Mind Garten

My Life at a Glance I suppose I owe it to some people to periodically update them on what I've been doing with my life. I think it's been fairly interesting lately and hopefully you will too. I'm currently at University of Southern California in Los Angeles studying for my Ph.D in computer science. I haven't been accepted to the Ph.D program yet, but I expect it forthcoming in the next month or so. Until then, I'm just a lowly Masters student. I finished my first semester last December. Semesters here are 4 months long and you only have three per year. Fall, Spring, and Summer. I'm currently in the Spring semester which will end in May. I got all A's in my classes last semester and hope to do the same this semester. I don't really have any plans for this summer, but I'll wait and see what my situation is before making any decisions. For the first time, I'm actually starting to worry about money. My savings is finally drying ...

A Special School I can't take credit for this piece. I reproduced it from here My life ended three days after my fifteenth birthday. As often happens when a life or even the world ends another life or another world will take its place and existence will go on, and that's how it passes that there is still a person wearing the name and matching the physical description and carrying the memories of the life that was lost. But make no mistake, my life ended three days after my fifteenth birthday. That was the day I was awakened at four in the morning by two very large men who asked me politely to dress and then grabbed me and put me in handcuffs. While my parents watched passively I was dragged into a van and then to a chartered jet and then to the island of Jamaica, and made a member of a special tropical Hell. You might ask what drove my parents to have me committed to the School. I asked myself that a lot over the next three years, and I'm pretty sure I know...

Studying at 5am I woke up at 4:30am today for no particular reason. This is happening quite often lately. I think the combination of a hungry kitty in the morning and the fact that my mind is racing ever since I got back to school, conspire to allow me to sleep for pure physiological reasons only. Last night I prepared my presentation on Marcel Schoppers' 1987 paper on Universal Plans. I had a lot of fun researching this since I studied related papers and its criticism as well as talk to the author directly. Working at NASA JPL now, he was kind enough to answer my questions via email, and I obtained wonderful insights about research work in the trenches. Of course, he doesn't do research anymore, since he got fed up with it. This morning I'm reading about a theory of evolution of the brain by Michael Arbib, one of my professors teaching my Brain Theory & AI class. This class is quite interesting but also quite difficult. There's so much new terminol...

There and Back Again 7:00am - Woke up to the meowing and harassment from Bean. Pushed him off the bed a couple times and finally threw a blanket at him to make him shut up. 8:00am - Alarm went off. Immediately Bean began meowing insistently that I feed him. I got up and walked to the kitchen while the blood was rushing out of my head. Gave him a scoop, reset my alarm and went back to bed. 9:00am - Alarm went off. Reset it to 10 and fell asleep. 10:00am - Alarm went off. Reset it to 11. Tried to go to sleep. Bean began harassing me again, and I realized that I needed to go to the lab to work today. Got up. Ate cereal. Drank coffee. Listened to the radio and answered my email. 11:00am - Got in the car and drove off to Marina del Rey where the research laboratory was. 11:45am - Signed in at the desk, and took the elevator to the 8th floor. 11:50am - Took the elevator to the ground floor and signed out after realizing that it was Labor Day and no one was t...

Transitional Sunday, End of the Month, or (Last Day to Be on the National Do-Not-Call List) First things first. Remember to get your phone number on the National Do-Not-Call List to keep telemarketers from calling you at home. August 31 is the last day to do it, otherwise you'll have to wait a whole 3 months before further entries will be put into effect. The website is www.donotcall.gov . So I am now living down in Los Angeles, and going to school at University of Southern California. I have 4 classes. Brain Theory, Foundations of Artificial Intelligence, Distributed Control & Learning in AI, and Chinese 1. I can say that it's quite a load. The last one, Chinese, I'm just taking for a fun diversion to keep my time here always interesting. Maybe some day I will go and visit China and put my new skills to use. Today was a day of doing odd jobs. This morning I took out the trash and the recycling that has been accumulating on the table in my new apartme...

A Casual Korean Existence Things are going well. I'm earning some cash now teaching middle school brats English. The cool thing is that they're actually good students and I don't have to spend much time playing babysitter. It's only a 7-day job since I'm filling in for a normal teacher while he visits his sick mother. I'm actually getting more money than I thought since the dollar is real low right now. I originally forecasted a $650 take but its turning out to be a $720 take after the currency has been transfered. That should about cover my plane ticket. On saturday I went to the Korean countryside and had quite a ball. We went to see the nun temple but if you've seen one temple, you've seen them all. The highlight was just walking around and exploring through the underdeveloped area. The Korean peninsula consists of lots and lots of hills. Where the hills meet, there's usually farms and houses there. The spaces between the hil...