and i need a date…
i forgot to mention that last week i had an interview with logikos systems, which went really well, i signed up for it before i had any offers, but with my current offers there was no way i was taking a job there, but i'm always up for sharpen my mad interviewing skillz...
the technical aspect of the interview involved first ranking your top three languages and then how you rank from 1-10 on those, i said i was a 6-7 in java (my best) and then was asked four questions regarding java and i got all four right :) my interviewer congratulated me on realizing that i’m not over an 8 in any language at this point - a nice quote from that was “you wouldn’t believe the gumption of the people who come in here saying they’re an eight or, or, a ten in a programming language and can’t even answer these simple questions.”

i have decided to go with the expedia offer for a few reasons
1) i've not yet had any industry experience, but i have done research (albeit sketchy research)
2) i am still thinking that i would like to attend graduate school for computer science, this would seem to indicate that i should pursue the academic research program, however i think that a variety of experiences will be helpful in my career as a grad student or whatever else.
3) finally, i should see what i would be giving up when attending grad school.
4) (not really a reason: the first chance i've ever had to make phat cash :)
getting that finished has taken a load off of my mind…now, back to being beaten to death with academics.

oh yes, i have tickets to the terre haute symphony orchestra for this saturday (rhapsody in blue, sweet) and no one to go with…anyone interested? (for those of you who wonder why i would buy tickets before i had a date, they were free from the rose-hulman student affairs office, who gets a bunch of them for free i guess.)

i think my parents were interested to see my schedule this quarter, here it is.
also, i got to help in raising the barn today…sweet…on another note, happy St Patrick’s day (bet most of you didn’t know that i’m a good part Irish? it’s true), it’s party time :)

so while i was thinking about which job i’ll be taking this summer, i was trying to figure out who i am and inadvertently made an about me v1.0, enjoy… i also noticed my resume was a bit old so i updated the employ me section, though that seems a bit unnecessary at this point.
tomorrow is workday, i’m pretty excited because i don’t know if i’ll ever have the chance to raise a barn ever again.

so expedia got to my offer, it’s pretty nice.
recently i’ve been leaning toward the expedia offer, this weekend i’m going to do some soul searching and think about what i want to do with stuff [life, career and stuff] and will decide by monday.
i’m pretty excited that things are working out so well with my summer job search, especially in these hard economic times for technology, because as i explained to my cousin Phil, i’ve been working really hard for a year and change now and it’s nice to see it pay off a bit.
in other news, number theory is totally beating my ass, wednesday night i was up till 6am finishing the homework, and i was basically being carried by lehman who had already done most of it. it beat my brain in so bad that i’m doing the homework preemptively tonight (he gives us “questions he’d like us to look at”, later asks us to turn them in), expecting it to be due monday if he continues his pattern (very likely, he’s all about patterns).
this weekend should be fun.

money! ...and a tough decision... (mo money more problems?)
well, expedia got back to me and it’s good! they’re going to send me my offer later today with the exact numbers and everything. this puts me in a position i’ve always wanted to be in: the position where i might (and will have to in this case) turn down a job offered to me. i’ve never been in this position, every time i’ve been offered a job before i’ve taken it.
the caveat to this situation is now i have to make a decision between my two offers. on the one hand i have the private sector (expedia) offering phat cash in a cool city working on a product that is really quality and makes money with cool co-workers who are really happy with their jobs. on the other hand i have the academic sector (rutger’s dimacs program) which offers perfectly ok money/housing in piscataway, nj which looks to be less than an hour out from nyc, a chance to go to prague, czech for two weeks, in addition, the program offers me the chance to do research which would be interesting as well as making my future graduate school applications look really good.
now i kind of wish i didn’t have to make a choice (what the hell? every time i think something’s good it bites me in the ass, stupid life…and irony and stuff...).

blah
i hate days like today. i got up around 2pm, which is pretty late, showered, made myself some food and sat down with it at my desk, and began my number theory homework. yada yada yada, it’s 12:40am monday and i got a bunch of other stuff to do. suck.
number theory makes you hate numbers. when describing it to someone else, Andy said it was about scary numbers, i think that it’s more about nice ordinary numbers (like 2 and 3) taking on new scary meanings. oh, and proofs...proofs that suck...with a vengeance...to the extreme. yeah.

25 hours in seattle, 44 hours out of terre haute
so like i said before, expedia.com invited me to do an onsite interview as a follow up to the on campus interview i did a while back, since it had to be on a week day i figured i might as well do it on wednesday so i didn’t miss much class. so it worked out that i had to leave terre haute at 2pm tuesday to make my 5:10 flight, making me miss 2 classes. got to the airport, my flight was slightly delayed coming out of indy, luckily my layover in detroit left an hour and change after i was supposed to arrive, eventually we board and the sweet thing is that the plane is almost empty so i have a whole row of seats to myself. get to detroit, which has a very nice new airport, walk about a mile to my gate (no joke, but the moving walk ways help a bit), they have these big new york/japanese style billboard sized tvs (several of them) and a really nice fountain i got some pictures of. so it was snowing in detroit so the line to deice the plane was pretty long, so it took an hour from the gate to get airborne, during the trip i studied a technical interview book that really ended up helping me [technical interviews exposed]. i arrived in seattle at 10:20pm, get my luggage, get my rental car, go to my hotel, check in and then crash (11:30pm seattle time is 2:30am indiana time). wake up at 7am, get ready, get the crappy breakfast bar, try to calm down and drive over to expedia.
interviews
first interview had to do mostly with string related questions, the book i read really helped me out on this one, nothing too complicated, i think things went pretty well here. second interview was pretty easy, single question along the same vein of the sting related stuff, but with an array of sorted integers, take out the duplicate numbers [modifying the array] and return the number of elements in the array that are still valid. then it was a long boring break in the reception room followed by lunch, where i got asked the hardest question of the day, first he wanted to know how i would model a tic-tac-toe game, so that’s simply a 3x3 array of integers/shorts (can’t be bools cause you need at least 3 values) and something to indicate who’s turn it is. then he wanted to know how you would check for if someone won, so, since the last move made would be the winning move, you simply check the row and column and diagonal(s) (if applicable) to see if it made that person a winner. next, how would that grow if the board was a n*n board, this i messed up on, doing a few examples i thought initially it was n^2, but that’s actually pretty ridicules, he helped me to realize that it’s actually an order n operation, so now i’m kinda raddled, and then he asks me how i can improve that. this totally blows my mind and i cant think of anything. i stall, i think, i stall, maybe this is a trick question….in the worst case you have to check all of the stuff in the rows/columns/diagonals that the letter’s in, no matter what optimizations you make. i am talking about this and he asks me, how many different ways can you win a nxn tic-tac-toe game? the answer is 2n+2, because you have the rows + columns (2n) and the 2 diagonals, he tells me this should help, so i think for a while and it finally dawns on me that you need to make a corresponding array for each possible way you could win, update it every time someone moves with say +1 for an x, -1 for an o, if the value of the entry in the array becomes n or –n, then that move won the game for the player, these updates take constant time and checking for the end game takes constant time. i was so glad i thought of it, that’s a pretty tricky question, especially to ask at lunch. so having completed that we went back to expedia. my next interview was semi-easy, having to decipher a cryptic c function and then add error checking to it, making it modify an error checking code that you pass as an argument, so that went pretty well. then i interviewed with a high-up project lead who talked to me about what kind of stuff i would like to do in the company, his big concern was that i was mostly into java and they do nothing but c/c++, i tried to tell him it wouldn’t be a problem, but he didn’t seem convinced enough (for my liking). from there i met with the hr representative and we talked about the stuff with the things and the yada-yada blah-blah. she arranged for someone to take me to eat if i wanted, i was all about it since i didn’t know the area, so i talked to the guy [Kyle] on the phone and he would pick me up later. i requested a seafood place, he found some interesting sounding sushi place and i was all about it, so we go the place, and it’s definitely upscale, and it dawned on me: this is complements of expedia.com, i smiled as we walked in. the menu met my expectations on expensiveness, i asked Kyle (a really cool guy, btw), “on expedia right?” he replied “yeah, get anything you want, uncle rich is paying for it” [later found out that “uncle rich” is the ceo of expedia], “fantastic” i said. so i basically ordered whatever i wanted, which turned out to be a lot.
we both got an excellent miso soup, then split up some appetizers:
oysters with avocado sause
dungeness crab salad
scallops and shrimp
i got the
sashimi platter
spider roll [contains soft-shell crab, mmm]
salmon and fatty tuna pieces
Kyle got the black cod and a few drinks.
i got a peak at our bill before Kyle grabbed it, 120 before tip…so you figure that the whole meal cost 140 after tip, quite nice, thanks expedia :)
the recruiting power of that meal was huge…it was soooo good.
from there, went back to the hotel, checked out, dropped off my rental car, my flight to detroit was delayed half an hour coming out of seattle so we ended up leaving around 11:20pm seattle time, connected at detroit, got to indy, picked up my car around 8:30am, got back to terre haute around 10am. i was supposed to get to my classes that day but i took a nap through two of them – meaning the trip made me miss 4 classes. the lesson learned: do your plant trips to seattle on fridays, cause you’re going to miss a day’s worth of class anyways.
one thing that really impressed me at expedia was that everyone i talked to seemed really happy to be there, i mean really happy, like get up on the first alarm ring so i can get to work that much quicker happy. seattle seems like a really cool place, many of the people working there were my age, expedia takes good care of their people, an offer from there would definitely be something to give mucho consideration. we’ll have to see what they think of me.

trip
expedia.com is flying me to seattle, washington tomorrow. this is what’s called a onsite interview/visit. it’s kind of unusual for a company to do this for an internship, i have only heard of microsoft doing it prior to this. basically they’re going to bring me to seattle and have me interview with a whole bunch of tech staff who i would likely be working with, and prove beyond a doubt that i’m an idiot. it’s going to be great. they have this itinerary all planed out for me, i go to indy and catch a 5pm flight out, arrive grab a rental car and check into my hotel, get up and drive to their offices, interview all day, do whatever, drop off my car and get on my 11pm flight back to indy, which arrives at 8:11am thursday due to the length of the flight and time zone differences, then i get to drive home to class, wheeeee.
i was thinking maybe i’ll just pick up my rental car, stay the night in the hotel, go sight seeing all day in seattle then fly home. wouldn’t that be great? heh.
i’m a bit nervous, i’ve never really had to travel by myself very much, plus i have to get a car and drive around in a place i don’t know, ah well, quite the adventure to come.

so...
the last two weeks of winter quarter were pretty stressful, including my birthday, probably the most depressing 21st birthday one could have. anyways, i finished my work and bolted out of terre haute on thursday, got home and immediately started doing laundry and finishing an application statement to a summer research program, that being finished i cleaned myself up, went to dinner, got ready to leave for Vegas, went to spend the night at the Ezaki's and got some much needed sleep. then got up and my Vegas adventure began (online with pictures shortly). arrived back on sunday night, been rather uneventful since. i got a haircut, new glasses, saw an allergist finally and have stuffed myself. my grades worked out rather well, three As and a B+ (a 3.875), not too bad at all.
oh yes, I was rejected from the Hope College REU already (apparently 45 people applied for 3 positions), it looks like the scrubs at Medical Decision Modeling have made their first round draft picks (Tom was one) and I didn't make the cut. however, I am being asked to do a second interview with Expedia.com soon, which is pretty cool, they're going to fly me out to Seattle to give me interviews all day, ugh. it would be pretty cool to get an offer from them though. also, i have received an offer from the Rutger’s DIMACS/DIMATIA REU program, which would be 8 weeks at Rutgers (NJ) and a possible 2 weeks at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. my project is a really mathy thing, i'm not even sure i understand it, it's about "patterns in the logical analysis of data", the description is here, the third project from the top (it makes about as much sense to me as it does to you, unless you understand it, in which case imagine you dont understand it, then you know where i am). in addition i have a phone interview with Finisar (Cali) coming up.
so, plenty of stuff going on, class starts for spring quarter on monday, i'm really pumped about my new classes, they're going to be very exciting. hopefully i will be able to return to terre haute later today (snow is making that difficult right now). more details to come about those last weeks of winter quarter, the vegas adventure, in addition i hope to have more web space soon and will be able to display much of my growing photo album.