Phew!

And so, ladies and gentlemen, my second semester of graduate school comes to an end. I'd say it went pretty well, all things considered.

It's been 3 months since I blogged. The amount of catching up stories I need to tell is insane, so I'm going to be shamelessly selective and just pick out anything that seems important.

Though now that I think about it, that isn't very different from what I normally do... So anyway, let's say goodbye to the semester with a little look at what I did.

Formal Languages and Automata Theory - in many ways the most fun course I've ever had, primarily because the professor who teaches it is the most amazing expert on recursive function theory (among other things) I've ever had the privilege of knowing. Not only do I feel twice as smart in some ways, I'll never forget those hilarious jokes that he'd deliver every ten minutes. They certainly compensated for all the brain-addling he dished out.

Actually, I will forget those jokes. What I won't forget is that they were absolutely freaking hilarious. And there is one comic incident that I'll remember to my dying day. That's right, even when I'm creating my own universes and reveling in godlike splendor that amateurs like Yahweh could never imagine, I'll occasionally remember that crazy antic and my laughs will thunder through the cosmos.

Machine Learning was pretty good - as a course I learned an amazing amount from it. The little project we had on constructing a Go AI using Temporal Difference Learning didn't go all that well - but it certainly seemed to be learning, which was all the professor cared about anyway.

I managed to come up with a fairly neat idea for my term paper on Natural Language Processing, though I'm not sure how good it is yet. Still, bad ideas are often the seeds of good ones. I'll shut up for now, because if something good comes out of it, I don't want to get scooped.

I guess the most useful thing that came out of it was the ability to read papers and not die halfway through the second page. When you have to read four of them a week and write reviews for each one, reading just one is a trivial task. And it helps that I can now read them critically too, though sometimes I can't turn on that particular mode of thought until I imagine firing up OpenOffice and starting the review...

Right, so what was the most interesting thing that happened? Without a doubt, it would probably be that amazing trip to Tokyo for the 2007 ACM ICPC World Finals. We didn't do too badly either - we're officially ranked 44th, but then so are all the other teams that solved 3 problems. We're actually second in that lot. In any event, we wound up surpassing UCF teams for the last few years, so our coaches are happy - and we got ranked rather than a mere Honorable Mention, so they're even happier. We even wound up getting interviewed by the student newspaper, and showed up on the university website for a bit.

As an interesting aside, Google has invited the ICPC finalists over to their New York office for a day, around the last week of June. They're going to show off in ways that only us geeks can do without looking like idiots (except to normal people, but then they're merely peasants whose opinions are unworthy of consideration anyway ).

Now for the really fun part: in just a few days, my family is going to be flying to the US for a month-long visit. They'll hit Orlando at the beginning of next week, and we'll have a whirlwind tour of Disney World for a couple of days before we head over to my uncle's place in Maryland. And then it'll just be a nice family holiday involving meeting relatives that I may or may not have met before, and all that sort of thing. Of course, as all hungry grad students know, these are merely incidental to the truly important things in life, such as getting to eat good old fashioned home cooking. And when your mom is the best cook in the world...

So any way you look at it, I'm all set.

Except for losing my yellow color on TopCoder. I guess I'll have to take it back by force in the next SRM.

It'll be nice to get in some real hard training over summer. I'll be teaching myself loads of cool mathematics (you never know when it might save your life) and preparing for the Ph.D qualifiers next Fall. Putting that all together will mean a serious boost in my abilities. If all goes according to plan, I'll be a lean mean problem-solving machine by the next ACM Regional.

Well, that's it. I'm off to do whatever the hell I feel like, because I'm free as a bird! :D

I think I'll make me some soup at 1 AM. That would just about hit the spot.

I did it again!

Woohoo - I just successfully cooked some rice, and it's perfect! Mom's recipes really work!

Now I can settle down in front of the TV and watch the South Park marathon.

Cooking? Me?

My latest exploit is probably the most uncharacteristic yet. I cooked.

It all started out two nights ago when my roommates declared they were going to Miami for two days with a bunch of other guys. Now I had a pretty good idea of what they were going to get up to out there, and unfortunately, I'm not the kind of guy who enjoys that sort of thing. Sad, but true.

For those who don't know what I'm talking out, I should mention that one of the major qualities of this friend of ours called Avinash(the guy who came up with the idea of the Miami trip) is that he can outdrink the most seasoned Irish drinker. Fill him up with alcohol to the point that you can hear it sloshing around inside, and he'll barely be unsteady on his feet.

Now it's always great fun to watch a bunch of progressively drunker guys make fools of themselves - in fact, a friend of mine claims that this is his only activity on the rare occasions he goes to a club.

Still, it gets boring after a while. I'm not a glutton for boredom, and luckily I wasn't invited. This gave me the idea that I could use this time to force myself to cook, and it worked. Necessity is indeed the mother of not-so-futile dodges.

I created some pretty tasty zeera-aloo - for those of you who don't speak Hindi or Urdu, this is basically a bunch of potatoes the way my mom makes back home. As far as I'm concerned, this is a great culinary achievement. Besides, I'm one of those guys who could live forever on potatoes.

I think I'll try my hand at making some rice tonight. Wish me luck. I'll keep the fire extinguisher ready.

Blogger upgrade and more

Season's greetings, everyone!

Blogger Beta has now gone official, so I just switched my blog over to it a few minutes ago. I've been messing a bit with layout and that sort of thing, and a lot of my old hacks don't work anymore, such as the comment expansion script.

Okay, actually I just can't be bothered to go through with figuring out how to integrate that into things here. I'm not sure how much the template has changed and I'm feeling kinda lazy at the moment. I'll probably look into it sometime soon. One of the things that has always annoyed me about Blogger is the way comments are handled - either a new window pops up, or it opens up in the same window - either way it breaks continuity in a way it shouldn't.

I was going to apologize for not posting for so long, but given that I seem to wind up doing that in every single post, I'm going to be shameless and simply refuse to ever apologize about this again. A man's blog is his castle, after all...

Here's a potted history of what went on between the last post and this one:

My team (UCF Kernel Panic) won the ACM ICPC Southeast Regionals, handily beating the second place team by a margin of nearly 600 penalty points. We'll be going to the World Finals in Tokyo in March.

Well, we were beaten by the pickup team formed by my coaches Ben and Raymond, but thankfully pickup teams don't count anyway. In any event, I'm pretty happy - my first ever ICPC, and I'm already going to the World Finals. Not that I had all that much to do with it - my teammates have been doing this sort of thing for a while now. I did help a fair bit, though.

Right after that, I was hit by midterms, followed by a rather heavy load of work for the courses I was taking. Now, for the first time ever, I wound up slightly concerned that my rather undisciplined approach to getting stuff done wouldn't cut it. It was too late by then for organization to be any help, so I just went with overwhelming force instead.

People who know my somewhat obsessive nature are aware of just how much overwhelming force I can generate. It paid off - I wound up with an A in all my courses but one, and that was only an A-, so I'm mostly satisfied.

Still, I was kept extremely busy all the way through, and that left me slightly annoyed. Having to work like that eats into your time in a somewhat negative way, and I think I'd be happier with a little more control as opposed to my current methods of reacting to things as they come.

Consequently, I've gotten into this self-improvement and discipline thing - presumably the catalyst was reading How to Think like Leonardo Da Vinci and then being strongly influenced by another of Steve Pavlina's posts: Passion Vs Self-Discipline.

Pavlina knows what he's talking about. He does occasionally post on stuff which I consider rather irrational - psychic stuff and what not - but his personal growth stuff is amazing, and well worth the read.

I'd like to point out that I've been inspired enough that I'm actually waking up early these days(so far, that just means before 11 AM, though) and I've been using his 30-day trial approach to train myself to drink 8 glasses of water a day. Works like a charm.

Be advised, drinking more than 8 glasses of water a day means that you'll be visiting the loo on a very regular basis. On the plus side, it does make you feel a lot healthier.

The day after my last exam, I flew off to Maryland to visit my uncle. Armed with my new digital camera - it's a Canon Powershot A630 - I ended up coming back with over 90 pictures. This was another overwhelming force thing - my dad had demanded at least 50, fearing that my lazy approach would result in only a few photos here and there.

Family and close friends - if you guys haven't seen the pics, let me know.

It was a great trip, though it was only a week long. The best part was all the home cooking - mmmm....*Sigh*

Seeing Washington DC was an interesting experience. I briefly contemplated running for President, but then realized that I haven't learned how to fake sincerity well enough to be an effective politician.

It was also nice to meet a lot of family, particularly cousins who I hadn't seen in years, and some who I had either never met, or had no memory of meeting owing to the vagaries of the infant mind...

So I'm finally back home, and rather predictably, I'm solving dozens of problems as practice for the World Finals.

USACO rearranged their training pages, so I suddenly found myself back in section 2.2, after having been in 3.3 a few months ago. In a fit of inspiration, I solved 10 problems in quick succession to get to 3.2. This was mostly done yesterday, and a couple of problems were done the day before that.

I'm aiming to go yellow on TopCoder soon. Hopefully these 2 weeks of vacation will give me the added boost I need. A trend I've noticed among most people who have a high degree of skill at programming contests, is that at some point, they sat back and solved a huge number of problems over a very short period of time, and ratings and skill suddenly jumped. So you can guess what I'm doing now...

I guess that's about it. I've been promising myself that I'd start blogging again, and it wasn't working, so I just did the overwhelming force thing again. It worked.

Cheerio, guys! Enjoy your Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule, Winter Solstice, Rohatsu - and have a happy New Year!