Welcome to my crazy life
Below are the 10 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Luke" journal:[<< Previous 10 entries]
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06:34 pm
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Oh what a tangled web...
Yesterday I was working with a product called Doxygen which profiles and documents code. One of its functions is that it will create a call graph and caller graph, but it needed an external package called Graphviz. I started wondering about what else the package would do, and that led me to think of stuff I could graph, and then it came to me... Facebook friends! So I spent an hour or two last night writing up the Perl code to grab a list of friends off Facebook, and created the required description file during breaks today in my Defensive Driving class. The result:
Pretty cool, eh? There's actually quite a bit of structure to it. Since it's a graph of only my friends, I'm the center node from which everything radiates. Other groups tend to clump together as well, like the big tangle off on the bottom-right quadrant, which tend to be Ropers. Towards the left/bottom-left, my high-school friends are clustered, and the top tends to be other random Trinity people. If you want to take a look at the picture, just click the image and then go to the original photo. Anyway, that's my nerdiness for today. Cheers!
Current Mood:  accomplished
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12:28 pm
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Catching up
It's a slow lunch period, so I think I'll write up a quick entry. I think I haven't done so in, what, like 4 months? I guess I'm due.
Perhaps one of the reasons I'm not updating as much is that life is moving in a kind of perpetual sameness. I get up somewhere between 5:00 and 6:30, get ready, pack lunches and head out the door. I come home, try to get something decently healthy ready for dinner, and usually we eat while watching some TV program or the other. I clean up the kitchen (most of the time, well, some of the time), and maybe we watch another TV show while Jen studies, and then we go to bed and repeat the day again tomorrow. I'm not sure why time suddenly seems like such a sparse resource, but it surely does!
Things are alright here in Houston. We don't really have any close friends yet aside from Jen's school friends, so that's kind of a bummer. To get my social fix I've gotten back into playing Magic at game stores and the like. That provides me with some socialization. Sometime I've got to go dance again, I've really been missing that.
Other than that, we've got some TV shows that we like to watch. Our top choice is probably Heroes, which was pretty cool this week. We also like House and the Law & Order variants. It's nice since Jen usually likes to have some noise on while she's studying and it gives me a way to kill the time before bedtime.
Well that's about it for generalities. I don't really have a ton to write about in specific, so that's it for today I guess.
Current Mood:  okay
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05:43 am
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Optics
Did you know that physicists and optometrists both deal with optics, but they seem to use completely different notation? I've been helping Jen with some of her optics homework, and it's been confusing because of the differences in convention. For example, both sides have the thin lens equation which says that 1/s + 1/s' = 1/f where s is object distance, s` is image distance and f is focal length. In the physics world, we say that s is positive for real objects and images and negative for virtual objects and images. Now the optometrists use a different system. Their equation is F = L' - L where the equation is expressed in diopters (inverse meters.) F is the power of the lens or the inverse of the focal length, L' is image position, and L is object position. They simply use the convention that to the left of the lens is negative, and to the right of the lens is positive. The first time I tried to help her and we didn't understand that we were using different sign conventions, it really confused the heck out of both of us!
And that was my random fact for the day. Lunches are ready, coffee maker's programmed, and I anticipate a productive day. And in a couple days, my parents are going to come into town to visit. Fun times!
Current Mood: good
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09:08 am
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Just a random entry
Wow, another long lapse in my blogging. Well, I'm just up early and thought I would push one out. Things are going well right now, although it is tough lately. There are all kinds of pressure from the wedding, both financial pressures and things that have to get done now. Work has also been pretty stressing as I've got a project that I've fallen a little behind on and I'm working long hours now to try to get back on track. We still manage to have fun though. Last night we babysat for Larry and it was fun to play around with little Cooper. Highlight of the night was teaching him how to "gas up" his little play car. This involves him opening the fuel hatch and saying "Sssssssssssss..." I did it once and it seems he really liked it because he wouldn't stop doing it afterward! So cute! It also gave me an opportunity to rest for a second after pushing him all around the living room in his car.
Things on the wedding are proceeding. We've got just about everything picked out except for final arrangements on the flowers and a person to marry us at the wedding here. We've been shot down by both our churches, so we're going with a JP. My church (Catholic) won't do an outdoor wedding, and Jen's church won't marry us because I'm Catholic. Ironically, I always expected the Catholics to be the ones that would have issues with intolerance. Anyway, got to find a justice that's willing to work on a Sunday, although so far it's been a pain to get them to return calls.
We went and saw X3 last weekend. It was good, though not as good as the last one. Larry and Kimberley saw it last night when we were babysitting and they thought it was just as good as the last one. Different strokes I guess. I'm not sure if I'm waiting for any other movie this summer. We don't really watch TV so I miss out on all the previews anyway.
Next week we're heading to California for Jed's and Tiffany's (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=91.6) link_potter) wedding. While we're there we're also going to dip down into Mexico and visit Jen's dad in Tijuana. Jen's mom will also be there for a visa appointment, so we'll meet with her too. My parents are coming along as well. It should be interesting since Jen is the only truly bilingual one of the whole group. In any case, it should be a nice break.
My job hunt is proceeding slowly. I send out resumes, but I've only had a few responses back. I had an interview the weekend before last, but they didn't call me back again. I had a phone interview last week as well, so maybe that will turn into something.
I haven't been out dancing in a while now. Jen's asthma has been pretty bad and I've been reluctant to aggravate it with the smoke out at Cowboys. I think she's getting better, so maybe we'll do it soon.
Hmm, that's about it. I'll try to keep posting regularly, but then, I always say that, don't I?
Current Mood:  awake
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10:36 pm
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Spring break, or vacacion de la primavera
This week was very active, but very fun. Jen had spring break so we decided to go to Mexico City to see her family. She spent all day on Friday trying on dresses while I was at work, and she actually ended up finding "the one", so yay! When I got off work, we drove down to Laredo and met up with her aunt and uncle. We left my car at their place and then crossed the border to Nuevo Laredo, changed our money, and grabbed a bus for Mexico City. It was actually quite nice! $80/person, and the bus was quite nice! They showed some movies on the way and we also just slept. I also was studying a book I had just bought on Windows device programming, so I had plenty to keep my mind occupied. I can't recall what movie they showed the first night, but I don't think I was that interested. In the morning after everyone was awake they showed "Herbie, Fully Loaded" (en espanol, naturally). Pretty entertaining. Anyway, the ride was about 13 hours long, but we made it in one piece.
There had apparently been some confusion as to when we were getting there, so we had to wait a while at the bus station. It turned out to be somewhat of a good thing though since while we were there we decided that rather than go straight to her mom's place, which is about an hour and a half outside the city, we would stay in the city the first night in order to do shopping the next day. Her sister Berenice showed up and we all went downtown and got a sweet room at the Hotel Catedral right next to the Palacio Mexicano. Only $50 too, can't beat that. Bere's boyfriend had driven her in and he went back, but Bere stayed with us that night. In the meantime, we did some fun sightseeing around the central area and did a little shopping. That night we ended up buying my wedding ring, a nice two-toned model, and for far cheaper than I had found back here!
In the morning we went out shopping again and found a number of things, including a flower girl dress for Jen's little sister (Andrea, not Bere), and our toasting glasses. For very reasonable prices, of course. We also had some really good food that was just being sold on the street corner. That was one of my favorite parts of Mexico! After our shopping, we took a bus to Jen's mom's house. It was interesting to pull into the little town because it turned out that one of Jen's ex-boyfriends was running for congress out of the district and his picture was everywhere! On the buildings, on the street lamps, painted on the walls... It's amazing how pervasive the publicity is around election time there! At least we mostly only have to listen to ads on the TV or radio. It was actually election day (and our 11-month anniversary) when we got there, and Jen made a point to cast her vote for him. Good news is that he ended up winning!
It was very pleasant to spend the evening with Jen's family. I had met them once before in Nuevo Laredo when I went to pick up Jen from another trip, but I had only seen them for a little while at that time. I feel like I know them all a lot better now, even with the language barrier. Bere actually speaks pretty good English, luckily for me, but her mom and her little sister Andrea and I have a hard time communicating. Andrea was super-cute because she made a point of trying to teach me Spanish while I was there. Somewhat odd to be corrected by a six-year-old, but I had a great time playing with her.
The next day we went out on the street for more authentic Mexican food and then drove into the city for more shopping. We found a kind of invitation district that must have had 2 or 3 blocks of just invitation shops! It was amazing! If you've shopped for invitations here, you probably know that the options are rather limiting. Blue or yellow? This font or that font? Well, not there! Everything was customizable, the paper, the fonts, the design, picture or no picture, everything! And for cheap! We did a lot of shopping around and negotiating, and finally settled on some invitations that I think are going to be great. After that we got some food, and then shopped for material for the veil and some flower decorations. We finally left for the bus station and then got back on for another bus ride home. We had to switch buses in Monterrey, and one annoyance was that both buses showed the same movie called Swimming Upstream. Not a terrible movie, but didn't really want to watch it twice.
Anyway, that was our trip to Mexico. Very fun, especially to see the totally different culture. Looking forward to going back again sometime.
Current Mood: good
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10:10 am
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Johari window
Everybody's doing it! The Johari Window was invented by Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingram in the 1950s as a model for mapping personality awareness. By describing yourself from a fixed list of adjectives, then asking your friends and colleagues to describe you from the same list, a grid of overlap and difference can be built up.
http://kevan.org/johari?name=luxgladius
Current Mood:  curious
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08:05 pm
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I'm engaged!
It's been a long time since my last entry, but the big news is in the subject line. Last Sunday I asked Jeannette Wong, the woman I love, to spend the rest of her life with me, and she said yes! I'm so elated and happy still that I simply can't put it into words. This is the best thing that has ever happened to me, and I haven't had such a bad life.
First let me grab the questions everybody asks: Currently we're going to try to see if we can make this summer work, probably August, here in San Antonio. If that doesn't work out, we'll slip it to next summer, or possibly the winter if it would work out. Secondly, I proposed to her in my apartment after we got back from going out to dinner. I was contemplating proposing on Valentine's Day, but I have to go for a business trip over that time, so that was out. I thought of waiting for a time that we both had time with no stress and worries, but I realized that with our respective schedules, that would probably happen around June. I'm not always a patient man.
And for the last question that everybody asks: Here you go!
Click on the picture for a better view.
The picture here is actually why I held off this announcement for a while, because my silly camera, circa 1999, has really terrible near-focus. Luckily I was able to borrow one, and after about 15 tries finally I got a decent picture.
So who is this amazing woman I'm going to be with the rest of my life? Well, the story begins many years ago when an American tourist from Philadelphia and a Chinese boxer met and fell in love in Mexico. The product of their love was a son who married a Mexican beauty queen. From this distinguished lineage comes my love. She was raised in Tijuana and Mexico City and, despite her dual-citizenship, she is a dyed-in-the-wool Mexican. Calling her "Mexican-American" to her face is a move that would surely earn one eternal ire. She is an amazing woman in too many ways to count, but I'll try to list a few.
1. She's beautiful! She has a figure that many women would kill to have, naturally curly dark hair that runs halfway down her back, and light brown eyes that have just an intriguing hint of her Oriental ancestry. She's fashionable and loves to wear makeup, but with or without it, she's drop-dead gorgeous. Naturally, my point of view is somewhat biased, but if you look through some of my albums, I'd be surprised if you didn't agree!
2. She's hard-working! Jeannette is easily the hardest worker I've ever seen. She puts herself through college, with no help from her parents and only a few loans. At the same time she does this, she works a part-time job that sometimes runs dangerously close to the forty hour per week line. She is majoring in biology and 9 more hours would get her a major in chemistry as well. Not only does she do all of this, she excels in all of her classes because
3. She's brilliant! Despite all the hard work she does and all the sacrifices she makes, Jen is among the favorites of practically every professor at her school. She always is fighting for the top grades in her classes. She's studying to be an optometrist, which there are only 17 schools for in the country. During her OAT (Optometry Admissions Test), she scored 350 out of 400. The average at the best schools is in the area of 300! She also did wonders on her biology subject test, as she got a perfect score! That's right, the 100% percentile. And this because she spent all of her vacation time studying and preparing, despite the fact that she worked her butt off in the summer taking classes and working. Even so, she's doing the work to apply to 9 of the 17 schools.
4. She's caring! Despite all the work that she does, she always makes time for the people that she loves. If I come home during lunch, she'll often meet me there and while I shower from my lunchtime run, she'll cook me a toasted sandwich and a milkshake better than any I could get at a restaurant. Despite desperately needing money as a self-supporting student, she still managed to pull money together to buy a car for her mother back in Mexico. That's right, she bought her mother a car, not the other way around! She loves her family dearly and will do anything for their well-being.
5. She's a nerd! Some may question why I list this as a virtue, but the fact is I'm a nerd, and the fact that we're both nerds makes us go together like peanut butter and jelly. We're both desperately into our fields, me into technology, and she into biology, and we could really care less about most other things. We like many of the same nerdy movies like Serenity or King Kong. One of our favorite things to do is sit down with her head on my chest and do a sudoku puzzle together. We seem to complement each other on that as we do in so many ways. Often I'll have been staring at a puzzle for a good 5 minutes without making any headway and she'll plop down to sit by me, look at it for 10 seconds and say "That's a three!" and vice versa.
6. She's a girly girl! Sure, she's got the brains and the looks, but she's also got the heart. She's a woman through and through. She loves pink, pink, pink (see the stones set to the side of the ring I designed? I know how to make it hard to say no!). She loves animals and nature and children. She likes to cook and is amazing at it, though she will probably belt me upside the head for saying so and spoiling her secret. She loves fashion and shoes and all things that are "cute". All this and she still easily qualifies for her nerd card. Can you see what a rarity she is?
7. We go together perfectly. I've never met anybody else that I've enjoyed sharing so much time and space with. We both look forward to the evenings where she'll get off work and swing by my apartment where I'll have made her dinner, or when I'll drop her off and pick her up at work during the weekends. We love having fun together in every way possible: hiking, picnicing, reading, studying, dancing, watching movies, just sharing the same space, there's nothing that either of us would rather do.
These aren't all the reasons I love her, but I hope they do some measure of justice to how much of a wonderful woman my fiancée is and how much I love her. By saying yes to me, she's made me happier than I've ever been and certainly happier than I have any right to be.
Current Mood:  ecstatic
Tags: jeannette
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11:46 pm
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Christmas
Christmas time, Christmas time. So here, gentle readers, is my gift to you: the chance to catch up on the particulars of my life. Life is good. Really good. Really really good. Jeannette and I are still going strong, and happy. Work's going wonderfully and there's some really interesting stuff on the horizon. I'm getting to spend more time hanging out with my brother, in a virtual sense, and that's a lot of fun. We play World of Warcraft together and it's been quite a blast most of the time. Also just got my friend Kevin to join in, so that will be fun as well, when he gains a few more levels to catch up. And right now I'm with the family during the Christmas holiday. Jeannette has gone home to Mexico for the holidays and work precludes her from coming up here when she finishes down there, so that is the only sour note in the current harmony of my existence.
Christmas has been a good time this year. The shopping was hectic, but Jeannette was able to help me with a lot of it. Ok, almost all of it. I'm such a lucky guy! My poor girl's been sick the last few days though, pobrecita. I had some difficulty getting back home yesterday as the flight was delayed overnight, and when I got here, my bag was still coming on the next flight, but aside from that a good Christmas. I got a ton of DVDs and a game that I had been wanting. Jeannette and I exchanged presents on Friday night, and it made me happy to see her happy over what I had chosen for her. I also got some great gifts from her, including Serenity, Batman Begins, and the latest George R. R. Martin book. I read the book on the plane ride here, and it was very good. I must admit that I do fear he's starting to slow his momentum in the same way that poor Robert Jordan did, but for the most part the book moves very well. ( Spoilers ) Tonight the dinner was extraordinarily good. Courtney has been attending a culinary school in Vancouver, and she helped prepare the Christmas meal. The meat was amazingly seasoned and the potatoes were wonderful. After dinner, my father, brothers, and I sat and watched football, the way that manly men should. I tried to call my girl in Mexico again, but was sadly unsuccessful.
Tomorrow starts the beginning of the skiing season for us. Dad claims that we'll be up and about at 9:30, urgh. It's a holiday! I mostly jest, of course, as that's plenty of time for me to sleep. It should be a good day tomorrow, although mostly it will be driving. But it will still be with my family and that will make me happy. I do miss my girl though... 5 more days!
Current Mood: content
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08:39 am
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A little bit of politics
Normally I'm not much of a political blogger, but I just think this is somewhat disturbing:
http://talkleft.com/new_archives/013011.html
Current Mood:  distressed
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01:03 pm
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Firefly geekness
When you see this on your flist, quote Firefly.
Mal: But if your hand touches metal, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet, I will end you.
River: No power in the 'verse can stop me.
Mal: You're not quite right.
River: It's the popular theory.
Wash: We will rule over this land, and we will call it... this land. I think we should call it your grave! Ah, curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal! Bwa ha ha, mine is an evil laugh!
Zoe: Remember that sex we were planning on having, ever again?
Jayne: The hero of Canton, the man they call MEEEEEE!
Inara: What did I say about coming in here uninvited?
Mal: That it was manly and impulsive?
Inara: Precisely, except the exact word I used was "don't."
Jayne: That's why I never kiss 'em on the mouth.
Jayne: I like smackin' 'em.
Current Mood: amused
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