A few years ago, the dentist mentioned that I might have to get my wisdom teeth removed sometime in the future. So when I went to India two years ago, I was taken to the dentist. It’s a lot cheaper there, of course. The old guy almost went into a coma. My dad asked him to see if he could extract my teeth, but  to his professional horror, he found no signs of my teeth even emerging from their slumber.

I went to get my teeth examined at the beginning of the summer and my dentist voiced his opinion. My teeth were trolling me. The bottom two were almost horizontal, somewhat like battering rams waiting to break down the enamel of my molars. The top two looked benign, but they would supposedly graze against my gums and cause problems later. A friend of mine is having trouble with a similar prophecy about the grazing coming to fruition.

I had an initial checkup a few weeks ago and originally had the surgery scheduled for that Friday. However, it conflicted with Intern Day at my internship. No way I was going to miss that. I rescheduled for two weeks later.

They prescribe a three types of medicine, including a voluntary-use painkiller, and some non-Listerine mouth wash. I had to start the regimen the night before. I think I missed taking a pill for reducing anxiety or something. No biggie though. I was excited about the surgery.

They laid me on one of those long chairs and IVed me some electrolytes. Then, they switched to the anesthetic. I wondered how long it would take for it to act. That’s the last thing I remember. Next thing, I’m in the recovery room, dazed and confused. I felt a certain puffiness in my mouth but couldn’t feel anything. The nurse kept asking me if I needed to stay for a few more minutes. When I finally felt the courtesy to leave, I walked to the car. I was helped by the nurse, of course. Falling down and breaking my teeth would be counterproductive. The whole procedure took a little more than an hour. I had no clue what happened during that time. Others say they were awake while their teeth were being pulled out. That would be one of the weirdest hours of your life.

I came home and lay on the bed for four hours. Every half an hour, I changed the gauze that was stuck in the raw sockets. For the first hour or two, I couldn’t feel anything in my mouth. Then the pain rose and fell like a perverse sine wave. Blood was just waiting to gush out. I finally got fed up with gauze, went downstairs, and played video games for the rest of the night. I surely deserved it.

I ate soft stuff like bananas for the next day or two. Then, I started eating regular food. I wasn’t obeying the diet restrictions strictly. Even after a week, it is still sore. Chewing with my molars has become more tolerable. I’d say I’ll be back to normal in a few weeks.

I wouldn’t recommend the experience, to be honest. There is a lot of pain and blood. I would have thought the bleeding would have been less with modern medicine. At least my gums will thank me.

I’ve been keeping a diary since the first day of 2006. I don’t quite remember what urged me to do so, but I can guess it must be something along the lines of wanting to preserve the events of my life. You look back into the past and see a fog. You do remember some events, but they are faded images in a haze. Keeping a diary is a way to put down a shadow of each day’s experience for future reflection.

I find it difficult to fully capture a day in an entry.  I often forget what exactly I did at a certain time during the day. I’m often too tired to want to write lengthy, detailed entries when I’m about to go to sleep so many of my entries don’t fully reflect my thoughts at the moment.

My diary is mostly a chronology. I write down what I did that day, with some pithy remarks expressing my opinion of them. For a while, I wrote as if the whole world was one day going to read my entries. Eventually, I started writing more personal things; I certainly wouldn’t want someone reading it now. Still, most entries are unremarkable. Once in a while, I go on an introspective tirade, usually after a significant event. I usually don’t pay attention to writing in complete sentences. I just put down what comes to my mind.

Until a year ago, I wrote on physical diaries. The shapes varied: I had a small fat one, a decently sized one, and a long thin one. The first two diaries had sections for each date of the year. This is a bad idea. You waste space when you write a short entry and are cramped for space when you have something long to put down. The third diary I had was essentially a hardbound notebook. I could take as much or as little space as I needed. I ended up keeping that diary past its one year, actually up until July of the next year.

Last July, I got a laptop for college and decided to move my entries to the digital world. It has been almost exactly one year since I’ve started writing in a Word file named Diary.docx. Every day, I just append the date, the entry itself, and the time at which I’ve finished writing. (I’ve put down the time of completion for several years. One day I’d like to compile them to see my sleep trends over time. A digital diary makes this easier, of course.) A digital diary makes is simple to search for when you started interacting with a certain person or to go back to a certain entry. Just make sure to back up the file.

Over the course of the past 365 days, I’ve written 60,251 words spanning 86 pages, single-spaced. That’s an average of just 165 words an entry. That’s probably because there were several weeks last semester when I neglected the endeavor. I’ve gone only a few long stretches without keeping up, the biggest one being a summer trip to India. It would have been great to keep those memories, but it was just hard to write when traveling. Each missed day makes it harder to write following entries.

I admit, it was hard to keep the habit in the beginning. You feel like you lose some freedom – the freedom to fall on the bed whenever you feel like it. But you gain a record of your past. It helps you hold on to your memories.

Each TED video can be distilled into a central insight. This video gave me the idea that you don’t have to be fully vegetarian or fully omnivorous. The speaker in the video, Graham Hill, suggests that we can be vegetarian part of the time: on the weekdays to be specific. I decided to try it out when I got to college. I’ve been wanting to have a healthier diet for a while, but I didn’t really have much choice in high school. Now, when people get to college, it usually goes the other way: they gain the freshman fifteen. I wanted to do the opposite: become healthier than ever. (A side note: studies show that freshmen usually gain no more than three or four pounds.)

Why exactly did I want to do this? At home, I didn’t eat meat very often. However, I knew that I’d have access to it all day, everyday in the college cafeterias. Eating grilled, fried, or baked meat every meal is not as healthy as eating it at a more moderate level; this fact is common knowledge. Reducing meat intake by 5/7ths means that you reduce your the bad stuff that comes along with it by that much. You even (indirectly) reduce your contribution to environmental problems caused by the production of meat.

And why am I not going full vegetarian? Because I don’t want to. I do enjoy the occasional plate of hot chicken wings and Chicken 65. Plus, meat is a great source of essential proteins. I don’t want to have to chug down bean cocktails.

Weekday Veg has a nice ring to it. But, I didn’t want wait until the weekend. In my version, I am allowed to eat meat on Wednesdays and Saturdays. This spreads the carnivorous gorging evenly throughout the week. So, I’m following the Five Day Veg plan.

I also added some exceptions. Eggs are always allowed. They offer a daily source of protein. And I love scrambled eggs. A lot. Fish is always allowed because it is good for you. In practice, I dislike fish, so I never use this exception. Eating meat is allowed if you’re eating out with friends. I’d like to be able to eat anything I want if I’m chillin’ with my peeps. If I have to spend more to eat outside, I’d like to eat whatever I please. You can move the meals around if I like. If there’s something especially nice on Monday, you can make that the meat day, as long as you skip Wednesday. Finally, if you really feel like it, do whatever you want.

Now, these exceptions sound like they defeat the purpose of the plan. But they don’t. The idea is to consume less meat. After a few weeks on the plan, I defaulted to picking vegetarian options for all of my meals. I had to remind myself that I was allowed to eat whatever I wanted on meat days. Even then, I picked the vegetarian option much of the time. The idea is to make it attractive for you to go through with the plan, not to get a certification.

For some, using exceptions might be the rule. You might take advantage of them too much. It all depends on who you are, of course. But, for me this works. I’d say I eat a lot less meat that I would have. And that was what I was trying to achieve.

Make your own plan. The key is to make it fit your desires. You might want to start with a Meatless Monday, and then add on a Tuesday, and so forth. I’d be interested in hearing if/how you implemented your own part-time veg plan. Comment away!

My first reaction was that this prank must have been some kind of sensation that I hadn’t heard about. After all, I can’t be the only one experiencing this, right? I was completely wrong. Later that day, the joker mastermind confessed. Apparently, I was the sole victim. I was not the original victim, however. He had sent a text to about 35 friends, telling them to send me “Friday” texts and to pass it on. One zealous helper sent the text to 37 of his friends, telling them to prank me and continue the process.

Now, this raises some interesting questions. It would be really cool to have the data of who sent the text to whom and who decided to prank me. We could then overlay that data with their social proximity to me to determine the likelihood of someone passing the message on or sending the message to me. We could further subdivide all of that data with regard to age, gender, and the like. But, I’d say it would be hard to obtain the data without actually contacting everyone who was involved. Doable, but not as simple as scraping a website, for example.

Of course, there’s one question remaining. How do I get back at them? I decided to write Pradbot.

Pradbot is an email spambot that sends spam to people via text via email-SMS gateways. It spams people so I don’t have to. I had an email-sender program from a while ago. It was quite simple, using the JavaMail library to connect to an SMTP server, authenticating, constructing, and sending the message.  All I had to do was figure out how to send text messages via email gateways, which is also a simple process.

Almost every carrier has an email that you can send to that will forward the message to the phone number. That email is the SMS gateway. You just need to append the number to the front of the email. (“15554443333@txt.att.net” to send to an AT&T number, for example.) Wikipedia conveniently has a list of these gateways. And since there is no easy way of determining a phone number’s carrier, I decided to send to the gateways of all four major carriers (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint).

I just put in a list of many of the numbers that had messaged me and let the bot loose. It used one of my new Pradbot gmail addresses to send the email. I knew from the beginning that this bot could only do limited damage though. SMS gateways limit the number of messages you can send. My bot, with the express intention of sending as many texts as possible, got to that limit pretty quickly. I used other email accounts, but they hit the limits pretty quickly too.

I think I sent around a dozen texts to the people that the texts actually got to. Ironically, the chief prankster didn’t receive any. AT&T handles their gateways differently from others, I suspect. Here’s the Eclipse project if you want to run it yourself.

At the end of the day, it was fun being the victim. Although they ate up about a third of my month’s supply of texts, it was good fun. Though my bot didn’t devastate their inboxes, some people did get annoyed. I also broke several TOS’s, but hey, it was April Fool’s Day. Remember kids, don’t go all techno-prankster on CS majors. Mildly annoying things might happen to you.

Two days ago, I decided to install ArchLinux. I was attracted by its minimalist design. All I wanted was a terminal, so that I could build it up however I liked. Plus, it’d be useful to be able to use Linux natively. Currently, I use Putty to connect to the CS Linux machines to do homework. Its fine and all, but I can’t do as much as I like that way. For example, its nigh impossible to work on GUI applications this way. Plus, Arch is what the cool kids use.

The Arch installation process is a far cry from Ubuntu’s. It’s not pretty and involves a lot of low-level wrangling with partitions and configuration files. First off, I had to search for an hour online to find the correct kernel flags that allowed me to even start the installation process. Setting up the clock was the only simple part about the process. Then came the partition selection step. Since I didn’t know the Linux names for the partitions on my system, I had to use the  Ubuntu LiveCD’s gparted utility to find out. I also used it to create a partition for the Linux install. It was much easier using the LiveCD’s  lovely colorful interface than having to endure the process of doing it on the command line.

Then, I had to configure the mount points. I had never heard of a mount point in my life. At this point, I probably should have called it quits, but I kept going. I did as Lifehacker’s guide suggested and set the swap and root partitions. Choosing and installing the packages was a breeze after I discovered how to select the ones I wanted. Then, I had to go through a bunch of config files and make minor changes. No biggie.

The final part was installing Grub, which lets you choose which OS to boot into, and that failed spectacularly. By spectacular, I mean without any cause and an inexplicable error message. I tried for another hour or two to find the golden solution on the internet to no avail. Arch had conquered me for I was not worthy.

At this point, I could still boot into Windows as if Arch didn’t even exist on the drive. Since GRUB wasn’t installed, it went straight into booting Windows.

Since I was defeated by Arch, I decided to install Ubuntu. I wanted to run some Linux distro. Besides, installing Ubuntu would partially redeem me, I thought. The installation process was a million times simpler than Arch’s for sure. It took care of most of the details for me.

But alas, I fire up the system and I can’t get into Windows! It gave me a blue screen. Isn’t it ironic that the supposedly beginner-friendly distro was the one to mangle my computer? Ubuntu, on the other hand ran fine and dandy. I proceeded to spent the next day feeling depressed at the situation.

The first thing that came to my mind was recovering it with the Windows 7 installation disk. I go through the maneuvers and try to do startup repair, but it doesn’t recognize that I have Windows installed on the disk. What? Ludicrous! Unfortunate…

I used Ubuntu to mount my Windows partition and was glad to see that everything was there. If worse came to worse, I could just backup my files and nuke the drive, or so I thought. It became obvious that it was a problem with booting up. All of the Windows files were fine as they hadn’t been modified in any way. The bootup information was messed up. Somehow.

I just cared about making Windows boot up again at this point. Linux was nice to have but definitely not as essential as Windows. So, I proceeded to recreate the boot information for Windows via the command prompt on the recovery console. Or tried to, at least. That process pretty gave me a bunch of error messages. But, hey! It made me lose access to Ubuntu and fated me to bluescreen when loading Windows over and over. What a productive effort!

Then, I backed up my files, realizing that repairing the master boot record was probably not going to happen. I deleted the Windows partition and tried to install Windows using the CD. But it wouldn’t recognize my partitions! Essentially, I couldn’t tell it where to install! I tried for a while to find drivers to get it to recognize, but to no avail. Then, I tried to change the BIOS settings to change the hard drive controllers. Nope. The setting couldn’t be found at all!

Let me take a second to explain my disk’s structure at this point. The first partition was about 100 kb and gparted didn’t recognize it. I have and never will have any clue about why it was there. Next, comes the 200 mb boot partition that Windows made for some reason. Then, the 450 gb main Windows partition. The 25 gb Ubuntu partition and the 1 gb swap came after.

So there was a bunch of weirdness going on with the drive. I read on some Windows forum that in an attempt to make the disk play nice with the installer, wiping the entire thing with zeroes would be a good idea. I decided to try the next best thing; I deleted all of the partitions and created one NTFS gigantor. I was ecstatic when the installer recognized the partition. Can’t argue with Gigantor staring you in the face, eh Windows?

I proceeded to install Windows 7. I was so fearful that it wouldn’t work after everything else going wrong, but it worked perfectly. Then, I realized that I installed the 32-bit version, so I had to redo the install again. I spent more than five hours after that loading my files back and installing the software I needed. The only good thing that came out of this debacle was that all of the tens of gigabytes of random stuff I had accumulated over the past eight months. On the other hand, I spent one day messing up my computer, another day fixing it, and a third day getting it back to how it used to be. Three days in spring break gone down the drain.

What lessons did you learn, children? Don’t mess with a computer that you can’t afford to lose. Install Arch only if you know what you’re doing. Even Ubuntu can mess up your computer. Whose fault is it for not being careful? Mine, all mine. I admit that as a I shed a torrent of tears.

This post is part two of a multipart series journaling the game writing process. You can find the first post here.

The engine of a game consists of all of the components that help you create the game. It includes the graphics renderer, physics, sound, networking, and artificial intelligence, among others. For the simple game that I’m writing, the engine will be correspondingly simple. The key point is that all of the subsystems should be as separated as possible. Since Java is object-oriented, this means separating the components into classes. This facilitates easy modification in the future. I have all of the code in an Eclipse project here, and an executable Jar of the result here. Referencing the code as you read this post will make a lot more sense. I hope you will be able to bring your knowledge of Java to making a game after reading this post. It’s quite long, but I think I’ve put in a ton of detail that might be valuable to somebody out there.

The entry point of the game is the main class named Glade. I usually name my main classes Main, but that’s horrible choice: it’s not descriptive and I already have 10 of them in my workspace. This time, I named it Glade, the code name I have for this project. This class creates the Renderer, the Controller, the Stage, the Display, and the Player. These objects are accessible as static fields of the Glade class. This way, they are easily accessible to every object in the game. I could have passed them in through constructors, but that would have been cumbersome and without any benefit.

Then, Glade starts a timer that fires at a frequency determined by the frame rate. At first, I set the frame rate to be 25 FPS, but that was very sluggish, so I pumped it up to the standard 60 FPS. There is no guarantee that the game will hit his frame rate. It only acts as a maximum. If you don’t cap the frame rate, your game is going to run extremely fast on fast computers, which will make it unplayable. I didn’t do this for my first game that I made several years ago on old school computers. On my modern laptop, it is so fast that I my character dies within seconds.

The Renderer class is responsible for the graphics component of the engine. It extends JFrame which has the paint method. The method gives us a Graphics object that we can draw to in order to display things on the screen. This paint method is called each time the timer hits. The Renderer puts the window into full screen mode if it’s available. Otherwise, it just uses a regular window. The full screen mode is significantly faster because it can bypass the windowing system and draw directly to the screen. Plus, it looks much nicer; people usually don’t want to play games in windowed mode. Renderer implements a double-buffering strategy. If you directly draw to the screen, it is slower and gives you weird flickering. So, we first do all of our drawing onto an off-screen buffer and then draw it to the screen after we’re done.

All of the objects implementing the Drawable interface are stored in a HashSet in Renderer. Drawable requires the object to implement a draw method. Each object is passed in the graphics object to draw to. This way, every game object is responsible for drawing itself. The Renderer clears the screen by drawing the background onto the buffer, and then iterates through all of the Drawable objects, calling their draw methods. Every Drawable gets drawn each time paint is called. However, you are not allowed to add to or remove from a HashSet that you are iterating over. This is because the iterator won’t be able to keep track of where it is and where it’s supposed to go next if we randomly change the HashSet that we are iterating over. But, we need to be able to add and remove Drawables, because enemies and bullets need to be removed all the time. To facilitate this, two other HashSets are maintained. One contains the Drawables that need to be added to the main HashSet, and the other contains the Drawables the need to be removed. So, adding a Drawable to the Renderer doesn’t mean adding to the main HashSet, but adding to the add HashSet. This way, we never add or remove while iterating. All of the objects in the add and remove HashSets are added and removed from the HashSet storing the Drawables before iteration begins.

The Environment object is created by the Renderer. For now, all it does is draw a transparent cyan background. The transparency makes it so that objects leave a smooth shadow in their wake. Although drawing such a huge transparent rectangle each frame is somewhat expensive, it leaves a lovely effect. In the future, this class can be used for all sorts of background effects.
The Controller is responsible for the game logic. Its main job is to iterate through all of the Actables, calling their act methods, when the timer hits. (So, every object’s act and draw methods are called each frame.) The act method is where the main logic for each object is placed. Since it is called each frame, anything that must be done as the game is running must be placed there. This includes moving the object around, checking for collisions, dealing with input, among many other functions. Eventually, the controller will also deal with bigger picture aspects such as level progression, creating enemies, spawning power-ups, managing high scores and the like.

The Stage is what holds and manages the Actables. I usually include this functionality in Controller, but I decided to split it off this time. The Stage is also responsible for facilitating collision detection. Bullets can ask the Stage if its colliding with an enemy. If they are, they would do damage to the enemies and be destroyed. For now, the Stage will naively just run through all of the enemies, asking each one if they collide with the bullet in question. In the future, it can be rewritten to be much more efficient if performance is an issue.

The Display object stores stats like the score and remaining lives and displays them on the screen. It can be extended to create a snazzy display in the future.

The Player class processes keyboard and mouse inputs to manipulate the state of the player’s little ship. In addition to implementing Actable and Drawable, it also implements KeyListener, MouseListener, and MouseMotionListener. Whenever the mouse buttons or the movement keys are pressed, the corresponding boolean variables are flipped. Whenever the mouse is moved, the coordinates are stored. These variables are tested in the Player’s act method and the corresponding action is taken. If the mouse is pressed, a Photon is created at the location of the Player in the direction of the mouse cursor. In the future, the Player will also be responsible for checking if it is colliding with an enemy and reducing the health accordingly. It draws a square at the location specified by its x and y coordinates in its draw method.

A Photon is a subclass of the Bullet class which encompasses all of the projectile weapons the Player has at his disposal. Bullet is given its origin and target at construction and some trig calculates its x and y velocities. It then updates its location each step and kills itself if it is outside the boundaries of the stage. For now, all Bullets follow the same trajectory. I can move that functionality to the subclasses if need be. All sorts of funky bullets can be created this way.

Play with the code. Try changing the colors or the constants. Create new bullet types. That’s how I learned to program games. I took an existing one and changed the graphics and added bullets and power-ups. Leave me any questions or comments!

It’s finally Spring Break and since I haven’t written any significant non-school programs in a while, I’ve decided to write a game. My first significant program was an abstract 2d shooter that I wrote in the first semester of my sophomore year of high school. Needless to say, I wasn’t much of a programmer then and my code was horrible and inefficient. But, it was really cool to be able to write a game and watch other people have fun playing it. I’ll be writing a similar game and trust me, it’ll be leaps and bounds above my first attempt years ago. So, I thought I might as well document the process of designing and coding the game. By Friday, I should have a fun little playable game in the vein of Geometry Wars and Everyday Shooter.

I’ve had ideas to incorporate into this game for months now. But, I still haven’t chosen which subset of those game mechanics and features to incorporate. I can’t just put everything in there. They need to consistent. I’m going to sidestep the issue for now. Initially, I’ll focus on the engine and the core game mechanics. This involves setting up the graphics, game controls, and the basic game environment. In a day or two, you should be able to move the ship around and shoot and destroy enemies. All of the other ideas build on top of this core.

Planning is very important to building a game. You want to have a base that can give you a lot of flexibility in the future. I thought of a number of optimizations I can put in the game engine, but I won’t be adding them in the first version. I might not even need to if the game runs as well as I want it to. However, I’ll make sure to build the game so that it won’t be much trouble to add them in later. For example, I’ll initially implement a particle system class that is simple, but inefficient. When I get around to making it more efficient, I can just plug in a different class. I shouldn’t need to change anything else if I designed its interface well. I think I have a pretty good idea of what components I need to create to have a game running. This time around, I’ll split functionality a lot more. I don’t want huge monolithic classes like I had in previous projects.

A key component of planning is choosing the tools to use. I considered using PyGame, but I didn’t want to deal with making sure my audience had Python on their computers. Even converting the game to an executable via Py2exe would have limited my audience to Windows users. Plus, I’ve never used PyGame. Yes, I should be trying new things, but PyGame’s disadvantages are great. I considered using Processing, but I felt like I didn’t need it. It’s meant for people to get started really quickly without having to know much of the technical detail. I’ve coded simple engines in the past and even have the code for all of those projects, so I though Processing would hamper me more than help me. I considered using a Processing plugin for Android, but it wasn’t completely mature, so I didn’t bother. So, I’ll be sticking to what I know: Java. It allows me to reach any platform with minimal effort. I’ll just be using the standard libraries. Sure, I can use JOGL or other libraries, but they are just not needed for this game. My IDE will, of course, be Eclipse.

So, there: I’ll be updating this blog every day or so. The next post should be about how the engine is set up and the basic design decisions I had to make in creating it.

Black Swan is an intense psychological thriller. And a thriller it is: my heart was racing for half an hour before and after the end of the film.

The film follows an innocent ballet dancer’s journey into her role in a production of Swan Lake. It is almost entirely a character study, a dark sort of coming-of-age film. As the Swan Queen, she is required to play both the parts of the White Swan and the Black Swan. She is naturally affined to the role of the White Swan; it fits her innocence and fearfulness. Her challenge is to be able to play her darker side equally well. Natalie Portman plays Nina, the Swan Queen. Mila Kunis supports as Lily, a new member of the company. Both play their roles with subtlety that’s hard to come by.

You might be averse to watching a film about ballet. Don’t be: the format of film makes it much more exciting than you might think. If you are watching a production on stage, you would see it from afar and could probably discern nothing more than the movements. However, film makes this art far more accessible.  You get to be close to the action: the movements, the bodies, and especially important for this film, the emotions. You can see the trembling on her brow. Furthermore, the tense mood and focused cinematography elevate this rendering of the art.

I was on the edge of my seat for most of the film; what happens next is never certain.  At points, I couldn’t bear to think of the possibilities that could unfold. You are made to root for her success; anything that distracts her from this is something that is hard to watch. From the onset, the even pace, dark lighting, and quietness create a dark feeling that falls like a blanket on every scene. I don’t think there is a single scene in the sunlight in the entire movie; it seems like the entire movie takes place at night. This adds focus to Nina, which the film unequivocally surrounds.

The real action happens on the stage that is the character Nina. The play itself is a metaphor for her transformation. The aspect of the White Swan is not what is needed to play the part, so Nina turns to that of the Black Swan. This mimic’s the prince’s seduction by the Black Swan over the White Swan. In the climactic scene, we find that as the White Swan dies, Nina’s transformation is complete. The play begets her transformation, yet mirrors it. In one sense, the film is a testament to the transformative power of art and ambition.

The film isn’t flawless. It seemed to me that Nina’s later reactions were unmotivated. There was no clear link between what had happened between her and the other characters to motivate her paranoia. In addition, her conflict with her mother was unresolved. A plot thread can be left unresolved if it is central to the story; we would call that a sort of cliff-hanger. But an unresolved minor thread points to sloppiness in the plot.

Black Swan is a film that I can’t recommend to the general audience. It’s masterful in the creation of a kind of voyeuristic thrill in its viewer. The acting is superb. However, it leaves the question of why she reacted the way she did unanswered. This precludes a sense of closure. You want to be able to ruminate about a film like this; you can’t do that with this kind of ambiguity. Aside from this, the film is simply too viscerally graphic. It is as far from a family film as you can get.

When you apply for housing, you get to choose your top dorm picks. My first choice was the honors quad and my second was Jester. (You don’t get to pick which dorm within the quad you want to live in.) Foremost amongst my concerns was the cost. I really didn’t care about having a private bathroom or living in one of the larger dorms such as Duren or San Jacinto. I’ve found that I can fit right in wherever I live, so I knew it wouldn’t be a problem adjusting to whichever dorm I was placed in. Since I didn’t want any of the premium features, I opted to go for the basic dorm setup: one roommate and community bath. It ended up costing about $8200 for the year, which is the least expensive route. The honors dorms and Jester cost the same, so I chose them over Jester. The quad was where a bunch of my friends were going to live, so it was an easy choice.

As for choice of roommate, I picked the random option. I could have lived with a friend if I had chosen to, but I thought it would be better not to risk getting into fights with him and ruin the friendship. In retrospect, that was a ridiculous reason. I don’t think that would ever happen; I know my friends enough to be able to resolve problems in a courteous manner. However, the random roommate choice worked out well; he’s a pretty cool guy.

Blanton has the smallest rooms out of the dorms in the honors quad, and I think the smallest out of all of the dorms I’ve visited at UT. Andrews has larger dorms and Carothers has even larger dorms. You get an adjustable-height bed and movable furniture, including a desk, and two storage pieces. I chose to arrange my side to give me the most desk space. The bed is up high, about six feet up in the air. Below the bed, I have the desk and the storage; they create what is referred to as a “megadesk”. Since I spend most of the time in my room doing things on my desk, it makes sense to have a large desk space at the expense of making the bed less accessible. However, since the bed is above the desk, the desk is not illuminated very well at night due to the shadow created by the ceiling light. This was a problem until I bought a desk lamp. Light during the day is lovely and perfectly adequate. Climbing up to the bed takes some getting used to; the rungs aren’t shaped in a way that makes it easy to do so.

As I’ve said, the bed’s height is adjustable. My roommate brought his bed down to the height of the storage underneath so the bed is more easily accessible. As a result, his desk gets a small area next to the bed. It’s nice that everything is configurable since everyone’s needs are different. At first, I felt that the dorm was too small, but in time I got used to it. I only wish I was able to seat many people in my dorm. It can’t really ever be a hangout place. They give us an adequate wooden chair, but I got a nice rolly chair off Craigslist, which made studying much nicer. That wooden chair is the only place guests can sit, which is sad. The bathrooms are well-maintained and take like little time to get used to. Community is no problem. Also, Blanton is the only dorm in the quad without a sink, which is a good thing. I don’t want it to get all dirty, which it will naturally. Walking an extra ten feet to get to the bathroom to brush my teeth is barely an inconvenience.

My dad kept asking why this little half-room cost us more than $8000, and I had no answer. (One impetus for moving into an apartment is that a shared room can be a bit more than $400, which is half the cost of an on-campus dorm.) But, the dining is also put into the cost of the housing. Your $8000 includes $1400 dine-in-dollars, which can be used in the dining halls, and $300 Bevo-bucks, which can be used at most nearby restaurants. You don’t really have a choice in the matter. Everyone is put into the same plan. You can always add more if you need to, but you can’t opt to get less. I heard that you get enough dine-in-dollars for lunch and dinner every day and breakfast once a week. This may seem like it isn’t enough, but don’t worry. Everyone I know agrees that it’s more than enough. I still have more than $800 of my dine-in-dollars left at the end of the semester though I eat breakfast at the dining halls far more often than most other people. Most people either skip breakfast or eat cereal in their rooms. I had a friend that had so many dine-in-dollars left over last year that he bought a big UT rug for his dorm. (You can use dine-in-dollars to buy random stuff at some of the campus stores.) Bevo-bucks are accepted at pretty much all of the eateries close to campus; they provide a convenient way of getting good food when you feel like a change.

The closest dining hall is located in the ground floor of the Kinsolving girls dorm. It serves that whole northern end of campus that the quad lies in. It’s about a five minute walk from Blanton, which hasn’t been a big problem. (I found out the hard way that umbrellas and sweaters are essential.) I have to say I do like the food there most days. You swipe your card and it’s all-you-can-eat. It’s around four dine-in-dollars per swipe, which is a pretty good deal if you ask me. There is a core selection that stays the same every day: pasta, pizza, salad, wraps, fried stuff, chicken, sides, juice, soda, fruit, waffles. On top of that they have different specials every day. Breakfast usually includes made-to-order omelets and tacos plus eggs, biscuits, sausage, and the same drink choices. I find the selection more than adequate on most days. (J2 is the equivalent for students staying near Jester. The food is pretty much the same, but some people say Kins has a better atmosphere.)

Right next to Blanton is the convenient Littlefield Café. I get food there if I miss meals at Kins for some reason. I frequently get delicious breakfast burritos there. Kinsolving also has Kins Market, where you can buy snacks and supplies. So far, I’ve only bought an umbrella there.

I love living on campus. In college, the line between school and home is nonexistent. I think I like it that way. You get to see you friends all the time: you eat with them, you study with them, and you relax with them. Seeking solitude is equally easy. You can live however you feel like. You can be with whomever, eat whatever, go wherever, and do anything you please. Only as long as you keep your wits about you, of course.

It isn’t required, but I highly recommend that you live on campus at least for the first year. It’s much easier to meet people and get used to college life.

The main advantage of being in the program is the classes. The program allows students to take honors versions of most of the core computer science courses. Honors classes are generally harder and have smaller class sizes. One complaint that many people have about UT is that the class sizes are large; being in an honors program definitely helps bring the apparent size of the university down. I hear that the usual algorithms and data structures class has over a hundred students; the honors version has about fifty. Also, since we are required to have significant CS experience in the past, we get to skip past many of the intro classes.

The classes themselves are different. They rely more on a dialogue between the students and the professors than lectures. For example, Professor Lin, our professor for the data structures and algorithms class (CS 315H), would explain what a hash table was at a basic level, then pose a question asking us to think of its advantages and disadvantages. We would raise our hands and explain our ideas, which would be critiqued and expanded upon by him. Eventually, he’d give us the points that we missed. He knew the names of every single one of his students. This fact alone shows you how the learning happens at a more engaging and personal level. It also helped that he’s just hilarious all the time.

Professor Cline, our professor for the logic, sets, and functions class (CS 313H), used the Moore Method. This meant that all of our homework consisted of proofs, essentially guaranteeing that if we spent the time and effort to complete them, we would have a very good idea of the subject. At the beginning of class, we’d write our solutions on the board, and we’d spend most of the rest of the class discussing them step-by-step. The writers of the proofs were responsible for explaining any unclear steps and were urged to fix any problems that were found. If they couldn’t fix their proofs, other students got the opportunity to chime in. Being able to prove it shows that you really understand the concept; that’s what we were asked to do in Dr. Cline’s class. His dry humor and mannerisms made the class all the more enjoyable.

The whole program is centered on research. In addition to the requirement that Turing Scholars take a number of honors computer science classes, they have to write an honors thesis by graduation time in order to receive the degree. Next semester, we’ll be in a research methods class where we’ll learn more about research in computer science. A number of fellow Turings are already thinking of projects that they could do. I hear that only about ten out of the forty that enter the program graduate with the Turing degree because of the difficulty of the classes and the requirement to do the thesis.

The program offers other benefits. Turings get admission into the computer science major automatically. Normally, computer science students have to be “pre-CS” students and then apply to be CS students at the end of their freshman years. Plus, Turings get priority registration for computer science classes. And they can live in honors housing if they choose to.

I’d say about half of the freshman Turing Scholars live in the honors quad. It makes it very convenient to set up study groups and design jams. Living elsewhere makes it inconvenient to be in the study group. Before every test, we studied together, drawing on each other’s knowledge. I can guarantee that my grades went up because of them. Since we all went to the same dining hall, having long conversations over lunch with fellow Turings about computer science topics were common place.

The Turing Scholars Student Association regularly puts on events for the group. Pizza nights with grad students as guest speakers satisfied my hunger for free pizza and for more information regarding research and graduate school. For the first time, I’m considering doing a PhD. One complaint I have is that we don’t have as much money for these kinds of events as other programs, namely Dean’s Scholars. We couldn’t do a banquet this semester due to budget cuts, but Dean’s Scholars get lunch every Friday and a trip to Fort Davis. Grrr.

Being in Turing does have one more benefit. They say that if a Turing wants to get an internship his freshman year, he will. I’ve heard stories of employers shouting to get the attention of passing Turing Scholars at career fairs. (It happened to at least one friend of mine.) I’d say being in CS gives you higher chances of getting an internship your freshman year than almost any major. And being in Turing definitely helps.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed being a part of the program. Putting aside the professors that make it fun to go to class and the social events and the tons of other benefits that come with the program, the Turing Scholars themselves are what make the program great. Never have I met such a group of people so enthusiastic about what they do. I’ve found that I can have conversations for hours and hours with many of them. Everyone knows something you don’t, so learning new things comes automatically. We freely discuss our designs and solutions, with a good mix of cooperativeness and competitiveness. Being in two classes together and seeing each other every day creates a pretty close group of friends. Finally, it’s nice to be with people who get your obscure Internety jokes.