Since it is almost the last day of the year, I suppose it is time to take a look back and see what has happened.

My research has progressed, but not very quickly. I missed several conference deadlines, and I’m still trying to get a paper done. However, I’m quite close!

My advisor retired in February. Not much changed until recently, when he announced he was not sure about funding those of us left in the lab next year. This spurred some panic, but we have time to figure it out. I’m thinking of taking an adjunct teaching position somewhere.

Inspired by _why’s potion language, I started working on my own little programming language called Brat. It’s been my best project, keeping me busy pretty much all year. I’m always running into or thinking of new things to do with it. Writing your own language forces you to learn a lot of things. Not just about parsers and compilers, but nearly everything, since any libraries will have to be written (or at least wrapped up) by yourself.

My parents came and visited around my birthday. That was pretty fun, although I now have a better list of things to do if they come visit again.

I was considerably absent last school year. Accordingly, this fall I made a resolution to be more involved, especially with the CSGSC. So far, I’ve been successful with this.

I also had an interesting programming experience wrapping up gdbm using FFI, making it usable from JRuby and other Ruby VMs. It was my first time using FFI, writing a library for JRuby, and packaging up something to be used as a gem. Quite a learning experience, but one I really enjoyed. Hopefully, it will eventually get included in JRuby itself.

I started a couple little websites: the Fledgling Languages List and a Neko Tutorial.

I picked up a T-Mobile myTouch, thinking I would get into Android programming. Hasn’t happened yet, but I’m still hoping to get going on it. I understand it’s pretty straightforward once you get the dev environment all set up, I just haven’t gotten past that part yet.

I lived through Michael Jackson’s death and Los Angeles’ frenzy over it. He was taken to the UCLA hospital, so I got to see some of it first hand.

The summer roadtrip I had hoped to take didn’t work out, although my girlfriend and I did get to go to Ohio for a little family reunion. We just flew instead of driving.

I was able to see Zao play a concert in a tiny little place in the middle of nowhere.

Despite having completed the WQE two years ago, I just now filled out the paperwork to get my Masters’s. Now it only takes 3-4 months to get my diploma.

Now I just have to get in gear for the new year!

After nearly three years of using the T-Mobile Dash, I was finally seduced into getting a new phone. Let me say upfront that I am no Microsoft/Windows fan, but once I got a good ROM with the latest Windows Mobile, the phone was really good. There was really nothing wrong with my Dash, the only real issue was me getting a little bit tired of EDGE speeds. But Android sounded pretty appealing, as did the potential of writing my own apps (and possibly making a little bit of money from them (also, this ).

Packaging

I have no idea why, but they shipped the myTouch in a really nice hard case (never to be used again) with everything packed neatly in foam. Pretty fancy. It came with a two-piece charger (wall plugin + USB cable), earphones, earphone adapter (more on that later), a nice little bag for the phone, a screen protector, and a 4GB microSD card (installed).

Unfortunately, it was quite light on instructions, and I had to go online to figure out how to open the battery cover. (I wasn’t going to start randomly pushing and pulling things on a brand-new phone.) The battery was charged, as usual.

Updating Services

For some reason, I was expecting the T-Mobile website to detect my new phone. I thought it did that before. With it still thinking I had the Dash, the site (wisely?) did not offer the myTouch data plans. Once I manually set my phone, it came up and I signed up for the $25/month plan.

Using the Phone

The onscreen keyboard takes some getting used to. However, after several hours of messing with the phone, I realized it expects you to use your thumbs, not fingertips. I would rather use my finger, personally, but it responds much better to “fatter” touches. Scrolling also takes some practice. For one thing, I’m used to down being down and up being up, although I understand the abstraction of “throwing” the screen. It’s also a little tricky to scroll instead of clicking on things. I assume in time I’ll get the hang of it, though. Oh, and sweaty fingers don’t work at all.

One other thing about the fingers: I was holding the phone landscape-style between the forefinger and thumb on my right hand, and touching the screen with my right pointer finger (probably behavior from playing the DS.) The problem with that is the volume key then directly underneath my thumb. Switching to thumbs-mode (like playing a NES, I guess) “fixes” this.

Another thing I kept confusing was the “disconnect” (red phone) key locking the phone. I am used to that being the “close application” or “cancel” button. But I got over that pretty quickly.

Besides basic dialing/browsing, the initial setup on the phone makes it kind of difficult to find anything. Settings are buried quite deep and I’m not sure they are organized as best as they could be.

Strangely, I often feel lost when using applications on the phone. Most apps don’t have “Okay” or any kind of confirmation buttons, you just use the ”<-” key. It’s hard to tell where you are or what you are expected to do.

Features

I started missing some things immediately. First, being able to quickly call a contact. On the Dash, I had it down to two keypresses. Second, I’m used to being able to see unread email counts right upfront, even when the phone is locked.

For the first issue, I found that “AnyCut” (free from the Market) will allow you to put a single-press shortcut on the home screen to call a contact. Problem solved.

For the email issue, I did not really find a solution. If you are an expert at writing email clients, here’s your opportunity. Search for “android email client” and you will see huge numbers of complaints. I’m using “K-9 Mail” now, which is a fork of the default client, but it’s still not as convenient or snappy as the Windows Mobile client (which was nothing special). K-9 still uses the “notifications” mechanism to tell you about unread emails, which is workable, but I would really prefer some kind of widget deal.

To combat the buried settings, I installed an app called “Toggle Settings” and dropped it on the home screen. Works for me. That’s how I found out the GPS was turned off.

Applications

Anyhow, now for the stuff that worked. The “voice search” is pretty cool and works well, although I don’t see myself using it. Google Maps is as good as you would expect, and that thing they showed in the G1 commercials with the street view actually works, too. Google SkyView is awesome. Of course, I had to get it during one of the rare cloudy days here, so I couldn’t try it outside.

The Android Market is decent. I hear it’s better in 1.6, but my phone hasn’t updated yet. Going through popular apps is alright, and I like the way you can immediately see ratings and comments from people. If you are just browsing, you can sort by category and then popularity or date. Unfortunately, though, if you just do a search you cannot sort the results at all (unless I missed something).

“Locale” is an application I’ve wanted forever. You can make all kinds of phone settings change according to your calendar, dates/times, location, or who is calling. You can set up all kinds of different things, and it’s really useful. No more embarrassing phone sounds in the middle of silent rooms!

The YouTube app works. Since I mostly use YouTube to lookup/listen to specific songs, I can see this being useful. I assume the video quality is a function of both the device and the uploaded video, so I am reserving my opinion of that until I fiddle with it more.

I also installed “Power Widget,” which simply displays the percentage of your battery left. The battery icon at the top of the screen is definitely misleading (right now shows full for 86%).

The calendar it came with is decent. My only complaint is that, again, the Dash would show upcoming appointments on the home screen, which was pretty nice. Perhaps there is an app somewhere for that, I haven’t looked yet.

I tried using one of the “home replacement” apps, but I could tell it slowed everything down, so I got rid of it pretty quickly. Like one blog I read, I think using the native one is going to provide the best performance/power usage for now.

Leftovers

I promised to get back to the earphone adapter, and then I forgot. Basically, it’s really short (like 3 inches), putting the microphone close to the phone and far from your mouth. I tried out the earphone/microphone deal from the Dash and it worked just fine. On the other hand, the adapter lets you use whatever headphones you want.

Anyhow, that’s most of what I’ve explored so far on the phone. I’ve come to the conclusion that I would probably not pay $199 for the phone, because somehow that sounds like a lot more than $149. But at $149, it’s pretty slick, and I imagine it will continue to improve as the Market expands and Android becomes better.

Soon I will beginning my fourth year of graduate school. The thought of that makes me a bit nervous. With only a single paper published and the summer rapidly slipping away, I am a bit apprehensive about my progress. While I do have a good idea of my research area and am at least getting a bit of stuff down for it, I worry that I will be slow in getting stuff done, and therefore not have time to do something I can be proud of. My hope, truly, is to be able to do something that matters. Otherwise, what is the point?

I have recently seen a couple videos which have gotten me a little more excited about things, though. The first was this interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson. He talks a considerable amount about how he has managed to get to where he is now (well-known astrophysicist). The other video is this one of Leonard Kleinrock (“Father of the Internet”) giving a talk entitled “My Life and My Work.” Really interesting and inspiring, in my opinion. (You can download it from here like I had to, since it kept stopping and restarting on me.)

I really wish to do “big stuff,” something that will matter. But it seems most of the people around me just want to graduate, get their degree, and get out of here. Of course, so do I, but I would like to be leaving while having accomplished something of importance, even if it is just a little bit of importance.

Okay. This is a serious post.

I am a white guy. I self-identify as one. Of course, I doubt I am completely white (I am not even sure what that means, really), but I look like I am. This means I am pretty much the worst person to talk about race and ethnicity and skin color and whatever, because I guess white guys have done enough talking about that and they mostly suck at it.

Alright, that first paragraph came out a little weird. Let me instead begin with a story. The “world” in which I live is pretty white. I know that is the case because I would notice if it weren’t. I noticed the other day when my girlfriend and I went to an area we don’t go to very often and I noticed a lot of people around were black. I say “black” the way I say I am “white,” to indicate that their skin or my skin is what is mostly accepted as being one or the other.

So it occurred to me, as I noticed that there were a lot of black people around, that I really wish I didn’t notice that. Today my girlfriend and I went to a restaurant and I believe there was one other white person there, the rest were Asian. I wish I didn’t know that. I don’t want to care. I don’t want my girlfriend (she isn’t white) to notice that most of the people around are white. I don’t want to notice that a lot of the people around where I live are Hispanic.

What do I mean by that? I mean I wish I lived somewhere where that was normal. Yes, it is true that I am getting better. I am actually amazingly glad that my girlfriend has a different culture from my own. It has given me (I hope) a much better perspective on things, especially “race” (not sure what that is, really). But the fact is that I immediately notice when I am surrounded by people who do not look like me. And I begin to wonder if that is what other people feel like, too. Is that how my girlfriend feels most of the time? (I asked, she said it was.)

But what is a white guy to do about it? Perhaps I am too self-conscious, but doesn’t everything white people do seem to come off as either pretentious (“I am so much better than you, so I am going to help you”) or like a wannabe (like, I wannabe a gangsta). Maybe it comes off other negative ways, too. But sincerity…I do not know how to do that. I mean, I know how to be sincere. I am sincere. But I do not know how to show that. And I know I am immediately critical of others trying to do the same. What is wrong with me?

When are we all going to be able to just laugh at all this? At how unsophisticated our treatment of race and ethnicity and culture really is today? I really hope it is soon.

As if I don’t have enough of a useless online presence, I have succumbed and joined Twitter.

I even added a little thing over on the sidebar to show my updates. Nifty.

This is weird. Every time I try to type gosu, my fingers type gosub. Especially weird since it has probably been a decade since I did anything in BASIC.

Apparently, BASIC really does mutilate the mind.

I’ve released a new version of kams (0.2.0).

Today is the first day of the new quarter, but I don’t have class and I’m sick. So I’m staying at home. Yay.

I’ve been so busy I have hardly had time to think. All these classes, homework, projects, conferences in Hawaii, missed midterms, and super-secret work all sort of collided. And next week is Thanksgiving, which, like many holidays, is becoming merely another speedbump in my route to getting stuff done.

Also, I’m number one on the list (for now).

Updating my address made my premium increase by $4.00. :(

I was doing so well. Plenty of updates. Then, like everything else, it fell apart. But now that I am standing here waiting for the bus I have some time to write something.

I received a jury summons for this week but I haven’t had to go yet. Apparently I am just on call until they have a new case that requires some jurors. This means I have to call in every evening to see if they want me for the next day. Kind of annoying.

I only have two classes, which only meet twice per week, but I have already missed one (due to the leak in the lab) and am now trying to rush to it again today because I had to drop off my rent check (office opens at 9am) and narrowly missed catching an earlier bus. It is always sad to stand on the other side of the road and watch your bus drive away, hopelessly separated by a stream of cars.

Now the next bus is late and I’m phone bloggin’ again.

Update: Bus was 20 minutes late. They come every 15 minutes. I need to seriously start trying to catch the earlier one.

Yesterday we spent the whole day at the fair.

I suppose it might be a good idea to provide some updates about what has been going on.

First of all, I’ve moved into a much nicer apartment, about half a mile from where I lived before. It’s a little one bedroom place with a tiny balcony, a real kitchen, and room enough to actually walk around. It’s also closer to the bus stop, which (with the increased cost of parking at school) ought to encourage me to take it a lot more often.

I spent the first half of the summer doing experiments and finishing up the paper for WiCon. Originally the notification date was the 15th, but it looks like it was pushed back to tomorrow. I’m a little nervous about it, because if it is accepted it’s a very nice step forward. If it isn’t, I have to look at it again and resubmit it somewhere else.

The second half of the summer was spent looking for a new apartment and moving into it. I didn’t travel anywhere except to Fremont to see Debbie’s family for the fourth of July.

As for school, I am hoping to finish my required courses this quarter. One day I will fill out my paperwork so I can officially have my master’s, too. I just hate getting stuff signed.

For more frequent updates, check out my other blog thing. I’ve been updating it pretty much daily.

I am totally phone blogging on the bus. Maybe I shouldn’t cancel my web access after all. I feel like one of those cool kids who are always typing on their little cell phones.

I almost missed the bus. It’s the last one, too. I was busy programming away and lost track of time. But I’m on it now and blogging from my phone. Sweet.

Maybe one day when I get a chance I’ll write up how to do the proxy stuff with the phone so you can all be cool kids, too.

A while ago I started adding some of my books to this LibraryThing after deciding the Facebook application I was using was lame.

Anyway, you can see a part of my pile of books right here, though you should be aware that it is heavily biased towards recent purchases and science fiction. I haven’t really gotten to any of my non-fiction books (they tend to be heavier and harder to throw around for some reason.)

LibraryThing allows you to catalog up to 200 books for free, so if I am to add all of my books I will need to pay the (relatively small) fee for a lifetime membership. But I am waiting to see if it is really all that useful for me.