Saturday: (note: I had to read Anton's blog to remember some stuff lol)
On early Saturday morning, we had a half-birthday party for Anthony and Robert. And Jenny made some IMBA cakes. Like those are ridiculously well made with different layers and shit (special cake for a special someone maybe? at least I remembered that that's what I thought at the time...). Robert got a strawberry vanilla cake, and Anthony got a chocolate strawberry cake; both are amazing. And when you have birthdays, you have showers :D. Anthony was the first to go down. He was in the bathroom, washing a fork or something, and we just ambushed him. After he got showered, he immediately went for Robert, and that started a chain reaction of showerings. The girls (Jenny and Sandra) came next, then Julian, and lastly Anton (yes!!!). Julian was also slapping random people's asses during the heat of things... rofl control yourself... I managed to stay relatively dry throughtout the ordeal. I wanted to get showered because I kind of felt left out of a group bonding experience. It was mainly because of a bad arguement Robert and I got into at the beginning of the year, when I dared him to shower me with Jenny and Anton. So he tried, except he got Julian to help, and four vs one small 135 lb Chinese nerd ain't fair. Apparently he refuses to shower me since then :(. I think we need to mend our friendship.
I woke up at noon on Saturday, and went to Next to do some coding on Battlecode. We didn't get much done within the three hours before Anton's Lunar New Year party (sigh), and our archons liked to spin around randomly. Around 5pm, me, Anton, Anthony, Nathan, Julian, Sandra, and Jenny crammed into both of Anton's parents' cars (Latifah, who lives two doors down, and her mom went with us too). The car ride was somewhat awkward as I crammed into with the girls, and no one spoke at all (wtf, not my fault I hope). When we got to Anton's house, all of us caught up on some good old television, and then had some kickass food. Fried shrimp is soooooo good. Then we went back to the tube, watch some Cops and then Crusoe (both are kinda bad, but it was chill). And then we said our goodbyes to the lovely Nguyen family. I decided to ride with the guys on the way back, switching spots with Anthony (sry). When we got back, Anton give us all red envelopes, which was like DUDE WTF!! YOU JUST INVITED ME TO YOUR HOUSE AND GAVE US FOOD AND NOW YOU WANT ME TO TAKE YOUR MONEY?! lol yea... but I took it reluctantly because arguing in the lobby would not have been cool (now I think of it, I still haven't opened it). On the way to 3W, Julian and I had a semi-serious arguement on who get Anton for the next few days (I rightfully deserve to since Battlecode was due Monday...), and we had a scuffle which resulted in this:
Don't ask how Jenny ended up on the bottom.
We got back at around 9:30PM, which is really early for us college students. Jenny, Nathan, Anton, Anthony, and I had a sudden craving for a movie, and I suggest City of God, which was a damn good movie. After we watched it, everyone was like damn that was intense, raw, and of epic proportions. We were like we don't know what to say... Funny thing that happened during the movie was when Shorty's wife was talking to another woman about sex and bananas, Nathan was like "wtf are we watching?" We still had a craving for movies though, so we watched Superbad, which was hilarious in the beginning. Sometime in the middle, the pace slowed and, since I saw it before, I flew asleep. I woke up during the "sex" scene at the party and was woah, and then I went back to MacG because I was exhausted.
Sunday:
I was woken up by Shankari at 12:30PM telling me that our truffle making class was at 1PM. WTF Sandra said it was at 3PM, just a day ago... (she lies too much). So my breakfast turned out to be 10% water, 5% cream, and 85% chocolate; sweet (literally). Robert and I partnered by and started off with a batch of dark chocolate. We tried to go for the breakfast beverage theme by adding coffee and raspberry and cherry tea. It tasted pretty good in ganache form, but later turned out to taste like medicine cherry (too much tea ftl). Our second batch was based on white chocolate. Since we started out semi-conservative, Robert and I decided to go all out. I really wanted to make something hot and spicy, so I wanted to put in cumin, paprika, and chipotle chilly pepper powder. Robert wanted garlic for some reason and also chose coffee to balance out the taste. In the end, we added everything. Sandra was like wtf, you're chocolate sux balls, eww. When the ganache was finished, everyone had a taste, and they were like wtf. It wasn't a bad wtf though; it was just genuine confusion. Too much spice; taste bud overload!!111!! Later on, after being rolled and shit, the truffle would start out like a punch of spice and fade into the silky smoothness of coffee. It was a masterpiece.
After the class ended at 3PM, a bunch of us went to the student center for lunch; I need a mini-meal of chicken noodle soup ($4.99 wtf man, it's soup). And then dropped my stuff off at MacG and headed back home for my own Chinese New Year dinner. My parents made dumplings, fish, and duck, and there was so much food... We then had a chat with my uncle and grandma via MSN. The next thing I knew, I was getting driven back to MIT. Got back around 10:00PM, I made Anton read them Rekrul threads on TL.net just to procrastinate. Then we worked on Battlecode until 4AM. Not much improvement. Archons spin and get trapped, workers still don't work, and my mini standing army was pathetic.
Monday:
Monday was all Battlecode, from 3PM to 10PM (ok I lied, I went to Dating Etiquette at 1PM sponsored by Charm School; it was boring as fuck). After hours of hardcore coding, Anton and I got our shit together and finally managed to get navigation and defense to run somewhat well (this was revision 116). The weird thing about r116 was that it couldn't best rushplayer... Then Geza came in around 8PM, which is about when we got shit working and decided to pimp our workers. The next two hours flew by super fast, and after some minor tweaks and a supposedly A* worker algorithm, we got revision 122. Except that the workers were as bad as ever, and the tweaks somehow made us lose to refplayer. So we just went from beating 3/4 computer ai to beating 2/4 to beating 1/4. WTF!!!! progress FTL. Argh after some minor panicking, we just uploaded our newest code and said fuck it.
I was glad that Battlecode was over (for now...) and not completely satisfied, but didn't want to think about it anymore. Went to 3W, and rewatched the Matrix. It was still as good as ever. Hello Mr. Anderson.
Tuesday:
The day of reckoning. Tuesday was the day of the Battlecode qualifying tournament, aka Judgement Day. Woke up super late (1PM) after a really exhausting Monday and checked the Battlecode website for the brackets. They weren't up for some reason, so I decided to go anyway since i got nothing better to do. I first went to Anna's for some grub and met Jenny there, and we went to 34-101 soon after. We just there just after we lost to Must Need Energon, so I didn't get to see how we lost :(. After watching Cathy's lose too, Jenny had to go back to Next, and I went to Media Lab UROP. Ankur said it was possible to get a MySQL database on rufus.media.mit.edu except I didn't know any Unix commands and didn't have permission yet, so I was like wtf. And then he said that I should get a basic visualization for the loans and bids tables by the end of the week. Yea.. I'm screwed. Doing too much during IAP unfortunately leads to half-assing a lot of stuff QQ. I then went back to Battlecode and saw that we were matched against David Chen and Darren's robot g fucking g. Yea, went 0-2 after all that hard work. God damn it. Both the teams we faced went pretty far, so I kind of felt cheated. But.. excuses are excuse.... damn. Later that day I talked a lot of trash about other people's code who went farther than us in the tourney, like Bartlet For America, but I was being a sore loser... I decided to take Tuesday off as a mental health day. And spent the night at Next House, don't remember doing what.. maybe Magic. Went back to MacG and caught up on some The Shield w00t.
Wednesday:
Wedneday was when shit started to rain. Early in the morning, my mom called and reminded me of my citizenship interview the next day. SHIT. Didn't do any preparation at all... I went to meet with Mr. Holtzmann in the early afternoon to discuss my schedule. He basically said my courses (14.01, 6.01, 18.03, 18.06) were all really good, but I had to do some HASS's and biology. I asked/tried to persuade him that I should try to petition for 3 more credits to add on a full HASS class (I was looking into Rhetoric, which is both a HASS-D and a CI-H), but he told me frankly that it was pretty much impossible (like you had to get the dean involved and shit... not worth it).This whole sophomore standing thing is complete BS. It's kids with sophomore standing that the Institute should worry about taking on too many classes... People who didn't have 1000 APs in high school are either sane or slackers. Fuck the system. He also gave a good arguement about how taking biology later is going to be a bitch because the other classes are only going to get harder. Scheduling sucks. I then went to the Hyperstudio and did a 4 hour programming sprint and launched the "launch clips" website. It's simple to do, but tedious, and some of the clips didn't work. It snowed/rained get a bitch that day. There were some epic puddles... zizi yo boots. At night I went to J. Crew with Anthony, Bohan, and Sandra. Before the event started, I dropped by Borders to get A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, the first book in the A Song of Fire and Ice series. It's supposedly epic like the Wheel of Time series, but I need to allocate time to reading... MIT just sucks away time like crazy. The J. Crew event was somewhat interesting (more interesting that I would like to admit), but still superficial, and I gots no money for fashion BS. Bohan needed to go to the bathroom, and the rest of crew did their disappearing act, and 5 minutes later called me in the middle of the talk. Not very cool. By the time I got back to MacG, my boots were soaked, so Next was out of the question. Watched more of The Shield and legitimately studied for the easiest test of my test. "What do the 13 stripes stand for?" Jesus fucking Christ, every resident in the US should know that...
Thursday:
Citizenship internship. Woke up early (10AM) actually and met my mom at the Z center to get my Selective Service shit, which wasn't even used. I walked to Government Center from Charles/MGH, and for some reason automatically assumed it was in the city hall building, but it turned out to be in the big tall white building across the plaza called the JFK Federal Buiding. I had to wait one fucking hour to get tested by this "i-fucking-hate-my-life" immigration officer. Easiest shit ever. I had to read "Where is the White House?" out loud, laughing out loud! Took only like 3 minutes. Then I had to wait in another room for my real interview. That wait was worse because I ran out of reading material and was hungry. I hate bureaucracy... My interviewer was a nice lady in her thirties. The "interview" turned out to be just a review of my naturalization form. Just a formality really. And then I was done. I'm going to be a citizen. Getting naturalized on March 4th at the Hynes. It's a Wednesday, so hopefully there won't be a test or something. Waiting is tiring, no joke. When I went to the Hyperstudio to fit in a hour of work, I just slumped in on the comfy revolving chair and wanted to sleep. Went to glassblowing next, but basically I fail at making cups. The first one I made last week had a cracked bottom, the second one which I made today collapsed, and my third attempt was pretty good actually, until I had to take it off. I shifted my left hand to grip the blow tube more firmly, but the pipe was really hot, so I immediately jerked away, and the cup was knocked from the pipe and bounced off the again. Luckily Katy(Katie? Katey?), the TA, reacted fast and put the cup into the annealer quickly. Apparently, the cup didn't change deform when it hit the ground wtf. Anyway, when I went OH SHIT, my hand rested on the hot jacks, and now I have a semi-big burn mark on my hand . GG.
I headed over to 6.270 competition next to support Peter, Shankari, and Kristin. There are so much more people there then at the 6.370 qualifying tourny :(. Hopefully people show up to the Battlecode finals. It's going to be epic. Go Spencer! The competition cool and fun to watch and really easy to understand. But pretty all the robot except the top eight failed. They didn't move at all... Including my buddies' robot. Peter was a bit upset. There's some tension with Shankari... She's been acting a bit weird lately; kinda worry for her. sigh. Then when I arrived at Next House, Jenny told me that Anton and Julian went their website to the wrong person, so technically they didn't submit yet, and Julian was breaking down. Shit 0-3, fail. As we approached 3W, it was kind of funny how me, Bohan, and Jenny were walking quietly and whispering, afraid to disturb the hornet's nest. Then all of the sudden we heard Julian's hysterical laugh from Jenny's room. Uh-oh, he's lost it. NOT!!!! JULIAN GOT AN EMAIL SAYING THAT THEY WERE SEMI FINALISTS!!!! HOLY SHIT!!!!!! WOOOOOO!!! (I wished Anton spent that much time on Battlecode QQ). Yea, today was intense.
Now that I finally caught up on my blogging. I have to do Media Lab UROP (aka learn MATLAB and MySQL in the next three hours). I also have buy books and register for classes. Shit. Reality hit hard and fast...
P.S. w00t, Bohan's learning Starcraft.
P.P.S. phew, my first epic blog
P.P.P.S. I BEAT ANTON'S LONGEST BLOG RECORD BIATCH!
P.P.P.P.S. Last day of IAP T_T
Lol, "went their website".
ReplyDelete