Zhanga: October 2008
Entries have their own pages now. Click the date to see the entry by itself with its comments.
Thursday, October 30, 2008 (2 comments)
During my studying for tomorrow's algorithms exam, I came across this lecture slide:
I remember exactly what I was thinking the day the [90-year-old] professor went over this slide: this slide could be so much more interesting.
1:07AM
Tuesday, October 28, 2008 (0 comments)
I did as promised in this post and redirected any of my images that were hotlinked on Myspace to show Goatse. About two weeks later, after about half a year of leeching my resources, the guy stealing my bandwidth stopped. In related news, Myspace pages are so cluttered, disgusting, and generally filthy that he didn't even notice a huge, stretched-out butt hole on his page, despite viewing several times a day on average.
I have a lot of job hunt stories, but it would probably be best to save them until recruiting season is over. Today, I'll tell one about a small IT consulting firm that I had half an interview with.
In 2006, I wrote about a girl who lived in my dorm freshman year (it's the second half of that post). Long story short, she made a false rape accusation and did a bunch of other related ridiculous stuff. She also didn't tent for the basketball game (I think it was the UNC game) and then cut in line to get a good spot for the game, though that's slightly less evil.
So anyways, she sent an email a few weeks ago to the Duke CS mailing list asking for resumes. I noticed the name of the sender, but I didn't know she had graduated a year early so I just assumed it was somebody else with the same name. Only when I ran into a friend who knew her better, and who also got the email, did I find out she was one and the same. We scheduled a meeting in a coffeeshop early one morning. It was the most awkward encounter of my professional life:
Me: Hi, I'm David. Are you Bertha? (Name changed
to protect the guilty...)
Bertha: Hi... I think I know you.
Me to myself: great... why did she have to point
that out... now it's going to be a hundred times weirder, especially with the
gigantic elephant in the room.
Me: Oh, that's right! You lived in Brown freshman year,
right? How have you been? blah blah blah
I got this extremely arrogant feeling from her. Like, most companies will say "we'll fly you up to interview, blah blah," she phrased it as, "you will be invited to attend blah blah in DC." As if it's a privilege for me to drive or fly myself up to DC to interview with... you?
In hindsight, the email she sent me inviting me to speak with her was pretty funny. It said to be prepared to talk about IT and technical skills, and I was. Unfortunately, she wasn't. Apparently, her dad has connections in IT which is what got her the job there. Worse, on the recruiting sheet, it said an analyst can be promoted to project manager in as little as five years — or, apparently, as little as 3 months (she started in June) if you're the daughter of somebody who matters.
And it really showed. I asked her to talk about some projects she's done, and she did a pretty good job of giving a high-level overview. But when asked about the technologies used, how the thing works, etc. she basically had no idea. Her actual role in the company seems to be, for lack of a better term, the GUI test monkey. Basically this entails clicking around the application to test it for bugs. What kind of company doesn't automate that, and worse, what compnay has a "manager" do it manually?
They were recruiting for two roles: technical analyst and business analyst. I applied for the business analyst position. A few days ago, a recruiter from the company called me. She asked if I applied for the technical analyst position, and I said no, I applied to be a business analyst. After going through some basic questions, I had this extremely puzzling experience:
Recruiter: The technical analyst position is sort of a mix of technical and business roles. You would be working on business strategy and also doing a lot of programming. Does this sound like something you would want to do?
Although that would in fact be interesting to me (I do love programming, after all), I figured she was trying to sell me into being a technical analyst and pretending like it has some business component to it, so I said no:
Me: No, I don't think so.
Recruiter: Ok. It was great talking to you. Thanks for
your time. Bye.
Me: Uhh.... bye?
I then just sat at my desk for five mintues trying to comprehend what just happened. I still don't fully understand why she booted me off the phone, but my hypothesis is that despite my statement of the contrary, she still thought I was applying for the technical role. But that doesn't make sense, because she even asked me why I want to be a business analyst.
I will end this post by declaring that women are confusing.
11:40AM
Sunday, October 19, 2008 (0 comments)
I went home last weekend, which was fall break, with some Duke kids from Walton (Yujing, Scott Brothers, and Debbie's sister Michelle). I volunteered in the tournament center for this year's Walton Academic Challenge, which is always fun because what's better than hanging out with Mr. Edelstein? A brief recap of that day follows.
After getting up at 7 AM, I drove to school, reminding myself of zero period and all that fun. Oh, the joys of eight classes a day, beginning with Kelly Bryan.
I walked around the halls for a few minutes wondering if I was that small when I was in high school (I wasn't; I was smaller), then found the tournament center and went in. Mr. Edelstein started showing me how to keep score using the score sheets I made 4-5 years ago. At first I didn't understand why he was telling me how to use my own creation, but then it started making sense...
Edelstein: You just type in the score here, then a 1
or 0 for a win or loss, and it automatically computes everything for you. You
don't even need to do macros or anything!
Me: Yeah, I remember. I... um, I wrote this thing.
I'm not sure we were on the same page though, because he laughed and responded with, "You probably did!" as if I was kidding. I got really confused and just started talking about something else.
After the competition began, since it was a divided round-robin tournament, not all rooms and buzzers were being used during every round. I played against some of the other tournament workers and Edelstein, and learned two things:
- I am really bad at academic bowl now.
- There's a Duke freshman from Walton who I didn't know about.
The first may have been obvious, but the second one was really strange. I sat down with one of the Duke guys on one side of the room, and on the other side were two other guys who I just assumed were still at Walton. Somebody asked about the teams, so I said "Duke vs everybody else." One of the kids on the other side got up and we had approximately the following exchange:
Guy: I go to Duke too!
Me: Oh, I didn't know.
Guy [laughing, as if I was kidding]: Haha, fuck
you!
Me: No, really, what's your name?
He never did tell me his name. On the trip back with the others, I asked them who this guy was. Apparently, he is "not worth knowing" but expects everybody to know him. How he knew me is an unsolved mystery.
I joked that I'd run into him on campus, he'd say hi, and I would again not know who he was. Sure enough, I was returning to my apartment from an interview on Friday, and some random guy said hi to me so I meekly said hi back. Only now, with the help of Facebook, did I confirm that it was him.
Isn't it exciting being an a-bowl nerd alum?
7:16PM
Wednesday, October 15, 2008 (4 comments)
I miss science bowl. Going to nationals on a double QD, catching alligators, almost drowning... what great times. You know what's better than all those things, though? Dragos existed in the physical world back then. Will somebody bring him back please?
I haven't posted in about a week, but don't worry, I've been keeping myself busy following Sarah Palin stuff online. Here are some highlights, most interesting at the top:
- Diagramming Sarah - An article that attempts to diagram the structure of some of Palin's sentences. Very entertaining.
- Interview Palin - Doesn't seem that interesting until you realize that the answers are randomly generated using a statistical model built from Sarah Palin's actual speeches and interviews. It comes up with something new every time you refresh. It sounds a lot like her, too. (If you run Dr. Seuss through one of these generators, it sounds him except on more drugs.)
- Palin as President - Click on random things. How did they get the voice to sound so much like the real Sarah Palin?
- Palin Bingo - I didn't find this until right after the VP debate, so I never got to play =(
And in personal news, I am a huge noob. I was riding to class like I do every Wednesday morning, and making the same turn I do every Wednesday morning, when all of a sudden I hear a loud scraping noise and find myself tossed into the air. It was great. There was only one person within 20 feet of me, a girl who cracked up but managed to stop laughing for just long enough to ask me if I was ok. I have to admit though, it was pretty hilarious. Imagine some guy leisurely biking along a pretty open section of road, when all of a sudden the bike suddenly stops and the rider goes flying off the front.
Apparently, I cornered too sharply, causing my right pedal to dig into the asphault or maybe something sticking out of the road, stopping the bike immediately and launching me at a rather uncomfortable velocity. Should have worn my seat belt. My palms lost about 2 square inches of skin after this one. Frisbee tomorrow should be fun.
I need to install a gyroscope on the bike. Or maybe it would be easier to install distance-meter-devices on the bottoms of the pedals to beep at me when they're too close to the road. But seriously, I've been waiting for my first accident to be from me running into a car or swerving to avoid roadkill (almost happened once... why do squirrels standing by the side of the road like to suddenly jump INTO your path?), but no, the first one had to be caused by the most retarded failure ever.
8:47PM
Wednesday, October 8, 2008 (3 comments)
It's always incredibly encouraging when you don't understand something, so you go to Wikipedia it... and the article has one sentence about it. And all that sentence does is briefly mention how so-and-so worked on this theory in 1972. And that person is none other than your professor.
On that note, what do you think of when you see "successive over-relaxation"? Eric said diarrhea, and now every time I see that term diarrhea is all I can think about. Anyways, SOR is a way to numerically solve a linear system. What a stupid name. It's not relaxing at all.
So besides failing my test ten hours from now, I have other news. My 76-LED headlight came in. I was led to believe that there is a bike mount, but evidently this is not the case. It goes on my head. I don't know... something inside me tells me it'd be incredibly toolish to wear a giant lamp on my forehead while biking around at night. I don't know what to do about this besides duct taping the thing to my handlebars. Charles, help?
3:39AM
Friday, October 3, 2008 (3 comments)
I had a math exam this morning which I did very poorly on, I got owned pretty badly on a CS quiz, and a TA knocked 2.4 points off my final grade due to a cheating accusation. He eventually dropped the penalty to around 1 point off my final grade, but still, this is probably the most absurd thing I've been accused of at Duke. The group believed that we stayed well within the collaboration guidelines, and at the top of each of our submissions we named, in bigger font than anything else on the page, everybody we worked with. How that could be considered cheating... well, I'm getting off topic, as the topic today is, again, Sarah Palin.
I watched the VP debate last night (Ronjon, if you're reading this, I watched it with Erica Lin among others, so you should be totally jealous right now) and haven't read or heard any commentary on it, so I'm just writing my personal opinion here. Actually, I did hear one headline, but we'll get to that in a second.
I actually thought Palin did a very good job during the debate, though that's partly due to my particularly low expectations of her. The one area she did really disappoint me in, though, was her ability to sound like Miss South Carolina, which would have been really entertaining but (un?)fortunately didn't happen.
Overall, the impression that I got was that she stayed up all night cramming for this one, and did the best she could have hoped for. It's definitely good that she took this seriously, though I'm not sure that makes up for her lack of gray matter. (Tangent: There was an article in The Chronicle today about why these candidates shouldn't have to pander to the population and pretend to be an average Joe. Don't we want our leaders to be smarter than the average citizen?)
She got owned by Joe Biden a couple of times, one of the worst being the response she gave about Obama's 80-ish votes for tax increases which was promptly countered by Biden stating that, by the same standards, McCain voted 477 times for tax increases (keep in mind that one of McCain's major platform issues is fiscal conservativism). I don't believe she even attempted to rebut that. More surprisingly though, and the point I'm getting to, is that I don't think she bombed any responses particularly badly, especially compared to her performance over the past two weeks. I was half-expecting this thing to be a farce where she would be owned repeatedly, but it turned out not nearly that bad. If Sarah Palin were a stock, 9:20 PM would have been a good time to buy. (And before the next debate/interview would probably be a good time to sell.)
I think the one specific thing that she majorly botched was when she said, "...toxic waste on Main Street that's affecting Wall Street." (She transposed the streets.) I believe the conversation went like this:
Jeremy: ¡¿Did she just say that?!
Me: Oh no she di'nt!!
About a minute later was when I heard the one headline relating to the debate: Hanif pulled out his phone, and apparently on CNN.com or somewhere there was already a link on the front page for an article about toxic waste.
Getting to the overall picture, I think Joe Biden definitely won this one. Palin very obviously memorized some lines that highlighted her key points. In back-to-back responses, she twice mentioned her experience as governor, mayor, and "energy and gas regulator" using the exact same phrasing. That wasn't a particularly high point of the debate for her. Plus, she kept wanting to go back to energy on issues that weren't related or were only tangentially related to energy, presumably because she didn't have a script for whatever Biden was trying to argue with her about.
I can't recall the exact questions any more, but there were some cases when she talked about nothing relevant and failed to answer the question. Obviously Biden did this too (he is a politician), but he did it much less, and did a very good job refuting or otherwise responding to pretty much every challenge that Palin made. Palin failed terribly at this, and often did so in such a confusing way that by the time she was done talking, I had already forgotten the prompt. Palin lost major points with me for equivocating and speaking with generalities in pretty much every response, while Biden did much better. I would even venture to say that, compared to most politicians, Biden had a more defined stance and was more straightforward in making them known. For example, his answer about gay rights was very clear and to-the-point, stating that there would be no distinction between gay and straight couples, while Palin fumbled around and said that while she would certainly "tolerate" gays, marriage is between a man and a woman only. "Tolerate"? Ok, so they can have hospital visitation rights, great. What about tax benefits?
One thing that lost credibility with me was the question about campaign promises that would could not be kept. I forgot Biden's answer, but he provided a pretty specific response to what promise he could not keep. On the other hand, Palin talked about nonsense for a while, and then finally answered, in perhaps her most straightforward answer during the entire debate, that there were no McCain or Palin promises that at this point could not be kept. Am I really expected to believe that?
In a response to Palin, Biden said that his wife and daughter died, and he had to take care of his other kids himself, and blah blah, which I think connects with the people well, but at the same time he also made it very clear that these days, he lives in a very nice house and isn't exactly struggling to pay his bills. Contrast this to Sarah Palin, who claimed to be a middle-class hockey mom! Middle-class? Let's be clear: this woman is not "one of us." I don't like that one of her primary selling points is that she's a middle-class hockey mom. I mean, sure it's great if it's true, but (1) it's not, and (2) she emphasizes that way too much and acts as if that's a reason she should be VP. My mom should be VP too.
I probably have more to talk about, but I'll just say one more thing. The maverick thing annoys me to no end. McCain is NOT a maverick. In the debate, Palin again mentioned Biden's tenure in the Senate and experience and said that McCain/Palin stand for change. Hmm, sounds like somebody else's line to me. (Some black guy is going around the country asking for change?)
And finally, I didn't really like Biden before, so I'm not really that biased towards either candidate besides thinking Palin is an idiot. Ok that makes me biased. I do have some issues with Biden, but today I only mention him to compare him with Palin, so we won't go there. In my mind, he won this one pretty soundly, but Palin may have also won by getting back some approval from those who were completely turned off by the recent interviews.
3:53PM
Wednesday, October 1, 2008 (5 comments)
Sarah Palin is retarded. Here's her appearing to support Hamas, not knowing anything about the Middle East, and not answering the question at all; not knowing any Supreme Court decisions besides Roe v Wade and blabbering about tons of useless garbage; contradicting McCain's stated stance and getting owned (this one is funny because of McCain's "Oh God, how is she so retarded" look he's trying to hide from the camera); and not being able to name a single newspaper or magazine despite being a journalism major.
The gold, though, goes to this one. It's one of the worst interview answers I have ever heard (and I do listen to myself), and from a VP candidate no less. If you haven't seen this one, and you're an American, you have to. After watching it, please watch this. What are the key differences? I mean, they both throw in as many positive-sounding popular phrases as possible, string them together with filler, and don't end up answering the question at all. Or making any sense at all, really. The only difference is that Palin used slightly better grammar.
I read a transcript of that last interview a few days before I finally watched it. During that time, I also read a transcript of Tina Fey's SNL skit where she impersonates Palin, and when I read it I was actually led to believe that the Palin transcript I had read was fake, because there's no way SNL and the real thing could sound the same, right? Apparently I had too much faith. Here is Tina Fey making more sense than Palin despite mocking her.
I am now convinced that McCain chose Palin solely because she has a vagina. They don't even agree on some major issues, which they openly admit to (I think it was the bailout plan, and might be in one of those videos). Let's face it, as a guy who went to public middle/high school, I guarantee that there are some girls dumber than sin who are better fit to serve as VP of this country than this woman.
I am incredibly embarassed to be a citizen of a country where almost half the population supports this nonsense.
And on that topic, I took the liberty of slightly editing a picture of a dear friend:
Yes, that is CiCi.
9:35PM
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