Heffalumps and Woozles

Its settled. I’ll be working for BAH this summer as an Intern. I am very pleased with this. Potentially more so than I think I would be with World Bank. The only downside is that I have to commute to the office, which is right next to BWI, every day. Could potentially be a pain, but I think its worth it. Not entirely sure what I will be doing with BAH, but I am starting with a research group (specifically Assurance and Resilience Team).

While messing around with this, I’ll be coming up with some ideas for research projects. Currently looking one of the winners of the semantic web challenge(2006): Foafing the Music: Bridging the semantic gap in music recommendation. Seems to touch on a lot of my interests — its probably a good starting point. Anyways, I’ll probably be making my way through a bunch of papers over the next few weeks looking for a project … so more on this as it comes up.

Well, didn’t get that World Bank job :-/.  Such is life!  I do have to admit, I really thought I had it.  I think I was way to cocky during that last interview and didn’t put as much thought into my responses as I should have.

After being that close and missing it … I’ve sorta been knocked back a few steps.  My first reaction was to try to do my own thing this summer.  The way I see it, there was a reason I didn’t get that job, and if I do my own thing, I can work to improve the things I want to improve.  I wouldn’t be constrained to projects given to me at a job.

However, I passed that by my Computer Science advisor today who said a lot of companies look for that ‘big junior year internship.’  This led me to think, unless I know what I’ll do this summer will make it onto my resume, I need to go find a real job :-P.  So, for now at least, I’m back on the job market.  I had an interview at Geico, but that wasn’t the least bit appealing.  Also considering an IBM research position in research triangle, NC …… and a business management/software development position at AT&T in Vienna.  The AT&T guy seemed particularly interested in my Econ major which could imply this could be a position of much interest to me.

Anyways, I’ve signed up for AI and Chinese next semester.  I’m trying to get into Econometrics and Natural Language Processing grad courses as well, but they require department approval which will take a little while.

Been feeling a little sick lately, so I’m gonna get to bed early tonight.

How awesome would that be? I applied a few weeks ago for a software development position for the development prospectus group at the World Bank. I made it past their ’short listing’ process and the first interview and went in for a interview in person today. I think it went well. At one point, they asked me to write the two easiest functions possible (I think to be sure I wasn’t completely faking everything) … find the area of a circle and to sum the elements of an array. I started thinking back on it, and I think I made a really stupid mistake cause I was rushing and though … oh this is ridiculously easy. I had a for loop from 0 to the len of the array, and in it just had the line (in my head at least): total = total + array[i]; But I THINK i wrote: total = array[i]; … They didn’t make any negative comment about that kinda mistake, but they might have just quietly noted it. They seemed really really nice. Before I get ahead of myself though, they were two guys, one software guy that graduated from UMD last year and another guy that seemed more econ-oriented from the university of texas I think he said. Anyways, besides that I think I did pretty well. At another point, they asked me to look at a chunk of PHP code that I felt was the kinda of code I’d write if I wanted something done fast, but wasn’t something I’d use in important stuff. I told them this. At one point they told me not to write on the printout, I took this to mean they were interviewing others for my position and were gonna show them this same thing. I guess secretly I was hoping I was the only one called in for interviews but that wasn’t very realistic I guess.

Anyways, eventually their bosses came into the meeting. So let me first point out I was at a long rectangular conference table. I was sitting on one long side, and the two originally interviewing me were on the other side. The two bosses that walked in sat on either side of me on my side of the table right next to me. So I was entirely surrounded by people interviewing me. I couldn’t tell if they were trying to figure out how I would react under stress or if they just did it for fun. I didn’t have any issue with it, but I was largely unsure how to answer their questions. I didn’t know if they wanted the econ/business answers to their questions or the technical ones.

At the end, they thanked me and seemed pretty happy to have talked with me. At least I think they were pleased with me. At one point the guy from UMD said (while looking at my resume),

Working at the World Bank, you have your own projects, whereas at places like Google and Microsoft … which I’m sure are positions you could get with your resume … you are a small part of larger projects.

For those of you that aren’t a CS major at UMD, saying that your resume is good enough to work at a place like Microsoft or Google is one of the strongest compliments a CS person can give a CS student.

In short, I walked out of the World Bank office in downtown DC feeling great and confident about my interview, but as the day went on, I got really nervous about it. They told me they would let me know if I got the job by Friday, hopefully I don’t become completely incapacitated by nervousness before then.

Fingers Crossed!

Just looking around at different blogger tools lately. If you noticed, my posts are relatively spaced out and don’t really contain much beyond a summary of the last few weeks. Right now I’m test driving a few blog softwares including Live Writer by Microsoft and flock — the social browser that sorta has the same angle as my recent firefox extension, social browsing (more on this later).

The idea is that right now — it takes a deal of work to browse to my blog and set up a post … by the time I do this, I’m no longer interested in writing about the given topic. One of these desktop clients will make it easier to compose and post my ideas etc etc.

Anyways, I’m really liking Live Writer at this point — very pretty and feature rich. Not to mention a lot of the blog writing software out there comes off as sleazy. When I say sleazy, I mean you download it thinking its free, but then they tell you its really a trial after you’ve installed the software. They sorta remind me of Gator from way back when and that whole spyware wave.

Simply put, Microsoft is a lot more trustworthy to me then all these small closed source companies out there that seem to be stealing people’s money.

Anyways, suggestions for blog software are welcome — but I’m liking Microsoft at this point.

Instead of sleeping off my cold … I’m surfing the net/ not getting better. The plan was to go skiing yesterday at wisp and leave for Boston tomorrow to see Devon with Anica. Well, I concluded I’m in no state to travel …

Anyways, been home the last 3 weeks and been loving it (minus this recent cold). Lots of get togethers such as Anica’s party in Baltimore and Elaine’s new years party that have really left me feeling all warm and fuzzy. This break I have gone snowboarding at seven springs and skiing at wisp, hiking near home at sugarloaf, and been to tons of ‘parties’ with friends. I have now seen Feast, Thank You for Smoking, and Caché not to mention all the other movies I’ve rewatched. Also started watching Ouran High School Host Club by Iris’s recommendation. I didn’t think I’d like this kinda thing, but I got to say, the first ep was amusing.

On top of all of this I have managed to work 20-40 hours a week for my lab. I’ve managed to finish a demo version of my firefox extension I mentioned earlier. Its called SocialBrowsing and we’ve just submitted a paper to CHI about it as a work-in-progress. This will be the first thing I’ve submitted to a formal publication and it feels pretty neat. The other day I was asked, “do you want your name on the author list as ‘Michael Wasser’ or is there an initial or something i should include?” Sorta reminded me of the significance of all this. The plan from now till the end of the year is to develop the extension further by adding user tracking to generate some ways of quantifying the effects of SocialBrowsing. After this we will submit a paper to UIST (ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology) detailing our study of the extension.

All and all, I’d say this has been a successful break. Finished everything I’ve set out to do, spent lots of time with high school friends, and generally feel refreshed … though not necessarily ready for school to start again. Still have about a week and a half to get past that. No real plans but I’m sure I’ll find plenty to do whenever I get over this disease and such.

Feast (2005)(FilmTrust): FilmTrust does not have additional information about this film.

Thank You for Smoking (2005)(FilmTrust): FilmTrust does not have additional information about this film.

Caché (2005)(FilmTrust): FilmTrust does not have additional information about this film.

“Ouran High School Host Club” (2006)(FilmTrust): FilmTrust does not have additional information about this film.

I am Superman

Superman 70% Robin 65% Green Lantern 60% Spider-Man 55% Iron Man 50% The Flash 50% Wonder Woman 45% Batman 45% Supergirl 40% Hulk 40% Catwoman 25%

You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

Not sure if thats a good thing or not, but at least I’m not wonder woman.

Long time since my last post, I’ve been generally busy. In some cases, far past too busy. I’ve really found myself in a ‘pickle’. I really enjoy the classes I’ve been taking; software engineering, Algorithms, Game Theory, Financial Macroeconomics, but it has really been sucking time away from doing other things.

I have had less time for going out than I think I’d prefer over the last few months, but at the same time, I am loving the problems presented in my classes. Generally I’ve concluded that I need more time … I’ve met some cool people this semester, but have not been able to get to know them as well as I would like. Part of this is probably a function of living off campus. I think people see me as less accessible? Either that or they hate me :-P. I keep telling myself I’m gonna start doing stuff with the Trail club and finally get back into camping/biking/hiking but again, I find myself with little free time.

As I mentioned earlier, I started working at Mindswap which is a semantic web lab. I guess this is sorta an example of me getting caught up in my work. I am currently working on this firefox extension that connects to social networks you’re a member of while your browsing to find data thats relevant to what you are currently looking at. For example, you see an IMDB link in someone’s webpage anywhere; the extension would put a little icon next to the link. When you roll your mouse over the icon it would expand a tool-tip and show you what the estimated rating of the movie is based off your trusted friend’s ratings from a movie social network your a member of etc etc. What’s even neater is that this may make its way into a IEEE journal on social computing in January. I’d be listed as a coauthor on the submission which would talk about a wider range of stuff — but would mention my extension.

More recently, I’ve found myself relatively stressed out, worrying about stupid stuff, stressing over school, and an array of other things going on. Close to the end though, having my birthday during exams like always, but no so bad as last year. Last year …. ugh…. i had 2 exams on my birthday and 2 the day after, one of which was at 8am. It sucked hard to say the least.

Well off to finishing up homework and a paper. Have three problem sets, two formal presentations, and two studio art projects due in the next week, ugh.

Here I am at the beach with the family. I can’t say I’ve felt this content in quite a while. Very little stress, very few sources of stress to be. It’s the end of the summer and I’m done with the internship and looking forward to school. Nothing to worry about, I love what I am doing and like the direction I am moving in. I set out to do many things this summer, some of them I have done, others I attempted, and I’ve been generally feeling really good. A few things that I wish could have developed more but probably better that they didn’t. I’ll leave that up to you as to what that means :-P.

I don’t know what will come of this year, but I do know it’ll be great. I don’t think I’ve gone into a school year ever so optimistically. I mean, some of that has to do with being single I guess. But I feel like nothing is unobtainable at this point (well almost nothing). I’ve been exchanging a few messages with a prof from last semester and from the sound of it there will be no problem with me working at his lab (www.mindswap.org) working with stuff related to the semantic web. No clue what kind of work it would be but hopefully it’ll be fun/interesting stuff as I’ll probably be working for free.

Been writing this post to music by Carla Bruni – it’s really fantastic stuff that’s different than most of the other stuff in my library. Powerful yet mellow; you guys should check her out.

WELL, I was writing a long post on how great going back to linux was as it was much more usable now then ever before — to the point of being more efficient than windows until my session CRASHED. I felt there would be just too much irony involved in rewriting my post on how great my new setup is …. so heres a blurb just to say I tried. Anyways you can check out a demo of the features I currently have on my desktop at YouTube despite my comp crashing — its worth watching — even you non-dorky people out there

So today I got a call from James around 6. He wanted to know if I wanted to play putt-putt with him *pause* yep. Well once I got passed that, it was actually a pretty good time. James, Yunis, Yin, and I went to the place over by Gaithersburg HS and basically ran through the course twice. We ended up putting money on each game so that first got 3$, second 1, 3rd gave 1 and fourth gave 3. I ended making 4 between the two taking first and second which was enough to make back the cost of paying for one round (yet playing two). I feel so dorky, but it really was a good time. There was this drunk couple in front of use that we had convinced that we only got holes in one … and that was why we were always waiting for them to finish (despite them being a couple and us being 4). Afterwards we hit up krispy kreme and got free doughnuts. I didn’t even think they still did that since last time they had the light on while I was there they didn’t give us any. I missed burgers with the family but all and all it was worth missing. At least I’ll have leftovers for the next few days to take to work with me. I would have taken pictures but James had an issue with his hair or something like that :-P. *feels content*