Deborah Tannen

Today a speaker gave a talk that was pretty interesting, about gender and siblings, and the way males and females talk to each other. Her name is Deborah Tannen, she has a lot of books out, one of her books was on the NY Times bestseller list for many years.
In her book "You're wearing that? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation", she says that mothers should avoid discussing weight, clothing and hairstyles unless ABSOLUTELY necessary (would you want anyone critiquing you in those areas, especially if the advice was unsolicited)?
I am going to check out some of her books from the library and see if they are worth reading, they seem interesting.

Midterm grades

Systems- Keith O'Hara: A

Bella's excellent performance on the quizzes is evidence of excellent note taking and studying skills. More importantly, her work on the assignments has been creative and very well done. Not only have her projects been interesting, but also well written and thoroughly evaluated. Keep up the great work!

Senior Project- Becky Thomas: Pass

Bella's project is off to a good start. She has a question, she has detailed plans about how to investigate the question, she's already submitted the necessary materials to the IRB, she's found the software packages she needs and is currently working on making sure they integrate properly. She's done well with finding background reading on topics she needs to learn in order to carry out the project, such as research methods in psychology/user interface design. She's working consistently and efficiently, and I look forward to finding out what she learns.

European Jewish Literature- Brent: B

Bella, good presentation of major themes in Sholem Aleichem in your first paper; and I like the way you used the Zhitlovsky essay. Does Tevye's decision to support Tseytl suggest that despite his endless quoting of scripture, there is another tacit value system that is in fact more basic. If so, what is that value system and what does it tell us of how it might be possible to adapt yet retain one's identity. Must Tevye inevitably come into conflict with himself? Will it end happily or tragically-like Tseytl or like Hodel? Is this an easy problem or a very difficult one? It would be good if you could press yourself further in your analysis. But your definitely on the right track.

Justus and Flamenco grades haven't been posted yet, but I assume A's.

Perfectionism is bad.

http://health.yahoo.net/rodale/PVN/being-imperfect-could-save-your-life

This is an article about how perfectionism takes years off of your life.

Weekend

I had a wonderful weekend in the city. The shows were all fantastic, and on Sunday there was a street fair on Lexington which was really fun too. I also got my essay done in the middle of all of that, and Noah helped me with it.

Today in flamenco class my teacher had me stand front and center. I don't want to brag, but that means I am pretty good. :)

Update: http://www.brooklynvegan.com/archives/2010/09/eels_played_ter.html
noah and I are in one of the pictures!! see if you can find us

New Entry!

Well, a lot has happened since my last blog post. Noah and I had a lovely engagement party held at James' house, and I came back to school.

I'm looking forward to this weekend. Noah and I got tickets to see two bands (Pavement, the Eels) a year ago, and they are playing this weekend in NYC! So Friday night is the Pavement show, and then Saturday night is the Eels show. Also, I got 2 student discount tickets (only 10$ each!) to see The Sneeze at NY City Center on Saturday at 2:30pm before the concert. Luckily the concert venue and city center are also close to each other.

The Sneeze is adapted from plays and stories by Chekhov.

Every couple these days has a 'song'. Noah and my song is "Trouble with Dreams" by the Eels.
If you want to listen to it, it is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtjmQ6Dwojs

Work

Time seems to fly by. I am starting to work on my poster and paper for the final poster session and presentation, and then back to NJ.

Julie and James are planning an engagement party for Noah and I. We are pretty excited but there is some drama going on between Julie and Deb.

I also want to move somewhere where the weather is nicer, but still next to some city. Also a dilemma. It would be nice if the family came too. I wouldn't want to live too far from the family, but I refuse to live in NJ. I don't like cold winters and hot summers. I want something a little more mild, or at least some other part of the world.

Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow.com

I had lunch today with Bjoern and Jeff Atwood. It was really interesting to listen to what Jeff had to say about his websites and get some feedback about what we are working on.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/
This is Jeff's blog. No time to write now! will write more later

GRE

Tonight is GRE day! It's our first GRE class and we'll be taking a preliminary GRE exam to get a base score and find out our weaknesses.

Wednesday

I read papers today and started writing up an analysis of the papers, picking out the important questions the authors focused on, the data they used, and how they graphically represented their results.

Molecular Foundry

I took a tour of the molecular foundry this morning at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. They have an entire building devoted just to nanoscience research, which I don't know much about so it was interesting learning a few things. They are government funded as well, and one of the only remaining public laboratories where researchers and students can apply to work there for a year and use their equipment.
I also continued trying to debug my buggy python code, and it seems like every time I discover one error, and fix it..another one appears. I read a paper titled "Questioning Yahoo! Answers" and have two more papers to read this week. It will help me get more familiar with the other research that has been done in this area, analyzing public online communities.

Monday

More struggling with python today. I'd like to say it's getting a little easier, but no. Not yet at least. Python is pretty hard to get used to since I've been using mostly java in my classes. SQL gets very complicated too. It's those little brackets you forget, or the lack of a quotation mark or a parenthesis that usually gets me. And even if that is all okay, my syntax will be off, or I'll tell it to do something it can't do, and then I sit there waiting and waiting, and waiting for a result that never comes. Right now I have a 'list' object has no attribute 'replace' error with my python script. I feel like I have seen this error before, but I'll have to scan through some other python examples to figure out how to resolve the issue. I have all sorts of other fun errors too, like string index out of bounds...
I also have a bunch of papers to read this week, which is a nice break from coding, or debugging, depending on how you look at it.

Garden

I went to the botanical garden today with a few people from my group. Photos can be found on facebook. It was quite beautiful there.

Friday!

California is awesome. Lemon trees. Palm trees. Fragrant flowers. Nice people in my program. What is there not to like?

Today I worked on getting that histogram from yesterday to work. I got farther along, it is working to an extent. I also took notes on lists, tuples and sequences, sets, dictionaries and looping techniques in Python. I pretty much have my histogram working for a small set of data, it just takes an extremely long time to load if I'm looking at the entire set of data in this one query I ran on frequency of tags.

I'm glad it's Friday! The group is going out tonight for some San Francisco fun.

Python

Python can be very frustrating. I spent quite a while watching the program crash, and waiting for results today while the window mysteriously reduced in size as results were printed. Bjoern came by though and fixed everything up, giving me some helpful hints. I also downloaded a new editor. I ran my code on the IDLE editor and it kept crashing so frequently and taking forever, really- not like..'oh no it takes 5 minutes to run, soo slow!'...more like 'oh no, it's never going to finish, at least not today, and it will probably keep going in and out of crash mode for the next hour'. But when I switched to TextMate editor..and I was expecting it to take an hour, imagine my surprise when I got all of my output in 6.79 seconds.

So what did I do today? Well, I worked more on creating interesting queries (which gets hard by the way) for analyzing the data. I thought I'd get a few graphs done today....not the case.
I had to save the results of my first working query in a csv type file, and use python to get those results, change them around replacing carats and whatnot and splitting words, and then that is stored in a dictionary or associative array, and then I want to sort it so it is no longer a dictionary but a bunch of tuples, and then finally I save those values as y values and x labels, and the last step is creating a histogram of that data.
So, in result, I didn't even finish creating 1 histogram today, but I spent a lot of time trying to debug and I guess that made me a little more familiar with python.

Also, the guy at a desk in front of me is listening to ABBA and lady GaGa. I can hear it through his headphones. :)

In other news, one of the coordinators of our program, Carol, had 2 free tickets to this Steinbeck performance at the California Shakespeare Theater. Exciting! Since I was the only one that responded, I got both tickets and I'll be going to the theater with Nikki tonight.

Day 3

I met a student today who came into the lab and introduced himself. He is an intern for Nokia and enjoys it. He says they have a lot of resources and are able to get a lot of work done quickly. He is working on some sort of new implementation there that is top-secret and classified, so he couldn't tell me what it was. But the mystery makes it sound even cooler.

I also worked with python today and went through a python tutorial. Tomorrow I'll be looking at saving the results of my sql queries into a file, then taking that file and reading it for information that my python code can use to create graphs of the data. It's an interesting process.

Day 2: Lost on campus

Day 2:
Today I spent most of the day looking at two pretty good SQL tutorials and doing all of the exercises at the bottom of the pages. It helped me get acquainted with SQL queries. Bjoern helped me download SQL Lite and a Stack Overflow dataset, and I ran queries on the data through the terminal. It was pretty cool, however... I had a moment of frustration before realizing I missed a semicolon.

Also, I went to lunch today and got extremely lost on campus. The enormous hills don't help. I must have climbed up and down a million staircases. I also swirled around the building I needed because I wasn't used to seeing it from the front. So I saw my building, thought to myself 'where am I ?!' because I didn't recognize it, and then went up a massive flight of steps to the top of some hill...looked down and thought..I should have really been back by now. Luckily, I figured it out after going in several circles. The people on campus also have no idea where buildings are. It seems most of them are tourists, visiting students, or just not familiar with building names.

My first long practice query from an exercise on the tutorial: select customers.customerid, customers.firstname, customers.lastname, items_ordered.order_date, items_ordered.item, items_ordered.price FROM items_ordered, customers WHERE customers.customerid = items_ordered.customerid;

Day 1: Orientation

UC Berkeley summer REU program:

Today was orientation day! Logistics, expectations, id cards, and safety were the topics of the day. We met our mentors and learned more about our projects today. It seems like there are a lot of interesting events going on at Berkeley. They seem to have a ton of campus happenings, as well as museums and recreation available to us for free. We also get discounted student tickets to theater events. They mentioned a possible visit to Intel and a visit to this National Laboratory that is so classified, you need a passport or drivers license / official ID to get in (can't just use your student ID). Very exciting! The people here are all very nice, and the weather is fantastic.

Recent Photos

Alstede Farm

Pirozki

Last Week

It's the last full week of college and very busy. I have a million forms to sign and send everywhere, what a pain in the butt. I wanted to go to the gym today but no time. Probably not going to see the inside of a gym again for a while. My presentation in economics class went well today, I fixed up my essay and it is about done. I also am almost done with my short story for Justus's class.

Oh yeah, and other great news! I turned on my laptop that had this screen problem where it had lines going down the screen, and its working properly! Let's hope it keeps on working properly.

WHAT THE HELL?!
My screen just got messed up again for 3 minutes, with the vertical lines and hard to read text, and as soon as I clicked blogger to write about my anger, it started working again. I don't know whats going on.

Catskills

Spring Fling

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road- Elton John
I like that song.

I've been looking at possible paths after college.
There is basically the graduate school track, and the go to work track.
Within grad school, I could either get a Masters or a PhD.

Masters:
+ finish in 1-2 years
- have to pay for it, very expensive
looking at ~30-60,000 tuition + cost of living

PhD:
+ earn a little bit of money
- it's 4-5 years of research, bleh
- don't want to be in school that long
- i'm tired of school

Then the other thing to think about with any kind of graduate program is, you're paying a lot of money and taking out more loan, in order to get a degree to do something you don't even know if you want to do. In addition, I'd be limited to living in certain regions, i.e. cities, for work. So if I wanted to live in the middle of tooki tooki land I wouldn't be able to because there is no way I could find a job. And if I wanted to become a self sustaining human being and live off the fat of the land then I'd have to wait quite a while to pay back loans and have enough money to build an economically friendly geodome on a piece of land I'd have to buy.

Then there is the go to work track:
+ start working, get an idea of the workplace
+ start earning some money
- might not start with a very good salary
- might take a while to find a job that doesn't involve coding

Sooo everything has it's benefits and disadvantages.
Especially since I'm still trying to figure out my purpose.
I guess it's nice to have all of this free time to sit around and listen to music, and sleep in.
I really can't imagine having to get up every day to go to work.
It just seems like...'why?'
I guess financial obligations and responsibilities are why people do it. I'm not ready for capitalistic enslavement.

Tulips

Australia

Yep, it's Eric Clapton holding a Koala.


I really want to move to Australia one day. They Australian lifestyle is supposedly relaxed and easy going. If I don't change my values then all of the stress associated with my expectations might easily take 10 years off my life.
I might apply for a work visa. They need people in their technology sector.
Then I can play with koalas after work.

Also, I have a great solution for Australia being so far away. We gather a billion people, and follow the sand into the water with special scuba suits. Then everyone just pushes down and forward against the sand, and move the whole island of Australia into the Atlantic ocean closer to New York. AND! We build a giant mirror to reflect the sun where Australia used to be, and put a mirror on a satellite in the sky, and just forward the sun's rays to Australia's new location so it's still sunny and nice there, and we minimize disruption to the ecosystem.

That way, Australia is much closer to New York and you can take a really quick plane ride or a ferry.

Hardware

My first test of the week, Hardware, I think went pretty well.

Creo

So this weekend, I have had a million things to do. Two tests to study for, one paper to write, some beef stew to cook, and some planting to do. Very exciting!
But perhaps the most exciting news of all is that Noah and I have found the perfect wedding ring. It's an engagement/wedding ring (it will be for both). We have checked out every single diamond selling store in all of the Capital Region. This one is perfect. Absolutely perfect.

I've been slow cooking this beef stew in the crockpot most of the day, and planted some of my herb plants (mint, basil, parsley, dill and cucumbers). Noah also planted a nice row of lettuce. I'm excited for it all to sprout.

We're going to go out for some dessert right now, but I'm going to study some more when we get back.

Weekend

Its My Birthday!

Happy birthday to me!
I have a ton of work to do so it kind of sucks, and it's raining like crazy. But it's nice that it is my birthday, I got a few nice phone calls and emails, and I'm looking forward to Noah coming because he is bringing me a home made dinner. :)

A recruiter called me about this job!

INTERNSHIP - IT User Interface-INT-03H

Description

IT User Interface Intern

Are you a college student seeking a unique internship experience this summer? Are you ready to 'learn by doing' from our diverse, highly motivated and well trained professionals? The Standard & Poor's 2010 Summer Internship Program is the right opportunity for you!

Standard & Poor's is the world's premier provider of investment research, market indices, credit ratings, financial data, and fixed income research and analysis. With more than 10,000 employees and offices in nearly two-dozen countries, S&P is valued by investors and financial decision-makers everywhere for its analytical independence, market expertise and thought leadership. For 150 years Standard & Poor's has been an integral part of the global economic infrastructure. Its operations provide essential information to nearly every segment of the global financial community, creating the tools, analysis and research needed to make informed investment decisions.

Standard and Poor's is currently seeking a self-motivated, bright, and talented individual to intern in our Portal Content and Collaboration department. The qualified candidate will be an artistic individual eager to learn the extent of the User Experience practice at Standard and Poor's.

Essential Accountabilities:

· Support three user experience staff with usability on projects

· Help conduct usability tests in our listening lab

· Work with our user experience team to develop governance documentation for our practice

· Assist in the development of application User Interface (UI) prototypes based upon business system defined requirements

· Participate in initiatives that measure quality and productivity standards

Qualifications

Qualified candidates will be enrolled in a four-year degree program at an accredited college/university and have a minimum 3.0 GPA.

Additional qualifications include:

· Highly detail oriented

· Interest in art/ computers

· Proficient in Microsoft Office programs, including Word, PowerPoint and Excel;

· Strong interpersonal, with effective verbal and written communication skills.

*The S&P Summer Internship Program is PAID.

---

VERY COOL!

I'm still going to go to Berkeley this summer, but I'm going to call the recruiter back and say thank you. Hopefully they'll have a full time job like this when I get out of college.

Julia's Wedding Invitation

The first piece of mail ever addressed to me and Bella together. :D

Enjoying Break

I'm going to a wedding in May!
Noah's friend Julia is getting married, very exciting :)
Here is their wedding page.

Pod-Cast

For a CS major, I'm pretty slow at discovering technology.
Anyway, I just discovered the 'PodCast'.
Apparently there are a lot of free 'PodCasts' out there available for iTunes or streaming, so I'm listening to an interview with John Canny that took place in Bangalore, about HCI.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/what-is-human-computer-interaction/id202383370?i=23942455

Predictor

I filled out this internship predictor survey and these were my results.