Nice hack....

This appears on our tallest building on campus last night (when Red Sox is playing the Rockies). It miht be even visible from the Fenway park d:

I finally started to cook again...

I was busy all the time. Though I always wanted to cook, I couldn't find time. But that's only excuse. Time is always there if we wanted to squeeze it. Fortunately (?) I bought some food last weekend, and I have to finish it as soon as possible. Over the summer I've learned some better ways to cook, and the food looks better now. d:

World music room

I never knew that there is a world music room had I not taken the weird music composition class. The room is next to the museum, relatively far from main campus buildings. The room is full of strange musical instruments, and I can't name any of it other than the generic classification. Ex. drums. The railroad (?) model club is right next to the room, and I finally saw the famous building-large tetris. Well, it's only a small model. I hope somebody can realize it on the real thing.

Today we had a class about western Africa drumming. More precisely, music from Senegal. I'm not sure if it changes a log across the Africa continent, though I will assume so. So basically we drummed for the whole class. The music itself is pretty interesting, but the examples are a little bit.... well, whatever.

Firefox spelling auto-check

I just re-installed firefox with my primary language being Japanese (for gaming reasons). And now whenever I'm typing something in the browser, for example what I'm doing right now, more than 95% of the words will have little red line under it indicating spelling error. It doesn't really matter, but it's kind of annoying. So I tried to look into the settings.....and surprise! The language it assumed me using is Esperanto. No other language package installed. Is this a joke? Ahaha.

Something is not right

I woke up late today, and left my room in the afternoon. Well, since I hadn't have both breakfast and lunch, why don't I go to some better places to have a meal? So I went to the ramen shop about three stops away by subway. It's 5 o'clock, and I started to eat the big bowl of noodle.

After I was done, I bought some random stuff and went back on campus. I met my friends in the student center, and apparently one of them is going to treat all of us to dinner. Well, it's free. So I tagged along. And at about 7pm I had an another large hamburger.

The strange thing is that I don't feel full even after the second meal. Normally I would be extremely full after eating the noodle. There are a lot of strange things recently. I hope I will be alright.

Senior portrait~

It's the personal portrait to go into the yearbook (a yearly picture book published by some student group). So I signed up to take the picture today, but have totally forgotten until one hour before the photo-taking. I went to their website, and find out that all the sample pictures are somewhat crazy. Well, I only got one hour to prepare. That's way too less..... I wish I could reschedule it to some other day.... But, no, not an option.

So I grab whatever I could find....unusable DVD x1. That's not quite enough. Then I went to the supermarket and bought some green onion. If you're into Japanese game/animation then you'll know what it is. I did bring a neckband with small bell, but I forgot to put it on :(. The final pose is two strands of green onion in hand, plus a DVD worn on the hair. It turned out to be okay. And I also forgot to bind my hair.

After I was done with the classes today, I checked my email and saw the reminder email:

This is a reminder of your Senior Yearbook portrait
appointment at 3:10 on October 18.

We suggest formal business attire. A number of poses will be taken for your personal portrait purchase as well as for the Yearbook.

Oops. Formal? Oh well, whatever.

Twix peanut butter flavor

I think it is a failure. First of all, the melting temperature is just toooooo low. Even in room temperature (my room), it is half-melted. Maybe it is intended to be like this (or maybe not), but it makes eating it a lot harder. I have to prevent it from falling into pieces or drop onto something. There is already some peanut butter and chocolate sticking on the cover. And then the flavor is also not very special. Too sweet in my sense. Since I'm worrying about falling onto the ground the whole time, I didn't have the chance take notice about the flavor. I like the original one better.

Internet.....

Last evening I was planning to do some work for the lab after I went back. I was running the data for the whole evening on our computing service, and I have to check whether or not the result make sense.....but there was an internet outage >___<. So I didn't see the plots until today's meeting at 9am, and I also didn't have time to make the plots look better. The color scheme didn't really work on projectors. I hope it won't happen again....

Some thoughts about science

To me, physics is a science subject that tries to parameterize the world. By parameterize, I mean "to describe" what happened in a mathematical language. Since there is limitations to what we can observe, there is never a theory that can be said as "completely true" theory. One never could know what really would happen for regions out of our reach. In this sense, there is also never a "wrong" theory (provided that it described our world to certain degree of accuracy). It's just a problem of scaling. We all know that Newtonian mechanics is not completely right in the case of extremely high velocity. Yes, in a sense the theory is not "correct". But since it is good enough to describe everyday motion, we still use it. The same idea applies to the now-developing string theory. It is possible that the ideas behind string theory are proved to be insufficient to explain "all the things" in the world, but, at least, it provides us a new way of thinking about elementary particles to a certain accuracy.

Electromagnetism homework 4 vs. 5

I added the class last week, and encountered the first homework two days later. It caught me off-guard. It was a long fight, and I spent a total of more than 10 hours on it (record-breaking!!). So this week I prepared myself some snack and were ready for a long night......but then I finished them within two hours. I felt really empty after finishing..... What should I expect in the future then?

I hate the auto-restart funcionality of windows

As title. My cellphone ran out of battery last evening, so I set up my computer as alarm. After turning the volume to the loudest, I went to sleep. Then today I slept late. The only reason is that windows did an update to fix a "serious security problem", and then automatically restarted itself. It's really annoying. What if I am running some jobs that can not be interrupted? The system do ask before shutting down, but the engineers assumed a certain time (what? 5 minutes) without response means that the computer is not in use and is safe to restart. As a consequence I missed class. Fortunately it is a class that I can make up by studying by myself. But still, I wasn't not too happy when I learned about the time.

Music composition class

It has kind of becoming a introduction class about all kinds of music.

There is one weekend where we have to listen to European music selection from different parts of the history: from Josquin des Prez to Johann Sebastian Bach to Mozart to ...., etc. Then we had a guest lecture on European medieval music, mostly the chants in churches. Last weekend we had to attend some avant-garde music concert in which instruments from Japan, China and Korea are brought together in the same music pieces. Just now we had another guest lecture, and we're talking about Indian music.

I certainly wasn't expecting all these when I first signed up or when I found out that I had to stand in an elevator for half an hour doing nothing. It's been giving me surprises. And I also remember the professor saying something about pop music comparison. Well, we'll see how it goes.

(There is also a large portion of avant-garde music. The professor even performed John Cage's 4'33'' in the first class. Then we had lots of non-traditional music. For example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8C4HL2LyWU)

Not again....

I have to start paying more attention to my wallet. Recently I have forgotten it in various places including computer stations, restrooms and classrooms. I'm very fortunate that there are enough good people around. Nothing has lost yet, but I'm afraid that I might lose something in the future. Maybe I'll put only cash in my wallet, and keep my credit cards and ID's in a more safer place, my bag for example. Then the maximum damage is some cash which is much simpler than losing ID cards. But well, I have also forgotten my bag before (in the student center, for 5 hours)....hmm.... then where is safe to me?

I started a Japanese blog

...to put everything I want to write in Japanese, especially for anime/game related posts. The names sound strange no matter what in other language. There will be a lot of grammar mistakes, I think. Well, that's not the point so don't bother too much if you see one. d: But do let me know if something is ambiguous. http://fheadblogjp.blogspot.com

Last week

I have experienced a rather dramatic change in my classes. And that has been keeping me busy for quite some time.

First there was a tragedy happened on Monday, so I had to drop my Biology class. The add date is Friday, so I think I might as well add another class, or else I'll have too few units.... Not that I cannot graduate, but I feel that I should at least take a standard workload. The tuition is expensive, and I don't want to waste it.

So I chose to add the undergraduate version of electromagnetism. It shouldn't be too hard. If I added class earlier, I would have chosen a graduate level course. But right now with the one month worth of material, I don't think I can handle it without decreasing lots of sleep.

Then, there came the problem. I added it on Wednesday, and I have to turn in the problem set on Friday. The class itself is not hard, but the "one month" is a challenge. I basically looked at the problems, realized that I didn't remember most of electromagnetism, and start to lookup things from previous lecture notes and textbooks for every problem, It took me more than 10 hours to finish the 5 problems, which is so far the longest for me. There was the suggestion to ask the professor for a extended deadline, but I just didn't want to. Well, I did finish it after all.

Things keep piling up on me, and I hardly have time for other things. It will probably get better once the graduate application is done. Also at least my GREs are done already. (Most of people I know took the GRE subject on Saturday. I hope they all did well.)

Vocaloid Hatsune Miku

Please listen to the first version before reading the text below....



It's so awesome. Kind of hard to believe that the first one is computer voice-synchronized. If you know that it is not natural human voice, it may sound a bit mechanical, but it is still surprisingly natural. Especially the latter half.

Now the original version.

Calories from Coke

(By the way, the niconico experiment failed....sigh)

I did some simple calculation on my way back....

There are 240 kcal in a bottle of coke. How many Etagen should I climb to spend all the heat? Assuming one floor is about 3 meters, the potential energy for me difference is about 0.5 kcal. So I have to climb 480 floors. Oops.

Drinking water is better.

Test embedding niconico clips

Can I play it directly from the blog?