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Name: Owen Landgren
Member since: 2000-04-08 00:47:55
Last Login: 2007-07-06 09:22:49

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I'm now a software engineer. Still using some open source tools, but not actively developing as I haven't found a niche.

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Recent blog entries by olandgren

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Meta

Heh. I'm not precisely sure why I chose to update this now, after so much neglect. It's been nearly a year since I've written a journal entry, and I suspect I've not been missed.

School

Nevertheless, my honors thesis is but two days away from completion, or at least it had better be. Reality is, I've got a broken implementation and a paper that's really not very good when it comes right down to it. Not exactly a place I would like to be, but that's life, eh? Then a week after I turn this horrific thing over to my readers, I get to defend. And there are enough holes to drive a Mack truck through, realistically. I'm not really sure whether or not I'll even get honors. All I can do is hope for the best.
In a weird stroke of fate, that talk on Rectilinear Art Galleries ended up interesting me enough that my capstone in mathematics is based on it. There's an utterly beautiful proof that the floor of n/4 guards is all that's required to quadrilateralize a rectilinear polygon, but it's incredibly dense. My capstone ended up being a huge explanation of the paper and what it was actually saying in slightly less condensed terms.

Life

Hmmm. What to say? Life outside of classes has been great, modulo not seeing my friends very often. Fate was kind, and dropped a wonderful girl into my lap almost literally. Funny how things like that sometimes work out. I've even got a future of sorts - working for the big H again this summer and then taking off to Northeastern for graduate school. I'm going to shoot for the stars like I've always wanted to since my grandpa showed me his doctorate and see if I can get mine. NEU has one of the best programs in programming languages(it's so much nicer abbreviated PL, but only Damian can pull off a Ph.D in Perl) going these days, so that should be a great experience. Boston is sorta ruinously expensive, but hey, that's tricks. I'm sure I can find cheap housing somewhere, and I can't complain too much - a stipend is livable if I don't get too extravagant and maybe the summer can provide a nest egg. Problems with carpal went away once I got a couple of ergo keyboards and started lifting weights three times a week - my wrists strengthened up and apparently so did my hands.

Listening

Nothing. Music seems to have lost it's shine these days. I listen less and less. The past year has seen lots of jazz of the old-school variety, lots of Sinatra and other crooners, and lots of clean ambient like A Silver Mt. Zion. Music for the ups and downs of life, I guess.

Meta

I've been having a lot of problems with carpal tunnel, which is why my diary entries have basically ceased. Frustrating, but that's life.

Hacking

Access to cable television has led me to decide that I want to do some screen-scraping of various sites like the scifi schedulebot to check for various things. I've also been playing with LWP in all of its various forms a lot more. I've also been steadfastly avoiding working on my honors thesis, which is no doubt a bad thing.

Work

Lots of cool stuff. Looking at some abstraction mechanisms with regard to distributed object systems, and porting software over to QNX. Hopefully porting software to a supposedly POSIX compliant OS won't be that hard -- but I'm not holding out any hope. Nonetheless, it's cool stuff, and I get to work with the same great people.

Life

Hmmm. Lots of interesting things, but I'm not entirely sure what I've talked about already. A couple of friends of mine hooked up romantically, which has taken a bit of getting used to. Ummm, what else. Imported men can sometimes be duds. DJ Shadow does an awesome concert though, which I was happy to see. I've gained a bunch of weight through bad eating habits that needs to come off somehow. It might also be a product of the fact that I've now got access to the ability to assuage my hunger for baseball on a nightly basis. It's a bad thing to be able to do. I discovered that I'm never going to be able to buy a really nice AV system -- I'll never leave the house. Sorta lonely, in the sense that I've got lots of good friends, but not really anyone that I can confide in anymore because they're all either engaged in a relationship and in their own world or offlimits because I don't trust my own behavior. Fun and games. Maybe a weekend with family will help reset eating patterns and rebuild a couple shreds of self-confidence.

Listening

Five Speed - What's our Dilemma?

Rant

Sometimes societal standards really bother me. A particular incident tonight just sorta rubbed me the wrong way. There's a local bar in the area, the Groveland Tap. It's a great place to hang out, chat with friends, and just generally have a pleasant evening. They've got a couple of pool tables in the back, lots of TVs, random bar games, and the best fries known to man. Now, they run a pool league, so the area around the pool tables is nominally 21+. This is posted on a "sign" (read an 8x11 piece of paper posted 10 feet up on the wall in small font) which is over the entrance to the inside of the back room. I say nominally because there are regularly kids playing the various games, while adults use the pool table. Some friends of mine and I decided to go out for the evening. I'm the only one under 21, but we figured it wouldn't be a problem as it never had been before. I just don't drink, and all's well. This time, we go to the back, order a pitcher and some fries, and while the waitress is checking IDs I politely note that I'm not 21 and she should just bring 3 glasses. For the record, pool season isn't in session, and there were open tables when we came in. The waitress, upon having this suggested, decides to check with her boss to see whether this is OK. She returns to inform us that I am not allowed in the back area, but am more than welcome at the bar up front or any of the booths up there. She then leaves. My friends express an interest in finishing the game of pool they had started, and the waitress OKs that. 20 minutes later, my friends are just getting done(not especially good at pool), and the waitress hasn't been back or complained at all. We figure that they decided to officially chastise me but then shrug their shoulders, and so start another game.
Heh. So much for that. The bouncer(a short, muscular gentleman with a very aggressive demeanor), comes back and declares that whoever is 21 needs to leave now or be "forcibly ejected." This, of course, applies only to me and not the 13 year old kid sitting at one of the bar games on the next table over. *shrug* I guess it's just really frustrating that I wasn't breaking the law, had no desire for any alcohol that night, pool league was not in session so they didn't need the 21+ rule on the tables, and they still kicked me out of the back because I was polite and acknowledged I was not 21. That, combined with the fact that "supervised children" appears to mean that your parents are somewhere in the bar, is just a tad bit annoying. The thing that makes me annoyed about this is that treatment at the bar depends almost completely on the waiter/waitress. I have friends under 21 without fakes who are regularly served alcohol at the Tap -- they just don't get carded. Heh. I guess a pool cue is more dangerous than a pint glass.

School

I'm in the home stretch now. It's really interesting - Friday was my crunch day, the day when everything was supposed to fall apart, but it didn't. I somehow managed to get everything done. There's still a decent amount of stress left, but it's stuff that I'm pretty sure that I can handle.
The proposal for my honors thesis is submitted, and I didn't even get an option of doing one. The chair of the department addressed me by name and said "You owe us an honors thesis" when my proposal was a day late. It should be a lot of fun.

Hacking

Hah! Other than having written a 400+ line Perl script that I can't test yet because it requires administrator access to do a lot of the stuff and I don't have that. Just hoping that none of the stuff it does ends up wiping out people's accounts. <grimace>

Work

Sounds like my job is more or less set up for the summer. I start work on the 22nd. It sounds like I'll be doing a lot of the same stuff I was over January, and I'm hoping that I can dig into another project and see if I can get out of the C++ box to some extent. Somebody has to need some systems automation or functional programming done.

Life

Life is weird, but good. I got shot out of the sky like a P-51 attempting to dogfight with an F-16 by Emilia. Oh, well - she said she still wants to be friends, and I guess that that's progress, in a sense. I wish I was better at this - I really don't have a clue what I'm doing or how to go about it. Oh, well. Chalk up another swing and a miss.
May 19 is much closer than it was last time. A lot of things fell into place for people, so overall it seems like it's going to be a very good experience. I have daffodils to give away. I just wish that I wasn't quite so locked up with all of these people. The fact that so many of them are taking off to parts known but far away scares me.
I don't know. I think maybe I should just give up on the whole social interaction thing. I'm not very good at it, I can't really read people or figure out what they're thinking, and I'm hopeless when it comes to women. I wouldn't know an opportunity if it bit me in the ass. The problem is, I really don't want to give up, but at this point it's probably just easier to do that. Maybe after a couple months I'll gain enough illusions of competency to try again.
Oh, well. Tomorrow is a day of homework. I should go to bed.

Listening

Orbital - Frentic
18 Apr 2002 (updated 18 Apr 2002 at 06:19 UTC) »

School

So today was capstone day. It's the one day of the semester when all of the graduating seniors in the math and computer science departments give a talk on the stuff that they've been working on for the last semester or two. It's really quite fun, as you get to see a lot of cool math and CS. Some of the more interesting talks that I went to today:
  • Goal-Directed Reactive Environment Navigation
  • Genetic Learning in a Real-Time Game System
  • Quadrilateralizing Rectilinear Polygons and The Art Gallery Theorem
  • RSK Insertion and Characters of Cyclotomic Hecke Algebras
I truly wish I understood what Andy was talking about in the last one. It was really pretty math, but I really needed the representation theory background to understand it.
So of course, all this stuff has gotten me thinking about what I'm going to end up doing for my honors project. I think what scares me the most is the fact that I've been working my ass off in classes this far, and it's not going to get easier. Next semester is going to be Discrete Applied Mathematics, Principles of AI, and Internet Computing, plus independents to work on my honors project and capstone, neither of which I have a topic for yet.
Well, that's not exactly true. I just haven't decided between the two topics for the honors thesis. Nargh. At least I'm pretty sure I want to do my capstone on game theory.

Hacking

Hah. Don't I wish - I convinced GOO to compile on my Win2k box, but I haven't gotten a chance to do anything with it yet, which is sad because it looks fun. Tomorrow I get to do a bunch of set maths in Perl - I've got two arrays, one of which is the current state of the system, and one of which contains added and deleted elements. The adds and deletes have to be treated differently, and so we get to do set math. Fun.

Life

bgeiger: I must agree, on reflection. However, change always makes the grass look greener, if only temporarily.
Other than that, I've just been working on trying to help senior friends stay somewhat less stressed than they might otherwise be. This involves stuff like backrubs, listening ears, providing a pint of ice cream or a slice of chocolate cake, make a mix CD, just general stuff that makes their life a little better and doesn't cost me too much. I sometimes wish there was more I could be doing, but I can't think of much.
Frankly, May 19 scares me a lot. I don't know what to expect - I guess I shouldn't be scared of change but the idea of most of my friends graduating and going out into the real world just makes something small inside wince and cringe. What's even stupider is that a decent chunk of them will be around for the summer, so I shouldn't even have transition anxiety. Right.
Here's to hoping that a friend gets an email she's desperately waiting for.

Listening

Jimmy Eat World - Hear You Me

Lately my musical tastes have been ranging back into rock. The Strokes, Dashboard Confessional, Jimmy Eat World,764-HERO, Do Make Say Think. Quite odd. I wonder if it's just springtime.

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