It's Friday night.

One particular aspect of American society that I have high regards for is the responbilities taken by manufacturers in making sure their products are safe. In comparison with Malaysia, we don't hear many news regarding recalls of cars, toys or lawyers making lawsuits against companies for negligence. I just read the news on a particular toy being recalled. Several Magnetix Building Sets are being recalled after a child died after swallowing the magnetic part of the building set that came off. I bet in a couple weeks or months, lawyers will be making legal threats to the manufacturer. It is going to cost millions if not billions, adding to the lost after the recalls etc. Some people think lawyers are sucking a hell lot of money from making this lawsuits basically enriching themselves from the grievances of others. However, we must agree to the fact that the influence these lawyers have shaped a more responsible society. Healthcare may be expensive in the States but it comes with a quality as well. My economics lecturer, young Indian chap who grew up in Singapore and had somehow worked as intern in a JB hospital, said that a bypass in the U.S. can cause the patient to be bankrupted while in Malaysia, such medical procedure would merely cost around USD 200.

Time for dinner.

it's really annoying when someone comes over to your room at midnight to do homework until the wee hours. i dont mind having a quick discussion to check answers. i do want my privacy and quiet time at night.

Spring break

Spring break was last week for Carnegie Mellon. It started pretty badly as Zane and I rushed through Project 2 for Distributed Systems. This time the beast was thread-based simulation of distributed systemds implementing TWO very different algorithms on mutual exlusion (ie. controlling access to a resource on a system, allowing only one processor at any time) - path compression (zane's party) and Maekawa voting district (my part). We intended to have both algos running on the same framework but as we coded, we got very far apart that we added so many features that make our implementations incompatible with each other. The report was 12 pages long. It's an interesting class, taught by a lenient professor who tells stories in almost every lecture. Zane and I are the only ones in class who have not taken O.S. but last semester's embeddedd systems did help.

I realize that on deciding on what areas that one should pursue depends on how comfortable he or she is in the core knowledge/skills need for that particular area. For example, I can't say that I want to delve into computer vision when I've not taken any courses on signals processing or matrix algebra. That was the mistake I did last Spring when I took vision without prior knowledge or understanding on discrete signals processing. This semester, Signals and Systems is listed as one of the 5 courses I am doing. Materials in Vision now made a lot of sense especially on the part in feature extraction. Btw, Computer Vision is a huge area. The course I took last Spring covered feature extraction, classification using methods like bayesian tree networks and some heat equation thing that you perform iteratively. There was also a topic on callibration of camera lenses to estimate distances.

Spring break was okay. Went on a roadtrip to visit several Shah Alam friends in State College and Boston. First was to Penn State to visit Rafiq and experience what a real american college is like. Huge campus in both the size of the student body and physical area. The newest building on campus is the business school which, in terms of design, is on par with KLIA or some fancy office building in NYC, London or Tokyo. After Boston, we left for Boston but since we left State College late, we stopped in NYC for the night. I drove directly into Manhattan. NYC traffic is no joke. The streets are narrow yet people were driving as if they are on the interstate.

The next day, we continued our journey. Stopped in Yale, New Haven for lunch. Then, we went to Newport, Rhode Island. An awesome old town which still has the English influence. The shorline is rocky and with cliffs. So, conjure up the image of a town in a classic English movie and that's Newport. Many summer mansions here built mostly in the Gilded Age, a time where a bunch of filthy rich Americans lived and pretended that they are America's royalties(probably cared less of the poor). I thought the celebrity homes in Beverly Hills were huge but the houses here are like palaces. The town also hosted previous races of the America Cup, a yatching challenge that attracted many billionaires. If there's one place on earth that I want relax, drink sangria and eat fresh seafood to my heart's content for a week, Newport is the place.

Met up with Eing and Cheng Hau in Boston. Apparently, both of them have single rooms in their MIT dorms. Eing keeps a cat in her room. A cat so smart that it shits at the right place. Wanted to go drinking at night but the bars at Newbury St were all closed. We visited this pub which unfortunately, was patronized white-collar white ppl. Felt a bit out of place. THe next day, drove back to State College because I couldn't continue the 10-hour drive to Pittsburgh. Recorded over 1900 miles in a week.

I am thinking of applying for a Canadian visa once all these work clearance with Banc of America is done. I heard Montreal and Toronto are cool places to visit. These days my objective of travelling is to eat, drink and laze. When I was in Boston, I did not bother to visit the historical sites the city is famous for. Given a week stay, maybe I could have visited them but I think I am slowly getting my dad's philosophy of travelling of not being attracted to tourist attractions. I now detest Museums or theme parks. I would prefer to visit a market in the town like the one in Frankfurt which had fresh sausages that was so tempting.