Photograph of the Month: Reach Up to Paradise

Reach Up to Paradise

Why am I a photoblog all of a sudden? Read about it here.

Ah Paradise…I shall be with you soon. Just give me time to kick the hell out of the coming hell weeks…

There is one productivity trick that I’ve learned from my internship which I’ve continued to apply even well after I’m out of it: plan ahead not what you want to do but what you want to achieve. This has been largely responsible why the past midterm season went by me without much hassle on my part. Ever since my internship, I’ve started my weeks planning ahead what I want to achieve and then tallying myself. I try to achieve at least 70% of the goals I set weekly and I’m pretty good at it; I usually get my 70% done, until recently, that is.

But before I proceed telling you about what’s been keeping me busy this past few weeks, allow me to backtrack a little and relate an interesting event I forgot to relate and that happened all because of my birthday last month. In an age where Facebook has kindly been reminding everyone of everyone else’s birthday, I pusposedly set my account to tell no one when my birthday is. As I expected, I didn’t get much greetings on my birthday. I had maybe around 3, all coming in at the last minute of August 8, two through Facebook and one via text message. And then the next few days became quite amusing, as people learned that I celebrated my birthday on the 8th. People wrote me uber-interesting greetings, starkly personal, if I may say, even if not by Facebook standards, going well up to a week after my actual birthday. True enough, I didn’t get as much greetings than if I allowed my birthday alarm to ring but I’m pretty sure that I got the better deal by receiving messages that is not the generic “Happy Birthday Chad! <maybe insert smiley here>”.

Anyway…so, what I’ve been up to. These past few weeks, my 70%-goal-achievement productivity saw a sharp drop as I found myself alternating only between two interesting projects: my thesis and my EEE8 project. This is my second take on EEE8; I don’t think I was able to tell the blog that I failed it last year largely because it was eclipsed by more personal failures, which took center stage in my posts. Back then, I never thought I’d ever even be remotely interested in breadboards, integrated circuits, and wires. But well, here I am, thinking of how can I build a robot to automate the cleaning process of my room.

As for my thesis, I must admit that one of the many reasons I wanted to join UPD’s Computer Vision and Machine Intelligence Group (CVMIG) was because I knew that I’d probably be working on image processing, which was, back in high school my idea of the pinnacle of programming. Well I got my wish, but that is not to say that I am not having a hard time in the task set to us. For some weeks now, I’ve been contemplating over the Gabor filter and I must say that I’m still pretty far from what I hope I’ve achieved with it already.

Well, that’s all for now. Wish me luck and see you soon in Paradise, wherever or whatever that is…~Your Skymeister.

heaven

Photograph of the Month: Futsal

Want to Play

Why am I a photoblog all of a sudden? Read about it here.

And for my last PE class I took up Futsal, a.k.a, futbol de salon (not futbol sa loob), or, in plain English, indoor footbal. Incidentally, this is also my only PE which is a team sport or a ball game, my other three being Archery, Fencing, and Taekwondo, taken in that order.

Some trivia: When some people hear the word Football what comes to mind are players like this,

football_zombie
From http://images.wikia.com/plantsvszombies/images/1/1a/FOOTBALL.jpg

save that they are most likely college-age, with a muscular build, and hungers for burgers and not brains. Well people, that is American Football. America, to avoid confusion, calls that sport in which Spain prevailed in last year’s World Cup Soccer. Elsewhere it is Football and…uh…Handegg?

Because I really can’t make a ball out of that egg-shaped pork-skin, I’ll be with the rest of the world in this matter and say Spain won in the Football World Cup.

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to play Football. I remember kicking softdrink tin cans with friends way back in elementary, being that we had no Football equipment and that softdrink tin cans were just perfect in weight if not in shape. Even as relatives and teachers thought I’d be playing Basketball due to my growth spurt when I was young, I kept dreaming of green fields and goals.

My elementary school had no varsity teams. So, when I moved to a new school for high school, I really looked forward to playing a sport. But alas, the high school I moved to had varsity teams, alright, but not Football. Our space was pretty cramped, you see, that sometimes even the Basketball team had to practice half-court since the other half was being shared between two other sports (giving them a quarter-court’s share each).

And I thought I’d end up in Basketball finally, and make my teachers and relatives happy for a prediction-turned-right. But then, my high school had Taekwondo. I trained for the whole four years of my high school.

Those four years weren’t exactly the most injury-free but they were definitely character-forming. It’s thanks to Taekwondo that I developed a habit for sports and working out. It also taught me how to push-through with what I want to achieve and to give my 110% in the things I do.

Come college, I knew that I wouldn’t have enough time to practice a sport regularly. I had to stop at 2nd grade brown belt. My need for some physical action was filled in by trying out various sports (as outlined by the PEs I took) and other activities (remember rappel?).

And now, Futsal. It isn’t exactly played on green fields but hey it’s got goals and play is football-like enough.

What about you, played any sport recently? *wink*

 

Photograph(s) of the Month: Roses

Wallflower

Why am I a photoblog all of a sudden? Read about it here.

And for my first “Photograph of the Month” blog I give you roses.

They’re my mom’s. I think she acquired them around mid-month. Of course, my first instinct was to jump in and take pictures. Yay.

I know that roses—like books, butterflies, and hearts—are fragile things but I never knew that they are that delicate that it is quite a task keeping them alive. I don’t know much about gardening but my mom said something along the lines of, “I hope I can make them last”. That just gave me an idea on how fragile they can be.

Withering

Why are fragile things often beautiful? Or is it the other way around, that those which are beautiful are fragile? Roses, books, butterflies, hearts—or why I’m so sure the world is beautiful.

For next month, I guess I’ll find something moving, throw in a person or two in the frame maybe. If you head over to my DeviantArt you’ll see lot’s of flower pics in there. I find flowers that beautiful that I can’t stop myself from taking pictures when I see some interesting ones—which scares me a bit. I guess it’s every artist’s fear that he has ran out of new ideas to try, that his recurring themes are no more than reused cliche. Where do you draw the line between recurring themes and loss of fresh ideas?

But hey this post is supposed to be happy. In other news, I’m no longer doing my thesis/special problem alone. I’m with two ladies and we’re working on Porites a genus of corals. More about the problem as we progress. Yee-ha.

(According to Sir Pros, our adviser, thesis is, by definition, something you do alone. But for all intents and purposes, our special problem, usually done in pairs or in threes even in other labs, can be considered a thesis.)

‘Till next month! ~The Chad Estioco

Another Awsomazing Adventure Awaits

Hello main blog. Despite calling you my “main” blog I am aware that you are probably jealous at how kode.play hogged all my attention this past summer. It was unavoidable, being that I had to blog about my internship and that the posts created were inevitably technical in nature. But it’s over now.

I’m not sure that the posts will be back to my normal one-post-per-month quota though. I’ll be doing my thesis/special problem this year. And have I told you that, through some turn events, I’ll be doing this solo flight? (Anak ng…special problem nga) This early on, I’m taking leave that I may miss more posts.

(But wait! I got a back-up plan. In anticipation of some middle-term plan I’m hatching, I’ll be posting, instead of my usual tirade of words, a photograph of the month, taken by yours truly. That should be pretty easy for me to meet and squeeze in a schedule expected to be full eh?)

I never really planned to do my thesis solo. Maybe I did but that was only at the start of my college career; when I saw how chaotic things can get I started considering doing it with a group, a consideration I held on to until I received the email welcoming me to the research lab I applied to. My name was there, at the top, alone in it’s line, unaccompanied by those whom I contacted as group mates—a solo flight ticket. “Chad,” says Neil, a gifted artist I hang around with, “if you need a crying shoulder anytime this coming year, we’re here.”

In my renewed sense of optimism and belief in reasons reason does not know, I can’t help but feel that doing my thesis alone is a challenge especially meant for me. Back in high school, I always dreamed of the time I get to make a system on my own, large enough to make a decent dent on a CD’s 700MB worth of storage space. I don’t know how large do theses get but I’m pretty sure I’ll be exceeding the line count of the spaghetti behindGradeGrid or the 1087 lines of code behind the programming language I created for my Programming Laguages class. Well, here’s my shot at immortality, I say.

Months back, I said that my internship will probably be the longest three units of my life. Over at {kode.play();}*, I have a record of how many hours did I spend for my internship. I clocked in around 281 hours and 52 minutes in around 7 weeks. I created a timer program that will keep track of how many hours do I spend working on something, inspired by an internal tool from Azeus. I’ll be timing how much time will I spend on my thesis. Anyone wants to bet as to which will be longer, internship or thesis?

Beauty Unnoticed

Stay beautiful, it’s a new beginning ~ The Chad Estioco

*Yep, I changed the styling of kode.play, to make it more geeeky. Rawr.

P.S. On “awsomazing”: For some time now, I’ve been watching my use of the word “awesome”—everyone is using it it’s become cliche already. I’ve been considering “amazing” as a replacement as it sits well with my alliterations and communicates the same meaning. However, it doesn’t have the same bang as “awesome”. So, I’m stealing from taking a leaf out of Jason Mraz and be using “awesomazing” from now on.

Wonder how long before the internet catches up? Anyone for another bet?

Announcing an Adventure

There I told you. It’d happen again. I passed my blog entry for March but, in summary, March was a month of code and that is a probable understatement. Not only did I have to type through lines and lines and lines of code but I also had to read through heaps and heaps of readings and solve past systems and systems of equations. But it was a fun month though don’t ask me if I’d like to have another go at it.

This summer smells of code as well. Ever since I entered college I forsook my right to have summer vacations. My “vacation” will mostly be around a week after I submit the last second sem requirement and then around 2-3 weeks after I submit the last summer term requirement, depending on when next academic year’s first semester will start.

I’ve never taken a CS class on summers mainly because they aren’t always offered. But that is not to say that I haven’t coded on summers. I remember, the summer after my first year, how I tried to run through the problems at Project Euler, brushing up my Schemer skills in the process. And then just last summer, I did a lot of recreational coding.

And this summer, in what will probably be the longest 3 units of my life*, I will be taking up my internship. I’ll be sitting in front of a computer most of the time but then I don’t know how much blogging time will it afford me, that “most of the time” being company time. But nonetheless, as we are required to blog on our progress reports, you can follow my adventures at kodeplay.skytreader.net (link not working yet. I’ll set it up after I’ve posted this.).

(EDIT (4/10/2011): My blog for my internship is now set-up. All over it you’ll find territorial marks fromWordPress. This is the only public-accessible portion of my domain that I didn’t build from the ground-up. Maybe I’ll say more later.)

And—here please pardon my seeming lack of modesty—I can’t be more pleased with myself at the company which accepted me. For the next few weeks, I’ll be seen around Azeus. Everytime someone from CS hears that I got into Azeus they go like, “Wow. Halimaw lang daw natatanggap dun ah“. I’ll be starting this Monday.

(It just rained as I type this. I hear it is going to be a wet summer. And it shouldn’t surprise you that I love the rain, that I walk in the rain even when I lug my laptop on my back (my backpack is waterproof). I just realized that I may not be able to indulge in that kind of pleasure this rainy summer out of courtesy to the workplace and courtesy to my fellow commuters.)

I’m thinking of doing a redesign of my website and also a longer, probably more coherent post. But for now, I’ll indulge in the rest I’ve so wanted ever since work started piling up. It seems that posts after a month of inactivity do tend to be short. It’s a shame I don’t have a poem to share with you, as with last time.

(EDIT (4/10/2011): On hindsight, this post isn’t so short after all…)

See you soon!

*I seem to forget how the senior students** I encountered this year has warned me thoroughly about undergraduate research.

**Who have now graduated***. YAY for them!

***Well, some, at least****

****Nested footnotes!