Meta Stats
Currently Serving: All Numbers
Last Update Time: 6:14 PM

Poly Stats
Polytechs Still Available: 6 suites
Polytechs Taken (today only): 22
Rate of Polytechs/lottery number: 1 per 29.5
Estimated Exhaustion: 827

Other Stats:
Stackwycks Available: 3 suites
RAHPs Available: 0
New: 20 female doubles
Colonie D: 13 singles
Colonie C: 30 singles
Colonie B: 15 singles
Colonie A: 8 singles
Nugent: 0
Davison: 0
Warren: 1 double
Sharp: 0
E-Complex: 2 of various sizes
North: 10 of various sizes
BARH: 12 of various sizes
Quad: 21, mostly singles

Our Stats:
Successful numbers: #122 chose Poly 304, #225 chose Poly 310, #231 chose Poly 316
Also, Lara is living in Poly 111, and the Crock 3 girls are living in Poly 319.

Floor Plan of Polytech:

Working on my theme, having fun with the CSS. Broken stuff is abound.

Ok, so, there were three things we need to work out before sunday:
1. 12th Roommate
2. Do we go as a group, or do Victor and co. go first?
3. Roommates for each room.

Overview of Discussion:

1. I suggested not filling the 12th slot and hoping no one fills it, as there is a glut of available rooms on campus (perhaps 150 open extra rooms), and it seems unlikely that someone would join a suite with 3 people. The group agreed with my sentiment.

2. Options are as follows. A: Victor goes at 12:00, Orian and Jinzhen go at 1:30. We risk getting split up, either among different halls (very bad), or different floors (still bad), but this guarantees Victor and his 3 roommates gets in Polytech. Option B: Everyone goes at 1:30. We get to strategize as a group to figure out our backup plan should Poly be full. If Poly is not full, we get to choose our 3 rooms to be as close as possible together. Option C: Victor goes at 12:00, but doesn’t necessarily get his room immediately. Victor stays in Sage until 1:30, but if he feels that he wants to secure a Polytech room for himself and his Roommates, he can butt in at any time and get his room. General consensus was that option B is best for the group, but option C is a good compromise. Victor initially favored option A to avoid “wasting” his number, however I believe he now accepts option C.

3. No roommate groupings were discussed. General thought right now is that roommate selection doesn’t really matter, as if we all get into Polytech, we’ll be able to swap as much as we want once the school year starts. However, should we not end up all in Polytech, or should the group be split, inter-hall roommate swaps are not allowed. We didn’t discuss this, however, I do believe we should take another look at this before Sunday.

On the news front, I brought several items to the table:

1. After talking with one of the Reslife directors, I now believe our chances are much better. The director stated that there hasn’t been much interest in Polytech, and he was very, and I mean very excited that a group of 11 of us were signing up. I asked about how lotterys have gone in the past, and he explained that singles always go really fast. Since there are 226 singles on campus next year, and our numbers are low 200s, we’re looking pretty good.

2. He also mentioned that the Polytech dining plan has received an adjustment. The plan now costs $3200 for 200 meals and $800 bonus bucks. This makes the plan much more competitive when compared to other plans. See the appropriate table below.

3. On a last note, I intend on showing up at Sage at 10:00, and either live-blogging, twittering, or doing something else cool so that others can keep up to date on the lottery. Graphs and graphics are abound!

Table 1: Everyone’s Numbers. The Perfect Distribution shows the numbers we would’ve gotten if our random assortment went according to math. The next column shows the +/- of our numbers from the perfect numbers. Red column means we did statistically worse, green columns mean we beat the average.

Table 2: All of the available rooms on campus. The top section showcases the apartment style housing options. Only completely empty rooms/suites are counted in this table. There are many rooms in Sharp, Stackwyck, and RAHPs that are partially filled with 2 or 3 people. Also included is the number of available singles and doubles/triples. Again, there are some doubles/triples that are only partially full with 1 person. Again, these aren’t included. As can be seen, there are 788 completely open rooms. There are probably 100-150 more rooms than this. Since there are 767 people in the lottery, there will be a lot of empty rooms.

Table 3: Meal Plans and their value. These numbers assume that you eat twice a day on weekdays. To view specific meal plan details (hours of availability), check out The Hospitality Services website.

I was more-or-less dependent on Vitamin Water Energy for the entirety of my first semester at RPI. As the second semester began, however, Energy’s guarana-derived caffeine began having less and less of an effect on me. This was not good for productivity!

Luckily, the folks at Glaceau, Coca-Cola, and Truvia have come up with a new solution!

I first discovered Vitamin Water 10 when flying home for spring break from Albany. Vitamin Water 10 is “naturally” sweetened with Truvia, a stevia based product derived from some exotic South/Central American plant. The result is amazing! Energy 10 has a much stronger flavor than the old Energy. It tastes like it has 10x more sugar. This Truvia stuff is pretty good. Not only does it taste better, but each serving is reduced to 10 calories from 50.

The Truvia sweetened Vitamin Water seems to have an even stronger kick than the old fructose based stuff. Once again, I’m able to stay up for hours on end, creating awkward sleep cycles.

Thanks to Glaceau, Coca-Cola, and Truvia for enabling my bad sleeping habits!

This blog has been sporting Obama ’08 logos in the header since January 25th 2008, when my favorite buddy Kucinich dropped out. Smaller Biden text was added on August 23rd, when he was announced as the VP candidate.

Given that the election occurred on November 2nd, and Obama was inaugurated in January, it’s well passed time to revert to the old, non-political header. The Obama header is being preserved, however, for 2012 purposes.

Within the last two days, I’ve noticed a salvo of Scott Murphy ads appearing on just about every web page I visit. If you’re not from the Capitol region, Scott Murphy is the democratic candidate for New York’s 20th congressional seat. He’s running against Jim Tedisco for the seat vacated by Kirsten Gillibrand when she was selected to become Hillary Clinton’s successor in the senate. The special election takes place today (March 31st).

Murphy appears to have spent a small fortune on these google ads. I literally see them everywhere. I usually don’t pay attention to ads, and there’s usually enough variation in the ads I look at. But Google seems to be targeting this ads to Capitol region IPs rather extensively; as literally one out of every two Google ads I see is from Scott Murphy. Jalopnik, ScoreHero, Ten-Tenths, VirtualR, YouTube… It’s really astounding. I wasn’t even aware the Google Ads API allowed for targeting by region like this.

This form of localized online advertising will probably become the norm in elections to come. It’s kind of interesting that its all starting with this special election near my college home. Rather ironically, however, I’d like to point out that RPI doesn’t actually sit in New York’s 20th, meaning Google’s geo-location algorithm is either a little off, or intentionally broad (so that it encompasses work places whose employees may live in the 20th but work in the 21st).

Blog Movements
I spent most of Saturday Morning moving things between my two blogs. My favorite part about blogging is reading old entries, and this was a wonderful excuse to do so. Some highlights of merged posts for me include coming out in high school, telling someone via the internet, a random picture, coming out to my parents, and why I’m gay. All posts from my old blog are tagged with the x-posted category.

Reslife Tour
After working on some homework Saturday morning, it was time for a tour of all the upperclassmen housing options RPI has to offer. First up was Warren hall: identical in shape to my current dorm, yet with a completely different configuration inside. Rooms are quite a bit larger than my current double, and they are split in half with a privacy barrier. Each room also has its own bathroom. Warren also apparently has a reputation for gamers, anime fans, and sci-fan fans. Supposedly it’s one of the more social dorms. If I were looking for a double, Warren would probably be on top of my list.

After Warren was Nugent. Nugent features the Ground Zero music club in its basement. As such, its home to a lot of musicians. Nugent had a similar room setup to Nugent (doubles with privacy wall), but the building and its interior look a lot older, 70s style. After Nugent was Sharp. From what I’ve heard, Sharp is one of the hardest halls to get in to, due to a high rate of squatting and high demand. Sharp has the most desirable setup for our group: 6 bedrooms, a bathroom, and a common area per suite! It was also recently renovated.

After finishing the on-campus portion, it was time for the far-from-campus portion. This required an approximatley 20 minute walk down Burdett avenue to the Colonie Apartments. Colonie has three different setups. We got to see Colonie B, which features large (330 sq ft) singles divided into a sleeping room and a living area. Apart from their distance from campus, these looked like highly desirable singles. After Colonie we walked up the hill to the Stackwyck apartments. Each of the 5 buildings contains 12 suite style apartments with 4 bedrooms. I was impressed with the size of the living area, however the size of the individual bedrooms was rather small. I also believe these are rather highly squatted, in fact one entire building is being squatted by a sorority. These are our backup plan if our Polytech aspirations fall through. More on that later.

The tour concluded with a brief look at the RAHPs. While the housing style is similar to Stackwyck, the buildings are not. These are double story units, with each suite occupying two floors. The ground foor features a common area and kitchen, and the second floor has 4 singles. These felt really small, and I’ve only heard bad things about them. Our last resort.

Formula 1
After sleeping and eating, it was time for the opening race of the Formula 1 season, the Australian Grand Prix! The race started off with a bang! Barrichello’s extremely slow start resulted in a clusterfuck as the field approached the first corner. Barrichello, Webber, Kovalainen, and Sutil were damaged. All continued but Kovalainen. Button ran away with it from the poll. There was much quabbling behind him. I’ve never seen a non-wet race so up-in-the-air. Mid-race, Nakajima crashed (FIRE HIM ALREADY). Safety car. Massa ran 3rd most of the race before something died. Raikkonen spun off into a wall, but continued until something else died. With 3 laps to go, the fucking moron Kubica tried to pass Vettel on the outside of a right-left corner. While he was alongside Vettel, he left Vettel nowhere to go. The resulting collision damage all sorts of bodywork and suspension. They both attempted to continue, but both spun out again. This we terminal for Kubica. Vettel continued under the safety car with a completely broken left front, wheel dragging along the ground, until it came to a halt a lap and a half later. The race ended under safety car, with Barrichello taking second thanks to Raikkonen, Massa, Vettel, and Kubica’s fail. Brawn 1-2 on their debut…

CounterStrike
Jeff, Ryan, and I played CounterStrike for the first time this year early Sunday morning. We played on a pub server, some 24/7 de_dust2. Twas good fun. I went rougly 1.1:1, using almost exclusively the FAMAS as CT and Dualies as T.

Rock Band
Sunday evening I played guitar a bit by myself. I tested out some of the newer DLC that I hadn’t played on Guitar before, and filled in some gaps in scores from RB1 songs I’d never played in RB2. Nothing too hard, nice and relaxing.

Hall Band
At some point, I decided that a longer headphone cable would give me more mobility about the room. I attached a couple cables together, and quickly I was able to play guitar from the hall way, and even in Joe’s room! When Peter returned and saw the nonsense, he decided to join in. A couple 3.5mm to RCA adapters and some RCA lesbians later, we had a cable that stretched down the entire length of our hallway. However, since the screen was in my room, the headphone long cable proved pointless. Besides, the wireless on the guitar couldn’t reach anyway. 4 USB extender cables daisy-chained together allowed the wireless receiver to be placed in the hall way. This didn’t solve the screen problem, however. No matter, I can play songs by ear no problem! The song: Blitzkrieg Bop, which mostly consists of GY chords intersperesed with some YB and YO. Unfortunately, I failed when the song did some unexpected stuff with some RB chords…

Of course, I didn’t intend to give up! A small crowd was going, and we discussed methods to get the screen into the hall. Mirrors? No one could find one. What about a couple of zoomed in video cameras? We only had one. What about the video camera connected to a laptop? So crazy, it might just work! And it did. With ~600ms of video lag. Unfortunatley, Rock Band only allows calibration of 300ms of lag, leaving the other 300 ms to screw with us. Oh well, it was worth a shot. Once camera and laptop were positioned properly, I attempted to avenge my fail on Blitzkrieg Bop. And I did! With a paltry 3 stars 88% notes hit! 300ms of video lag is a bit much for anyone! Hungry for more, I attempted to complete That’s What You Get, however that ended badly about 80% of the way through the song. Hoping to prove that it was really hard, I offered my guitar to Kevin. Kevin accepted the challenge, but not before I decided to bring the drums out in the hallway as well!

Now, there were two of us, struggling with 300ms of lag. Since we didn’t have a headphone splitter, I turned up my speakers. This, however, introduced a bunch of audio lag, as I sound travels at 1 ms per foot, the game was callibrated for headphones, and we were ~50 feet away from my speakers around a corner. Thus, our venture on Maps went poorly. I failed on drums at about 30% the first time. Unfazed, I adjusted for the perceived audio lag, and we made it much further: 55%. A song with less drum notes would’ve probably helped things. Due to the advent of quiet hours, and complaints from the RA, we packed everything up, and most of us went to Fathers. Peter took some pictures of the setup, which I’ll link when they become available.

Campus Housing Lottery
Upon return from Fathers, the hall was in an uproar. Lottery numbers had been posted a bit early, and everyone was checking them. Quickly, a whiteboard with everyones names and numbers was produced. Things didn’t look good; our top 3 were #122, #225, and #231 (out of 767). After several more visits from the RA, we moved headquarters to a vacant study room. The mood was fererent. I haven’t seen so much action and excitement of out Crock 3 before. I began spreadsheeting away. Turns out that while our first three numbers were much higher than a statistical average, the remaining 8 numbers fared far better than statistics and probability would predict. Unfortunately, it’s only the top 3 that really matter for us. More spreadsheeting produced the number of occupants of each of the Suite style housing options: Sharp, Polytech, Stackwyck, and RAHP. Estimates of the current number of squatters were produced (from my ass), resulting in the approximate number of open suites available. More spreadshetting, more voodoo math, and more estimates resulted in an approximate total number of rooms available on campus of all varieties. From this, I produced a breakdown of what would happen next Monday, on the room choosing day. The last Polytech apartment would be chosen by number 258. Since our top 3 numbers were below this, I declared our chance of getting 3 polytechs to be “workable”.

Now that a bit of our concern had diminished, we turned to the Roommate problem. 11 people to be split between 3 rooms. First problem: we needed a 12th. No one could think of anyone right away. People will be asked throughout the week if they’d like to join in our coop. Then, the actual roommate choosing. I rigged up a little graphical tool to drag-and-drop people into rooms in Fireworks. Initial configurations were selected by the room “captains”; those with the lowest numbers. Swaps and adjustments were made. People’s futures were converted into pixels and molested by the cursor. I was rather unsatisified with the result, but nothing was declared anywhere near final. The brouhaha wound down, and people we to bed. Afterward, I printed “Create your own housing setup” forms to gather more input from the denizens of Crockett 3.

We’ll see how it goes. I’m quite excited about next year, and the opportunity to live together once again. The thought of Polytech still excites me. Hopefully it’ll become a reality.

Last night, I called Ian. The premise was that I was asking him about housing next year, but the reality was that I just wanted to talk to him.

I started off the conversation with the typical “how have you been” stuff, which elicited nothing more than a fine. So, I launched into my pitch about next year: we’re planning on getting 3 apartments with 4 bedrooms each; trouble is there’s only 11 of us: would you be able to join us? While this was a perfectly legitimate question, I was also asking for more personal reasons: when would I get to see him again? Unfortunately, his answer was negative. He’s unable to return to campus until Spring term 2010 (roughly 9 months from now, which as Orian put it is the equivalent of a pregnancy). Bad on both levels: we don’t have the roommate we need, and I don’t have the Ian I want. At this point, I was finished with my legitimate pitch, and was about to go deeper. “I really miss you” was on the tip of my tongue, but before I could articulate it, Ian said something like “well, thanks for letting me know, was nice talking to you.” It no longer seemed appropriate to have a deeper conversation. I told him to take care, said bye, and hung up.

Dammit, that’s not at all what I had in mind.

But my mind is running its imagination again. What happens when Ian does return? My imagination says he’ll come live/sleep in our apartments; in the common area, or maybe even my room. Seems great to me. I keep thinking of activities and things I want to do, but I’d be uncomfortable doing alone. Like I’ve said before, I really need a sidekick, a partner-in-crime.

In school news, I had my 2nd CompOrg test yesterday. It was mostly on digital logic, and it felt good. I got my first CompOrg test back. I was expecting around 90%, and I received an 85%. That’s adequate. I also received my second Calc II test back. I was expecting a 40% to a 50%. I got an 84%. Sweet, no complaints there! I also took a Calc quiz, which went swimmingly. Things are suddenly looking way up in Calc II.

Upon completion of said quiz, I went to sleep. It was approximately 2:00 PM, as I had stayed up the whole night not studying for CompOrg. I awoke from my slumber at 8:30ish. Damn, Commons and Sage had closed. I dawdled around before heading to the study room for another weekend StarCraft party. I failed pretty hard at StarCraft, losing three times to Will and Ryan. I also broke a set of headphones in anger over one of the losses. A diagram, because I can.

I had decided to canon up, as I figured Will and Ryan were going to be little shits with their Vultures and Spider Mines, and I intended on teching to air once my canon defense was established. I failed to notice that the hill to my west provided easy access to my base. In frustration, I threw my headphones: breaking them.

F1 News!
2:00 AM was time for F1 Qualifying! Its the first race of the year, and I was pumped! Tons of rule changes over the season made qualifying anyone’s game. However, I was most unsatisfied with the result. Brawn GP 1 and 2?? REALLY? McLaren 14th and 15th??? Raikkonen 9th? FUCK. I was pleased with Vettel’s performance, however. Toyota’s time were disqualified, and Hamilton changed a gearbox, so amusingly Sutil will start 16th. New this year, F1 is posting the weights of each car, which indicates how much fuel they have on board. Ferrari, McLaren, and BMW are lighter than Brawn! Imagine that… Should be a good race tomorrow morning–as long as Brawn doesn’t run away with it.

I’m now running version 2.7.1! Woohoo!

While the site looks the same, the admin pages are quite different.

EDIT: The Database update appears to have messed up all apostrophes and some other elements of punctuation in my previous posts… grumble…

Editor’s Note: All broken punctuation should be fixed!

Since its inception cuttlefishtech.com has remained more of an impersonal space, a place to talk about my interests, to share wacky stuff I’ve done, and to regurgitate internet links.

Apart from cuttlefishtech.com, I’ve been blogging away on more personal matters anonymously on another site. Recently, I’ve decided that it may not be entirely necessary to keep that site anonymous. Most of it is fit for the general public, and I don’t mind my name being attached to it. It was original intended for me as an escape, a place to share feelings I hadn’t yet made public. However, as I have made said feelings public, it no longer seems necessary to hide in anonymity.

I’ve also been inspired by the content of some of my peers’ blogs, Brian Michalski and Marc Ebuna.

I’m going to investigate merging articles from this other site onto this blog. I think I can “go back in time” and fix dates to make everything fit a normal timeline.

Additionally, I hope to once again rekindle my blogging spirit and post more frequent updates. If it’s anything like the past couple rekindlings, it’ll result in a spurt of posts for a week or so, then months of silence. I’ll attempt to avoid that.

Things I’m crossposting will be tagged with the category “X-Posted” and almost certainly “Personal“.

Editor’s Note: I just finished going through and cross-posting everything. Roughly 40 articles (from the 80 or so on that blog) were carried over. Some censoring took place. Check the X-Posted category.