Online again
Time Warner Cable finally came to my apartment to give me a cable modem today. I was without porn for over two weeks! I had 1418 e-mail messages waiting for me, mostly spam and bugmail.
While I was without an Internet connection in my apartment, I played Rise of Nations and read two short books: The Selfish Gene and Can I Fax a Thank-You Note?.
In Austin
Posting from work ;)
I'm in Austin now. I'm doing well except for two things: it gets very hot outside, and I might not have (fast) Internet access in my apartment for two more weeks. I'm still trying to find a roommate.
Post-graduation update
My extended family gave me some awesome graduation presents: a San Diego hiking guide, a small MP3 player to help me keep my sanity while traveling, and over $1700 in checks and gift certificates.
I'm going to move to Austin this week and start my summer job at IBM next week. To do:
- Find a hotel near my Austin apartment (Google rocks!).
- Find a way to back up my 40GB hard drive or at least the important stuff (5GB of hard-to-find music + 1GB of other stuff) before I ship my computer to Austin. I have an old computer with 6GB free but I'm not sure how I can transfer the data.
- Figure out how to ship my computer to Austin.
- Find out if it makes sense to rent a monitor instead of shipping mine there and back.
After I graduate
I will spend the summer in Austin, Texas, working in the Mozilla group at IBM.
I will start graduate school at UCSD in September.
Choosing a grad school
I have about 2 days to choose a grad school. I got into UCLA, UCSD, and UO.
When I applied to grad schools, I said that I enjoy doing research in computational complexity. That could change, since I've only had half a course on complexity (I understand P, NP and NP-completeness, and PSPACE and PSPACE-completeness). I might end up doing research in Algorithms (parallel? randomized?), Cryptography, HCI, HCI ⋂ Security, Programming Languages, or Programming Languages ⋂ Security.
I visited UO last week and had a great time. Many UO CS grad students play chess and settlers, hike, and have senses of humor I agree with. Most of them speak English. On Saturday, Peter (a Mudd alum) and James took me on a hike up Spencer's Butte, which overlooks Eugene. I feel like I'd have good friends and maybe even be social if I went to UO.
I would probably have fun doing algorithms at UO's Computational Intelligence Research Lab. Right now, they're doing some impressive stuff with... [I'm under NDA and don't know how public this information is]. But I don't know whether CIRL would fund me. And Matt's belief that P = NP scares me, even if he'll settle for merely laying the groundwork for someone else to prove that NP = coNP.
Unfortunately, nobody at UO researches Complexity. Peter went there wanting to study Complexity, but he couldn't find any profs at UO researching Complexity (and his interests changed), so now he's studying graph drawing. I want to at least have the option to study Complexity rather than Algorithms.
I've also visited UCLA and UCSD, but I only spent 6-8 hours visiting each of them. UCSD and UCLA have higher-ranked departments than UO and are closer to home in Palos Verdes. UCSD has an established Algorithms and Complexity group, while UCLA has hired several professors in the last 2 years in an attempt to build a similar group. UCLA seems to be slightly better at Algorithms and UCSD seems to be better at Complexity. Funding at UCLA seemed sketchy, but I might have misinterpreted something.
I think I'm going to go to UCSD.
Grad school visits
I visited UCSD during Spring Break. I'm going to visit UCLA tomorrow (Tuesday) and UO Thursday and Friday.
Observations and photos from trip to Bellevue
Shortly after my plane took off from Long Beach Airport, I saw an empty parking lot that perfectly demonstrated the Zollner illusion.
On the flight back, I noticed that lakes and rivers looked colorful through my polarizing sunglasses. I don't have an explanation.
Update on applications
Graduate schools
I applied to Ph.D. programs in computer science to study computational complexity. In order of US News ranking:
U Washington : REJECTED Princeton : REJECTED UC Los Angeles : ACCEPTED UC San Diego : ACCEPTED UC Irvine : In Progress Boston U : In Progress U Oregon : ACCEPTED
Admissions: 3/7
Full-time jobs
Expedia/testing : March interview IBM : In progress
Summer jobs
Google/HCI internship : In Progress
3-hour UI review of Expedia
I signed up to interview with Expedia on Monday. I figured I should look at their site for a few minutes before interviewing with them, but I ended up playing with their basic search feature for over an hour.
Should I spend my 30-minute interview pointing out how their site sucks* or trying to get a job?
The form on the front page
- "Search for flight" (for submitting the form) looks like a link, not a button. IE users are used to losing form data randomly when they click on links, so they'll spend a lot of time looking for something that looks like a button before clicking the link.
- The return date textbox is prefilled with "mm/dd/yy". Prefilling textboxes like that is usually frowned upon, in part because it makes people like me skip the textbox. But I think I understand why Expedia prefills it.
- If the return date textbox is prefilled, it should clear itself onmousedown!
- Why make it look like I have to enter a year? I'm very unlikely to book a flight more than a year in advance. And I'm still typing the year as "03" out of habit, even though it's been 2004 for a month.
- The single-digit date for February in the "Depart" textbox makes it look less like a date.
- Why can't I get a flight and a car without a hotel? I can get every other combination of flight, car, and hotel.
- I think the form should use 3 checkboxes (flight, car, hotel) rather than 7 radio buttons (each nonempty subset of {flight, car, hotel}). Using checkboxes would make the UI simpler but would require more clicking.
- "Morning, Noon, Evening, Anytime": What times does Expedia consider "morning"? More importantly, what times are "noon"?
- "Morning, Noon, Evening, Anytime": Where's the "middle of the night" option?
- The DHTML calendar does not work in Firebird.
- In the DHTML calendar, double-clicking the right button only goes forward one month. This is a bug in IE, but Expedia should work around it because it affects almost everyone who books a flight two or more months in advance.
