Senior Beach Camping

Last night we had a senior beach camping event at San Clemente. We spent most of the day just hanging out at the beach (I am a little sunburned now), and the evening relaxing around a fire at the campsite. It was an awesome way to celebrate completion of our classes and a beautiful location!

Course Requirements

It is basically official, all of my degree requirements have been met! In a week I'll be graduating from undergrad!

Undergraduate Education: Finished

I just submitted my last paper! I am officially finished with all the work for my undergraduate education! Wow!

Tokyo Police Club

Last night Carling and I went to a Tokyo Police Club concert at the BellyUp Tavern in Solana Beach. The venue was really awesome and seemed like a great place to hang out. There was a lot of seating all around the edge of the stage, and an open space out front.

Carling and I sat off to the left of the stage, where we had a pretty good view of the band and both of the openers. Behind us, the wall was covered in weird concert posters, most of which appeared to be signed:

and over the bar hung a giant shark with glowing red eyes!

During the opening bands, Carling and I had a couple drinks from the bar (the show was 21+). She convinced me to have a not so terrible beer (but it wasn't great either):

Tokyo Police club was amazing live! They have so much energy and the crowd loved them, which made it a really awesome show! For the first encore song, the lead singer (David Monks) came out on stage all by himself, told the crowd to quiet down, and sang a whole song without the mic and without plugging in his guitar.  It was beyond impressive that he was able to get the crowd to cooperate for long enough to complete it. It was a very beautiful and moving piece to hear him play.

The drive to Solana Beach was pretty long, but it was definitely worth it to hear them play in such a great venue. I would love to go back to it someday, though I'm not sure when I'll be back in the area.

UW Welcoming Gift

Yesterday, Jeff and the Interactive Data Lab sent me a welcoming gift to their group!

I can't wait to take a look through both of these and start to learn a lot more about the visualization field! From the looks of it, the UW was the perfect choice for me.

Last Day of Mudd Classes

Today was my last day of Mudd classes! My Thursday class was cancelled and I don't have any classes on Friday, which means I'm practically finished. And when I say practically finished, I mean that all I have to do is:

1. Finish my Scripps class on Monday and Wednesday of next week
2. Finish making the books for my Typography class
3. Listen to the last colloquium talk
4. Completely edit my 100 page final clinic report
5. Prepare and practice my clinic presentation
6. Give my clinic presentation (3 times)
7. Write a final literature paper
8. Write a short paper for my Frontend Development class

So, basically I'm not quite thinking about what it means to be at the end of the year. But I'm in the final chapter now.

Happy Easter!

Easter is always a fun time for packages :) Check out what the bunny sent me this year!

Big

For photography, our last project is a big print of a big idea. This is mine:

University of Washington Grad Student

Today I am officially a graduate student at the University of Washington! I can't wait to get started on my research and see all the great stuff that is out there in the visualization field!

Photography: Perform

Our latest photography project was entitled 'Perform' with the additional requirement that we had to be in the pictures. These are the ones I turned in for the project:

  

Jayne Hat!

Mom mailed me a cunning Jayne hat! It is the little details that help make it great!

Time

In my photography class we had to do a project about time. Here is the result:

Aside: Sorry these pictures are so tiny. It is surprisingly difficult to position pictures using this blog, I just wanted a few larger pictures in the square shape, but this was the best I could do.

I threw in this picture just for fun!

Grad School

Today, I finished applying to Grad School! I applied to:

University of Washington
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Media Lab)
Carnegie Mellon
Brown
Tufts
Virginia Tech
Georgia Tech

It was not a fun process. It was a lot of repeated data entry, which is really an unnecessary waste of time. I'm glad it is now over.

Winter!

So, this blog sort of died. Whoops!

Anyway, today I found out that I received an Honorable Mention for the CRA Undergraduate Research Award, which is pretty cool.

I have finals, and grad school, and classes, and tons of work.

Summer!

Finally! It is really summer. I finally studied for and took the algorithms test I missed while in the hospital with pneumonia.  After five weeks of not doing algorithms, the test was tricky. It would have gone a lot better if I could have just taken it with everyone else. At least I no longer have school work looming over me.

I also found a marble.

That's all for today.

Program Embedding

My assignment for Programming Languages this week was to embed a programming language inside an existing programming to make it more extensible. We began with the Unix script program and embedded Lua inside of it so that we could use it to complete other actions. the Unix script program is something which records a log of the terminal session while running. In other words, at the end of the session you can read a file which shows all of the actions entered by the user and the output from the terminal.

In general, you can imagine the script file as follows (figures taken from CS131 assignment instructions):

The internal behavior of script can be visualized as:

Finally, we embed a language within script to add functionality:

To complete this process, we had to substantially modify the C source code for script and make it so that we could call functions written in Lua from C and vice versa. The final part of the homework assignment was to do something interesting with the new Lua embedding. One of the things that could be done was to change the way in which information is displayed on the screen. This is what my partner and I decided to do:

For every string that was supposed to be displayed to the user, we went through character by character and added the ansi commands required to change the color and then displayed the newly altered string to the user in the terminal. As you can see in this picture, we began by running the newly compile lscript. All of the text in white is the original color before the embedded code starts running. Then, once the code starts running, everything displayed and everything the user types becomes RAINBOW! As an example, I used cat on the rubric for this assignment so the terminal displayed the rubric in gorgeous colors.