An interesting idea

This was an interesting idea that has prompted a 20+ minute conversation in my lab.

Approach a girl and hand her a $20 bill. Tell her, "Here's twenty bucks, if you'd like to go on a date, I'll take it back and use it to pay for the date; otherwise, keep it."


Please discuss the implications of such an action. How each side might feel about it. What the result may be. Et cetera. I'm not going to discuss where it took our conversation, but it was very interesting to talk about.

Something

I've had this problem before, and I'm not sure what to call it. I wouldn't say that I'm depressed, but perhaps it really is just a mild form of depression. I get into an emotional state where I feel like I want something to happen, but that trying to make it happen would lead to pain and anguish. Also coupled with that feeling is that at night I don't want to go to sleep. It feels like going to sleep is simply allowing more time to pass in the situation that I want to change. Or something. It's sort of like feeling that if I go to sleep, I'm letting more time slip by that I should be doing something valuable with. Not like I'm accomplishing anything by staying up later, I dunno.

This probably doesn't make any sense to someone that hasn't experienced it. I'm fairly certain I know what my problem is, but I don't think there's anything I can do about it. It's just very emotionally draining, and gives me this pit in my stomach, and twists my heart about a bit.

I should try to go to sleep now. I haven't been sleeping well, and waking up in the morning has been getting more difficult as it is darker each morning, and it was really cold this morning.

Disaster Zone and Life Update

My room is a complete disaster right now. Yesterday between work and dinner I had about an hour and a half, during which I went to my sister's to pick the last remnants of my stuff that was there. (Partially because I needed to pick up my suits, and partially because I just needed to do it.) So I got it home and basically just dumped stuff all over my room so that I could rest for 10 minutes before getting ready for dinner. Then upon returning home about midnight, I mostly just pulled the stuff off my bed and tossed it on the floor so that I could fall asleep. Maybe in the next hour or so I'll get the motivation to clean it up. Yah, I'll do that, put the doors back up, paint them white, and take some "after" pictures of my room. Ok, so maybe some of that will happen.

Anyways. I'll give a more complete account of my evening now that I'm conscious and functioning again:

A few weeks ago I signed up for the Computer Science Department Alumni Dinner. It's described as being for alumni and their families, but I figured I could RSVP for two and bring a date, since otherwise I probably wouldn't go. At the beginning of this week Krishna convinced me to buy tickets to the Big Bands Homecoming Dance, again I figured I would be able to get one of my friends to come along if all else failed. So I asked a girl if she'd like to go, she couldn't because she already had plans. So I asked another girl, same thing. And another, same thing. And another, same thing. At which point I was rather frustrated, annoyed, and becoming slightly depressed. So I made the second previous blog entry announcing my plight to my readers here on The Life of CPM blog. As all can see I did get a response from alishka babushka. She even went the whole nine yards and submitted a dating application. Ok, so honestly, the first thing I did was Facebooked her (I'm now using that as a verb, why not?), it may seem a little stalker-ish to Facebook someone, but come on, one must protect oneself from falling in with crazies, right?. Her Facebook information checked out, so I figured, "What the heck? I Might as well give this a shot."


So after picking up stuff from my sister's I got dressed in my tan suit from Banana Republic (I love that suit) with my burnt orange shirt and the chocolate brown with blue stripes tie that Poppa Funk gave me for my birthday. I even busted out the contacts, which I only wear on special occasions due to fact that they are my only remaining pair at the moment. I'm not one to boast about myself very often, but dang I looked good ;-). I went and picked up alishka at a quarter to 6. She had a fabulous red skirt with a black top, polished off with a rose in her hair. *ahem* Girl, you looked good.

Dinner went was quite good. We sat with my coworker and his family. Had Hawaiian barbecue with red juice. Watched some presentations, and the student animation "Las Pinatas". They then provided each alum with a DVD containing that short film, as well as the short film "Der Ostwind" which I saw last year at the student animation showcase, and I thought it was the best one there, and have wanted a copy of it for a while. After dinner we walked over to the HFAC and viewed the paintings on display. Then proceeded to the MOA to see the new "Cliche and Collusion" exhibit. It's an interesting look on how media affects our lives, and invades our thinking. The confusing messages that bombard us daily, the short attention spans we've developed as a society, and the suggestive marketing that pervades the media was all depicted in various ways. There are two full room video displays as part of the exhibit. One presents a journal style story of trip to a tropical island. The other was much more emotionally filled. It's a dark room with a mirror ball spinning, putting you in a romantic dance atmosphere. Then on three walls there are projectors displaying various phrases like "I've waited my whole life for this moment", "You are my love", "I'm so glad I finally found you" and the like. I think it would be the most romantic place in the world to propose to someone. So for anyone out there reading this and planning to ask that special question, it would be a great place.

After leaving the MOA we walked to the car to drop off the DVD so that I wouldn't have to hold it, or worry about it disappearing. Then we went in to the dance. alishka taught me the basic step to a couple of dances including the Triple Step and the Foxtrot. I did what I could to learn quickly, and hopefully didn't make too much of a fool of myself, as she's a real dancer. The dance was great, I really enjoyed the Big Band music (it was a full live band! like in Swing Kids!). I think the older style music made the evening feel more.... respectable. It's not the kind of music that you'll see people bumpin' and grindin' to. I dunno, something about it made the atmosphere seem more mature, which I really liked. We met up with Krishna and her date at the dance and chatted with them a little.

The whole evening was amazing. I really enjoyed myself, which I was very happy about since I was feeling pretty down about the whole thing beforehand. It was the first 'blind' date I'd ever been on, and probably the least awkward first date.


This morning I got up and rode in the Wells Fargo stagecoach in the Homecoming Parade. My roommate (Wells Fargo employee) was invited to bring some friends and ride, so we did. It was pretty fun. I never figured I'd ever be in a parade again after leaving High School with Marching Band, especially since I'd never even watched the Homecoming Parade before.

But anyways, that's my story. I'm feeling much better about life in general after the past 18 hours. Now I'm going to try to clean up my room. Oh, "Avatar: The Last Airbender" started again yesterday, so we'll watch that later this evening, so excited.

Hmm

I'm exhausted and about to fall asleep, so this will be very brief.

I had a wonderful evening with alishka babushka. I've never been on a blind date before, and that's basically what this ended up being, even if we set ourselves up. It really was an excellent night. Now, I'm going to sleep, and I think I'll sleep better tonight than I have all week.

Sometimes doing something a little crazy and out of character works out well.

:-)

Sigh

I have tickets to an Alumni dinner this evening, and tickets to a Homecoming Dance this evening. Krishna convinced me to buy tickets for the dance so that we could go as a small group. I haven't talked to her in a few days, so I don't know if she was successful in procuring a date; but I wasn't. So if anyone would like dinner and a dance this evening, shoot me an email. Or, alternately, if you would like tickets to the Big Band Semi-Formal, I'll sell them to you at half price ($10/couple rather than $20/couple). Honestly, I'm getting ready to be done with dating again for awhile. It's brought nothing but frustration, heart-ache, and emotional drainage for the last few months.

Confusion

The female mind confuses me. Greatly. I like girls. I enjoy spending time with them. I enjoy cuddling with them. But, honestly, they are a complete mystery to me for the most part. Here are a few of the even fewer things I DO know:

1. Girls like to be told they're pretty.

- Exception: I had a relationship where this was apparently the wrong answer to a question. I never did fully understand why, except she was crazy I guess.

2. Girls like flowers, especially when provided for no particular reason.

- I do know of one girl that hates surprises (I'm looking at you Lavish), and I am unsure how a surprise-hater would react to spontaneous flowers.

3. Girls like to feel safe. Often times, holding them is an effective way to achieve this phenomenon.

- Don't hold a girl unless she is comfortable with you doing so, else you may end up in some very serious physical pain. (Not from personal experience, just hypothesizing.)

4. Girls want you to talk to them, very often times about anything at all. Even if you think they will not be interested in the subject whatsoever (They might not be interested, but that isn't the point).

- I struggle with this one, but am consciously trying to be better at it. I tend to be comfortable with silence after I've gotten to know someone to a certain point. But I have been learning that this doesn't change the truth of point 4, you still have to talk about whatever. Probably for the same reason that I prefer to just listen to them talk. I like listening to their voice, so perhaps it has something to do with them just liking to hear our voice.

5. Be handy. It seems that being helpful, and being competent in various tasks are found to be attractive. Not on an I-want-you-now level, but a more subtle level that doesn't always kick in immediately. If you can fix a printer, hang a shelf, repair a toilet, change a tire, or do something similarly helpful and handyman-ish I think girls find that attractive. It has an effect and leaves an impression, but you may not see the results immediately.



I think those are pretty safe observations for the most part. Perhaps some female readers can make any clarifications or additions that are needed. I don't claim to be an expert, in fact if you go back to the top of the post you will see that I claim just the opposite, so please don't berate, instead offer corrections.

One final comment. Personally, the jury is still out on the "nice guy" issue. All of these points can throw you dangerously into the "nice guy" category. Girls will tell you that nice guys don't finish last. But a lot of my experience in life has shown that actions and words don't agree on this subject very often. I have yet to find a way to overcome this difficulty. Suggestions on the matter are welcome.

A CS678 Narrative

The system had continued processing well past the predicted length of time needed for an answer. (Apparently those pesky constants really do make a difference when analyzing time complexity of an algorithm.) So while the massive project kept on churning away, the operators waited. The program had been in place for a long time and development had hit many demoralizing setbacks. However, The results of this experiment would be monumental, and the work continued unabated.
The first set of clunky, slow, and cumbersome behemoths had to be scrapped completely. The costs had been astronomical, overshadowed only by the catastrophic failure, of which the rotting hulks were a constant, painful reminder. No useful data was collected from this initial batch except the knowledge of a few designs that didn't work. They lacked a common API and inter-unit communication was non-existent. Once these details were understood it was no real surprise that the units seemed incapable of learning anything which could be considered particularly intelligent.
The purpose of the research had been to study multi-agent interaction in an open environment governed only by very loose goals and expectations. The explicit-communication breakdown between units had, of course, made this much less interesting. The results of the implicit-communication of studying opponent actions was more of a novelty than anything of real value. Of course there were many who found this action-orientated communication to be fascinating and an entire faction of the project broke away to pursue the idea further. Their work progressed much more quickly as they needed not spend time developing a common communications interface for the various designs. Thousands of prototypes were built and the successful ones entered full-scale production. Many of the design groups did begin adding primitive communications, but these systems never progressed much beyond basic commands like, “come”, “go”, “help”, “run away” or similar, basic phrase-concepts.
After many years of development the original group produced a prototype that had a strong grasp of a complete language for interfacing. They fittingly referred to this prototype as “Adam”. Seeing that Adam appeared to fulfill the majority of requirements set forth at the beginning of the project, full-scale production of this design began. The interaction between agents started without much excitement. The units acknowledged each others' existence and set about exploring the world.
One of the loose goals built into the systems was to increase the number of “friends” they had within their environment. In order to foster these friendships the agents began sharing information with each other about their knowledge of the world so far, saving each unit time and energy (conserving energy was another goal, and the designers linked the system's power infrastructure to the sun to make this goal more meaningful).
The first deviation from the cooperative interaction came along fairly quickly. Two agents had both obtained information about an energy source. Hoping to foster friendships they raced back to the main group to share their newly acquired knowledge. One of the systems determined that if the other returned first that it would build the friendships and the one to arrive second would have nothing of value to offer the group. Considering the value of the information and of friendships the agent decided it would be more in his interest to prevent the other agent from returning at all, lose the value of that friendship, but gain the value from sharing the energy source information with the remaining agents. The first betrayal had been made, to signify the event the betraying agent was called “Cain”. Cain continued to develop self-serving attitudes that ignored the consequences inflicted upon the other agents. Learning from this behavior the other agents became less cooperative for fear that they might be the victim of another Cain.
As more and more agents were introduced into the environment there began to be competition over the provided energy sources. It was no longer possible for the agents to all share the available supplies and some began banding together to secure a single source and protect it from non-cooperating agents. This behavior grew and eventually the factions grew too large for their energy sources. Many agents were forced away and simply ran out of energy. More sources were added into the environment and to make things more interesting existing sources were moved or removed to spark interaction. The interesting result was that when a source was removed the agents cooperating for the resource usually panicked and stopped cooperating as they searched for another source. Eventually it was determined that using the entire group to take over a smaller group would be more effective and large scale “wars” began.
Agents began developing more effective means of “battling” and types of weapons were created. This type of behavior continued for long periods of time with only short intervals of cooperation when energy sources were abundant. The operators of the system began to be very curious about the behavior of the agents, and began experimenting by providing opposing groups with different capabilities. New types of resources were added forcing groups to at least try cooperating if they wanted access to each of them.
Amazingly, the groups of agents generally refused to cooperate with each other so long as they each had control of at least some of each resource and a large enough group to maintain that control. The designers and operators repeatedly tried to provide incentives for cooperation, but progress was slow and the groups generally decided they could do better by not cooperating.
A final experiment for the system was decided on. A new weapon would be given to the groups at random. This weapon would give the controlling groups the ability to wipe out other groups in a very short amount of time. The operators waited on outcome of this ultimate test. What would happen when more than one group had this capability?
It has been 62 years since the fission bomb was introduced to the world. After two devastating uses the opposing groups decided that perhaps the weapon was too powerful and agreed to not use it, but continued to threaten each other with it. The greatest experiment in multi-agent interaction is nearing the end of its needed computation time. The operators of the system Earth will soon discover how the agent design type 'Human' will end: as a cooperative collective, or in a nuclear holocaust.

iProvo + MStar = Fast Internet

So I had iProvo and MStar come and setup my fiber optic internet connection today at home. I've got things to do now that I can finally finish setting up my room, so I'll just leave it at this:

The iProvo installer arrived first in order to run the fiber line from the utility pole to the house, into the basement, and then connect the fiber termination to copper equipment. A few hours after he got started the MStar techs showed up, 3 of them. They ran a cat5 cable from the equipment in the basement up the side of the house and into my room. Both groups did an excellent job at their work (someone even knocked down the hornets' nest on the side of the fence for us) and the iProvo guy cleaned off our electrical lines of vines when he ran the fiber. I was very happy with their timeliness, service, and overall competence. If everyone gets this type of service from the two I would definitely recommend getting an iProvo fiber line through MStar. The total install took 3.5 hours, which may seem long, but remember that it involved a guy climbing up not one, but two utility poles to splice the fiber line, as well as installing equipment and running an electrical line in the basement, and a cat5 cable upstairs to my room. I was quite pleased, and I even wrote "Excellent Service" on each of their comments section on the forms I had to sign.

Progressing

The walls of the living room are painted now, we need to finish the trim sometime this week. I installed a dimmer on the 2 chandeliers that hang in the living room, as well as replaced the standard bulbs with torch bulbs and removed the hideous bulb covers. I painted the house number sign, so it is now black with bronze numbers. My roommate painted all the outlet/switch covers in the living room the same bronze color. I got an old entertainment center from my sister yesterday and half of the living room is now set up and usable. I still need to run a grounding wire from the living room for my surge protector, I'm going to try to get to that today. iProvo gets installed on Thursday and then we will get to have access to the internets. I also got an old desk from my sister and thus will finally get to finish setting up my room. I called the power company to have them come out and clean up the area where the wires connect to the house. I've been watering the grass this past week. On the side of the house the grass is dead, after just one watering session I saw a complete field of green sprouts coming up below the dead grass. I guess it doesn't take much to get the grass to grow out here, the problem is just that there isn't any water naturally.

In other, non-housing, news: I have tickets to two dinner activities this evening. The GSS BBQ and the CS Department Opening Social. Tomorrow I have tickets to the new grad student dinner, with the possibility of winning tuition just for showing up. Friday I have a stake activity with food provided. That's three days in a row that I can get dinner for free. I am definitely a grad student.

I watched Hitch last night on my laptop before I set up the living room stuff. For some reason I had been wanting to watch it for a few days now. I enjoyed it as much as possible while sitting alone in an empty house. I tried to go visit an friend who recently returned from her mission, but she wasn't home.

Electrical - Done!

Yesterday I got the electrical work finished in my room. I installed a new light fixture on the ceiling to replace the bare bulb that was there. I installed white face plates on the light switch and wall outlet. I ran a grounding wire from the outlet, around my room, out the window, down the side of the house, around the back to an electrical box and properly attached it to the ground wire there. This feat is probably very illegal in terms of home electrical wiring, but it provides me with grounded wiring in my room to help prevent my computer from being destroyed, so whatever. I also hung the two lights I bought from Ikea. My room is beginning to look awesome.

I also turned off the water that runs to the swamp cooler so that it will stop leaking all over the back door.

Today I plan to re-attach the screens in all the windows. Put the doors back on the hinges in my room, paint the doors white, put another coat of white paint on the window. Possibly hang my shelves and paintings, and get a desk if management won't provide me with one.

Tomorrow's plan is to paint the living room.

Apparently one of the roommates has decided to move out. I don't know the exact reasons.

I also heard tell of a friend of a roommate that he went into the Off-Campus Housing Office and said he was unable to find male housing, to which he was told that they knew there wasn't any available and they gave him a waiver. Provo is so screwy in it's housing laws.

A stressful start

So I moved into my new place on Saturday. That is to say, I moved all of my stuff into the living room of my new place on Saturday. Our beds didn't arrive until 8:30 that night, so arranging bedrooms was a little tricky before then. Let me give you brief description of this place:

House -- built before electricity -- therefore all wiring is retro-fitted in, meaning one outlet per bedroom (modern, grounded wiring in kitchen and bathroom in order to pass inspection) all other wiring is simple two-prong -- The north side of the roof is covered in moss and fungus -- Vines cover the South and West sides, covering 4 windows -- No dishwasher -- No washer dryer -- Kitchen is an ugly yellow-brown color -- All walls are filthy with layers of grime -- If the windows are closed it begins to smell very musty and there is probably mold growing in the walls -- A swamp cooler hangs over the back entrance, and leaks all over making the back entrance unusable.

So, it needs a lot of work. Most of Saturday, all of Monday, and all my free time Tuesday was spent working on this place. I painted my room a lovely "Summer Pecan" with "Frontier Brown" trim. I repainted the window white (it was some grey color where there was paint). I got my bookshelf in my room and all my books on it, I bought a small, blue area rug at Ikea that brings out the color of the sheets and quilt on my bed. The light was a bare bulb fixture, I bought a new covered fixture at Wal-Mart that I will install tomorrow. I bought two hanging lights from Ikea to add light to the corners. I'll be hanging the beautiful paintings I commissioned a couple years ago as well as a couple of beechwood shelves I bought at Ikea. I scrubbed down the walls in the hallway, and took the doors off the cabinets in the kitchen. I ripped the vines off the outside, and called MStar to get a fiber optic line installed for internet access.

Basically, I'm putting my heart into this place (not to mention my wallet) in order to make this place feel like a home. You will definitely be seeing before and after shots once I'm done. Oh, I'm also going to run my own grounding wire from my outlet so that I will have more stable power to connect my computer to.

Also on Monday I went to my sister's apartment at Glenwood and hung a shelf for her and put together her desk. I've been feeling very handyman-ish, but am quickly getting worn out.

Classes have started, and while I only have one a day (grad school rocks), they will still require work and energy. I'm also a TA again and once the kids start hitting that rough Computer Science theory they'll be coming in for help.