Categorized: September 2007 Archives

As previously promised, here I am once again, sitting in the Hacklab and writing a post to my blog, as there aren't enough students who bother coming to office hours. "So why not reduce their number?" Well, we could-- but the thing is, students do come. Over the course of the semester, I'll have students at all times during my office hours. Once or twice, I might even have, say, six kids in the four-hour timespan. So it's hard to reduce without cutting off (theoretical) Java Babies; therefore, we run 28+ office hours a week (for 120 students). Anyway, interesting items recently. One major thing, certainly, is that I was able to spend yesterday (Saturday) judging all day at the Lorwyn Prerelease at George Mason University! Prerelease tournaments are interesting, because they're tournaments organized by Wizards but run by all the area Tournament Organizers (just the largest ones) to introduce players to a new set-- and they do it by having many small tournaments, running throughout a day. There were 24 8-person booster drafts, about 15 32-person Sealed tournaments, a couple of Two-Headed Giant Sealed events, and some Open Dueling for younger players-- all in all, way more tournaments than the one at a "typical" big tournament (excepting, of course, the super-huge tournaments like Pro Tours, that have their own clusters of side events). Quite a lot of fun to play in, I'm sure-- but I greatly enjoyed judging the new set in that variety of situations. It seems like it will be especially fun for Limited play-- which is what I usually play myself. Huzzah for that! So after the 20-hour day (I got up at 6AM, was at the tournament by 8:30AM, and didn't get home until 2AM) yesterday, I got up at the crack of noon for my usual Sunday JHU Magic tournament-- today with a special twist: we didn't announce the format until the tournament started. This was partially because it's amusing to keep the players in suspense, and partially because we hoped to play with the Lorwyn packs I'd gotten from the Prerelease-- which is what we ended up doing. Thirteen players attended (quite a few going to the Sunday prerelease tournament), and a good time seemed to be had by all. So now, having helped just a few students, I am left doing homework in the Hacklab, and taking time out to write update-type blog posts. I also recently updated my blog to WordPress 2.3, which I very much enjoy; all my plugins worked right off the bat, although I decided to retire the venerable Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin in favor of using WordPress 2.3's new built-in tagging support. This looks, to me, to be the same from a user perspective, except that the directory rewriting for tag URLs looks nicer now, for which I am grateful. If you haven't upgraded to WP 2.3, why not? Other interesting things coming up in the next few days:

• My mother is coming to visit on Thursday-- seeing the new apartment and the like.
• Shannon's playing in her first PCO concert of the season on Friday-- which Mom will be attending, of course.
• 10/02/2007! Nuff 'said.

And now, as I sign off for the moment, I would like to leave you with what I hope (or perhaps fear) will become a regular series on my blog this semester. I can only assure you that this entry is uncut, unedited, and uncensored-- and that it does indeed come from a Hopkins student. I think it otherwise stands on its own. This one was from a phone conversation, of which I only heard one end. Incredibly Disturbing Things Overheard in the Hacklab, Episode 1: "I got rejected from Teach For America. Ain't that some shit? *listens*Yeah, well, I dunno how much emphasis they put on, like, getting in trouble. Like with the cops. *listens* Yeah, well, I got a 2.3! That's pretty good; damn straight it's pretty good." Wow.

Time, it would seem, continues to pass. This not being unexpected, it does not need much comment. So, interesting things that have happened recently:

• The JHU Magic Club has continued to thrive. For various reasons, I've morphed from "just" a DCI liaison into quite a lot of capacities: treasurer, website maintainer, inventory organizer, .... In short, I do most of the work. That's OK with me-- I actually quite enjoy seeing the club go from a mere thought into something that's really happening. We have had an amazing twenty-nine people show up to at least one of the last three drafts-- amazing! I was also able to judge, in full stripey regalia, the most recent draft, which I quite enjoyed doing; as I've noted before, I'm a much better judge than I am player (as I hope the members would agree)-- and even in such a casual setting (Regular REL, 16K-- a long way from the tension of a PTQ or a Pro Tour), I do feel like the tournaments I get to work at are improved for having me there. (Again, I hope the members would agree-- but certainly they appreciated this tournament's being run a full hour faster than either of the previous two.)
• I've also received confirmation that I'll be judging at the Lorwyn Prerelease at George Mason University, hosted by Dream Wizards; yay! This will be my first opportunity to work with the mid-Atlantic judging staff, whom I met a week ago at a *very* informative judging seminar, run by the local high-level judge, Brian Schenck. If nothing else, it'll be a good opportunity to see how the new expansion's Planeswalkers interact with the rest of the game. (For those of you who don't play Magic, a brief translation: big powerful things go boom in the new set. BOOM!)
• My research is slowly starting up again; up first, completing some fun Command&Control systems for Telos motes, which was a project I was working on last semester. Then adding new features-- and, possibly, trying to get the SunSpots to play nicely with the rest of the mote world. They're great, powerful little devices-- but they don't natively speak ZigBee, unlike the Telos motes (they just speak raw 802.15, without the extra .4 protocol), so I'd have to either implement that part, or find someone else's implementation.
• The JHU Chapter of Upsilon Pi Epsilon, the CS Honor Society, is trying to redefine its place within our department. After our induction last semester, we didn't even manage to elect a full officer contingent; just myself, as vice-president, and Jonathan Lasko, a Master's student in his final year, as president. We're hoping to be able to help more with recruitment efforts-- but there's an inherent problem. In contrast to most JHU clubs, there's a huge entry requirement (to wit, being an honors student in the Department of Computer Science)-- and it also requires that you be at least a 2nd-semester junior to join (and most people join their senior year). This means that (except for the people who both make it in their junior years and elect to stay for the concurrent Master's degree) you never get more than a year and a bit as a member-- which makes establishing continuity and reliability extremely difficult. We're hoping to be able to negate that through doing things (like recruitment efforts) that don't really require continuity as such, but it's still an uphill battle; hopefully it's one worth fighting.

As for uninteresting things that are happening-- I'm writing this post while sitting in my office hours in the Hacklab at JHU (so called not because it's a hangout for the computer elite, but because it's big and oppressive and the CS majors want to cut the whole thing into little bits; we are, unfortunately, required to hold hours here, as opposed to either the nice CS lab, or any offices we might be able to lay claim to in other buildings). I never quite understand why students don't seem to start their assignments until the night before-- while that's a good strategy in (say) math courses, it doesn't work very well for programming courses. So as always, I have three students, and, according to the TA schedule, Jai will have the usual mad rush of students three hours before it's due (mid-afternoon on Wednesday). Well, at least my four hours of office hours helped a few people (which I really quite enjoy-- teaching kids who then understand when I'm done is quite nice); I hope, as I do each week, that I'll be flooded with students next week. If not, you might see another post from me then. :-)

So the habit of regularly posting appears to elude me, but nonetheless, I'll try to keep the blog updated from time to time. So, when last I wrote, I was preparing to go back to Hopkins for my fourth year; I am now here, having finished nearly the first week of class (we started on a Thursday) in my epic let's-not-attend-class schedule. Perhaps I should explain. At the moment, I'm taking a maximum overload-- twenty credits. That might slightly dip, but not in ways that concern this article. However, I only have ten hours of class per week-- 2.5 hours a week for each of four courses, divided in various ways into seven class meetings a week-- and no class meetings at all on Tuesdays. So then, dear reader, how does this *not* translate into the laziest year yet for Brendan? Well, the other parts of my day are taken by a staggering research load; I'm signed up for three credits of research with Professor Terzis for his lab (sensor networks), and three credits for *my* research, toward my thesis. So while technically I'm not going to *class* much, it's not like I'm not *doing* anything. And as usual, violin lessons at Peabody. What other things have kept me away from blogging? Well, the first meeting of the JHU Magic Club, for one thing-- a smashing success. We had seventeen people show up for our first booster draft, and we hope to have even more in the coming weeks. I wasn't the Tournament Organizer for this one, but I will be on the 22nd. The other really exciting thing was that I spoke on the New Engineering Students panel, for the third year in a row, last Monday. It's an interesting group-- ordinarily, it's been run by Tau Beta Pi, the Phi Beta Kappa equivalent (National Collegiate Honor Society, basically) for engineers, and staffed almost entirely by their membership-- almost, because the JHU chapter doesn't allow CS majors, and thus I've been the pseudo-Honors student invited to fill in that gap. This year, it was only run by Engineering Advising, and I was the only student there who *was* in their honor society (Upsilon Pi Epsilon). Ah, how things change. But it was a good time. Shannon, my sister, was the moderator this year, one of several BMEs on the panel-- and the usual assortment of the rest of the engineering groups. Lots of questions about how students can do research, one amusing one from a student who'd been told by his parents that 18 credits wasn't nearly enough (Shannon set him straight about the horrors of ultraloading), some questions about activities. What I thought was interesting was that this year, the other students on the panel told all the students not to do many activities, not to exert themselves, not to experiment-- a *complete* about-face from last year's panel, where everyone (myself included) told the students to try everything, do research early and often, and join what they wanted now and cut back later. I, for one, kept to my same position, which Shannon shared-- but we were the only two. I wonder if there's some correlation between being honors students and that opinion... :-) I was also able to get in a few plugs for the JHU Magic club, which got quite a lot of attention; several students came up to me afterward and asked me how to join. As at that moment the website wasn't operating, I just gave them *my* contact information-- on my new MooCards, which I got on David's advice (or rather, mention on his Twitter instance), and which I *greatly* enjoy; I have my cartoon representation on the front, and a bare minimum (name, website, email, GPG index) of contact information on the back. This worked well (and they thought the cards were *really* neat-looking), and soon I had many freshmen ready for Magical corruption. So then, what next? Well, I've just been informed that I'm the new Head TA for my usual school-year job, 600.107 -- Introduction to Programming in Java. Should be lots of fun, although whether it'll be fun for me, or fun for the students, remains to be seen. :-) Tomorrow's also the first meeting for one last class, with the inimitable Professor Daniel Deudney, which should also be quite interesting. And this Saturday, I get to meet the Mid-Atlantic DCI Judging contingent, at a judging seminar-- excellent! And then we'll see if, somewhere amid the chaos, we can't get the blog updated more often.