Qualification exam coming....

The qualification exams are offered twice a year, and new students are expected to take the first try within the first year of study.  One can officially try up to the third time without any trouble.  Normally incoming students take their first try in June just after school ended, but I am feeling lucky and decided to try it in two weeks.  Well, I'm not going to use up all three chances anyhow, why not testing the water temperature?  It's not like I'm going to go there barehanded though.  I'm trying my best to do practice problems recently.

Today, after doing a dozen problem in succession (which totalled a few hours/20 pages of answers), I felt like thowing out.  I think I need more sleep.

One thing that strikes me is that the solution is sometimes not the best way of doing it.  It is simply not intuitive and makes things unnecessarily messy.  I am fortunate that I underwent IPhO training, and have more experience in a lot of the topics.  However I can imagine a normal student struggling to understand why the solution utilized such a strange way of solving the problem.

There is still a lot to learn though.  I've found some weak points that I've been unconciously avoiding before.  Now is the time to correct them ^^".

I hope I can pass the exam in the first try.

Orientation starts, but....

Today's the start of pre-orientation.  The new students go there, have some free food, and listen to presentations.  In the afternoon there are some "games", which supposedly make us less sleepy while getting to know the environment.

This afternoon we had one little hunt in which we should group up in teams, go to a few designated spots, pick up question sheets and answer the questions.  The questions are related to the campus of course.  The three groups with highest points will get a secret prize.

So we ran around in campus, answered most questions, and turned in the answer sheet two hours later.  We weren't one of the highest three teams unfortunately.  Instead, we got the special prize for the most creative team name.  It seemed like walking under the sun for two hours was kind of empty....  We could've filled out the sheet and turned it in right away and still got the prize.  It's nevertheless a nice program.  I visited the gym and health center for the first time today for example.

Just as the new term is going to start, my battle with the boxes is in full swing.  They arrived last week, and I've been fighting with them since then.  The boxes contains stuff I accumulated over the 4 years during undergraduate time.  Most of them are usable living necessities, clothes and notebooks my parents send me, but I never got a chance to use them.  In other words, they take a lot of space, but I can't get rid of them.  (Look at the pile of stuff on the ground).  (Sigh).  Well, life will work itself out.  I'm sure I can find some good ways out.

Deco online frontier PV

I found this on the web the other day. Somebody made this promotional video, and it is very hilarious. (ps. Deco online is a free MMORPG game)

「DecoFro-ダンスPV「一発かましたれ」」のビデオ
powered by ＠niftyビデオ共有

Well, I went on to try it myself. First kill the monsters that are wandering around, but don't get too close to the big one. I would get killed before I know I was attacked. Then, switch to different clothes, and dance....

Bunny suit

Swimsuit

Another swimsuit shot. Why isn't my character dance as good as the two guys in the clip?

I wasn't paying too much attention to time, and, unfortunately, the monsters are back....


....and then I was killed. The defense point is too low :(

Javascript animation

I've been playing with js for these couple of days. It's quite interesting. Compared to flash, which I feel is kind of heavy, I like this pretty much. The only downside is that IE browser behaves different compared to others, and tuning can be a hassle. A primitive version is here with no decorations yet. I'm still trying to create a satisfactory theme.

Cool!

---

So when can we see tetris been played on Green building (at MIT)? They've been talking about this idea for years now....

Major 2nd season

I needed a break earlier this week, so I've been trying to do things to get my mind out of work. I haven't watched any other animation since I left Boston, so I tried to marathon this series. And I watched 18 episodes in a row today. It's really a nice change of pace. I feel like I can get back to work now.

"Home"sick

It's really strange. Now that I'm in San Diego, I started to miss everything back in university. Everything. It is even stronger than what I experienced four years ago when I left my hometown. Without sound, I felt like I was screaming. Yet, when I tried to dig into memories, my notorious mental lock start to function. I was bounced back from thinking, leaving only the dangling feeling in the air.

It is dark at night. A car rushed away in the street, kind of noisy.

And yet another one.

Somehow I passed the written test....

...for the driver's license. And now I can legally drive (if there's somebody with a license around). It's not easy mentally, especially since I haven't sat in the driver's seat for more than 4 years already. I didn't get used to driving in the first place four years ago anyways. It's more or less learning from scratch. I hope I won't crash into somebody....

Summer

I have a feeling that this summer will be a different one.

I come to San Diego, in part visiting my teacher, in part helping him in analyzing data. And then there are some plans going on. I almost have too many things to do, and I have to squeeze out some time for my personal stuff. As an example I'm start learning Russian. Здравствуйте, меня зовут Эфхэд. Pretty crazy, huh? I'm also not sure why I picked Russian. Then, if I still have time, I'll spend some time on Korean. I finally got past the first big barrier of learning foreign language: know how to read the words well enough so as not to discourage you from reading the text. But, well, learning both languages at the same time was the plan a week ago, but now it seemed almost impossible to do that at the same time.

Let's see how much of my plans I can carry out.

Not an end, but a start, or so I believe

I hope my sleeplessness will disappear soon, or I'll collapse.  I think the reason behind my insomnia this week is the hollow feeling that things I'm familiar with will be gone.

After spending another night feeling depressed about the fact that I'll be leaving here in 40 hours and couldn't fall asleep at all, I finally came to the same conclusion as before, when I graduated from junior high school: go out there, do something and prove your existence.  There's no help in whining about the past, but I certainly can change the future.  Let memory be just memory.  I just have to move on.

Commencement, commence, start.  Good word choice.

Tsukihime translation script

I'm again organizing/packing my things that were left behind. I didn't notice that there were more stuff in the storage room until I checked earlier today. And, among them, I found a nostalgic notebook. It was the notebook I use to translate the story of Arcueid route of Tsukihime (visual-novel type game). It was from the beginning to the point where Shiki met Ciel. I remembered its existence, but I didn't know that it was this long. About 60% of the notebook. I must have had too much time at that time....

Now it seemed a bit more reasonable to me why I passed the Japanese test.

Yahoo pipes (cont.)

Luckily, the messed up version of the feed entries I saw in the google reader was indeed a cached version of the feed when I haven't finished constructing the pipe. Now the feed looks fine. Yay! For those who want to try it out, the feed is here: http://pipes.yahoo.com/yi149657149657/allblogs. It's just for fun, so don't expect the feed to exist forever just yet.

Yahoo pipes

I'm trying to unite all my blogs into one single feed for anyone who might be interested. So I went on to try Yahoo pipes....


It looked fine. The result also turned out to be fine on the yahoo preview page. Same reason as before, I wanted to use feedburner as my final feed output. Who knows if there will be a google version in the future or that Yahoo pipes stopped functioning. However when I tried to redirect the feed to feedburner, it gave me errors. It seemed to me that the feed doesn't meet the standard strictly. Oh well. I then tried to subscribe it in google reader, but for some reason the date is completely out of order....is it cache problem? I guess I'll wait a few more days and see.

Pennies

After today's club meeting, we went to the club office to check about extra spaces that could be used to put more shelves and to check out stuff. Suddenly somebody found out that a whole box worth of pennies is missing. That's more than 50 lbs. Nothing else was missing, and this nothing else includes cash in a folder, and some hundreds of DVDs. We were really puzzled by it. There isn't even a label on the box saying that there is money in it. In cents.

But really, why do we have such large amount of pennies in our office in the first place?

Later on it turned out that our nice club president carried it to the Bank of America and later deposited it to our club's account. The poor person in the bank counted the 8350 coins. I wish I were there to see what her response was.

My stomach is going to break.

Graduation, yet once more (part 1)

So, after finishing my last final last Tuesday, other than waiting for the commencement, the only real challenge left is to pack everything in a couple of weeks, and some free time to face myself. It's a rather tedious work, especially since I've been asked to move to a small room after finals week. I feel like I'm playing Sokoban, ahaha.

Now I look back at my four years of study, academically I won't say that it's a successful one. I never faced my studies fully. The tempo is overall not fast enough, and I had no intention to zigzag with the official course progress and advance forward. Instead I started to focus on random things. And so the 48-hours-per-day mystery. The by-product turned out to be fine, but recently I started to think about what could have been different if I were to restart my undergraduate studies.

There could be no difference at all. The environment made me into who I am, and if the environment were to repeat again, I might still be doing similar things. It is because of the social difficulty in the first couple of years that I kept things to myself and started learning Japanese in the process. And now I passed JLPT level 1 easily. How sarcastic.

In the core a lot of me has remained more or less the same. Now I want to do something that could serve as a message to my friends, telling them that I'm doing fine. Just as I always did. This is the very reason why I entered the Olympia competition in science in high school. It was not because I want to prove myself of anything, but to say "hello, I'm doing great. How are you guys doing?"

Or probably a lot of differences. There are a lot of things left undone, and I wished I had time to finish them. I wish I could start doing illustration and music composition earlier. I wish I could advance more on my project of creating a high-quality RPG game. I wish I could get to know more about science research before I submerged myself into one of the labs. Things are just starting to get interesting, if only I had a bit more time. Illustration-wise speaking I'm getting better since the end of last November, when I first lifted my pencil and tried to sketch. In half a year I am confident that I could produce good enough illustrations that meet my expectations in my game.

Yeah, if only I could have more time.

Yet time flew through as if there was no friction. Graduation ceremony is coming. The outlet has been cut off, snap, and the light on TV disappeared. I looked at myself in the black screen, having no choice but to move forward.

(to be continued)

High-quality Vocaloid song

It seems like very exciting events/progress are going to happen. So first of all there is the mysterious hidden technology "Vocaloid Listener", partly developed by Yamaha, that greatly enhances the quality of Miku song:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=0OvwHhrEU98

It's hard to believe that this is computer-synthesized voice. The technology is rumored to be taking real human voice, extract the parameters, and import to vocaloid editor. Then there is somebody, who posted his work earlier today, without using the mysterious technology:

http://akita-neru.at.webry.info/200805/article_2.html
http://dtm.e-nen.info/src/up2087.mp3

It's totally tuned by hand and the quality is extremely high. There's also a sample vsq file in the webpage linked above in case somebody wants to see what it looks like. Yes, it looked feasible for human hand.

I can't wait to see what's going to happen next.

The game Go

A couple of weeks earlier I found out that I can win the hardest setting of gnugo without too much trouble, so I've been playing go intermittently since then. I switched to a stronger AI program, handtalk, whose latest version is advertised to be as strong as amateur 1d. Well, I'm trying to advance forward right now. Then I'll go online and play with other players since a lot of the online servers are not friendly to newcomers whose strength are on the low side. Another reason is that I can adjust the strength of my opponent and won't feel too crushed if I lose.

However the bad thing is that it took too much time. Although I've been pretty cautious, it just happened that most of my time this evening was eaten by watching game online. Time just flew by. I'd better start working. Really. Okay, one more game and I'm off to work.

Lost + Found

I lost my wallet (again?) yesterday. I went to pearl to shop, and on my way back I found it gone. So I went back to the shop, hoping that I left it at the cashier. Then it'll be safe, I thought. But the store was closed. Just as I was preparing for the worst, I checked my email, and, guu, I received an email saying that my wallet is at the police office. What a pleasant surprise. There are so many good people around here.

Graduate school....

For some reason I received a three-year fellowship offer, and now I'm decided to go to Caltech. The high energy experiment group is in need of manpower, but due to monetary issues, they can only hire two to three more graduate students. And judge from the open house, there are at least 6 people wanting to join the group. But now I think I'm in a good position to join the group, since I will cost them much less money than other students.

Elementary Biology

I thought that I had learned most of the material needed for elementary biology in pieces already. I'm minoring in neuroscience and I'm taking the last class needed for completion of minor. And I took the same biology class until more than halfway before. So I've been pretty laid back about the course.

Last week, there was a homework due on Friday. And I found out on Wednesday that I couldn't understand most of the names. Since when do they have this many new words? Alarmed, I started to mend the hole. The problem set itself is not a problem; the real problem is that there is an exam this coming Monday. I have to do something or I won't graduate.

Luckily it seems that this course will be on opencourseware, and they are filming every lecture we have and put them on the web. I guess you can see what happened. I took a month's worth of lectures in a couple of days. And I finished the problems without too many problems. d: Lucky~.

I'm really surprised at how fast biology is going. Even at this fundamental level (this is one of the first classes a freshman has to take), there are many new things incorporated into lectures.

Safari

Somehow there is Safari installed on my windows XP computer. I have no idea how it got here in the first place. I didn't even know that there is a windows version. So I tried it out, and it's kind of strange. I'm not used to Mac-style key configuration, but there is no way to change that (or I couldn't find it). And there's no way of preventing address list caching. Not my thing, though it looks pretty.

Bunches

I'm in a play-y mood and tried out to wear bunches. I was too lazy so I didn't try to braid my hair. After I finished adjusting, I walked to the mirror. OMG it's soooo girly. And cute. This is just not right. Maybe I could use it to surprise people :p For everyday life I'll go back to ponytail...

21: Bringing down the house

Several MIT students learned how to win in Black Jack, and went to hit Las Vegas for a good fortune. They did earn a lot, but then things started to get strange....

I bought this book at the airport as I head towards California and finished reading it during the 6 hour flight. Then in the hotel I swapped it with one of the books in the room. I hope it's fine.

The fact that it is NOT a fiction makes me proud of being in the same school. I totally believe that things about card counting in the book could in fact happen in the real world. The last part sounds a bit fictional, though it's not that unbelievable.

The author also makes winning sound very easy, while in fact it is not, or there won't be casinos. I personally think that the author focused too much on the money part. Throughout the book figures are flying around, in units of thousand dollars. It had its dramatic effect at first, but then I got numb. Yeah, it is a lot money. And?

Contrary to some of the responses written on the book back page, the story makes me don't want to gamble. I definitely don't want to be hurt by some random guy working for the casinos.


ps. The guy in the front of the poster looks a lot like Tegmark, a professor at MIT.

Caltech open house

I'm right now in Pasadena, waiting for the shuttle to the airport. I spent the past two days here in Caltech running around, learning about the exciting research. The weather is pretty nice, and it seems that it is very research-oriented here. People do mention over-the-top nerdiness, but I don't yet see a reason. I'm pretty surprised to see that the students are free to do anything they want. It certainly doesn't look hard to switch groups, even after months after first decision. And the qualifying exams don't look intimidating.

Another surprise comes from the neuroscience group in physics department. It fits me just good. There isn't many students with neuroscience background in physics department, and there aren't many groups in physics doing neuroscience research. The group is studying the connections between neurons in a way I haven't encountered before. It's definitely not the conventional medical-style neuroscience.

I still wants to go to the particle physics group though. The talk by professor Newman ignites me again with the passion towards particle physics. Maybe I really should go outside the framework of heavy ion physics and look into more basic stuff. The physics in heavy ion collisions is too obscure and I couldn't appreciate it. Definitely not at this stage, when I still have much to learn. But I think I will eventually go back and study heavy ion physics, because nobody knows what could happen there.

Hope

I was pretty much exhausted last week. There were an exam where I have to remember some medicine/toxin names (as well as what the effects are, etc.). There weren't that many, but to a physics student, it was really a lot. Shortly after that, I have to write a one-and-a-half page long essay in German about some aspects of Berlin. It would be very interesting if I had more time to research on it, but it was too precipitous. We had to grab material from a program called Berliner Sehen, which is basically a collection of interview clips with Berlin residents. Most clips are hard to understand, so I have to listen for more than once to know what they are talking about. Then, maybe the clip I just heard is irrelavent to my topic. Cool, find a new one then. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Finally I put together some one page long essay. Well, I've done my best.

What makes things worse is the work for my thesis. This week I returned to the summer schedule: work in the lab until past midnight everyday. Thursday is worst. I worked until 2:30 in the morning. Luckily, I made a lot of progress, which is what I never dreamed of. For some reason the result turned out to be too good. It's almost too good to be true. I'm one more step towards graduation!!!!

"Hosed"?

A lot of people compare undergraduate education in MIT to drinking water from firing hose. I would say it's a bit of an exaggeration. It is the students who can say so and who don't like to make others think that they're working hard? I never feel hosed in undergraduate level science courses. Maybe the humanities classes because of my shitty English, but never undergraduate science classes, especially in physics, my major field. The professors did a good job keeping pace of the class, and it's pretty easy to follow without too much effort. I'm not a bookworm; I didn't spend much time on studying.

One of the main reason might be that I've learned most of the basic stuff in high school already. I grew up in an Asian country, and I don't quite understand what American students learn in high school in terms of basic science training. The first year here is like a recap of high school material to me. Of course there are problems with every education system, but if I have a child in the future, I will want my child to be more competitive.

But, well, in terms of self-confidence or communication skill, it's another story....

Some interesting web games

There are some interesting flash games recently. First of all there's this "MyMinicity" thing. It's kind of like building your own city, and the way to expand the city is to get other people to visit your city. With the growth of population, more problems (traffic jams, unemployment, etc.) will be introduced, and one has to make things better before increasing too much population. For example there will be links that will increase industry, transportation, and so on. My city is here....http://myminicity.ad-s.org/?id=FHead. Every click counts! (one IP one action per day.) After a while, it becomes harder to balance between different clicks because it is the visitors that can decide which link to click instead of yourself.

Another interesting one is the GoCrossCampus game. The main goal of the game is conquer the whole map. When joining the game, one can choose a force to join. Normally the map is your campus, so people just join their own dorms. The game is progressed by turns. One turn is about one day, and players can place troops, put commands, etc. That's all what a person should know to play. What makes things interesting is the coordination within and between forces. There could be spies who leak out battle plans for example. The weaker ones should also ally together to fight off larger forces. The game will go on until only one army is left, and would last a couple of months or so.

Both these web games require people to go there every day to check status or do things. The advertisement benefit is sure large. I have to admit that whoever made the game is clever.

Food Fight!

This is a interesting short clip about the wars in the 20th century.

She's selected to be on a magazine cover!!!

....just kidding.  This is a fake magazine cover, generated by a website.  I didn't do any image cropping and it turned out to be at about the right place :p

There are also coins made with her on the front side:

Her visa to Germanie

And somehow she's also in the news

...and newspaper

German exam again....

I got my third German exam today. The second one was last Friday. I have no idea why the two of them are so close to each other, but it's fine since we don't have too much new vocabularies to memorize. This test is longer than the previous two, and we need to write more short essays. If all of the exam are in German, then it's not that bad. It turned out that there is one set of questions that confused me a lot: "first choose from 'werden' or 'sein' to fill in the blank, and then please translate the sentences to English." It sounds easy but it's actually pretty mind-consuming. I had to switch back and forth between German and English, and that's much harder than I thought. Of course I know what the sentences mean, but my translations become German-ish. For some Reason I capitalized all the Nouns, and I used 'ist' instead of 'is'. Luckily there are only two sentences to translate.

Illustration:



From now on I won't put too much comment on the illustrations here, and only finished illustrations will be put in this blog, as I opened another blog exclusively for illustrations (and also music compositions, but I don't have much progress on that side recently).

Daylight saving time

I went back home very late yesterday with my cell phone's battery dead. My cell phone is my primary source of knowing when, so I have no clue as of what the time really is. After I recharged the battery, I did notice that the time on the cell phone is one hour off compared to the time showing on the computer. I didn't consider the possibility of daylight saving time change though. The only thing I thought was that the backup battery in my cell phone also died, which causes the time change. The next day I woke up at exactly the same time as before without noticing that the duration of my sleep was actually shortened. Hmm. This probably means that my schedule is too irregular.

Bowling~

In spite of the vast amount of work for me to do, I was pulled away from the computer and went bowling. A couple weeks ago I also went to play. As a complete beginner, I didn't expect much for the outcome. It turned out that my high score on that day was 96. So I set my goal to be over 100 points this time.

After the first game, I got something like 60. Oops. I was probably too ambitious. The second game I come to 80-ish. I'm back :p The third game went okay until close to the end. It seems that I rushed too much and the ball keeps going in the wrong direction. I end up with 95 points, and the 10th block was [9 -]. If only I could hit the last bin.

Next time I will definitely be over 100.


Drawing~ I'm lazy with the background again. :p I've also made desktop wallpapers based on this: 800x600 1024x768 1600x1200. It's free to download.

Ocarina

I bought one when I went home last time in January, but I've been busy so I didn't really have time to play with it until yesterday. The instruction sheet says that at most 12 sounds can be played with this type of ocarina, from F3~C5 (or it can be shifted, as I don't have absolute sound). The available songs are very limited, for example there is no #C or #F. I didn't notice it when I bought it, but well, it's probably how it works.

Then I played with it for a while, trying out different songs. And I discovered that the available frequency spectrum is actually continuous! One has to cover the holes partially to get the intermediate sounds. To be honest I don't know how exactly it works even though I'm a physics major, but it seems that the frequency is dependent only on the total area that the air can come out from the ocarina. I have to think harder to check this.

Going on to today's sketch. The siting-on-tree one is kind of boring, so I started a new sketch. Now I think of it, the direction of the sword is wrong. It should be rotated 90 degrees given the hand position (if it is western fencing style). But I guess nobody cares about it :p

I must be dreaming

After discussing with my thesis advisor and admitting that the efficiency is way too low for me to do anything, I went on to try some desparate options. Then the total efficiency jumped up at least 15-fold. That means I will have more than 200 times the statistics all of a sudden. What's going on here..... Is this a dream? Now I can see my graduation coming.

Here's the progress of the new drawing.  The drawing pad is really evil.  Every time I take it out, a few hours of my time will be eaten.

Finished!

Title: 「私、飛べるよ」

I don't intend to translate the title into other language, as it is hard to find exact translation which is both correct in meaning and feeling. Feeling of words depends heavily on culture and is not just a dictionary thing.

A lot of things here are only roughly drawn, but the feather makes the drawing kind of high-quality-ish. I don't have much time to refine various parts: the wings in particular. Out of laziness I drew only the silhouette of the imaginary wing. :p But overall it went okay.

As a side note I noticed that there are some bloggers uploading two or three drawings everyday....I wonder how fast they draw. For me, each one with whole-body figure in it took me 5 hours on average. Maybe that means that I'm just too slow >____<. Just kidding. Having fun is the most important thing to me.

The power of facebook

Today, about 5 minutes after I left the neuroscience classroom I suddenly received a phone call from some guy saying that my wallet is still there in the classroom. I at first thought that it might be the TA, who happens to have access to my information. To my surprise, it was one of my classmates. Apparently they found my wallet, found out my name from the ID card, and looked up my cell phone number on facebook. Thanks guys.

To continue, this is my progress on the next drawing. She is standing on a sea bank (or some random high place) with her eyes closed, imagining that she's flying. I might add a pair of wings, depending on how good I can draw them d: . I'm moe'ed by her (Isurugi Noe from True Tears), so you'll probably see me drawing her for the next couple of days. The girl in yesterday's post is also the same person.

SAI made product

Official site: click me!

After some ten years of development (the development history dated back to 1996), it is finally made an official product. The price is set to 5,250 Yen (~50 USD): a quite affordable price which is definitely much better than the price of Adobe products. I, for example, won't pay hundred of dollars (or thausands) at once for a license of a software that in nature one needs time to get used to. Now that I'm used to SAI after using it for about three months already, I guess I'll stick with it. There are some bloggers mentioning abnormalities with the official version though: the pressure control is a bit weird for example. The expiration date of my trial version is still way ahead, so I still have time to wait and see.

QR code

(For this blog entry please decode the following QR code to read the text)



<<
Ahaha. Surprised? Actually somebody started a blog exclusively for this QR code.

http://www.qrcodeblog.com/

This is the nerdiest thing I've seen in a while. Even more than the QR code cake. The guy apparently fell in love with this QR code and created a blog which everything is encoded in QR code. Pick a decoder and import the picture and one can read the content of the blog. It's so nerdy that I can't stop laughing. Good job. It was a nice distractor.
>>

ps. The text between "<<" and ">>" are encoded in the code block. Nothing more. You can try to get a program to decode it just for fun though.

Feeling down recently.....

....that's why I draw her in the first place. If you know Japanese, you'll probably notice that her name has a meaning.

I got rejected yet again by another school. That's not the very reason though, since I already have somewhere to go. The real problem is that my thesis doesn't seem to go anywhere. Is the problem even possible? The deadline is May 9th, so I still have two full month to finish everything. Haha....

German class has become better now. There are lots of stuff to read. but I'm catching on. I guess this is the best way for me to learn a language.

Well, I guess I can still write something saying that the task is very difficult, for reason A and B and C and D. But that's kind of lame. I guess I'll do some crazy brainstorming this weekend.

By the way, the eye is kind of strange....

ps. I don't know who the creator is for this character, but it seems that there are some connections with Hatsune Miku.

Fairy of question mark

I did some search and found out that she is the "fairy of question mark" (はてな ようせい), appearing in a educational-for-first-grader animation. Her cuteness made her famous. And all this means that even with a cute character in it, I won't want to spend my time on it. Somebody will probably upload a summary version of scenes with her on Youtube or Niconico very soon.

I wonder how long this upsurge will last. What comes fast also goes fast, and she comes all of a sudden. Unlike Hatsune Miku, there isn't really too much going on except the animation (in which she's just a supporting character).

By the way, she should look like 6 or 7-age child, so in my drawing she is definitely too old. I wasn't aware of her age when I started drawing, but now I think of it, I like it this way better. I'm not a pedophile.

(ah...where are the gloves....oops)

Some mysterious character with sudden popularity...

Half-finished version:

My apologies if the title sounds confusing. I don't know what the proper word is for this situation. I would say it's popular, but in a temporal sense, not in a spatial sense. This is more confusing I think. Anyways, this character suddenly appear on lots of blogs out of nowhere (or somewhere I haven't noticed). I don't even know who she is. She is cute, so I decide to follow the trend. If you're curious, the front side can be seen here for example. (The hat is missing. I forgot things again >___<.)

Yesterday I got my first German vocabulary exam back. There are lots of small grammar mistakes scattering around. The total score is 60, and I got -9. Cool. ...Ehh? Negative? Then I checked again. There is another number, 53, written just below the -9. I'm totally confused. What could this mean? Well, whatever. Things won't change if I continue to figure this out. I have to pass this class to graduate anyways.

Finished!!!!

Before I noticed it, I invested 3 hours to draw the picture. Oops. You might find some trace of laziness in the picture, don't worry about it. I do not intend to revise it anyways.

I think I found another problem with my coloring scheme. Let's try something new next time.

Surprise!

Somehow I passed the Japanese exam. (Level 1 is the hardest level of JLPT) I didn't expect this, as you can tell my grammar sucks. (Grammar probably contributes only 5X in the 15X in reading/grammar section.) I didn't attend traditional Japanese language classes, so I have no idea what I missed.

Another surprise come from the Graduate office. So I got the fellowship offer from a second school. I didn't expect this as my GPA is only 3.3/4.0, and my GRE score isn't at any means great, only (V540+Q800+A4.5). One never knows what their standard is in choosing students. I guess I'll write more once I made my choice.

Oh Yes, and this is the updated picture. I still don't have time to draw in more detail, but you get the idea. I wish I had 48 hours per day.....

Working....

Clothes come tomorrow. Don't think too much, this is a pretty normal thing to do in drawing.

I have been working all-time again and am out of breath already. Plus I just got the rejection letter from Princeton, and I don't really want to do anything. And there's three hours of solid German reading in front of me. I didn't expect German IV to have THIS much work. I'm glad that now I can do something more meaningful (eg. practicing to draw or to compose) instead of playing games forever like in my freshman and sophomore years. One really feels empty after playing 9 hours of game in a row almost everyday.

OK, back to work.

Miku clock added

It's in the right column.

It's quite cute. If you click on her, she'll wake up and tell you the time (in Japanese). And if the note floating around to the left is clicked, a short song will be sang.

New toy :p

I just downloaded a bunch of free VSTi's, and it's quite fun to play with. So I spent some short amount of time and randomly created a short piece XD. (mp3)



And also I think I found a faster (though not necessary better) way to compose. It could, however, be just beginner's luck. We'll see in a couple of days when I try again to put together another one.

I've been trying to compose music in the past several months, but I got stuck most of the time. The image is simply not strong enough. I want my music to have "something" in it. Some special element/feeling. Writing music, to the current myself, is much more difficult than other types of creation work, like, say, drawing. Sketching outline on a canvas is much easier than "sketching" the "outline" of the music. Once a melody is written down, the feeling is more or less fixed, and it is often hard to fix it. It's like if you're drawing two straight lines with an 1 degree difference on top of each other without using a ruler. The second one will tend to stick with the first line around the overlapping region. I hope you can understand what I'm talking about.

Another problem is that the melody or feeling often goes away before I can jot it down in full. So as a consequence, the second half, or a little bit of the last part, of the music I've written down isn't quite right about the feeling. About how to write lyrics for a piece or make a piece of music to go along with some existing lyrics is yet another problem, but I don't really want to think of it now. :p I have no idea how to do that at all. For now I'll just stick with lyric-less music.

The law regarding entropy in thermodynamics

The stated law: entropy of a system will always go up. It will never go down by itself.

Isn't that strange? I wonder how many people actually questioned this. It's true empirically in systems we encounter everyday, but apparently it is wrong microscopically. Say, you have ten balls rolling in a rectangular box. Let's count the number of balls in the left half the of box. The "maximum entropy" corresponds to a count of five balls in the left side. But does that mean that there will always be five in one side? Of course not. I won't be surprised if I see only three in that half-box. It's true that the "maximum entropy" situation is statistically most likely though, but the "average entropy" (over all possible situations) is definitely not maximum. In other words, if the entropy is low, it will have a high tendency to go up; but as it approaches the average value, it fluctuates around the average.

Now I'm curious about macroscopic cases. What is the ratio of average entropy to maximum entropy? Again, in a two-side box setting. The result is as follows..... the x axis is the number of balls, and y axis the ratio:


So in machines or systems that we can see (10²⁰ or more atoms), the entropy will "always" tend to go up. The rule is not exact. It is instead a bit fuzzy: if you don't examine it in great detail it is true.

And what will happen if the entropy of the universe reaches maximum value? Good question. Probably nothing special.

---

ps. I guess I won't have time to start a "physics intuition" webpage or blog, so I'll dump them here for the time being. It's for things that are easy or trivial but sometimes hard to explicitly realize by oneself. ex. the ground surface speed from earth rotation at equator is faster than the speed of sound in air.

ps2. I really should go and do work on my thesis. What am I doing here?

Random drawing...

Life is too stressful, so we need some "distractors" :p

Text: "I want red wine, not grape juice!" On the left: "12 years old"

I still don't know how to draw hands >__<. She wears a dress (in my head) which is full of lace, and out of laziness I drew a table to block it. I plan to color it over the weekend.

(clothes: lavender; dress: black; lace: white)

Mascot girl? (Candidate #1)

It'll be kind of cool to have one (original!) for my website/blogs/etc. Something like, for example, this site, this site, etc.

Well, I have to have some candidates first....

It happened that I didn't want to do anything due to the large amount of work waiting in from of me, so I spend some time (2.5 hours?) and drew a first version of the first candidate.


The background is kind of random and coarse because I don't have time :p. Plus I don't know what to put outside of the door so I left it white :p :p. I'll make a better version of the same character later when I have more "real" time (...most likely different picture composition though, it's boring to redo similar work). Let's leave it as it is for now.

Speaking of coloring, this is my first time drawing something with back-light. I hope it looks so.... Hmm. Probably not dark enough?

Anyways. Time to go back to work.

Busy >________<; Pressure >________<

Now I can probably graduate ^^" It was close.

On the registration day, my advisor told me that I have to submit a thesis proposal on that Friday. I didn't realize that. Phew. Fine, so I setup a meeting with my thesis advisor, reported my progress, and drafted a proposal (about 1 page long, which is not difficult). After revision, I submitted it.....

Physics department: "The deadline was the add date of last semester! How can you not know that?"

Uh-oh.

The kind lady: "But I'll take it. Be more careful next time!"

Oh thanks.

Otherwise I won't be able to graduate on time ^^". But really, there's not much written on the website. It is there, but I somehow didn't think about what it meant. I suggest they put a deadline section there to prevent other student making the same mistake as me. Anyways. One obstacle cleared.

Now I only have to find some nice electrons and write my thesis up.

The German class is not as bad as I thought a week before, but it still take a lot of time. Well, it cannot be helped. Other classes are just snacks :p

End of vacation

Begin of the last semester in my university life.

The last semester will not be an easy one for me. I have to take German IV, an almost forgotten language (for me), and finish my senior thesis which I'm still not sure what the exact title will be. During the last few months the electrons turned out to be much harder to find than initially expected.

Still I want to take quantum field theory, and one more class for my neuroscience minor. Not vital for my graduation though. I'll have to see how things go.

I wonder how much time I would be able to spare for other activities, like drawing, like composing, like writing a script for my game. And also constructing my website and blogging. And some other stuff.

I'm sure for the official stuff thing will straighten itself, but sacrificing too much is undesirable.

PIAPRO / illustration update

http://piapro.jp

It's a place where people can submit their work (illustration, lyric or song) and collaborate. It's a really good idea, but currently only parody works of vocaloid characters can be uploaded. I've been feeling strange about this restriction. Then I found out that the site is part of Crypton. Interesting.

A couple of weeks ago I thought that the company doesn't really like parody works using their characters because of the Hatsune Miku game incident. (Check here: http://doubleegg.blog89.fc2.com/blog-entry-16.html (Japanese)). So that's not really the case seeing that the company actually setup a website.

Anyways, I uploaded one of my recent illustrations. I want to have more comment since I'm right in the process of changing (or trying out new) coloring style. Here's my personal page:

http://piapro.jp/FHead

Vocaloid2: (Character series 2) Kagamine Rin

Vocaloid1: Meiko

There are more in my web album, and everyone is welcomed to take a look.

Happy new year~

Yahooooo~ it's 2008~

My high school classmates and I went to New York to join the Times Square crowd. But we did a couple of things wrong... we took the 12/30 midnight bus there, and went to visit the liberty statue and Ellis Island. Then we arrived at Times Square at around 5pm. Too late already. We were 10 streets away from the center already. So we couldn't see anything (sigh) except people and people and people and people and people everywhere. Everyone seemed to be in a high mood, but we were sleepy. We wouldn't have toilet access for the next 10 hours or so, so drink was prohibited....which means no caffeine intake. It was cold also, and we hadn't had dinner.

So, sadly, we quited the main crowd and sneaked into a McDonald's nearby to regain some heat. There's no way we could get back in, so we headed towards the bus station, one avenue away from the ball drop. We can not see it from the station. Maybe it's because of this that we were able to get there in the first place. Then we waited there for another 4 to 5 hours or so. I was really worried about theft and tried to remain awake, but some of my friends just slept through their way until almost midnight.

More people were around compared to that of few hours earlier. The road block by police was also getting more complicated. Alas, we couldn't even get to the corner of the same block without risking of missing our returning bus. We welcomed 2008 just outside the bus station, and dashed towards the bus gate. Luckily we got on the 00:30 bus. Some people didn't plan this far didn't get on this bus and had to wait for another 3 hours at least. I hope you guys had a good time waiting :)

And now it was my turn to sleep through my way. I was really out of energy and had to sleep if I don't want hallucinations. Fortunately the person next to me, unlike somebody's neighbor, wasn't fat (no personal attack!), and I had enough space to lay my back. Zzzzzz. The next thing I know was that we had arrived already.

Our original plan was to stay at New York for another day and take the next 00:30 bus back to Boston. I'm glad that we went back early. My body wouldn' t last if that's the case. For one thing, what are we going to do before sunrise? I'm worried about safety. Anyways. It doesn't matter now. Back, we spent the next day sleeping and continued the one-meal-per-day schedule ^^".