Studying at the PCL

Here I am, sitting tucked away in a tiny corner of the Perry Castaneda Library (PCL). It's the massive library of the University of Texas at Austin, and one of my favorite haunts. It's located on 21st and Speedway, right across the street from Jester (the residence hall) one one side, the McCombs School of Business on another, the University Teaching Center on a third, and the Blanton Museum of Art at the back. I love PCL. I used to come here earlier just for the books, but it also provides a very quiet, peaceful study area. I'm sitting right now on one of the couches at the southern end of the sixth floor. My legs are pushed up against another couch, my laptop balanced on my knees. I can see the reflection of a pair of denim-clad legs and white-and-blue Reeboks in the mirrored window opposite me. Outside the window is a stunning view of downtown. It's quite dark now -- it's 7:15pm -- and the only thing I can see outside is the lights of the city, and shadowy shapes of the buildings opposite. There is a huge tree right outside, although I cannot see it in the dark right now. Underneath its shade, I can often see people sitting, studying, or just lazing around. I'd like to do that, but (a) it's too dark now, and (b) it's too cold, and I only have a thin jacket with me tonight. Opposite, I can see the shadowy outline of Blanton (where I'd been for a Fine Arts Web Team meeting earlier in the day -- it's beautiful), and some vague lights behind it. Nightlights, maybe? I know the Blanton is closed on Mondays. Behind that are large, tall buildings. One of those is Brackenridge Hospital, though I can't see it right now. Beyond that, the buildings are too far away to make out even the shapes -- all I can see are bright oblongs of light pouring out of the windows. Far, far away, I can see some cars on the distant roads -- it's a beautiful sight. And lastly, I can see the large dome of the Capitol -- it looks beautiful! I can make out the shape of the dome, and the white pillars supporting it. The rest of it is obscured by a building -- probably one of the numerous parking garages dotting downtown. It's a beautiful sight, and I feel blessed that I live so close to the beautiful downtown.....

Fickle Texan weather

Man! Talk about fickle! Texan weather beats 'em all hands down. I have given up trying to predict what it will be like tomorrow. Yesterday, it was a hot, humid day. The sun beat down on everyone, and it was muggy in the night. Tomorrow morning when I woke up, it was freezing! Well, not really freezing...more like bracing cold. But brrrrr! I had read something about today being a cold day on the internet, and had thankfully dressed for the day in jeans and two layers of clothing. Many of my friends weren't so fortunate. They were caught in the cold wearing short-sleeved shirts and T-shirts, and, even worse, shorts. The wind howled about all day, and the windchill was probably in the lower 40s. It was a very cold day today. I had cleverly worn a turtleneck, but the wind crept in even through that, making me shiver all the way to my workplace in the Fine Arts library. Now, normally the library is one of the coldest places on campus -- it may be steaming hot outside, but it's cold enough to give me goosepimples inside the library. Not so today. I actually breathed a sigh of relief on entering it, it was a respite from the cold!
After work, I shivered all the way from the FA library to Taylor Hall, which is where the Computer Sciences department is based. The cold crept up my nose, hurting my sinuses (I've had a sinus problem for ages). Even the squirrels seemed subdued today -- one little chap sadly gnawed on his acorn with apathy, and even the sight of me passing by didn't motivate him enough to spring away unlike his compatriots on normal days. I guess they are preparing for hibernation, and the unusually cold day caught them by surprise.
Taylor lab is a dark, gloomy basement with stacks of Linux and Sun machines lining the walls. It's usually freezing cold in there, and I need to often bring along a jacket even on the hottest days if I know that I'll be spending any amount of time in the lab. Not so today. I actually felt warm in the lab! I was stunned.
Yeah, it was a cold day all right! The tip of my nose froze on the way back home. I think it's going to be 88 degrees again tomorrow....that's Texan weather for you!

A crazy month

It's been a very crazy month. In fact, ever since the semester started, it's been crazy. The sheer amount of studying I've had to do has been mind-numbingly immense, and I cam close to a nervous breakdown a few days back -- all thanks to Graphics (as I write this, I'm casting a baleful look at the textbook, 3-D Graphics by Alan Watt, lying next to me). No course has ever caused me as many problems as this one has. And, what frustrates me, we study only math, physics, and other abstruse concepts in the course, and nothing of creativity whatsoever. I've come close to yanking my hair out this past month.
We've had projects, and my word, were they awful! Well, the first one wasn't...but the second one most certainly was, and though I haven't had a look at the code yet, the third one also seems to uphold the tradition. I finally took the monumental decision today of converting the grading of the course to a credit / non-credit. I might have to take four courses next semester, but that sure beats getting a nervous breakdown, and only a C or worse to show for it.
But I didn't want to crib. I'm actually feeling pretty good right now. I've been working part-time at the Fine Arts Department at the University of Texas at Austin, as the assistant webmaster. For some time, I just had to make HTML or basic Coldfusion updates, which weren't bad at all -- I love visuals, and was more than happy to work on it, and arrange elements of the pages as I wished. But now, I'm doing my dream job -- security!
My boss, Jeremy, has asked me to help out with the security concerns of the Fine Arts website -- and has given me full permission to poke around, and try as many exploits as I can to try to hack into the FA system! How cool is that??! Right now I'm trying to implement a CAPTCHA for the Art and Art History website. CAPTCHAs are the strange twisted words that show up when you try to send potentially spamming material. They cannot be deciphered by machines, but can be read easily by humans, so they prove very helpful deterring spambots.
What I'm actually using is the reCAPTCHA -- which is a nifty little concept. It has two words, like the CAPTCHA, with a line running through them, like a strikeout (it prevents bots from using edge-detection mechanisms to deduce the word), and, the cutest concept of it all, the words come from scanned historical texts, so everytime someone uses a reCAPTCHA, they are helping translate a word that wasn't scanned in well and not recognized by the OCR readers at wherever they do the scanning. I had read about the idea sometime back in an issue of Wired magazine, and actually got to implement it! It's wonderful.
Well, that's enough rant for now. I'm dying of sleep (haven't slept more than 10 hours in the past 4 days), and still have a paper review to complete. So I shall get going, and return again some other day. Adios!

Long time, no see

Wow! It's certainly been a long time since I last updated the blog! I don't think I've even seen the Blogger home page since 4th September -- which was the last time I did an update. Life's certainly been hectic! I have, for some reason, decided to pursue one of the heaviest courses at UT CS this semester, and am suffering as a consequence. But that's not what I was going to talk about.
There have been so many things happening, it's difficult to know where to start. Should I start with the swimming lessons I took? Or maybe with the hours of sleep I get each night? Or about the length of each program we students have to write for the Graphics course? Or the career fair that took place some time back? Or the trip to Mozart's I made with my friends a couple of days back? Hmm...how about a bit of everything?
It's been an interesting month since I last wrote, with quite a lot happening. Probably the most drastic things happening were the sleepless nights in Taylor lab, and the fulltime offer from Dell :) But there were other things happening too. I joined a swimming class for one! Now I'm one of those people who hyperventilate the moment the water level rises above their stomach. I did so during the first swimming class, and the instructor had to spend almost 25 minutes getting me to calm down. When I finally did, I gripped her arm so hard, I'm sure I left welts across it. But by the end of six lessons (five actually -- I missed one because I had too much work), I could swim across the pool using a kickboard. Not bad! Of course, I haven't returned to the pool in ages, so I might find myself thrashing about again if I'm lowered in the water.
But probably the starkest memory of the past month was the nights in Taylor lab. I decided to shoot myself not only in the foot, but in the head as well, by taking the hardest course offered by the CS department, Computer Graphics. Now, I have nothing whatsoever against the course or the professor. The professor is awesome, and the course is excellently designed. It's me that can't cope, I suppose. There's just too much math and too much hard-core programming for my liking. The student population is almost exclusively male, except for my roommate, Sandy, and me. All the boys are the studious, geeky types. There are a few Turing Scholars (undergrads) in the class. I'm sure the grad students are ex-Turing Scholars -- they seem the type. They're the ones who eagerly respond to any question posed, and come up with brilliant algorithms to solve the toughest problems, while I just gape at them, and wonder if there was ever the slightest chance of me getting any kind of solution, ever. Even the undergrads know more than I could ever hope to, and as for the grads, well, I have lost all hope of ever catching up with them. They're a fervent bunch -- people who probably go home and open up a visualization algorithm and worship it, or explain the intricacies of the Phong shading model and distributed ray tracing on dates. They scare me. We recently had a class by a guest lecturer, Dr Fussell (another Graphics guy), who looks like Robert DeNiro with a ponytail (and spouting vector algebra). He was talking about distributed ray tracing. I had slept only three hours the previous night, so it was a task of monumental proportions to just keep my eyes open. What heartened me, though, was two of the undergrads making faces at each other. At least I wasn't the only one completely lost! Dr Mark's classes are much better, and at one point, I used to positively look forward to them. Not any more. All we talk about is perturbation of the surface, and texture mapping, and the like. I could just cry.
The assignments for the Graphics class are another story worth telling. The first one entailed modifying a program that would make photographs look like impressionist paintings, to make them look even more impressionistic. I didn't sleep at all the night it was due, spending the entire night coding furiously. And, of course, two of the features didn't even work, earning me a C. Now the next project is due on Thursday, and I still find myself clutching my hair in despair, and wondering what on earth possessed me to take this course. I'm in Taylor lab right now, half-slumped over the computer, scowling at the screen and at the virtually undecipherable code in front of me. My only saviors are my three best friends sitting next to me (also coding miserably) and my trusty iPod.
In fact, I think I should probably return to the code, instead of typing away into a blog. Maybe the extra 5 minutes of coding might earn me a B next time.......