Checksum Arcanius

Friday, Jon and I played basketball at Greenlake, I got a call from Christine, and Jon and I headed to Kerry Park with Spencer, Christine, and Erik, where I took some pictures (to be posted later).

Saturday, I drove to frisbee with Bobby, Spencer, and Theo. We played until about 1:00, then went to Portage Bay for Brunch. That afternoon, Vince and I got together to work on a final paper for the class we’re taking together. We finished up at 4:00 am.

Sunday, I woke up around 11:30 — missing the CSE canoe trip — but I was double booked with a bike ride anyway, and Theo was flexible, so we rode 35 miles to my parent’s house. I can’t climb hills with Theo’s bike — I have no idea how he goes anywhere on that thing, honestly. He handled Cougar Mountain with relative ease on my bike, though. I clearly need to work on my climbing.

Tomorrow is my last day of class. Wednesday is my last day of school-related duties. Friday is my graduation party (contact me for details). Saturday I graduate. Sunday I leave for Peru.

For a long time I’ve had the colorful Facebook Friend Wheel on my Facebook profile, but I was always a little unimpressed with its grouping mechanism: Although it was generally pretty good, it always put a few friends in totally the wrong place, it seemed. Recently, I became interested in finding a better way to vizualize the mutual-friend relationships among my many facebook compatriots.

The two best applications that I’ve found so far are Touchgraph Photos and Nexus.

I like Touchgraph Photos because it renders the graph in real time (it is in Java, so the performance is fine up to about 100 friends, but when I go to all of my 400 connections, it slows to a crawl). Touchgraph Photos also lets you customize which networks and friends are shown, and, as the name implies, can show photos of each friend as well. Since I’m much more interested in the connections, I disable the photos and end up with a graph like this:

Each node can be dragged around, but with this many nodes it is slow and not very effective at moving groups around. I also noticed that some mutual friend connections are missing, which is the most perplexing part of this application. Nevertheless, it is pretty cool: IS kids are on the left in red, CSE kids are on the right in yellow-green, and BioE kids are in the upper right in purple.

Next, I tried out Nexus, which takes a similar approach but without real-time rendering, and names are only shown when highlighting a node (all connected names also show up as well). The rendering engine looks cooler, too, but the result doesn’t have as much information in it:

You can see the same three groups in this rendering: IS kids are the top cluster, BioE kids are the bottom-right, and CSE kids are the bottom-left.

Good times!

Dear Ryan McElroy,

Thank you for completing your payment using District Court Ticket Payment. Your transaction reference number is 3513368445.

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Erik pointed me towards some interesting research with an accompanying website: It tries to understand the moral foundations behind political affiliations. Along with an interesting paper (worth the read, in my opinion), there is a survey that tries to get at the survey taker’s moral foundations. Here are my results (red is average conservative, blue is average liberal, and green is my score):

Hmm…

Today I donated blood for the first time in about 6 months. The last two times I donated had been bad experiences — nurses missing my relatively big veins, fishing around, me being somewhere between uncomfortable and in pain, and the process taking a lot longer than it should have. I had almost gotten to the point where I wasn’t going to donate anymore — but today I decided to give the Bellevue site, where I have had the best luck overall, another try.

My experience today was very good.  The paperwork and screening went quickly, the nurse was very competent, with a perfect stab on the first try, and my blood ran freely — 615 grams in 5 minutes, 5 seconds — not a personal record, but a very good clip considering my two previous took 7:45 and a staggeringly long and uncomfortable 17 minutes.

The lady who screened and stabbed me was nice and very good at her job. When I thanked her for her high level of competence (especially compared to some of her peers!), she humbly deferred thanks to God instead of accepting the well-deserved praise herself.

It was a good enough experience that I am thinking of reconsidering my decision to remove myself as an organ donor (I wouldn’t feel right signing up to have my organs donated to someone who supported the legal system that we have in this state which screws over good people). However, if there are enough people like this nurse out there, maybe its worthwhile.

For me, today started out with Ultimate Frisbee, followed by consuming a Jamba Juice and four hours of power programming on Paxos with my OS group. Next was some more Frisbee with Bobby, and then some TF2, followed by walking down the Ave after the U-District Street Fair closed for the night. Then we barely missed a meal at Red Mill Burgers (supposedly really good), and instead made tacos at home (which turned out very well) before playing a few games of Fluxx with Jon, Bobby, and myself winning games.

Fun times!

I just ended a busy week. Highlights were pulling an all nighter Wednesday to Thursday grading Operating Systems projects, then running two OS sections on one hour of sleep right after that. Friday was more grading, this time of OS midterms, with the other TA and the teacher. After that, Theo and I went shooting. Wednesday my intramural Ultimate frisbee team lost for the first time this season — also our first playoff game, so we’re out that quickly, after going 4 for 4 in the regular season. It was my last shot at an intramural championship, so I was pretty bummed. This was the best team I had ever been on. Also this week, I ended up “finding” a place to live in Palo Alto. Actually, my friend Scott did all the finding, just keeping me informed via phone. The place is really nice, with a pool and sauna.  It is close enough to Facebook to bike. The downside is that it is expensive, but it’ll be alright for the first 9 months while I get settled in.

Also, I want the Rockets and Magic to win their game sevens in the NBA playoffs. It doesn’t really matter too much though, because Denver and Cleveland will meet in the finals.