|
dhavatar
|
read my profile
sign my guestbook
Name: David
Country: United States
State: Pennsylvania
Birthday: 8/26/1983
Gender: Male
Interests: Programming, art, designing, engineering, photography, snowboarding, rock-climbing, tennis
Expertise: Computer/Art, design, origami, crafting, photography
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
4/10/2003
|
|
| It's been a whirlwind of activities for the past week, ranging from helping friends with their art portfolio to meeting online friends to a friend's birthday. I haven't had much time for myself and for the most part, I've been running non-stop from place to place to get to appointments on time. I wonder if this is how social people are with their constant activities with friends. Although it's nice to see everyone and spend time with them, it really drains time away from myself, so it's refreshing to have a day away from everyone to do what I need to do. Currently, my mind is going toward February as I need to design some plans for that month. I have an idea for the next Mark Project, but I need to do more research to see if it's possible. However, before that, I need to run through my photos and upload them while packing for Thanksgiving.
Culture Night
The yearly show by TSA, though I feel like it gets worse every year, or at least isn't getting better. The MCs aren't that well done, the dances seem lackluster, and many of the performances seemed rushed for some reason. The Indian fusion dance was probably one of the best ones of the show and ARCC's dance was pretty good, but the rest felt off. It's also especially odd to have things pre-recorded like ASA's skit and the people on stage just move in their parts. However, maybe I've seen way too many performances and I'm a harsh on the student performers. On a random note, it seems like I'm missing photos from last year's culture night.
Mike and Sylvia were asking me about how I take photos of the performances and I mentioned that I take it on the beat. If you have a sense of rhythm and can follow the music, it's usually a good indicator of what the people are about to do, even if you don't know their choreography. Generally, I can tell when people are about to jump or do something cool as there's usually a small setup time when they prepare or formation changes that tells you something is happening, though you can still miss it (and I still miss a ton of shots). Having a dance background helps with this too.
Bloomfield with Eve
More randomness with Eve! Nothing really much other than taking photos of her around the random neighborhoods, looking for a good background or just playing around with ideas.
James's Birthday
We went to a pricey place called Casbah to celebrate James's birthday. Everyone dressed up and headed over there in different cars. The place is definitely expensive (an entree costing $35-50) and the portions are small, but very rich. The place was also extremely dark, so not a lot of photos here. Honestly, I don't like pricey places because most of the food is possible to be made by yourself, plus $50 can feed me for 2 weeks instead of one dinner. Generally, the food is really good (though you sometimes have expensive food that's bad), but I don't like spending that much on food.
I'm off to AR for Thanksgiving.
| | |
| I'm sleep deprived due to the sickness, but I'm much better than before and basically almost fully recovered. I just need to get a full night of sleep without constantly waking up coughing every half hour or so. I have several things I need to do, one of them is the massive pile of photos I need to distribute and upload for people (specifically Big Straw and ARCC). I also need to do some soldering tomorrow.
Iron Chef Competition
I was supposed to be one of the chefs for the competition last weekend, but due to my sickness and near constant coughing, I opted out since I shouldn't be handling food while coughing everywhere. The "secret" ingredient (not quite secret since the ones cooking know what it is ahead of time) this year was bell peppers. It seemed less impressive than years before as food presentation wasn't very high and there weren't many wildly unique dishes. We didn't win, but at least we made something cool. As a side note, there was a sketchy old guy who, according to my friend, goes to all free food events on campus to eat. He was constantly eyeing everyone's food, just waiting for it to be done so he could have some. He talked a lot too, which made it somewhat awkward. I hope I don't become like that, haha.
Randomness with Eve Again
I think shooting on Sundays is what we'll be doing since we've been doing it for the past week. We go to a different location around Pittsburgh and shot places where Eve noticed while at work or from walking around before. This time was by the Strip District where there was a railroad track and very little traffic. We didn't manage to spend too much time shooting, so we'll probably come back here later. The sunset was the perfect light when we were there.
Jane Lui
I'm not up-to-date with youtube musicians and artists, so I don't know much about her, but she has a nice voice. She performed at CMU yesterday and did an Q&A afterward. She's really friendly and one of those who sings and creates music because she enjoys it, never thinking about anything else beyond just performing. I like supporting indie artists since you get to know them better plus I enjoy their efforts and what they do and they personalize it with their signature and writing. I also recorded some clips, including a full song, which I'll upload to youtube once it finishes processing on my computer.
Busy busy, just as I'm recovering.
| | |
| My health has been failing me for the past week. I felt it coming Wednesday night, so I slept a bit early, and by Thursday morning, I was dizzy and had a bad headache. It was hard enough to stand, and walking just made my head pound even more. Lying down made the headache worse, so it was hard to sleep. If I did manage to sleep and everything felt fine, the moment I tried to get up, the dizziness and headache would be worse than ever. I slept through most of the day, and I recovered fairly well enough to go back to work Friday. The next day, my throat was in pain and felt swollen. Anything I drank or ate felt like thumbtacks going down my throat. I bought some painkillers and cough drops to try to lessen the pain, which helped enough for me to sleep. Sunday, the pain was still there, but not as bad as before, but now I was coughing a lot, to the point where my stomach was hurting. I was well enough to take photos at the Iron Chef competition, but after that, it just got worse.
Today, my cough was bad enough that I stayed at home again, though I really don't want to keep using up vacation days, so I worked at home (yay for programming). Cough drops weren't helping me any more, and the constant coughing made it hard to work. I still managed to do some work, though not as much as I would like. There's a backlog of photos and videos on my computer now along with with hours of missing code for work. It's been a long time since I've been sick, so I guess my time was up for that, and I'm hit with something far worse than I've had before. I'm usually not sick for more than 2 days, so being sick for 5 days is tiring and annoying. At least this didn't happen during holidays or important events (like this weekend's Culture Night).
Hopefully, I'm at least good enough to go to work tomorrow. If not, this is more serious than I think. Until then, more tea + honey for me.
| | |
| It's weird. Even though this isn't my project, I'm trying extremely hard to make it work. A friend of mine needed help to make electronics for her project since she had to design this scarf involving motors and wires. She doesn't know anything about putting together circuits and programming microchips, and it seems like there's no one else on campus (at least her engineering friends) willing to help her, so I decided to give it a go. Besides, I have a lot of the supplies and the chips with me. I actually like their design course. It's interesting since it's not just about drawing ideas on paper and making them pretty, but they have to actually build their idea, and many of them, once they build it with real materials, become something very usable, like wooden salad spoons, tables, and shelves.
I've been spending a majority of my time at home tinkering with electronics again and relearning the electrical engineering I've forgotten over the past 7 years. I encountered several problems with the chip due to custom Fourier Transform libraries and realizing I had missing parts in my circuit design, and although this doesn't effect me, I've been working late into the nights trying to make this work. I guess I always try the hardest when the project doesn't involve just me. If the project is for myself, I don't really care if I let myself down since I can pick it up again, but if I fail someone else's deadline, then I would hate myself for not being to do what I told them I could. I hate giving people broken projects, so here I am running Makefiles, importing libraries, and wiring this small board to handle FFT on any audio. FFTs are reminding me of all the things I can do with photos as well. I need to open up my book on Fourier Optics and read through those again.
ARCC Dumpling Night
There was the usual rush of people in the beginning to get dumplings, so the place was crowded, but they ran out of meat this year, so halfway through, most of the people disappeared while the board members were getting more meat for the dumplings. I haven't seen a lot of my friends for awhile, so it was nice to see them and also meet some of the new board members.
At Robin/Mike/Dave Apartment
 It's Buckbeak!  They have way too many computers in this house (mine's in the middle). Buckbeak is also there.  Band Hero playing.
I hung out with the three of them for quite a bit over the weekend. Saturday was all night playing through Band Hero, the pop version of Rock Band. The game has some bad interface designs and doesn't play as well as Rock Band, but it was still enjoyable. They really like singing Taylor Swift songs. Sunday was helping to copy edit as well as eating their massive pot of congee that they made.
Walnut Street
I met up with Eve briefly to go shooting again and though I was going to go with her the next day, I was too tired and couldn't join her. It's fun hanging out with her.
I've been so busy with projects now, but I'm enjoying it. I have too many ideas to execute right now. One idea is to make an RF transmitter/receiver for my camera since Eve wants a wireless remote, but doesn't like the fact that you have to stand in front of the camera with an IR remote. Besides, I think it would be fun to make my own RF trigger.
| | |
| Daylight saving time, which means it turns to night at 5pm here and it feels like I'm getting off of work at 10pm. It's the usual bus ride to work and back while listening to Japanese audio tapes. That reminds me. I need to print some of the lessons so I can practice reading the language since my listening is starting to fail since I don't know how the word looks like, and if I don't know what the word is, I can't repeat it or know what to listen for. Also, the audio is already beyond what I can translate through one listen, so I need to go back to the beginning and re-read everything. I've listened to over 150 hours of audio now and still going. I should ask Eve and Mark for help later so I can start talking to them in Japanese.
Mount Washington
 The city at night with a bit of hazy weather.
A random call from Eve at night meant we would be going to Mount Washington before she left for a trip home for the weekend. I've always been curious where I should go to take photos there, and I found out that they conveniently have a touristy overlook with no fence blocking the view for photos. It was located in front of this high class hotel place as people in business suit and a lot of money to throw around were walking back and forth. I think I'll have to go back here when it snows for some more photos. I also took a full scale panoramic of the area that I'll print up at some point.
Halloween
 Space Invader!  A creature of the night (or perhaps dusk) with her tongs.  My friend got Redundant Chicken and a Whisky Tango OMGPonies drink.
There's way too many parties on this day, none that I'm really interested in going since almost all involve loud music and alcohol, and I don't know most people in those events. Instead, I went over to Robin/Mike/Dave's place and hung out. They were carving their pumpkin and after making our space invader, we went back in and basically played Beatles Rockband and Rockband 2 for the night with a dinner break in the middle. I haven't seen them for awhile, so it's nice to see familiar faces.
| | |
|
