Work and Workings of a Nerd

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Appreciating the Best

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

This past Friday, I went with the Zanbato team up to San Francisco for a sendoff dinner for Mark, who will be headed off to Africa. Partying isn’t quite my domain, much less heading up to the city to do it. The real lure for me to see Mark off instead of just being extra-nice to him on his last day at the office was the opportunity to go to Tony’s Pizza Napolenta. Tony himself is a world champion pizza dough tosser several times over, and Tony’s Pizza is among the contenders for the best pizza in the country. They have different ovens for different styles of pizza, get their ingredients from the most authentic sources, and feature the Neapolitan pizza, the pinnacle of pizza-ness for the pizza connoisseur.

It was good. With a large party, we got 6 different types of pizzas and got to sample some of each. Our order included Neapolitan pizza (Margherita), New York pizza, St. Louis Pizza, California pizza (“Fear & Loathing”), classic Italian pizza (“Cal Italia”), and the “original pie with cheese”. The styles were unmistakably different, and I liked some better than others. My favorites ended up being the simplest pizzas, which is somewhat surprising given my usual preference for loading up American, delivery-style pizza with every possible topping. Having never had a Neapolitan pizza before, however, I now wonder whether I was appreciating the “country’s best” or the “Neapolitan” part of it.

It’s natural for us to seek out the best, most acclaimed in everything that we can get, assuming the opportunity cost is small. I would rather see “The Producers” on Broadway instead of by the local high school drama club. I would rather drive a 2010 Camry instead of a 2005 Camry. I would rather eat at the 4-star Thai restaurant instead of the 3-star Thai restaurant. In all of these cases, there appears to be a better choice by general consensus. Even more, I don’t know if I would really know the difference in any of these cases.

In any domain, general or specific, there’s a learning curve to the details, and many subtleties are only learned through experience. Over time, whether through explicit or implicit learning, we gradually acquaint ourselves with the domain, and that opens us up to a different kind of experience. Even so, we often are attracted to things beyond our understanding at the time. Let me give a few examples in different circumstances of what I mean.

Last year I went to a public lecture by Terence Tao. He’s a Fields Medal winner and therefore one of the most talented mathematicians today. His lecture happened to be about the history of our understanding of the universe, which was very interesting, but frankly had nothing to do with his professional career (he admitted that it was just a side interest for him). Although the content was very interesting, it didn’t take a foremost mathematician to give the lecture, and yet, I’m certain I have missed many other opportunities for similar material by someone far less prominent. He actually also gave a separate lecture to the math department, where he explored ideas within his specialty: there’s no way I would’ve been able to make anything of that.

I have also gone to see the San Francisco Symphony on a few occasions, which I am able to appreciate slightly more from my musical history from high school. On those trips, I would gone both with long-time classical music buffs as well as very non-musical people. For them, it was an enjoyable experience with some exciting, not obviously flawed music. It was fun. For myself, I could hear the things that went well and not so well for the performers and could appreciate the talent of a professional orchestra above my high school orchestra. I’m not sure that everyone could’ve made that distinction.

I play racquetball fairly regularly, and I have also tried to introduce the game to many of my friends. I have my own racquet, which is fairly good: it doesn’t vibrate too much when I hit the ball, and it can deliver a pretty good amount of power. Although I’m happy to lend it to others to others to use, it doesn’t really help inexperienced players to even up the game. Without the skills learned through extensive play, the racquet performs roughly as well as much cheaper loaners that they can get from the gym.

At this point, I’ve gotten fairly far from my original point about pizza, but I think it’s a curious paradox about how we orient ourselves to these situations of inexperience. On the one hand, it inevitably leads us to preferences beyond our understanding to appreciate, but that itself a product of our reliance on others in situations that we don’t understand. Put more concretely, I can figure out what are the better Chinese restaurants around without someone else telling me: with a stomach large enough, I can find out for myself, eventually. I do, however, need someone to tell me what the best sushi place in town is, because of and despite my ability to tell a difference.

So what does it matter? I can think of a few upsides to this confusing situation. First, we can be attracted to new things because of the prominence of the best. I was excited to hear that “Avenue Q” was being performed at the Orpheum up in San Francisco and probably wouldn’t have been about Palo Alto High School doing the same. Add that as one more step in slowly learning about the world of theater. Second, it overcomes more pragmatic concerns about the breadth of discovery, even for the knowledgeable. Although I could play every computer role-playing game released in the past 10 years to find out which is the best, I can rely on reviews to find out which are the best ones to actually spend my limited time on. Finally, it gives recognition to excellence in a field, presumably by those who understand it.

Bringing a lot of rambling thoughts back to pizza, I wonder whether I’ve ruined Neapolitan pizzas for myself forever by having one of the best in the country first. Were I to know notice the difference, I won’t ever be able to find anything as good anywhere else. I hope that instead, I gorge my way through many more pizzas to come, enjoying each as I slowly develop the sense to appreciate the delicious subtleties that I can’t miss for having never experienced them.

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If We’re Moving Classes Online, Where Are They Leaving From?

Sunday, January 29th, 2012

There’s been a recent trend of moving opening up coursework to the world on the internet. The first steps towards this happened a few years ago with resources such as iTunes U and OCW, where recorded lectures and notes were made available online. This trend, however, has taken the next step as university courses in their entirety are being offered online, with graded homework and a certificate to boot. I’m mos  t familiar with offerings from Stanford, but I think others are jumping on the bandwagon, too.

The reasoning behind it is sound. A lot of coursework is moving online anyways as convenience for students, and it seems like the right thing to do. I’m fortunate enough to be a student at a well-funded private university, but that luxury isn’t available to most people. With the popularity of this model from sites such as Khan Academy and the pipeline to do it, it seems almost unfair to restrict the content to the few who can afford it.

It’s not perfect. For many classes, there’s no replacement for the ability to work hands-on and in-person for a class. You lose the physical environment of a college campus and the ability to collaborate with instructors and other students directly. Some argue that the most valuable part of college is not the class but the people you meet. If you can’t have that, though, this is pretty close. The traditional teaching model with hour-long lecture and problem sets don’t really involve interaction to a large degree.

At the risk of sounding privileged and snooty, however, I’m a little disappointed by how this change is being embraced in class design for in-person students. Since this was an initiative in the Stanford Computer Science department, I’ve taken several classes (and am currently taking a class) that are now in the online format. To accommodate the students, they’ve made some changes to how the class is taught, both for online and in-person students. And I think they’re a little worse for it.

Most professors really do just lecture, and a recording is no different. I actually depend heavily nowadays on watching lecture online to work with my schedule. But some professors are really good in class, and it’s a shame to lose that. For example, Dan Jurafsky is teaching an online class on Natural Language Processing. I took the class from him junior year, and the lectures were great. He actively pushed students to think in-class, ask and answer questions, and just made it a really fun environment, even though he did teach by lecturing from slides. Even though the class was early in the morning, everyone was awake and could really be a part of things.

That class, however, might be an exception. The other substantial change that I’ve noticed is a change in the workload for students. In order to make classes available to possibly thousands of students, grading must be automated: it isn’t practical have TAs go through all the assignments by hand. This model isn’t really scalable for, say, English classes, where most of the work is discussion and essays. But for many technical fields, where work boils down to getting the right number at the end of a derivation or writing a program that computes the correct output for some specification, it might work.

Having gone through these classes, however, I think that might be cutting students short to some degree. Let’s take Computer Science as an example. Past the 3 course introduction to programming series, most of my work has been tailored towards proofs and conceptual understanding. Once you has a sense for how to program, actually programming in classes becomes much less relevant: if you need to implement a program, you take a few days and learn the specifics of the language. The real trickiness comes in understanding how to build systems, which requires conceptual understanding to compose and extend systems.

Take, for example, Probabilistic Graphical Models. Roughly, this class on artificial intelligence is about modeling phenomenon using probability. This class is historically known to destroy students. In the past, there were biweekly problem sets involving derivations and proofs for 5-ish problems, often the results of research papers in the field. TAs were responsible for grading these lengthy, often page-long proofs involving a mix of mathematical derivations, cleverness, and intuitive explanation. This syllabus, however, needed to be switched up, so it’s now weekly programming application projects.

So admittedly most of my response to that is bitterness at having been brutalized by the problem sets for this class while current students can just write a little bit of code. But it seems to me that students now aren’t getting the same depth that they would have thinking through problems. For many advanced algorithms, the actual implementation is relatively easy when it’s already outlined: it’s basically just translating a description into code, which often doesn’t require much insight into the algorithm itself. Trying to re-derive the same result or prove a similar concept, however, is much more difficult and requires understanding of how things work. I don’t need a class to teach me whether I did something right: I need a class to teach me whether I understand.

We’ll see how this shift goes moving forward. I’m all for providing content online as long as it doesn’t displace valuable aspects of current teaching methods. By focusing on the most tangible products of coursework, such as lecture content and quizzes, we might lose out on more subtle parts of an embodied, learning experience. Let’s democratize education as best we can, but don’t sacrifice the vitality of colleges while we’re at it.

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Using the Web to Make Academic Work Useful

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

For several stretches of several academic school years, I have allowed my class-related work to become my blog content. Sometimes it’s more natural, such as the final essay for Creative Nonfiction, and sometimes it’s less natural, such as short critiques for Moral Philosophy. Most of my motivation for posting this work is pure laziness: it’s really hard to will myself to write a blog post after having worked through an essay. A smaller point, which is the crux of this post, is that it seems a shame that I should spend so much time on classwork that will ultimately be seen by only one grader.

Not all classwork is valuable beyond its own context. Mechanical math problems and proofs of known results are obvious examples of classwork for its own sake, so I hope you won’t be offended if I avoid posting addition and multiplication worksheets. A lot of other classwork, however, emphasizes critical thinking, synthesis, and creativity in research and projects.

I’ve tried to make most of my original and less embarrassing writing available on this site, either in blog posts or on my Writing page. Despite its pedagogical purpose, classwork can still be original and contribute to knowledge as a whole, especially given how sparse some of the content may be. For example, Google Analytics tells me that my essays and responses for Moral Philosophy are some of the most popular content from google searches on specific philosophers and philosophies. Posting this content is cheap and easy for me, and it may be extremely valuable to anyone else who ends up researching similar topics to those papers.

Even so, most of my work has been relatively simple, and I have often been frustrated by how difficult it can be to find similar resources for some actual published papers. Many researchers have released open frameworks for their work, but more often than not, the details aren’t available. Datasets, stimuli, program code, and all sorts of other work are poured over by researchers for months and sometimes years, yet are basically forgotten after being summarized and presented in a paper. I’m not a full-fledged researcher and don’t understand most of the logistics, red tape, and politics that probably drive most of the reasoning behind the process, but in the pursuit of knowledge, it only seems right to make as much known as possible.

Along those lines, I’ve taken that first step and released several of my projects on GitHub, where you can view much of the code for research I’ve done, along with some results and write-ups. As you might expect, the code is something of a mess, though should anyone want to use or understand it, I would be happy to clean it up. In all likelihood, the repositories will likely sit on the web, unseen and unimportant, but for how much I complain about not being able to find things, I can at least say that, “I tried.”

For many of my peers who have also worked on various projects, I recommend that you do the same. I’ve seen some really impressive work come out of class projects, and it would be a shame for that to be the end of it. And use it for current projects as well. Should you be doing any coding or research, you should be using a version control system anyways, so you might as well make it publicly available as well. In academia, we’re always all collaborating with everyone.

Posted in personal, psychology, technology | 1 Comment »

New Year’s Hopes: 2012 Edition

Thursday, January 5th, 2012

Another year, another set of hopes. In case you’re not familiar with this series, my Hopes are like Resolutions, except without the resolve part. I’m not too committed, and therefore basically unable to fail. If that doesn’t quite make sense, you can follow the chain back from last year’s post and look at other explanations I have given. Feel free to critique my explanation as it’s likely changed and become contradictory over time.

But first, let’s check in with last year’s Hopes:

1) Be more informed and open-minded.

I feel like I succeeded on this one. I still only read The New York Times as my only source of mainstream media news, but I have at least branched out to reading the conservative op-eds that they have. That’s getting a different perspective, right?

More seriously, though, I think another good switch that I made was using reddit instead of Google Reader as my primary stream of internet content. Although reddit has its limitation, Google Reader has more: I was only getting information from a fixed set of sources that I predetermined to be of interest to me, i.e. similar to my own mindset and views. reddit is a strange community, and it has the mob mentality and young, libertarian bent that you might expect from an internet community. Even so, I have been reading content from many sources I would have never found otherwise, and I can read reaction to content in the comments on reddit.

2) Stay in touch.

This was less successful. I think I have done as good a job staying touch with people as I ever have: I usually try to round up a couple big groups at this time of year, but otherwise, I haven’t really reached out too often. Cold-calling is a little awkward, especially in a growing world of asynchronous, digital communication, but I should probably work to overcome that a little more.

 

So what do I have on tap for this upcoming year? I honestly contemplated not putting any hopes out there since I’ve recently been going through a weird zen phase where I’m trying to avoid planning and setting goals too much. Even so, I do have a few things on my mind that I would like to do, and I would be deceiving myself to deny that they exist. Hopes are just hopes anyways, right?

1) Write a book, and get everything done to get to that point.

I’m currently planning on finishing my master’s a quarter sooner than I originally anticipated, and although school comes to an end, I want to keep up with the same sort of things. For one of the term papers I wrote this past quarter, I ended up with a dozen different topics surrounding an issue that I thought were interesting, each of which could turn out to be an interesting chapter. While thinking through that, I read several interesting books and sources that I would have loved to spend more time reading as leisure. I’ve thought quite a bit about doing this, but we’ll see what comes of it.

2) Play a few more video games.

Specifically, I currently have 4 different role-playing games in my Steam account that I haven’t played, and I would like to catch up on those. Through college, I played a tremendous amount of Super Smash Bros. and found a few other fun things to do with my friends, but computer games, a staple in my pre-college days, were left behind.

I think this was the correct thing to do, but over the past month or so, I’ve been playing The Witcher. Although the gameplay is a little weak and monotonous, the decisions and plot were very compelling. Specifically, the moral choices are very complex. I’ve played many RPGs, and most have a good/evil split, with the “correct” choice being quite obvious. In The Witcher, nothing is clear: do you help the Order of the Flaming Rose, who is sworn to killing monsters, protecting humans, and maintaining order, but also is racist and intolerant of non-humans? Or do you help the Scoia’tael, the freedom fighters who believe in equality but have resorted to crime, terrorism, and hostage-taking to achieve their goals? I could go on quite a bit about some of the rest of the content, but it suffices to say that this game, for the first time ever, legitimately had me thinking for a minute about what the right response was in some conversation or decision. Perhaps I’ll discuss this further in another post.

3) Cajun cooking.

For the past few summers, I’ve had a goal of something that I wanted to work on with my cooking. I think the next goal I have is Cajun cooking. That probably means that my mostly vegetarian cooking will need to come to an end as I start using seafood and sausages, but we’ll see how that works when I get there.

 

I think I have more that I want to do but don’t immediately have in mind. These types of Hopes come up regularly, so maybe I just need to follow the thoughts I have in the moment. Let’s count that as another Hope, too.

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Christmas Cooking with the Leungs

Wednesday, December 28th, 2011

Merry Belated Christmas, Happy New Year in advance, and Happy Holidays as a catch-all! Here at the Leung family estate, being all together means a few things: whining, bickering, accusing, and, most importantly, cooking. Often all at the same time. Over each other. It’s quite an enlivening experience once you get used to it.

But Christmas is extra-special, because we put extra planning into everything: my mom coordinates all of the gifts, my mom determines what we’re going to cook for her birthday (often celebrated along with Christmas since they’re close and we’re all home), my mom makes sure that the house is organized for all of our arrival, and we all dredge up old stories to jab each other with. This particular Christmas, we all have our own kitchens to stock, so my mom appears to have amassed a huge pile of on-sale kitchen gadgets from which we can all snatch what we need. My haul was particularly good:

But moving past my obsession with containers and random gadgets, let’s focus on what we actually cooked up on Christmas. And all pictures are credited to the Zanbato iPad, which at least takes better pictures than my phone.

When it came time for planning our contributions to cooking for my mom, I was politely asked, “What are you doing?” I shrugged and offered up my services anywhere they were wanted, but my mom threw me a bone and said, “I liked the bagels you made last year.” That might make her the exception, as they were universally regarded as too salty and a little small and not fluffy, but I accept any low standards that I manage to set for myself. It makes it more difficult for people to be disappointed in the future. At the recommendation of Lisa’s Jewish boyfriend Matt, I looked specifically for a kosher bagel recipe, which I found here.

The recipe called for far too little flour, and I ended up adding close to another cup of flour to get the consistency of the dough right. It also calls for very large pieces of dough for each bagel. I made them much larger than last time, but not quite as big as recommended. I think I got the size just about right.

This recipe said to put the bagels in hot but not boiling water as well. I’m not entirely sure if this is correct, but at least they floated this time. The dough also rose more at each stage (resting, boiling, and baking).

The tops of the bagel browned up quite nicely after setting the oven to broil for the last 2 or 3 minutes of baking. The consistency is a little funny, which I think has to do with how I rolled out the individual bagels. You’ll note that there aren’t any toppings on it. In my excitement, I somehow ignored the etymology of “toppings” and got the notion that the bagels would work better if I had the toppings on the bottom where it would be pressed into the bagel more.

The bottom looks a little gross, but it ended up being delicious. They got a crispy side that beats any baking I’ve ever done, and it ended up being quite a success. Like many of my creations, they don’t look perfect, but the usual criticism ended there. We fortunately had some lox in the fridge, and they made a nice lunch before we started baking.

The menu for dinner ended up not being nearly as extensive as it has been in the past, but we didn’t need more food with stacks of leftovers in the fridge and more in our tummies from bagels and snacking. Nicole headed up the shrimp ravioli made entirely from scratch. I beheaded some of the largest, ugliest shrimp I had ever seen, and she made and rolled out the pasta by hand. It sounds like it was a lot of work.

The ravioli were quite large, but Nicole managed to dole out all of the shrimp filling, so it worked out. I guess this is preferable to ravioli without enough pasta around the edges that might burst. The recipe didn’t make a lot of sauce, but it made enough to coat all of the ravioli, of which it was difficult to eat more than 1 or 2 because of the size.

We had about an extra 1/2 pound of shrimp, so Lisa used that to make some Greek shrimp. Unfortunately, mint didn’t quite make it onto the shopping list, but it still ended up being pretty tasty, even if there wasn’t quite enough shrimp. She ended up slicing them in half, which worked because with the huge shrimp we had, this meant that we still had 8 pretty meaty halves.

To fill out the rest of the meal, we also had a few crackers with some very ripe brie and leftover cranberry sauce:

some asparagus:

and a simple salad. The most exciting part of the salad, from my perspective, was the avocado we used. I carried it back with me from California in my luggage after Julie and I picked it off of a tree at Stanford. We were worried that we picked it too soon, but it ripened nicely. The inside was bright green, soft, and juicy:

The other big effort was in making the birthday cake. My mom wanted something not too sweet and relatively light so that it wouldn’t languish in the fridge for a long time like the rest of our leftovers. It took a good portion of a car ride for her to describe a fruity cake, which was essentially the fruit tart we had always done, except with a sponge cake on the bottom instead of a crust. Why we couldn’t have just done the crust we’ve always done is beyond me, but I don’t do any planning.

The recipe we found for it turned out to be a vegan recipe, which we only realized after Lisa made the cake, and we started the custard, all without using eggs. Quick tip: if there aren’t any eggs in it, it’s not custard. Anything pretending to be is suspect, and by suspect, I mean probably bad. While I was stirring the custard, we tried a bit, and it wasn’t very good. Lisa made a game-time decision and tossed that custard down the drain and started again with a real custard. Better success followed.

Although it’s probably not the fruit cake you’re thinking of around Christmas time, it ended up being pretty good. The cake had an interesting (but not bad) consistency and definitely held its lime. The custard was as delicious as you might expect, and the array of fruit all worked pretty well.

I hope you saw something that you liked!

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Valley State of Mind

Monday, December 26th, 2011

I always look forward to coming home on vacation. I know I have the chance to snap out of my regular rhythm, enjoy home cooking, sleep in, see my family, and snatch up various items from around the house. What I sometimes most look forward to, however, is the least predictable opportunity: catching up with grade school friends. Unlike my family, I’m not constantly updated with the latest news, and get-togethers let me hear where people have been in the often too-long time since I last saw them.

This particular vacation has been interesting because it’s 4 years since high school graduation, and many of my friends are just out of college. Oddly, I happened to end up meeting up with quite a few I haven’t seen at all since high school, which makes it as though college never really happened. It seems like people are all over the place: some have moved out of Texas, most stayed. Some are doing something related to their college major, most aren’t. But across the board, it sounded like they just didn’t really know what they wanted the rest of their life to be yet.

Which is fair. Unlike in other education systems, it seems that American students often make very late choices about what they want to do. I’ve heard that in Europe, some students are tunneled into a profession as soon as they reach high school. Here, most high school students don’t specialize at all. 4-year colleges often don’t require students to choose a major upon admission, and even if they do, they have the flexibility to change well into their 3rd and 4th years. And as I’ve discovered, even college graduates don’t know what jobs they want. It’s a sentiment I can understand given my huge changes over the past year or two, but I was surprised by their approach to dealing with it.

Many of them mentioned that they were just working jobs and not working on their careers. The sense I got is that they were biding their time: uncertain of what they wanted to do, they were trying something out to gain a little experience, like a small job at a big corporation, and they were continuing to explore and see what might come their way. While holding down the fort 9-to-5, they could spend their evenings learning about other opportunities and enjoying life. Instead of returning home and becoming dependents again, they wanted something temporarily stable until they found their true passion and could jump on that opportunity at that time, with a resume and work history that demonstrated their commitment.

Put that way, this plan seems very reasonable, and I happily agreed that this was the best thing for them to do at that time. Only after thinking about it a little longer did I realize that this very sound plan for any college graduate completely contradicted my own plan.

The mindset that I came into was that this time after college was the best time to go for the biggest, craziest idea possible. At this time, my only commitment is to eat and have a warm roof. I don’t have a family or any dependents and am not locked into a corporate ladder. Even if I fail, I can learn a lot, and even the worst failure is still work experience. By the time I’ve waited to find my passion, I’ll have lost that window of freedom. I only need that really steady position a few years down the road, and I can reevaluate the rest of my life at that point.

This mindset is undoubtably a product of my time in the Bay Area, where you can’t miss the optimism that anyone can change the world and the urgency that someone else will if you don’t. And even then, it can be hard to follow that plan. Many of my friends, even from Stanford, are heading out to well-paying jobs at big companies, some of which will definitely pitch their startup roots but realistically can no longer maintain that excitement and enable individuals to really go for the big thing. Even I almost took the safe path of job opportunities with Silicon Valley firms. It actually took some external forces to push me along the path I am now that has really allowed me to embrace this headlong mindset.

That difficulty and serendipity, however, reminds me how hard it is to believe these perspective from the outside. Out of my great confusion from CS378, one thing I learned is how important it is that one be immersed in a particular community and circumstance to really understand certain ideas. Just as how a halfback pass play isn’t very tricky to someone who doesn’t understand football conventions and strategy, it’s hard to really believe the mindset I’m in without being where I’ve been.

So for my peers reading this, I’m kind of directing this post at you. I understand that this mindset doesn’t really work for everyone, but don’t let that be an excuse for you. I think it applies to more people than they themselves realize. But don’t take my word for it: I think just reading my words on it is exactly the sort of passive engagement that I don’t think will change your life and is characteristic of learning about what you might do instead of going for it. I have an open couch for anyone outside of the Bay Area who wants to visit, and I’ll extend an open invitation for anyone around the Bay Area who wants to have lunch at Zanbato. At least take enough of a step to see what you might be able to do: once you start, it’s awfully hard to stop.

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Kevin’s First Annual Newsletter

Saturday, December 24th, 2011

I started this blog 6 1/2 years ago on a whim to keep everyone aware of what’s been happening in my life. It’s taken some odd turns here and there, including fiction, papers for class, food, tutorials, and more, but my life has been the core of it, with different facets of it coming into view at different times. I slowly transitioned from broad summaries to specific observations in my life, and although it makes blogging more engaging for me, it also leaves a disjointed trail for you to follow. And now that I’m at the point where my friends and family have dispersed, it seems more relevant now to pick that back up.

My mom still mails out a Christmas newsletter to family friends, but since it appears that snail mail is dead and no one reads their email, this blog seems like the right venue for that. The fact that it’s publicly viewable doesn’t bother me too much: my rule of thumb is that I’m willing to write about anything I would tell someone sitting next to me on an airplane. Most of the important facts are also available via any number of social networking sites as well. So, here’s the rundown.

I ended up graduating with my degree in Symbolic Systems this past June, right on schedule. My concentration was in “learning,” which was just a convenient way for me to fit the classes that I wanted to take. In reality, my studies were more directed towards computational models of cognition. Think of it as the flip side of artificial intelligence: instead of trying to make computers intelligent for its own purposes, I looked at how we could use the same technology to better understand how people think. I applied to PhD programs in psychology hoping to continue that type of work. That isn’t what I’m doing now, and I often skim over that fact by saying that I decided not to do that. The more complete truth is that I didn’t get accepted to anywhere that I applied to, so there wasn’t much of a choice. Instead, I decided to finish up a master’s in Computer Science at Stanford as part of a 5-year program that I was already accepted to.

Instead, I’ll be working at Zanbato, a startup in Mountain View that I co-founded, as a software engineer and have been working at part-time during school. Currently, I’ll be finishing up my degree at the end of March and going full-time after that. The basic pitch is that we’re building a marketplace for infrastructure investments. Infrastructure, such as bridges, powerplants, and schools, has a pretty fragmented market, and given how much interest there is from both sellers and investors, it’s a shame that it isn’t easier to work in this space. If you’re interested, check out the 5 minute video at sokoni.com on what we’re doing for Africa. Although it’s not quite what I envisioned myself doing a year ago, I legitimately think that this is the most important thing I could be doing right now and can change the world with it.

As such, I’m planning on staying out in the Bay Area for awhile. Meanwhile, my parents ended up never moving to Boston and will now be staying in Houston for the foreseeable future. The house is a little more empty, and all of my possessions are in (many, heavy) boxes, but it’s still good to see everyone around here.

StackMap, the other startup I’m a part of, is going well. We hired a CEO and have been picking up clients and making improvements. You can see it live at appstate and Stanford, where it’s hopefully making students’ lives much easier. It’s been around for 3 1/2 years now, but I think we’re just starting to make things happen with it. Given how many student startups fail, I’m proud to see us endure through all of that and still offer a valuable product on the far end.

Cooking continues as you’ve likely seen between my blogs. The biggest change happened this summer when I tried the mostly-vegetarian thing, which Julie, as my co-chef, also endured. She actually puts my attitude best in that I don’t cook meat for myself. I’ll happily eat meat when I go out to eat but have switched to meatless sandwiches and various alternatives for dinner. Future goals for cooking might show up in my new year hopes.

I played quite a bit of sand volleyball during my senior year, taking it 2 out of the 3 quarters. I haven’t played much since, but I have been playing racquetball regularly. Although we aren’t going to the national championship, I spend another season obsessed with Stanford football. Throw in a bit of Starcraft and ton of awesome potlucks, and that’s pretty much what my life is like.

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Being a Stanford Football Fan

Sunday, October 30th, 2011

(Author’s Note: check out one of the recaps at ESPN or Go Mighty Card if you’re interested in the details of the game this post came from. It shouldn’t be too important, so read on if you prefer)

A few minutes after Stanford beat USC 48-38 and we had a chance to recover from triple overtime, my roommate Joe commented that it had been the “most nerve-wracking game” he had even watched. I pointed out that it was only so because we won: had we lost, it would’ve been the most devastating game ever. Cue the camera panning over fans with their hands on their hand.

This year, Stanford football, only 5 years from going 1-11, came into the season as a top-1o ranked team with aspirations for and a shot at a national championship. So far, it’s gone very well. Coming into the game last night, Stanford had won their last 10 games by more than 25 points, were on a 15 game winning streak, and, through 7 games this year, were never behind at any point in a game. It may have been close a few times, but we never needed to come from behind.

Even so, I was scared in a few games when we were only winning by less than a touchdown at the half. Unlike teams of the past, we were expected to win, and that changed my attitude towards the games. Before, I could be happy just that we were playing well and winning. Now, in a season where we could go to the Rose Bowl or beyond, each game isn’t a step forward: it’s another chance to lose.

So watching us go to the half only leading by 4 point was worrying, but being down 10 points in the 3rd quarter was frightening. And when Andrew Luck, our star quarter back, threw an interception that USC ran back for a touchdown late in the 4th quarter to put us behind by a touchdown, I had a scary realization: our season could be “over” so quickly. Everything we hoped for could disappear, and I was looking at the score on the TV by which that might happen.

But the team showed the poise that matches their tunnel vision and “one game at a time” mentality that makes them far better and stronger than their fans, many like me who are aware of every scenario for how things play out. The offense put together 4 consecutive touchdown drives (3 in OT), and the defense forced a fumble that linebacker A.J. Tarpley jumped on top of. And that was the shocking end to a game that left all fans in disbelief, some better and some worse.

I sometimes wish we were back in the old days, when the only fans were true die-hards to a team that didn’t have any big expectations. But as easy as that life was, it didn’t drive the same intensity in me. It was easy because I wasn’t invested, even if I was watching. Stanford’s upset of then #2 USC in 2007 was great, but had we lost, I’m sure I wouldn’t have any particular memories of the game. NOw, I can experience all of the highs and lows of a game developing before me, tracking other teams and feeling every moment of the season.

I would never wish a game to come as close as this last one did, but it was probably good for us. The team showed their ability to endure a long and physical game against a tough opponent. But for the fans, we felt a fear that we hadn’t really in the past 10 games. Instead of thinking to the next few games after the team had a huge lead in the first quarter, we were intently watching every moment of the game. We saw every tackle, every reception, every juke through the game. For that game, we weren’t the fans of a possible future: we were the fans of the game of football itself that we claim to be.

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How My Desktop Follows Me

Sunday, October 16th, 2011

In my last post, I mentioned that I have been transitioning out of a single machine mindset into having everything at hand with terminals where I go. I have largely stuck with it for the last month and a half, and it works very well. My backpack is oddly out of balance now that I’m mostly carrying around little items like my iPod Touch without the monster.

In any case, I promised a follow-up post where I discuss how I’m managing to do it. Here’s the list of computing tasks and needs that I have and the services that have me covered:

  1. stickies, random text documents, and other notes: Evernote. Until recently, I was very dependent on the stickies on my computer. It had my todo list, various details of interest, important addresses, and anything else I needed off-hand. I couldn’t survive without it. As evidence, when my motherboard got fried and I didn’t have a computer for a few days, the most important thing I needed to get off my external backup was my stickies: all other documents, music, code, etc were secondary. Beyond that, my “Documents” folder on my computer was also largely random notes and lists. All of these transferred cleanly into notes in Evernote, which syncs these to the cloud and offers desktop, mobile, and web integration. Now, without my stickies, I can’t live without it.
  2. music, podcasts: Pandora, Spotify, iTunes syncing. There are too many good services online nowadays to stream music, and since their libraries are mostly bigger and better than mine, it works. Podcasts are still dependent on having my one iTunes account on my machine to keep track of which ones I have listened to, but since I can sync it to my iPod, they’re with me everywhere. Recently, I put a pair of speakers in my kitchen and have been listening to podcasts while doing dishes and cooking. So, this is even more portable than the setup I was fixed in before.
  3. movies/media: Netflix. I never did have many movies or TV shows, so netflix streaming is another improvement. I like to think it’s not completely down the drain paying for the service, since it is saving me from buying another season of 30 Rock on DVD every year.
  4. documents: Dropbox. But to be honest, I don’t really use documents anymore and haven’t really used dropbox. Weird.
  5. bookmarks: Chrome syncing. Without this, I could have never made the switch, but between the computers I use regularly, I’m largely in exactly the same state since I spend so much time in the browser. This, along with Google+ (as discussed here), stopped my delicious usage almost entirely. Instead, I can keep a “To Read” folder on my bookmarks toolbar and leaves interesting but long sites in there.
  6. calendar: iCal. Someday, I might switch to Google Calendar, but since it syncs up to my iPod, this has worked out fine.
  7. email: gmail. I haven’t used a desktop mail client since getting my gmail account 7 years ago.
  8. video games: no solution needed. My games are only on my home machine, but that’s fine. I don’t need them anywhere else anyways. This also happens to be the only thing that I do that requires my computer to have any juice whatsoever. Since I usually manage to keep the number of open browser tabs relatively low, everything else runs fine and could on much less hardware.
  9. software development: ssh. I don’t do any development on my local machine: everything I do is on servers that I log into.
  10. homework: none. This largely sits on my home machine since this is where I do my homework, though I could just as easily copy them into my dropbox folder. The only downside would be that I wouldn’t have them appear on my desktop, so this is probably another relic.

Even for all these changes, however, I actually have been moving my computer pretty regularly. In my school year housing, my room and the common room are separate, so I end up carrying my computer downstairs to plug it into the TV whenever I want to stream any movies or sports games.

I don’t necessarily have any problems or need my life more fragmented, but let me know if you have any suggestions for other services that might be useful. I’m definitely interested to hear how others have transitioned with more cloud services or have compelling reasons for not changing.

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My Desktop Everywhere

Wednesday, September 7th, 2011

Back in my high school days, I wondered why computing wasn’t more portable than it was. Although laptops were popular, they still weren’t that convenient. I myself had a 64MB flash drive that I carried in my backpack that I used to sneak prohibited files onto school computers. It got most of the work done, but it wouldn’t be too much worse to carry around an entire hard drive with me if it could maintain the total state of computer between home and school. This clearly seemed like the dream setup to have: carry around, say, a 1 lbs device that could be plugged into any terminal and give you the exact same setup on any hardware.

In between then and now, I found a pretty good substitute in my Macbook Pro. Coming in at 5.4 pounds, I could carry my life around with me between my dorm room, home, class, library, and wherever else I needed it. It was pretty ideal, and for awhile, I believed that the best way to live was with a single machine. No hassle with trying to sync multiple devices or reconfigure anything: just pick it up and go. My dad insisted that I have a laptop for when I went off to college, and I still agree that this was the easiest way to do things.

Having finished my 4 undergraduate years, though, I’m thinking that this is no longer such a good setup. First, it actually isn’t as wonderfully portable as it could be. When I travel, I have to switch out to use my laptop backpack, and it and peripherals dominate what i can carry. Second, it isn’t very comfortable to use. My current setup has it linked up to an external keyboard and mouse with the actual laptop perched on a board game so that the screen is closer to a comfortable viewing angle. Even better would be a larger external display, but at that point, I’m not using any of the built-in input or output functionality of the laptop.

Third, I don’t actually need to be that portable nowadays. Most of my work is done at desks, and I don’t need a laptop to work at a desk. I don’t go home that often, and the only other time I can think of that I really need a laptop is when I’m working with someone else on, say, a group project. Continuing on that note, my fourth reason is that I probably shouldn’t be carrying my laptop around with me anyways. For the first 2 years of college, I almost never moved my computer from my desk. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say it was less than once a month. It was fine because I wasn’t distracted while I was in class. Beginning my junior year, I started lugging it around, thinking that I would be able to do some work at various times. Inevitably, though, I would find another good distraction and never get around to what I meant to do. And fifth and finally, the specs are very good for the price.

Even though the laptop doesn’t seem to fit my needs as well anymore, it’s okay because my original dream has been accomplished, though perhaps in a form I wasn’t expecting: the cloud. It’s a buzzword, but simply, that complete setup on any hardware exists and is even lighter than I thought it would be. Now, I can sit down at a computer, pull up a few online services, and have access to all of my music, documents, applications, files, and everything else I typically use on a computer. And thanks to Google Chrome syncing, my effective “desktop” is the same everywhere as my bookmarks, extensions, and other browser configuration follow me around.

I’ll get to describing the suite of services I use to do that in another post, but the conclusion that I’ve drawn from this is that I don’t need to carry around a physical object with me to make my computer use portable: I just need the internet, and other than airlines and fancy hotels (the cheap ones always offer free wifi; go figure), wifi is pretty much everywhere I would sit down to use my computer.

Still, there are situations where I would like to carry around a device with me, such as plane rides or trips home, and I’m thinking about getting myself a tablet (specifically, an iPad) to cover my bases there. In many ways, it doesn’t have good features that a PC would have, but I don’t think it needs it. My conception is that using a tablet is a fundamentally different method of computing, and I think I’m willing to take the plunge and see if it works when I get one.

In the meantime, I have stopped carrying my computer back and forth to work, instead leaving it at home as my “desktop” here and using another box at work. I couldn’t quite get away from the convenience of UNIX for development and am learning how to use Ubuntu on it, but in spite of a different operating system, I’m using it in almost the exact same way as my MacBook Pro sitting at home. As for portability, I’m carrying my iPod Touch around with me at all times now after basically leaving it untouched for the past 3 years. It’s limited, but it’s unnoticeable to carry and comes in handy in a few spots.

My transformation isn’t complete, but I’m excited to see how I adapt to this new setup over the next few months while I wait for another round of better hardware to come out. It may not be instantiated exactly as I imagined, but it looks like technology has snaked past the road bump of laptops and passed my dream of portability.

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