Obsession with twngan

Too busy to write about anything serious. Just a short comment about the title, in case you wonder. The obsession is about my choice of the word "twngan" and nothing else.

Today we got some feedback about our IPTPS submission from the faculty. Unsurprisingly, the comment was basically rewrite everything, so that's what we're going to do for the weekend. Hopefully things will go fast enough so that we can have a reasonable version ready by tomorrow night to get another round of feedback, and then my boss will have the time to rewrite everything about for us on Sunday... Too bad there will be an electricity outage in the offices on Sunday, which will probably affect my boss...

So we finally finished a draft for a faculty to look at. I feel so exhausted right now, and yet I'm not too happy with the draft. Probably the faculty will call off the submission, since it is nothing close to ready yet. Gee, I'm so sleepy. I should stop working 4am-11pm each day (and waste a lot of time in between). Maybe I should switch to a 7am-11pm schedule. This is important, as if I keep going on like this, someday I'll fall asleep when someone comes to my office and talk about uninteresting stuff...

Not much to say, as I spent most of my time writing today. True, I spent some time eating piazzas in a talk by a student visitor from UT-Austin, and met with him to talk about my research work, but nothing else interesting. Surprisingly, spending a lot of time writing made me think of a faculty in my previous university (I'm not going to name names...). What's so special about him is that I recall when I was in his graduate class, he distributed a course description sheet. There were maybe 5 or 6 sentences in the first paragraph, yet I failed to find a single sentence that was free from grammatical errors. More scary, that faculty got his PhD from a reputable US university... What I don't understand is, why am I spending all my time writing, yet he seemed to had received no training in writing (or simple grammar) at all...

Oh, also, I finally used my mosquito repellent for my soccer game. My officemate said what I got is not very strong, but at the end of the day I was more than happy with it, and couldn't help but felt sorry for those who didn't use.

It's been available for a while already, but I still want to praise Java 5, particularly for its new language features. I have written more ugly and clumsy class casting code than I've ever wanted for my whole life, and features like generics are finally here 5+ years after approval. True, most of these features are already in C#, and I don't think they will be used in FreePastry in the foreseeable future, but still, there is hope now... Speaking of which, programming languages are so interesting, it is indeed my biggest regret that I didn't learn enough during my undergrad.

Atul and I finally talked to my boss about our IPTPS idea. After talking with him, we're convinced that although we're onto something, we need a more interesting story to make this paper competitive enough to go to a place like IPTPS. Too bad, while I think I'm a good enough writer for clear presentation and reorganizing the paper, story telling is my weakest part in writing. Let's just see how screwed up we would be this time...

I can't help but notice that since I have posted my innocent comment on tihs blog, the owner has stopped adding new posts to the blog. Did I scared him off? I don't know, but let's hope I did not...

To live in Rice you have to get prepared for network interruptions from time to time. But sometimes things do get a little uglier. This time, it was a campus-wide out of water. This is ironic, since this is also the very first day I saw the "wash-your-hands-after-you-pooped-to-avoid-flu" notice.

I went to the field today to see the game where my fellow CS graduate dudes get trashed in their last soccer game. Not much comment on that directly, but at the night I was reminded that I really need to get some mosquito repellent; I hate the god damned mosquitoes around the field.

Today I started reading on computer architectures to resurrect my preparation for my qualifying exam (c-exam). I recall that Anwis once told me that Ars Technica - CPU and Chipset Guide is a very great place to read about architectures, so I went there instead of reading the legitimate "photocopied" version of textbook I brought back from Hong Kong. The site has very educational yet interesting articles, and I actually had a lot of fun reading it. Now I'm done with Pentinum processors...

I've also been talking to Atul about superpeers and hierarchical p2p systems. Maybe we will write some crap and submit to IPTPS.

I played soccer today. Lost to the Chinese team, 3-5. Well, an excuse is that we were one player down. But I really hate playing the goalie when the opponents are shooting hard...

Today I was also told by someone that this comment I posted is kinda inch (as oppose to being funny). I didn't quite realize it and still don't quite see it that way, so probably I have some problem myself. Gotta fix it when I have time (read: this won't happen).

Ok, I made this site just so that I can post a non-anonymous comment on this blog. Unlike something else, I am not quite ready for commitments to something like a blog. Of course, I always have a lot of weird thoughts and comments, but they are usually not suitable for the public, or at least not until I put some time to write it in some more clever ways. So don't expect much crap here any time soon...