Zhanga: September 2007

Entries have their own pages now. Click the date to see the entry by itself with its comments.

Saturday, September 29, 2007 (5 comments)

I feel like I've written about this before, but I couldn't find it. Anyways, I just sent out three emails to my three econ tutees by copy/pasting the same message and changing the name. Each time, I forgot to attach the attachment. I am living in a new dimension of uselessness.

Luckily, though, KMail is smart. If it detects "attached" or "attachment" in the text of your email, it reminds you to attach something before it will send the email. I tend to forget to attach things 3/4 of the time, so this is very useful. At Microsoft, when I had to use Outlook, I sent a ridiculous number of "sorry, forgot attachment, here it is" messages to my superiors. I think KMail has caught me every time with only one false positive.

In other news, Hanif and I will be back in EC for fall break, which is next weekend (Sat, Oct 6 - Tue, Oct 9).

In other news still, typhoid, dysentery, and drowning oxen are highly annoying.

2:54PM

Tuesday, September 25, 2007 (2 comments)

I biked to East today for an interview. The biking really sucked. When you bike around on main campus where there are lots of obstacles, turns, and people, top speed is not that big a deal because you rarely hit it. Biking on a long stretch of straight road, though, really makes me impatient with the speed of the crappy bike I have. I think I could go a full three times faster (peak) with my crappy Walmart mountain bike.

The interview was for becoming an econ tutor. I walked in and the lady asked me some general questions, like "What is the worst thing that could happen during a tutoring session and how would you handle it?" and "What do you expect to gain from tutoring?" and more. The routine for each question basically went like this:

  1. I would begin my answer and talk for 15 seconds to a minute. ("Well, I think one thing I'd gain from tutoring is that I would know the material better myself.")
  2. Before I'm anywhere close to being done with my answer, she'll start talking about stuff that's kind of related... and go on for 15 minutes.
  3. Rinse, repeat.

So my interview was essentially me giving very vague, uninformative answers followed by the interviewer talking endlessly about... things. It was entertaining to me though, and I guess I learned a lot. For example, apparently some kid asked her (the tutoring program coordinator), while crying, whether he/she could meet with his/her tutor again later.

I did get the job though, but that's only because she was really desperate for more tutors (that was one of the things I learned from her random talking).

3:47AM

Monday, September 24, 2007 (0 comments)

In two years of being a TA, nobody's ever questioned or asked for an explanation of a grade I've given. Today, that changed.

Some guy asked me why I took off some points on his assignment. I gave him a ~15 line explanation, which I thought was plenty. He comes back and still isn't happy with the explanation.

So I went through his program and tried to break it in every way possible (and there were a lot of ways...), and sent him a detailed, 1.5 page list of mistakes he made plus seven screenshots. All that for six measly points. But if there's one thing Microsoft taught me, it's that breaking other people's programs is very fun.

In the process of writing up that list, I found a couple of bugs I didn't spot when I first graded it. It would have been fun to eat some more points for those, but I'm not that mean.

Ahh, poor kid.

1:51AM

Friday, September 21, 2007 (3 comments)

Two or three days ago, I came to an epiphany-like realization, except not. I still wear the same boxers that my mom bought me from Kmart in 7th grade -- the first pack of them that I've ever owned. I've had to discard a few pairs due to old age, but the surviving ones make up over half the boxers I have now. I think it's time for me to retire them, though. Either being washed 800 times has shrunk them, or I've actually grown somewhat since I was... 12.

Besides deciding I need new drawers, I also went to the Microsoft info session today. I won a boxed copy of Office 2007 as a raffle prize... great? Then I got to draw the final ticket, so I drew the Xbox 360 winner =(

Then people walked up to me and shook my hand and did the whole "Hi, I'm foobar, nice to meet you, could you tell me a little bit about Microsoft?" routine. I felt psuedoimportant for a few minutes! It was great.

I'm going to admit, the only reason I'm writing this entry is because I don't want to write my Chinese essay. I'll probably have a post soon about how much I dislike Chinese this semester.

3:55AM

Tuesday, September 18, 2007 (1 comment)

I bought a can of fat-free Pringles the other day, thinking it would be a little easier on my poor arteries, especially since I eat fake Chinese food all the time. Well, it turns out that instead of fat they just use fake fat molecules that are too big to be absorbed into your bloodstream, so it tastes the same but instead of potatoes + fat + carcinogens (like preservatives and the plastic shaping agent or whatever), I'm getting potatoes + carcinogens + more carcinogens. Yes!

They really need to put a warning label on these things. One that goes something like, "WARNING: May cause your turds to contain significant amounts of oil, causing you to think your pancreas has gone AWOL when in reality it's just lab-created fat coming back out."

1:58PM

Friday, September 14, 2007 (1 comment)

Today, I Googled "powerpoint viewer" and clicked the first link of the results after skimming the summary and not really paying attention to the URL.

I pasted this into an IM window and then noticed the URL:

http://thesource.ofallevil.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=428d5727-43ab-4f24-90b7-a94784af71a4&displaylang=en

At first, I thought maybe Linux was trying to be funny by replacing www.microsoft.com with thesource.ofallevil.com. Then I thought that maybe this was an imposter Microsoft site trying to give people trojans disguised as Microsoft programs. Actually, it turns out that thesource.ofallevil.com points to www.microsoft.com so they are effectively the same site.

Sorry for talking about computers again. The real purpose of this post was to talk about the bikes here. Duke offers a program that lends bikes for free, up to a week at a time, and with apparently unlimited renewals. The problem is the bikes that they have really suck.

The bikes are made for old grannies. Here's my list of complaints:

  1. I got lucky and got the last 3-speed bike. But the high gear tops out at half the top speed of the Walmart bike I had in Seattle, and the low gear goes up to 1.2 mph, assuming my legs pedal at 900 RPM.
  2. The bike is ridiculously heavy. It's also 2 feet longer than it needs to be. Popping up the front tire to get onto curbs is needlessly difficult.
  3. The handlebars stick out really far, so it's difficult to manuver through tight spaces... like say, hmm, a college campus with students on it? (Fortunately, #2 is an advantage here -- I accidentally knocked over some traffic barriers, including one of those orange and white striped cylinders 4 feet high and 2.5 feet in diameter, without losing any stability. This bike is a tank.)
  4. The handlebars curve backwards (towards the rider) a lot. What's wrong with this?
    1. This position tires my arms quickly.
    2. Turning is difficult, as I have to jam my elbows into my side in order to turn the wheel any significant amount.
    3. It's hard to stand up off the seat, lean forward, and pedal (uphill and/or sprinting).
  5. There aren't any handlebar brakes! You have to pedal backwards to get the brake. Why is this annoying?
    1. I'm used to handlebar brakes and it's become almost a reflex. Now I lose half a second on response time just because I always try to brake with my hands before I realize there's nothing there. This will eventually lead to me being owned by a car.
    2. There's no suspension, so hitting bumps often causes my feet to lose the pedals. Whoops, can't brake now.
    3. I rest my feet on the pedals when I'm not pedaling. Now I can't do that because if I do I will brake.
    4. No front brake.
    5. I'm used to jumping off the bike before it's come to a stop, and then hitting the brakes to stop the bike after it's rolled up to the stopping point (bike rack, etc). I still keep trying to do that, causing completely preventable bike rack crashes.
    6. Sometimes the brake will lock, and (for example, when I'm de-racking the bike) I will be unable to roll the bike backwards... very annoying.
    7. My hands have lower latency. My feet lag.

For all the complaints I have, a bike is still a bike and is always better than walking. I'm really loving this bike program and wish it existed earlier.

And a little story... last night I was riding the bike back from the gym where I was working out. (That's a complete lie: I was playing ping pong.) I was really tired so I decided to go the long way because although it was more distance to cover, I was tired and didn't want to have to carry the bike up and down stairs.

So I'm biking along and all of a sudden stairs appear out of nowhere with utter disregard to my fatigue and not-paying-attention-ness. (I suck at remembering directions, and this includes whether the path has stairs.) I definitely biked straight down a set of 4 or 5 steps.

Never, ever bike down a steep drop unless (a) you're standing up off the seat, (b) you have great suspension, or (c) you're a girl.

11:19PM

Tuesday, September 11, 2007 (5 comments)

Hanif and I reduced a probability problem down to the following:

How many different man-woman partner pairings are possible between 5 men and 5 women in a dance class?

Unless we both misunderstood the answer key and/or the problem, the professor has 5C1 * 5C1 ( = 25) as the number of possible pairings.

EDIT -- Ok, Tiffany found the confusion. Basically it has to do with what the question is really asking. Hanif and I interpreted it as "If you pair off all the people to form 5 pairs, how many different combinations of 5 pairs can you make?" The professor interpreted it as "How many different ways can you form one pair by choosing a man and awoman from the group?" To be fair, though, the problem in the book wasn't helpful at all -- it just asks, "how many results are possible?" However, this doesn't really affect the rest of my post.

Hanif and I didn't like this answer, and he was tripping over himself thinking in circles, so I tried to explain why the answer is 5P5 = 5! = 120.

First I tried to explain in terms of permutations, which made sense to me when I wrote the answer down but spontaneously stopped making sense as soon as I started trying to explain. So that failed.

Then I tried to explain by saying that the first man has 5 women to choose from (or vice versa), the second man then has 4 women to choose from, etc, so there are 5*4*3*2*1 possible results.

Nope, not satisfied. By this time the permutations idea was coming back to me, so I tried to use the classic textbook example of permutations as an analogy. It went something like this:

Me: Ok ok, I got it. This is just like the cars and parking spaces thing, where the cars are men and the parking spaces are women.

(Canonical cars/parking spaces example: if you have 5 cars and 5 parking spots, then there are 5! ways to park those cars into the spots.)

I usually make some sort of effort to not laugh at my own jokes, but I'm giving myself a pass here because it wasn't supposed to be a joke and I didn't actually realize what I was saying until I got to "women."

Ok, this is really not fair. Why does everything become so unfunny after I type it? This was so funny at the time, but written out like this it just seems like another mundane sexual innuendo, one of many thousands that I produce and/or encounter daily. How uninteresting. Sometimes I feel like it's because the (un)funny thing in question (like this one) invariably occurred at 2 AM, but right now it's 4 AM, so by this logic, it should be even funnier! I guess at least Hanif agrees it's funny...

4:02AM

Tuesday, September 4, 2007 (6 comments)

I have this pair of shorts. Sometime in May, while I was in China, the moving part of the zipper fell off. I tried putting it back on a couple of times, but somehow the knob thing that prevents the train from sliding off the end of the rail disappeared, so the zipper wouldn't stay on well. Eventually I gave up and just put the zipper in the pocket and put the shorts away.

I brought the shorts home when I left China and then forgot about them. Yesterday morning, I put this pair of shorts on not remembering its history and went about my day. In the evening, I played some ping pong (where I got my ass kicked by a girl, but for the sake of political correctness let's pretend there's nothing wrong with that), then went to take a shower. Before I took my shower I checked my pockets as usual, and found the zipper. Then I realized which pair of shorts I was wearing.

"Did I really just go an entire day and play two hours of failed ping pong with my fly open?!?"

So I looked at my crotch and found that (whew) there was a new, fully functional zipped zipper there. I'm really confused though, because I don't remember ever fixing these shorts or telling my mom to. What lucky magic happened here?

1:18AM

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