Burn it Off

my self-inflicted panopticon failed.

3.31.2004

311 - Love Song

brrrr


i really do HATE when the weather's like this...i mean yeah it's not freezing...but it's right in that temperature range where the bastards don't turn on the heat in the building very high. i can close my door and shut my window and i still freeze.

i hate wearing clothes.


loud

3.30.2004

evanescence - everybody's fool

"perfect by nature"


so my life has boiled down to about 2 classes a week....on tuesday and wednesday. what's going on in the world :) ironically that means it takes me even longer to get outa' bed these days. i got up at 10am this morning to get workin' on this pset for music signal processing...ate breakfast......watched tv....WENT BACK TO BED....finally started workin' around 2pm and didn't finish one part that i definitely could've finished.

somehow i'm on top of my classes even though i show up to all my classses late...homework fresh off the printer/notebook/whatever. i dunno how i'm doing it but i better hold on for just...what...seven more weeks or something? i could probably fuck it all and do decently...but i'm not going to be going straight into a 'career' after school so i need all the good marks i can get on my resume methinks.

how does this happen? i had a teacher in high school who enjoyed giving lectures on how senioritis was a farce instead of teaching us physics. he thought if he made sense to us that senioritis was a psychological thing we wouldn't do it.

too bad i was sleeping in class then, too.

the more i think about it, the more i wish i wasn't so hellbent on achievment in high school. it's turned me into something i don't wanna be. i could've made my life a lot easier and a lot more...me....had i gone to an easier school. or so i think...maybe that would've just been less motivation than i require to do the bare minimum. did that make sense? what i mean is that my work is very tightly bound to my level of motivation. exponentially, even. possibly my best semester here was when i was taking 21 credits...one of which i still claim to be one of my hardest classes (electromagnetics)...all while i was dealing with a depressive girlfriend and a drinking problem...looking back i don't know how i did it. my course load just got easier and more interesting after that...and i haven't been able to bring myself to finish my homework since. sure, i COULD challenge myself more...but when i don't have that pressure, which i relieved myself of by taking lots of credits frosh and soph year, i just don't work. i can't sleep, then i can't wake up. i zone out. i can't concentrate...fuck.

i'm thinking i will be going back to grad school in a couple years or so....i have to get outa' school for now...but i don't think i can pursue what i'd like to with only a BSEE...

somebody poke me...


*cymbol crash*



3.28.2004

silence

muck


yeah, haven't blogged in a while...almost a week. lots on my mind lately...mainly one thing. one of those times i'm questioning my entire life before now in an attempt to make some sense of...well...now. my parents have been growing apart since their kids started leaving the house...and when i, their last kid, left the house, i actually thought it was alright. four years ago...or close to. turns out everyone was just biting their tongue 'till they couldn't bite it anymore. ritual of chüd? (know the reference?)

of course this solidifies a lot of my quelms about relationships...also throws them into chaos. what can i expect? who knows. my parents met in college...my mom followed my dad to grad school...my sister was born in oregon and they moved back home a few years later. part of me wants to say fuck it and have some fun, 'nother says to rethink my goals/tactics/(standards?)...but most of me wants to sit back and just bob in the waves, see what falls in my lap.

and the rest of me drinks a lot *shrugs*.

i need more stimulation.......


*silence*



3.22.2004

bangles - eternal flame

back.


back from the best spring break ever.

frosh year: it was freshmen year. everything's cool. even getting evicted from our beachouse
soph year: it was so fun just not to get evicted!
junior year: buncha' pussies. i just showed everyone that i'm an alcoholic when nobody wants to party with me
senior year: rawk.


i'm sure i'll sporadically (sp?) remember shit and start posting them....

of note, an unprecedented 3 kegs kicked in the course of the week and the entire supply the red & white grocery store had of guinness on st. patrick's day. we drank - A LOT...

injuries: tennis elbow (right), carpal tunnel (right wrist), pain in left shoulder from a layout, REALLY tight muscle/tendon in my right foot arch, about four sprained toes, bruised foot from getting cleated (left), my back's sore (but not too bad), a bruise above my right eye, and sore muscles all around.

didn't take a single pain killer all week...but i'll take some right NOW.


rawk.

3.11.2004

blink 182 - feeling this

donedonedonedonedonedonedonedonedonedonedone


that deserves a marquee

todo:

pack
mohawk
eat
drink
break.


david gray - please forgive me

how come


how come nobody blogs or newsgroups? wtf? i want my 10 minute study breaks, goddamnit!!!

t - 1.5 hrs. and counting 'till i get fucked by my last midterm.

then i get instantly unfucked

and unfucked

over and over

for a week and a half




bitter


3.10.2004

Stevie Ray Vaughn - Red Hau (?)

closer


'bout 2.8/4 done on my take home midterm. easier than i thought..once i got to it. i have to go to mudd for like...15 minutes to use a computer to do one of them, though...and i'm going to get my friend's textbook (ec) just in case i find something i can't find on the net (riiiight)....so i figured i should go golfing "on the way"....

i love my logic sometimes.

yay for midterms

stevie ray vaughn - life by the drop (acoustic)

so close


it's gonna be a long 20 hours or so from here on out...

finished one midterm today (surfaces & knots) that joke class....harder than i thought it would be...but most of the rest of the class was still sitting there and people were asking some DUMB muthafuckin' questions, so i'm not worried about it.

took the subway down to penn station to go to christian's workplace to pick up his balance board from him and drop off a boot disc i made for him so he can hopefully fix his busted-ass MAC. fuckin' macs *shakes head*. oh, and christian works with like...40 women in the office. i heard ONE guy's voice....and a lotta the girls were cute, too! lucky bastard...too bad he's already chained.

still on the plate, take home midterm for embedded, still only a quarter done, and an oral midterm for sound & hearing which shouldn't be too bad. basically have to pretend i'm 'teaching' one of the homework problems which she'll choose for me. aaaaalmost there.

oh, and i really have to do laundry....


blue

3.08.2004

sarah mclachlan - posession (acoustic)

fuck the marquee


i don't like that marquee anymore....and i noticed it kinda hurts to watch w/ black on white. i don't check my blog all that often since i have my homepage directed to my haloscan site which has all the comments....

mmm...very blah day. got up around noonish to run some errands, including a stupid knots pset i didn't know existed 'till eric complained about it. who gives a pset right before a midterm? bullshit. turned out to be confusing, too. not like i give two shits.

proceeded to sleep for two hours before practice...that was dumb. i was kind of hoping i'd wake up and my suite would be gone to practice..but no luck. 20 minutes to get up and get ready, and it fuckin' snowed pretty hard...enough to stick on the astrograss and clump up my cleats every thirty seconds (not even exaggerating). it's really hard to run when there's a block of ice in the arch of your shoe higher than your cleats....

good practice, though :) it was a lotta fun. ended up covering baldwin a lot for some reason and was makin' more plays on him than i thought i could. kid's FAST, but i got a few d's nonetheless. point blocked his ass, too on an attempted break. point blocked albert (total telegraph). poached a shitoad. tried to take out mike liu's ankles...it was a fun night. one'a those practices where we can have a lotta fun but people were on, so it didn't degrade into uselessness.

one thing we were concentrating on today was the 3 second stall. moreso at the beginning than at the end but we were trying to get rid of the disc within three stall counts. we didn't change the rules or anything, it was just an offensive mindset. even if it was a dump we wanted to get that shit moving and never let the D set. i fuckin' LOVE this kind of play. it's alway been kind of downplayed on uptown local...the whole setting up and walking to turned discs....i always hated that. granted, it can get messy, but the quick play w/ cuts straight from the back of the stack, march that shit up the field. that's my ideal game. 3 seconds is hard to pull off, but we did a lot of the time. it expanded later in the scrimmaging but the quick mindset remained keeping the disc moving...it rarely stopped. and when it did, it got really nasty cloggy and you'd end up threading a needle...meh.

i'm psyched for spring break. i need to get outa' here. i wanna play in shorts. i wanna layout on grass.

we're coming.



love

BEP - Where is the Love
dream, and more



i'm writing this here 'cause it's not really the dream i'm bloggin' about. in this dream i was watching myself on tape, for some reason. i wasn't doing anything very interesting. just day to day stuff, talking to people. it was at a funny angle that made me feel like it was a video surveillance camera (from above) and it was through parts of my day.

thinking about it now....it's always really intriguing for me to watch myself on video...or even look at myself in a picture. i don't know what it is about me...but i can't really 'imagine' someone's face in my mind's eye. i can get close...like....you know hair, eyes, small or big nose...but i can't get a clear picture. most amazing i can't even do that with my OWN face. it's always amusing to look at myself on a video...and moreso my movements and speech all seem a bit more foreign than they should be.

i used to wonder if i could draw myself from memory. do you think you could? i don't really think i could. i have to try someday, though. i wonder what it would look like :) i'm not the greatest drawer in the world, but i've had quite a few lessons with my mom who's drawn, painted, and done ceramics most of her life. she taught me drawing and ceramics...but i didn't pick up drawing so well. i'm decent, though. i'll find sometime to do it when i'm not so stressed....


fiddle

3.07.2004

311 - love song
vacation



so this was quite a fuckin' weekend. almost a little vacation. as seen below i was workin' on a disgusting wek until 5pm last friday....took a nap, got some grub and met christian at his place in brooklyn. we walked over to andy's place about 10-15 minutes away for his b-day party. cool people...but i didn't really get to know any of them. i didn't mind, i was havin' a good time just being a wallflower :) oh, and drunk is always good. we started off with 40's and andy had lots more beer in the place....i was well taken care of :)

so after that, christian had two bikes at andy's place (don't worry 'bout why) and there was me, christian and christian's new roomate keri who hye knew from columbia (year above him). very cool girl. so there were three of us and two bikes...a bmx and a 10-speed. i couldn't ride the ten-speed 'cause i'd only ridden dirt bikes as a kid...i wasn't comfortable with the balance of leaning forward on the handlebars. so i rode the bmx and keri tried to hitch a ride on the back of the 10er, which didn't work at all, so she jumped on the back of my bike which had pegs and it was a lot easier. i managed pretty goddam well considering i haven't ridden a bike since like highschool, the bike is made for a 4 foot 12 year old, it was raining, i had a passenger...and i'm forgetting something else...oh yeah...i was DRUNK. haha. it was fine. fun, actually.

so we rode back to christian's place and we heard some music from across the street in another loft so we decide to crash it. we walk in and some dude's askin' me for money. i tell the dude i'll come back after i get my friends (christian and keri had walked right past him..i shoulda' done the same, but he was trying to talk to me). so i go find christian and he says just don't go near the door. the dude eventually finds me and kind of starts guilt tripping me saying i'd return and christian's like, "no man, i live here, this is my boy." the guy asked him again, chrstian reaffirmed that he lives in the building and the dude smiles and says it's okay. in all my years, chrstian is probably the best muthafuckn' liar i've ever been friends with :) good form.

too bad half the time i realize he's lying it's at my expense...bastard ;)

there was this cuban band playing at that place that was really tight. we only stayed for two songs 'cause they were getting shut down, and went back to christian's place.

true to form i couldn't sleep that night (i stayed over there)....or rather...couldn't stay asleep. we got to bed sometime after four....and i woke up at 9am....*shakes head*. i forced myself back to sleep, got up at ten, did it again, got up eleven....i'd set my alarm for 11:30 'cause i was gonna meet my sis. so i roamed around for a bit reading magazines and trying not to make too much noise (his loft is WIDE open...) 'til it was time to go.

i met up with my sister outside of prospect park three subways later (L to the G to the F) and we walked across the park to get to the brooklyn botanical gardens. that was beautiful :) it was kinda dead but they had a bunch of controlled greenhouses that had a bunch of cool shit. they even had a bonsai room :) that was really neat. so vaness, brad and i spent a few hours there and then roamed over to a restaurant on flatbush and prospect that we found in time out magazine. it was called 'city lighting' and it was really fuckin' good. they played the best fucki' music, always love a place for that.

i recognized the area from when we bbq'd at coach's place a few years back and decided to try and find him. called dave who gave me blinn's number who gave me coach's number. thanks guys. coach wasn't home but i left a message. amazingly, he called just as we were finishing dinner, and even more amazingly, lived right down the road on prospect. i'll admit i did feel kinda weird calling this old dude in the middle of brooklyn to bring my sister and her girlfriend to meet my ultimate coach, but whatever, i was in the area and i like coach :) nice to see willard, too. poor guy's gettin' oooold. so we chilled at coach's place for a bit, shootin' the shit. his new girlfriend's movin' in so he built a cabint to put a bunch of stuff he had in a closet to make mroe room for her and stuff. impressive work. i was really surprised but he's like, "i was a carpenter for 12 years before i got into construction." did not know that, very cool.

left coach's at some point...maybe sometime before seven or so and caught the train back home. i was tired as FUCK from not sleeping well, walkin' a whole lot, and being completely stuffed so i took a nap when i got home, went to eric's sometime after 11, and partied 'till about 4:30am again....always fun. ended up here w/ koronets watching 'the scorpion king' w/ goose, who blessed our toilet twice before he bailed, garrett, sam, steiner, who busted two of our lightbulbs but graciously replaced them today, tao, eric, salty, max, who stayed the latest....i think that's all. it was a fun night. and a great weekend.

today consisted of lots of laziness, always a good ending to a week. i might do some job hunt type stuff later tonight...or midterm studying...or....nothing. we'll see.


cheers

3.05.2004

ambient
mother fuck.



so our lab was due at 5pm today...seems like EVERYTHING worked except one crucial step getting twot hings to talk to eachother...but hey....that's the point of the class, i guess. i think about 5 other groups were havin' problems with it...and we hit the deadline with everything working but that one link....but what's a chain with a missing link....bah.

i normally wouldn't give a shit but me and mike put in about 21 hours in on this thing this week. i have, without a doubt, spent more hours in mudd than i have slept this week. AND the goddamn thing didn't even work. this is why i never went into compE. either way...i am so dead and pissed right now i'm going to sleep, eat, and go party with christian.


red

3.03.2004

bblack eyed peas - whre is the love?
gawlf.



finally got golf goin' again today. unfortunately i'm a giant tool and arrived about twenty minutes late from an 8 hour binge in mudd (five of which was in the embedded lab). seems SO CLOSE sometimes...but we kept getting error messages...and finally we were getting error messages on code we didn't even write so we got pissed and left.

golf was fuckin' awesome, though :) so glad to get back out there. i two'd the penis with a thumber which was hot (especially after a horrible forehand pull) and i two'd jefferson in front of journalism with a monster forehand pull and a monster hammer. hot hot hot. then we went to jj's for some grub and on to south lawn for some cower. me and tao against albert goose and garrett. we killed 'em. i don't think they caught a single one of our throws but me and tao caught a bunch of theirs. so fun. i drank some rum and coke i had lying around but i wish i had time to get a fo'tee. that woulda' made mudd fade away a little more....

but NOOOO, i gotta go back tomorrow morning...then back to the lab...then the rest of the day is acis tickets and then practice at 8.

loooong long day. *yawn*



"whenever i'm alone
with you
you make me feel like
i am home again

whenever i'm alone
with you
you make me feel like
i am whole again."

-orinally the cure, here it's 311...either way it's never happened to me.



jerky


311 - Love Song (from 50 frst dates sound track...GREAT soundtrack)
attempt at writing



so i had to write an essay for my sound & hearing class (BME)....first essay i've had to write in a LONG time...i even had to install microsoft word :) sometimes i amaze even myself. either way, don't feel obligated to read it... just thought it might be interesting (4 pages, double spaced) to some of you....both the content and the fact that i'm a really shitty writer, hah. but you already knew i'm a shitty writer.

without further adieu:

*****


Directional Sensitivity

Directional Sensitivity is a process in which creatures use both mechanical and neural processes to locate the source of a sound. According to Masakazu Konishi in “Listening with Two Ears,” this process has only been thoroughly understood in Barn Owls, which Konishi discusses, and a fish that senses electric fields (often emitted by other fish of the same species). A lot is known about human hearing, but at the same time there are still steps in the process that are not understood.
The strongest sense of directional sensitivity comes from a process called “binaural fusion,” the process in which your brain processes a source signal being received differently by two ears. As best as I can figure, all animals use two ears. Having two ears works a lot like having two eyes for seeing. By seeing one object from two different angles, our brain can deduce depth by putting the two images together. The ears just receive a different kind of information – vibrations in the atmosphere instead of light waves.
I remember an interesting analogy from a physics class I had a long time ago (I don’t even remember where). If we were to try and ‘simulate’ hearing, it would be like making a large pound with two small outlets. If we were only allowed to monitor these two outlets (our “ears”), then hearing would be like throwing a single pebble in the pond and trying to figure out exactly where it hit the water by only studying the ripples in the two little outlets. Imagining this visually, it seems like an impossible task; but somehow our brain can take these seemingly lacking bits of data and, indeed, locate the source. The analogy with eyes, now, seems rather unfair because light is much more tangible (also a point that could be argued, however, but this is not the place).
The simplest algorithm the brain uses to process the information from its two ear signals is to compare time. If a sound source is directly in front of you, by basic symmetry we can tell that since the sound travels radially outwards from the source it will reach both ears at the same time. The brain will compare the two signals, see that they’re Identical, and indicate that the source is directly in front of you.
It gets more complicated when you start to move the source horizontally to different positions, though. It is a common misconception that directionality is a result of different intensities received in the two ears. Often times when an amateur is configuring a stereo system to try and “move” the source (called a phantom image), he/she will try and pan the signal left or right (I myself am guilty of having tried this). From experience and another class of mine called “Music Signal Processing” (Prof. Alexandros Eleftheriadis), I know that what happens when you do this is the sound source will “flip” from left to right when you pan it left and right instead of gradually moving from left to right as most would expect. The reason for this, I think, is that different intensities between the two ear signals do not provide enough information to locate a signal source.
A stereo speaker system is not a natural thing. No natural sound source will be identical but come from two different places. What this means is that, for example, if you have a sound source to your right, the sound will hit your right ear first, travel across your head, and then hit your left ear. The only difference in intensity will be the sound pressure lost in the short distance the sound travels the width of your head. Even with an oscilloscope, this intensity difference might be impossible to detect. Instead what the ears do, as I mentioned before, is monitor the timing of the two ear signals.
When a wave gets transmitted from the outside world to the outer ear to the middle ear and finally to the inner ear, the brain receives a train of pulses with some type of periodic pattern based on the physical wave that was received. When you compare these two patterns in the time domain, any difference would be readily apparent. Intensity isn’t really a factor anymore because no matter what intensity of a sound source, its waveform will be the same in the time domain. Therefore, the pulse train patterns the two inner ears will send to the brain will be identical, but if the sound is off center (left or right) one of the patterns will be lagging. This lag is detected in the brain and I imagine through childhood development, the brain learns what length of lag determines where to the left or right the source is in relation to our “forward” which is usually where our eyes are facing.
Unfortunately this timing difference between the two ears is only one tool the brain uses to locate a sound. It is, however, a process that is seen in almost every animal and one of the strongest indications of direction. From there directional sensitivity becomes rather animal-specific. For example, research done on barn owls by Konishi, documented in “Listening with Two Ears” indicates that another tool owls use allows them to sense directionality up and down as well.
An owl’s ears face two different directions; one slightly up and one slightly down. Through a series of tests (which are very impressive), it was found that to sense vertical direction an owl does indeed use intensity differences. I told you earlier why this doesn’t work from left to right, and in humans, it won’t work for our vertical perception, either. With owls, though, because its ears are physically facing in two different directions, a sound coming from up high will be heard much more intensely in the ear facing upwards. I imagine an analogy to humans would be to cover one ear. When a sound is up high, an owl might here it only (at the extreme) in one ear, whereas down low an owl would hear it only from the other ear. By spreading out the range of differences it becomes plausible for the brain to sense the magnitude of the differences. Again in humans, the only intensity difference would be the intensity lost in the distance from ear to ear which would be very minute.
All this does beg the question of how humans locate sound sources vertically. It is obvious that we do, because you can always tell a bird is chirping overhead, a plane is flying above you, or even when you are walking on dry leaves. I unfortunately don’t know the specific process in which this happens but to the best of my knowledge (from class discussion) I think it has something to do with our outer ear filtering out certain bands of frequencies when hit from different elevations. The contours of it would definitely do different things to sounds hitting it from different directions, but I can’t even imagine the complexity of the processing that would involve in order to extract directional data.



*gunshot*


3.02.2004

jack johnson
unplugged



i feel very dislocated from the rest of the world these days. lotsa things adding to it, as usual...maybe the onslaught of midterms is just bringing them all the the surface, i dunno. nothing seems worth it anymore. my classes are really interesting, but i don't give a shit...i'm a senior now, and i'm more comfortable being alone these days. maybe i'm just in denial about my social situation? i dunno. poker and ultimate are the only things i really enjoy outside of my suite. i play guitar with my stereo through my headphones...and i'm happy.

reminds of when i was a senior in high school....well..not really 'reminds' me...but gets me thinking about it. back then..the whole 'i'm leaving soon' mentality made me much more sociable. i went out to parties, somehow turned into the least likely alcoholic in my class, discovered lots of classmates i'd never talked to that i wish i had...and also discovered lots of classmates who'd whished they'd talked to me more. they were good times. ironically, my best friends in high school are nothing but memories now and those friends i picked up in that last year are the ones i go home for vacations and hang out with. how does that happen?

now, though, i have no motivation to meet new people. too much effort. everyone's putting together their plans for their lives in what...three months now? in high school it was different 'cause that was our home. columbia, though...when i leave i really don't think i'll be coming back for a long, long time. a new friendship i cram into these last few months will take a lot more than a common interest to last longer than those few months...so what's the point? so in the end i just hold onto the friends i have now...but somehow i feel like i'm just not moving anywhere. the whole college life has become stagnant to me. i need more sleep, i get injured more easily, i get drunk faster and i get more hangovers...time to move on. but i'm working on the transition...

wherever i go i'm bringin' my life. guitars, snowboard, discs, lawn chair, clown shoes.....maybe that's what i should be concentrating more on than looking for reasons to be depressed. am i depressed? who knows. there is one thing that could be causing that, but i'll save it for another time.


*wince*

3.01.2004

jack johnson
thunk



i don't think i've ever gotten so beaten and battered at a tournament before....my back's been getting better so i was playing a lot harder than i usually do...laying out for more and whatnot. my legs were on FIRE when i took a shower 'cause they were all scraped up. i slammed my head on the ground on one high layout d (i missed) in the endzone...got kneed in the head after pulling down a pass to me....that was one of those mind-numbing *thunks* that seems to resonate through your entire body...folllowed by a headache and a ringing in my ears (i got it right in the temple)...and the worst one was when i tried to layout around a guy to d a disc....and charlie horsed myself just about as hard as i humanly could on this guys ass. with the soft part of my thigh in his ass, i put him on the ground....stupid me finishes out the point, too. that was by far the worst one 'cause it didn't go away...i played the last...maybe four or five games across two days with this disgusting pain in my thigh. i'm pretty sure i bruised the muscle 'cause there's nothing visible on my skin.

spectacular weekend, though would've liked to beat umass (10-13), but we played well. not a whole lot more we could've done, and not a whole lot more i could've done myself. i was happy with my playing. i haven't been able to play that hard in a long, long time. and i don't actually feel all that bad today, either! thigh still hurts, my back's a LITTLE tender, but not bad at all, and my muscles feel pretty loose. yay warm weather :)

and a good sold 8 hours of sleep feels just fine.


bouncey