seattle

A city of grey,

And cities of hot and cold,

Too many plane trips.

Seattle was fun. It was good to go back there; I remember when I was 12 or so I decided that that was where I wanted to live the rest of my life. So when Microsoft offered me a chance to interview, I jumped at it. There are pictures to be seen in my picasa album. The interview? Well, it was not quite as easy as the phone interview, but I wasn't impressed with its difficulty, either. A couple sample questions:

What's the best way to do a level-order traversal of a tree in which each node has arbitrary numbers of children, and there is an 80% chance that there will only be two levels?

What's the best way to find the previous node in an in-order traversal of a binary tree?

What's the fastest way to find the nearest common ancestor of two nodes in a binary tree?

Design Expedia. (This question was unfortunate; I'm an Orbitz girl.)

If you have two sorted linked lists, what's the fastest way to merge them into one sorted list? How much extra space do you need to maintain pointers for this algorithm?

It was sort of like I was back in C343. I even got asked runtimes for all the algorithms I designed. Woot. Anyway, the moral of the story is that I felt like I totally nailed the interview. I'll know for sure later this week. I really hope that things happen such that I get the position in the Dublin dev office... but we'll see. ;)

I guess I still have to comment on the election, too! I'm really excited that Indiana went blue. AFAIK, it's the first time since LBJ that we've voted Democrat. I'm proud of you, Indiana! I'm also proud and not proud of California; they passed one bill that requires the humane treatment of all animals raised on farms within that state (i.e. Valkyrie could eat any meat that comes from California!), but they also voted yes to Prop 8? That's disappointing. I don't understand why homophobia is so rampant.

I got my new glasses yesterday, which is exciting. They're exactly the same as my old glasses... but not lost. Haha. And now they come with the added amusement that they're vaguely like Sarah Palin glasses. :)

I can't wait to leave on Saturday. My two-week adventure promises to be epic. I wound up buying a plane ticket to Toronto; since Mom offered to pay half of it (she's terrified that I would crash into a snowbank and die and then my corpse would be raped by wolves, then be stolen by Canadian lumberjacks and boiled down into syrup) it's actually cheaper than driving. Which is awesome because it saves ridiculous amounts of time (2 hours in a plane is way better than 20 hours in a car, imho).

Oh! The guys for the Cluster Challenge team from Germany--well, two of them--, are in town now. I met them yesterday finally. I think that this year is going to be lots of fun at SC! How could it not be? I mean, c'mon. It's frickin Austin.

Anyway, I think that's about all I have for the moment. Maybe I'll get better about blogging regularly sometime...

delay

Too much to do, and

So little time for blogging.

I'll have to make due.

Well, it's been a really long time since I wrote anything on here, but that's okay, haha.  I've been adventuring!  The Canadians came, and we went quarry jumping, crazy caving (thanks to Mr. Sean Lewis for setting up a ridiculous trip :D), wandering around Bloomington... we also cooked a massive (I mean massive enough that I couldn't finish all the leftovers before they went bad) Thanksgiving dinner for Canadian Thanksgiving and watched War Games.  So now I've finally seen it!

I've taken midterms, and I realized that different departments function differently.  Up til now I've been doing all CS stuff, mainly, and not a lot of math, but I guess the Math department likes to kill souls.  I know that I got a 73 on my Modern Algebra midterm, but that was actually pretty good compared to what other people got.  This leads me to think that there is going to be some kind of grand, happiness-inducing curve at the end of the semester.  :3  It's definitely stressful to try to think about that grade, though.  But it's my favorite class!  Augh!

Also, I've been doing CC stuff way too much.  It's hard to manage my time when I spend 6 hours at the fricking data center in one night.  Ridiculous.  But it's sort of cool to learn how to install and optimize operating systems.  I'd actually never installed Linux before... *ashamed face*  But now I have!

The times that I see my roommates are becoming even fewer and farther between; it's sad.  But it looks like my course schedule next semester should permit many more shenanigans.  Woot!  I actually am allowed to register for classes starting today, so I think I'm going to get on that.

One of the projects I'm working on for this semester is called Fluency, and it can be tested out at this webpage.  It's a pretty neat idea; a GUI builder for people who don't know how to program.  The code that underlies it is a pretty massive mess.  I started out by improving the text areas (I just did that last night), and I'm terrified to death to try to mess with all the Null Pointer Exceptions that pop up in it.  But the project should be fun, for sure!

Also... umm... hmm... oh!  I changed my mind on what I want to be for Halloween.  I'm going to be the Silk Spectre from Watchmen.  I'm pretty excited about it.  I think I made this decision mainly because I got invited to a Heroes and Villains birthday party, and Daphne just doesn't really cut it as a superhero, haha.  :)  So that's going to be my project this afternoon.

This weekend is Homecoming, and I think it's going to be another football game that I don't go to.  Oh well.  I'll get to one eventually.  I'm pretty excited about going rappelling tomorrow, though, in stead of going to the game.  Wewt!

Oh!  And elections!  I'm TEH PSYCHED about the elections.  I had my mom buy me a sweet shirt recently: Bigfoot-Nessie 08--Change you can believe in!  ^____^

I'll try to be more diligent about writing this in the future, but no promises!  It's sort of fun to try to remember everything I've been up to, anyway.  Sort of.  :P