Life is better
- Talked to my manager, who said his first six months were painful because of not having a clear coding project to work on
- Got a clear coding project to work on
- Happy for Jason
- Miriam and I made some friends at church
- Will be moving to third floor of 41 instead of second; the view is of trees instead of parking lot.
Stuff I elided from my snippets this week
- Remembered that I don’t much like computer security work–that’s why I was going to school for a degree in physics instead of trying to get back into security
- Got angry at Jason for leaving me here to play with his cars
- Alma talked to me about looking lonely; hopefully that’ll improve in the shuffle after the move to 41
- Designed v0.2 of marginalia, what I’ve actually been spending my time on. I think the UI has improved a lot, and I got rid of most of the reliance on site-specific preprocessors. (You’d still need one if the side didn’t put ids on any of the divs or if it was plain text. I’ll provide some kind of default preprocessor thing for those cases.)
stay@google.com
I’ve accepted a job at Google in their Applied Security team. We’ll be moving at the end of March, when the quarter is over. I don’t know if my first choice of email address above will be the one I get, but I can’t imagine someone else has it. My second and third choices were quantum@google.com and functor@google.com .
Cris checked out U. Auckland’s policy on off-site students for me. They’re currently waiving international student fees for doctoral students, and I wouldn’t have to take any more classes or exams, just write a thesis. The guideline for what constitutes a thesis is apparently three publications’ worth of material, and I have that much in the queue already:
- “Most Programs Stop Quickly or Never Halt,”
- “Four perspectives on braided monoidal closed categories,” and
- “Weakly-universal machines and the algorithmic uncertainty principle.”
I’ll need to have a co-advisor, so I’m hoping John will agree to it. It would be really cool if I could get a Ph.D. while at Google. It would be cooler still if they still give me that scholarship they offered me when I graduated.
Finals finished
Complex analysis went stunningly well–I got a 95% on the midterm, far better than the guy whose notes I studied! The final was iffy up to the last few minutes when I had a couple breakthroughs (I think.)
I was dreading real analysis, though; I got a 50% on the midterm and hadn’t understood much since then. I actually survived, though. There was only one question I had no idea how to answer. I know I got a few of them right because I studied those problems before the test. I guess we’ll see if it’s good enough.
I really wish there was a good way to include math markup in blogspot. Something they do with their CSS makes MathML render wrong.
Thwoosh!
I spent yesterday morning building a water rocket with Martin for Aidan’s birthday present. It was based on a vague memory of one Dad made years ago.
I drilled a hole in a plank deep enough for an inverted 2-liter bottle to go up to the rim around the neck. (Marty sat on the board to keep it from moving.) I mounted two metal L-brackets with a slot down the center of one side on either side with a single screw in the slot. (Marty screwed them in.) I didn’t tighten the screw all the way down; the play allows the bracket to reach over the rim on the neck of the bottle and also to slide away quickly. Once the brackets are over the rim, I lift both and put shims underneath.
I also drilled a hole about 1cm wide all the way through the plank; I inserted the valve of an old bike tire and a few more layers of tire with a hole in the center. (Marty cut up the rest of the tire to “help”.) This allowed the bottle to be pressed tightly against the rubber to form a good seal. Getting the seal right was the hardest part.
I tried using a small water bottle first; the pressure got too high too quickly, so after a few abortive misfires I switched to the two-liter. There, with more room, the pressure increases much slower and maintains pressure for longer after launching. (Note to self: try some combination of 2L bottles!)
Ten pumps on the bike pump shot the thing around 30-35m high. I think Aidan will like it.
