Chinese New Year

This past week-end was the Chinese New Year. Welcome to the year of the golden pig! Ruifen had a party where I met a lot of people. Iryna and myself were the only non-Chinese people there, so that was fun. I realized i can use chopsticks and felt very accomplished. I remember trying hard to learn to use them a long time ago and turns out something happened between now and then and i'm miraculously able to use them. The idea was to eat more slowly and therefore not so much (plus i don't think Ruifen had any forks and knives), but that didn't work since I was so good at handling chopsticks.

We had hotpot and dumplings. Hotpot is a pot that they put in the middle of the table and where you can boil all kinds of things (mostly animals and vegetables). One hour before, people start cutting stuff. Then you have a lot of bowls, each containing different things you plan to eat: shrimp, octopus, mushrooms, fish/meat/shrimp-balls, fried and fresh tofu, lettuce, sweet potatoes, etc etc etc. I don't like octopus.

AND i made dumplings!! Actually, only rolled them, because Ruifen bought the dough and made the filling. I tried to help, but the only answer i would get was "learn how to use chopsticks". So Iryina and me walked around trying to grab stuff with the chopsticks: pencils, computer cable, food, etc. And i have a very unuseful tip for you all: if computer cable was eatable and you would be very hungry, you should prefer it to grapefruit, because it's easier to grab. Happy Chinese New Year!

Binary octopus

Haven't blogged in a while. I needed something really exciting to get me back in the game. So I'm happy that this semester I'm TAing for the class for non-CS majors again. And we also started using clicker which is way more fun than ... well, not using them. But I'm not going to talk about the clicker right now, because they are kinda so last month.

Last week professor Littman has talked about binary numbers. To make people understand, he made a little song-movie about an octopus who counts in binary. He used one of Beatles' songs, but everything else is his contribution (the lyrics, the singing, the drawing and putting everything together). His kids also helped with the voices of the fishes. Here it is.

To my surprise, NOBODY applauded. Rutgers college students are "so cool"...

A walk in the green (state)

Last week-end I went to visit Samantha's family in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania. It was Samantha's birthday and my gift was the coolest t-shirt, because one thing we both really enjoy is coffee :). The geeky t-shirt idea was given to me by this guy who was wearing a black t-shirt that said "No, I will not fix your computer". I really need one of those. My sister was always wondering how come I can't fix a computer, even though I'm a computer scientists. I guess that's a mystery for anybody who's not a comp sci. You have to be a CS graduate to understand :)

Anyway, I must say I was very impressed with just how beautiful the state is. I almost felt like I was traveling in Romania, in Transylvania or in one of its beautiful parts. It was awesome to see so much green, hills with rocks and forests. I really missed that. And again, it was confirmed to me (by contrast) that New Jersey is the garden-of-power-plants state :)

Samantha's parents have this huge awesome house with a very large back yard and a pool. It's like the dream house. All the houses in that town are on grass and surrounded by trees and there's forests all over the place. Plus, there are no sales taxes for clothes! Of course, we went shopping for clothes, and it was so weird to pay the same amount as for grocery on a considerable amount of clothes. In conclusion, I just love Pennsylvania :). It really is one of the prettiest states (it's the prettiest among the three states that I've seen so far: NJ, NY and itself).

Invasion of the clickers

Ok, this is exciting: the professor that I'm TAing for wants to introduce clickers in class starting next semester. This is supposed to make the class more fun and probably easier to grade (we'll see about that). The class is about introducing CS to non-CS majors. It's a new class (it was introduced last semester) and I think the university wanted to have such a class because of the decreasing number of students enrolled in the computer science program at Rutgers. Computers are still cool, people. And software engineers are still well-paid (#1 job according to some article I read on the internet about 2 months ago, probably written by software-engineers who also run the internet - coincidence?). So clickers are supposed to make the class even cooler. And they are already used for lectures in some of the departments, which is great because... there are people who used them and survived.

We want to use the clickers not only for quizzes, but also during lectures, when we want students to participate. We'll have to implement everything, because the software that the clicker comes with (I really hope there's any!) is just the very basic. Also, the clicker is the 4-key type of clicker. So, we'll have to think (and, most importantly, make the English, art history, etc majors think) binary (because we'll need one key to cancel the answer and one other key just in case).

So what we now have is some mysterious clicker that can be connected to the computer. When used, it spits a log with what's going on (keys that were pressed). Now, all we need to do is write a device driver for the USB and engineer some pretty software that will happily live with it. Oh man, I remember the operating systems design class I was taking in college, i swore to stay away from device drivers for the rest of my life. Well, I guess the "never say never" saying applies here..

Sisters know better

Music has always played an important role in my daily life: most of the time distracting me from doing homework. A couple of years ago, I was obsessed with the band K's choice. I think I had all of their albums and for a few months, my playlist consisted if 10 hours of their music. I've always been drawn to music with weird lyrics, probably because it's more intense.

Anyway, my sister was listening to some of the music on my computer these days and ran into one of their songs, called "Breakfast". So she thought of playing it for me. I thought this was the sweetest thing. Here it is! Hope you guys will like it too. She's the best! :)

The peanut butter dilemma

Peanut butter (PB) is sort of an American thing. Most of the rest of the world is, well... not a big fan. To me, it always looked tempting, especially as a filling for crackers (combination that I actually enjoyed once, when I was REALLY hungry). But each time I tried to eat the peanut butter I was thinking to myself "man, I'm really wasting this loaf of bread/bagel". Recently, I found out that it's actually really healthy. Unless you have high cholesterol and you're way heavier than you're supposed to be. It's got a lot of proteins and it really keeps your stomach satisfied for a long time.

My ex-roommate used to eat peanut butter and really enjoyed it. She was the exception that confirmed the rule about Europeans and peanut butter. Once she bought this peanut-butter mixed with chocolate spread (such a waste of chocolate spread!! haha) and it tasted better than the chocolate-free peanut butter. And I guess I can get used to ignore my brain yelling about the waste of chocolate and get over it. The proteins deserve it! Another good option would be peanut butter with jelly. Because pretty much the only dessert I'm actually making (as in cooking) is crepes, I think they would be delicious with PB and grape jelly or something.

These are the two options that I know of. Any other suggestions?

Adaptation

As some people know, I'm a newbie in this place. I've been a newbie for almost 9 months now and, apparently, there are still things that are waiting for me to discover. I like this place a lot. Coming here was like an adventure for me. And most of the time it's a lot of fun (especially when i don't have to study), even though I sense compassion from some of the people who have never really lived farther than 100 miles from home. Fortunately, humans have adaptation capabilities and are not afraid to use them :).

People keep asking me what the hardest thing to get adjusted to here is. Until some time ago, I had no idea. It wasn't THAT hard, after all. After you start making friends it even gets to be fun. "Some time ago" ended when I found that some people graduate or finish the career stuff they were involved in and have to leave. I'm so not used to that. Moving around is not that common where I come from. Right now, at least 3 of the friends I made here had to leave, probably for good. And it's true that the internet makes the world a smaller place, but who's actually writing emails regularly to friends far away when you're used to hanging out with them? I guess sometimes it's not all about the information exchange :).

One of the guys who live nearby said he's tired of saying good-bye. He's been here for only a year, just like me, and I feel the same way. But if we're going to be around this place for 6-7 years, this is kind of part of the package and we have to live with it. Plus, some have to go, but there's new people coming around all the time, new opportunities to make friends and new opportunities to eventually say good-bye (notice my optimism :D)