Zhanga: April 2007

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Monday, April 30, 2007 (12 comments)

This is me not wanting to study for econ.

Actually, that was all weekend. I drove home in five hours and made it back in six and a half, including getting gas, eating lunch, two naps, and an additional rest stop. Now I have to wonder how it ever took my mom seven hours to get here. She doesn't even drive slowly.

On Saturday night, I went to prom with Maylene. She made me dance so much that I didn't even get a chance to feast on the free fruit there. There was a pretty funny scene where a white girl got on stage to dance in front of everybody. Unfortunately for her, the stage was surrounded by untold numbers of black people. A black girl got on the stage and completely owned her. The white girl walked off stage and looked about ready to cry... it was great. Loud cheering ensued.

Later that night, I went to Tiffany's (the residence, not the stripper place next to Waffle House) and found a bunch of sags, Andrew, and Tiffany's little brother (!!) sitting at a table getting drunk. What a terrible older sister, right?

I think it's hilarious how Lilly repeatedly says the same four things in various combinations every time she gets drunk:

  1. IIIIII'm not druuuuuuuunk... just a liiiiittle bit tiiipsssy!
  2. Daaavid I can seeeee you... I knooooow you're laughing at meeeee...
  3. I knooooow you think I'm druuuunk but I can think veeeerryy cleeeeaarly!
  4. IIIII'm not druuuuuunk yet... I'm nooooot even sluuurrrring my speeeeech...

I know Maylene's going to complain because I didn't talk about what a great time I had with her etc etc. However, she implicitly forfeited any chance of positive mention on this Zhanga when she digitally gave me a 50-cent bone that says "GOOD DOG" on it.

4:18PM

Wednesday, April 25, 2007 (5 comments)

That stupid Indian pizza crap gave me diarrhea 30 minutes before my interviews began yesterday. Indian pizza... never eat that stuff.

I'll get to the interviews soon. First, the food.

Eating the crappy sushi at Duke has made me forget how good sushi really is. I went to a Korean barbeque last night and got eight pieces of sushi. They tasted absolutely amazing, and if my tongue could have multiple orgasms...

Unfortunately, my stomach didn't feel so good, because along with the sushi I ate six mussels, assorted appetizers, ane a huge bowl of beef noodles. With a glass of iced tea and tip, it all cost $33. Good thing Microsoft is reimbursing me... the joy of free food! Come to think of it, the (lack of) cost probably made the meal taste 50% better.

Before yesterday, the only time I've ever spent more than $30 on a meal for myself was when we went downtown for CiCi's 16th, but that restaurant wasn't my choice. Yes, I am so cheap that I'm still complaining about a $32 (plus tip?) meal three and a half years later.

When the waitress asked me what I would like to drink, I opened my mouth to say "water" before I caught myself and asked for iced tea. I figure if I put up with diarrhea food the night before and cafeteria food for lunch, I should feel free to indulge/gorge myself for dinner.

That was, perhaps, the most satisfying meal I've ever eaten. Not even watermelon would have made it better (I would have exploded and scattered my entrails all over Seattle).

It was kind of like going on a dinner date, except she sits there and watches you eat both meals while not talking about shoes. And on top of it all, you don't have to pay. What a dream! (*ducks*)

Ok, now for the four interviews. I am warning you now that some stuff below may be pretty technical, so here is the summary: went mostly well, went well, went kind of well, got raped. Now the details:

The first few went pretty well. The girl who gave me my first technical interview asked me to tell her the differences between a struct and a class, and when I would use one over the other. Yeah... I had about as much clue as you (this sentence should be approximately true, assuming only sags read this). I kind of just sat there and went "uhhh, ummmmm, uhhhh, ok I have no idea."

Besides that one point, the interview went pretty well. Then the next guy was a stereotypical overweight nerd. He wore a "got geek?" shirt which I liked. He gave me the standard boolean isPalindrome(String foo) problem to do (determine whether a string reads the same forwards and backwards), and it was especially easy because he let me do it in Java. (The other interviewers wanted C++, and I don't know C++ as well. (Those are two programming languages.)) We finished half an hour early. He told me the half hour was supposed to be him questioning me about various places I screwed up, but luckily I didn't.

That was the first and last time I felt really good during the day.

The next guy asked me to write a function that returns the intersection between two arrays. Well, obviously you can compare every element in the first array to every element in the second array, but this is slow. So I sat in silence for 5 minutes panicking and trying to figure out how I will ever do this in less than O(n2) time.

As I sat with my face in my palms, I thought, "This would be so easy if the arrays were sorted!" After a few more minutes of silence, he asked me if any constrains on the inputs would make the job easier. I didn't realize I could impose arbitrary conditions, but I said it would be easier if the arrays are sorted. That seemed to be what he was looking for, and it reduces runtime to O(n), which is much better. I spat out some code for this pretty quickly once I knew they are sorted.

His next task for me was to come up with test cases for the float atof(char* s) function. Let's just say I failed...

The fourth and last interviewer was some Asian manager dude. He asked me to write a C++ class that represents an integer without size constraints, i.e. it can't overflow in either direction. It needs to support all the regular integer operations (add, subtract, etc).

I failed... miserably...

Now I see why they let you spend $40 on dinner. It's so you can eat your mind off of how badly you got raped in the afternoon. It all makes sense now.

10:52AM

Monday, April 23, 2007 (2 comments)

I got on a plane headed for DC at 3:05 yesterday. Fell asleep before takeoff and woke up when my head banged against the window upon landing.

Why do I always get shafted so badly every time I take a flight? Once again, to get to my gate, I had to walk all the way down to the very, very end of the terminal. Usually, this is understandable, because the planes that fly the 54,000 miles from Detroit to Beijing or whereever are pretty big and they can only fit at the end of the terminal. But this was a 66-minute flight. I had seat 18F. I was last row, window seat. I don't even know why I got F, as there were only two seats on each side of the aisle.

Hm. Finals are next week.

Next flight I didn't manage to stay asleep the whole flight. Unfortunately, I did sleep through the meal.

I arrived in Seattle a little before 8 (local), got to the hotel at 9, and got settled. Then I went out to eat, and got to some Korean place at 9:58. They close at 10. So I kept driving around and it seemed that every place closed at 10. Finally, I drove into one last plaza-type-place and decided that was the last one. It was fast food after that.

As I pulled into the parking lot, I noticed some Indian restaurant and a Viet noodle place. Murphy decided to close the Viet noodle place at 10... just like everywhere else I wanted to go. So I thought, great, I'm going to have to eat Indian food and fail my interviews tomorrow due to smelling like fresh curry. Turns out they were closed at 10 as well. As my great luck would have it, there was... an Indian pizza place there? What on earth? Anyways, I got some spicy chicken thing and it tasted kind of like the kind from The Loop except you can actually taste the spiciness.

That was the most unfulfilling dinner ever. I get reimbursed up to $40 for dinner and I spent it on a crappy pizza. I'm so making up for this tomorrow by eating the most extravagant meal ever. (That means getting a Coke instead of water.)

I was so hungry when I got the pizza that I stuffed it in my mouth and didn't notice that it burned the roof of my mouth until an hour later. Isn't that ironic? Of all places to go when I'm starving, I end up getting fed at some Indian place. Ok ok sorry, that was tasteless. (The joke, not the food.)

So tomorrow is my interview, which actually consists of 3-5 interviews about an hour each. So um... I don't actually know where to go, and they're in 12 hours...

11:40PM

I went to the basement to print out my Chinese homework, and I ran into Jerry. He was working on a paper. When I looked at his screen, the first thing I saw was a source citation: "Yuk and Zhang (1997)." I died.

I'll write you an update in two days, while I'm on the plane back from Microsoft. I'm sure I'll have lots to say about my interview failures.

5:27AM

Saturday, April 21, 2007 (0 comments)

Sweet! I get paid $1.60/hour at my summer internship. I'm going to be rich!

4:53PM

Thursday, April 12, 2007 (10 comments)

There's this guy who I did a project with once. I always felt some guilt inside me every time I spoke to him, because every single time he said anything, I couldn't stop thinking, "I bet he really, really enjoys getting pounded in the ass." I just couldn't help thinking it.

Well, today he joined a Facebook group for gay people, so I guess I was right. I don't feel so guilty any more.

...

Anyways.

...

So I'm supposed to be going to China for some sort of investment internship, but yesterday I got a call from Microsoft saying they'd like to schedule a second round of interviews for me (this is a month after they rejected me the first time). That means a free trip to Washington, a visit to the Microsoft campus, and maybe a shot at interning there. I'm excited!

Maybe I should wear my Blue Screen shirt? Or what about a pirate costume with a Windows shirt? Or maybe a Linux shirt with Tux the Penguin, plus a Firefox hat...

Dear Microsoft recruiters, please ignore the previous paragraph if you've somehow managed to Google I mean Live Search this site from my name.

2:28PM

Wednesday, April 4, 2007 (5 comments)

Well, it looks like some people are more gullible than I'd like to believe, so I guess I have to clarify which parts of the last post actually happened:

  1. There is a lot of pollen. Two days ago, between the time I went to bed and the time I woke up 4 hours later, my roommate had accumulated a pile of at least 50 tissue wads, completely covering the top of his dresser. Assuming that no more than 10 of those were the result of killing kittens (how many kittens can you kill in a night, anyways?), that's a lot of allergies.
  2. However, the pollen wasn't so bad that everybody looked Asian.
  3. Duke is not a subscriber to Google's sewage Internet access April Fool's joke. The Internet is not a series of tubes.
  4. There is a smelly guy down the hall. He smells. I think he showers twice a week.
  5. Isaac does have tons of porn on his computer, and for some reason videos (of anything) appear really bright and washed-out. I was in fact trying to fix this in a 217-square-foot room occupied by five males.
  6. Isaac runs Linux. I tried installing Windows, but Windows doesn't have drivers for either the wireless or wired network cards, making it pretty hard to get drivers for them or anything else. Everything but the LCD backlight brightness buttons worked as soon as Linux booted for the first time.
  7. My RA did not actually walk in and write anyone up. She also has no idea what Linux is (because she's a girl).
  8. Obviously I didn't walk back from anywhere, I didn't try to crap on the side of the road, and roadkill juice did not squirt on me, causing me to fall into a pile of crap and poison ivy. I hope nobody believed this... *cough*

7:46PM

Monday, April 2, 2007 (5 comments)

I know that for the past two weeks, all of my loyal readers have been doing nothing but sitting in front of their computers and pushing refresh every 15 seconds. I know how you feel. That's what I do on the Firefox site every time a new version is about to come out.

So here's what happened in the past two weeks while I appeared to be idle, because I assure you, I wasn't:

First, there was so much pollen in my room that my monitor only displayed two colors: light yellow and dark yellow. I couldn't write any Zhanga posts because of this. Outside, it was worse. Everybody looked Asian and had blonde hair.

A few days later, that cleared up, but we experienced an arguably worse problem. Duke recently upgraded to Google's new internet access over sewage pipes service. I was actually in the middle of typing a new Zhanga post at this time, but the smelly guy down the hall completely clogged the toilet. The water flowed back out of the toilet, and the half-post I had written got stuck in the tubes, never to be seen again. If only the Internet was a big truck...

Then Isaac came over and complained that his computer wasn't displaying porn correctly. So I started to adjust his display settings while he and three other guys were in the room (they were doing something else). I was just about done and started testing my fix when my female RA walked in and wrote up all five of us for watching porn together. I tried to explain that I was just adjusting Isaac's Linux video settings, but she replied with, "Yeah right, don't think I'm dumb just because I'm a girl. Linux doesn't support porn."

Two days later, I was coming back from Judicial Affairs for the dumb porn incident. That building is far, far away, and I missed the bus so I started walking. Unfortunately, the guards at my detention cell gave me something atrocious to eat the night before, and all of a sudden I had to let it out. So I picked a well-hidden wooded area. I was just about done with my superbly gratifying dump when a car ran over a stupid, fat racoon so hard that blood squirted out of him and hit me in the face forty feet away. I fell over, right into my steaming pile of crap, and also into a nice little plant of poison ivy. This resulted in a painful rash on my anus, which is just starting to recede.

5:55PM

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