Festival of Colors

A certain other Board writer and I went to the Festival of Colors today with a bunch of other people at the Krishna Temple in Spanish Fork. It was really neat. They sure know how to throw a party: burning a witch, music, dancing, covering each other in colored chalk... We all had a blast. There were tons of people there too. Perhaps even some of you. I hope you all enjoyed it as much as we did.

Rex Lee Run

Today was the Rex Lee Run. I am tired. I did fairly well. I'll try to give as much information as I can, without just giving away my identity, since all the results are nicely posted online. I will give you a hint though, I'm one of the 100 people on this page. Hehehe. So I'm pretty happy, in the top 200 overall. I totally beat my target time of under 24 minutes. Hope anyone else that was there reached their goals.

Sunburn

I got a sunburn yesterday from sleeping out on the grass in the sun for about 1.5 hours. It is glorious. There were actually times when I felt uncomfortably hot, it was so great.

In the morning I made a presentation of my work to the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Spring Research Conference. It was a neat opportunity to organize the research I've been doing and show people. Sadly my videos didn't work because I had to present off a Mac without the proper codecs, but I think it went fairly well anyways. It was nice to have a couple of friends show up to watch and support me. Hehehe, I was the only person in my session to have 2, count'em 2, girls show up to watch; quite the feat in a Computer Science session. ;-) I then went around and watched some other people present their work. One of the two girls presented her work on creating molecular bowls. It involved a lot of Chemistry words that I don't think I have ever learned, but the pictures looked really cool.

In the afternoon sessions I listened to a girl present her work on using Fourier Transforms to get the frequency spectrum of audio samples and using machine learning ideas to do song identification. I thought that was really interesting and I really think I want to try and do further work like that for my Master's degree if possible. Since I'm currently taking Machine Learning from her adviser I'll talk to him about it and see what he thinks.

After my nap in the sun I cleaned up the kitchen (in which it rained last night from the apartment upstairs....) and then headed off into the world to visit that one Board writer whom I seem to be spending lots of time with lately. In order to get to her place I have to walk by a flower shop, and today just seemed so awesome out that flowers were necessary. So I picked up a bouquet and finished my walk. When she came to the door I surprised her with the flowers and she got all giddy. Hehehe, I like it when girls act girly.

After an excellent dinner of Papa John's Hawaiian Barbecue Pizza we went up to the Marriott center to see Guitars Unplugged. It was pretty good this year. It was so very awesome to be outside again, at night, in shorts, and be comfortable. I can't wait until this summer.

Great Quotes from CS478

I was sitting in class this morning after arriving 20 minutes late (don't worry it's a 1.5 hour class...) and the class was really funny. I laughed more in CS478 this morning than in any other class over the past 2.5 years.

Here are two of the quotes that were especially good:

Dr. Ventura: "Both of those notations are equally ridiculous." -- speaking about infinite root notation

Sam: "I didn't expect to learn anything this useful today." -- speaking about Lx-Norm distance formulas

It was really nerdy humor, but not as bad as you might find in say... the Math Department... hehehe... We spent a good 10 minutes talking about how Theoretical Mathematicians seem to spend a lot of their time trying to get even more absurd than everyone else, and how they get disgusted when someone actually finds a practical use for their work....

BYU and The Board

So, at some schools they have anti-drunk driving awareness things. At BYU we have our own ADD things, but they are for anti-drowsy driving. Just seems so peculiar compared to growing up in Connecticut. I mused about it as I walked across campus....

I was up standing in line at the grad fair waiting for my 2-inch mini ice-cream cone and someone began asking the scooper about the alcohol content of the mint-chocolate chip. I KNEW it was a writer since we have that question sitting in the inbox right now. Unfortunately, my terrible name-face mapping failed to determine who this writer was. Although, in my defense, it may be one of the new writers that I haven't met yet. Anyways, if you were that writer and you are reading this, please comment. I was the one that mentioned that we had already answered a question about not listing the nutrition facts.

The other day I was walking through the Talmage Building and saw someone at one of the kiosks reading the Board, it was exciting.

That's all my random musing and sightings for today.

Sneak Peek: Board Question 33915

So I just answered this, and it won't post until tomorrow, but I'll probably forget to put it up here tomorrow because I'm going to be crazy busy. So here it is, enjoy your sneak peek.

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Dear CPM,

How are you? I hope you are well.

So, for a few days now, I've had this feeling that there is a question I want/need to ask you. But for the life of me, I cannot figure out what it is! Perhaps you know?

~ Kismet Keeper

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Dear Kismet,

Perhaps you were going to ask me one of the questions I've been asking myself a lot lately: What do I want to do with my life? I've had a lot of interesting things occur recently and the time is soon approaching for me to decide where my life is really headed. Over the weekend I had a nice chat with someone I really like, her question: "What is your greatest ambition?" (or something akin to that anyways.)

So, since I didn't respond to the question that posted today about goals, I'll respond here.

My Goals in life:

1. Be Happy
- to be achieved by the following:

2. Get married to a wonderful woman who is excited to raise a family with me and with whom I have common dreams/goals (see below)
3. Make my wife feel like the luckiest woman alive
4. Raise a family
5. Own a house in which to achieve #4, this house should have enough land around it for my kids to play in
6. Have said house be in an area where I don't have to lock the doors or worry about my kids disappearing off the street
7. Provide for my family with a steady job where I can leave my work at the office
8. Leave my work at the office and devote my time at home to my family
9. Read as many books as possible
10. Cook for my family as often as is feasible

I think these 10 things are what I want most out of life. They are the things that I will push the hardest for above all else. But there are still other things that I would like to do if life goes my way.

Things that would be nice to do if possible:

1. Visit Australia / New Zealand
2. Visit France
3. Fly in a hot air balloon
4. Visit a little diner somewhere and leave a $100 bill as a tip, just to make someone's day
5. Have enough money to not have to worry about it
6. Visit Machu Picchu

-Curious Physics Minor