Every time I had my ID (and its affixed class schedule sticker) checked at the door, I made it a point to very obviously time the poor teacher doing his job with the stopwatch function on my Casio, and then record the time wasted by the check in a notebook I kept in my pocket. The following is the data I recorded:

Dates are recorded in October 2006 format; that is, the “day of month” is the number of days since September 30th, 2006. Days not in the table between 10/782/2006 and 10/830/2006 do not mean “not checked”—they mean that I didn’t eat lunch at the cafeteria on that day (I think).

As a warning, this post was useless, so those with time traveling capabilities will want to dial back 10 minutes to before they began reading this post.

My school was rather inclined to disagree with my petition for a “prerequisite override permit,” which is what I need in order to register for the C++ class, ECE 3090. After all, you couldn’t possibly learn C++ if you hadn’t first implemented some discrete FIR filters in the digital signal processing course first.

OK, just read my response after my registration permit was denied:

Hi Xxxxxxx,

But I will lose interest in schoolwork and begin to find my course-load irrelevant and tedious. Soon I will feel as if I have lost my way, and either turn to religion and/or become a Management major. Either path will only further my anxiety about my capabilities and self-worth, and soon my very existence will come into question. I will wonder if school is worth my time, or if life is even worth living.

Years later, as I lay on a desolate sidewalk, a vagabond stranded by the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering, tears will stream down my face onto my primary religious text and/or my diploma for my Management degree. It will be my last of many cold, lonely nights on that sidewalk. Hunger and sickness have taken its their final toll on my frame, already thin and abused since the second semester of Georgia Tech.

But as the world fades to darkness, I will realize that my tears are not of sadness, but of joy, joy that I had completed my core subjects instead of junior electives.

Oh, the humanities!

But seriously though: could I talk to the professor teaching the class next semester about getting a prerequisite override permit? I really am quite confident about the material in the course, and would like to take it to boost my GPA, and because I feel it is more relevant to my major as well as my interests and skill level overall.

Thank you,
Xo Wang
gtID: XXXXXXXXX

On Tue, 06 Apr 2010 09:59:59 -0300, Xxxxxxx Xxxx wrote:

ECE does not override prerequisites for its courses. Once you have
successfully completed ECE 2025, 2030, and 2040, you can take ECE 3090.
ECE 3090 is offered every Fall and Spring terms, and occasionally in the
Summer. You will have plenty of time to take it in the future. Right
now you need to concentrate on completing your core subjects, not junior
electives.

Regards,

Xxxxxxx X. Xxxx
Manager, Undergraduate Academic Advising
School of Electrical & Computing Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
PHONE: 404-894-XXXX
FAX: 404-894-XXXX

Below is the result of your feedback form. It was submitted by xxx@gatech.edu (ZHAO WANG) on Monday, April 05, 2010 at 19:18:02.

grad_ugrad: Undergraduate
term: Fall
GTID: ———
course: ECE3090
major: CMPE
graduation_term: Spring
graduation_year: 2013

comments: I already have knowledge of C++ and programming in 3090; previously held a job at a game graphics/AI company doing software engineering with C++.

The response I got was essentially a straight-faced “no” and “go have yourself a terrible @#$%ing day” only without those specific words and phrased a lot less politely. Yes, less politely.

By the way, I’m not actually a Management major now. I’m just going to be an EECS who leans towards CS rather than EE. And hates life.

I once had an English teacher at Stuyvesant who insisted with utmost sincerity that the character Kurtz of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was so named because of its supposed phonetic similarity to “Christ.” Furthermore, Okonkwo of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart has his name originate from our subconscious understanding of long, “masculine” vowel sounds. How could a syllable be masculine?

Her most far-fetched comparisons, which she dispensed daily with an unconquerable, belittling sneer, were the only ones which could match in tenuity to this little headdesk I was subjected to in junior year: “The jolly baker down the street has elected to use powdered sugar instead of granulated sugar. What do you think the author intended by such a decision fraught with between-the-lines intention?”

NOTHING. The author intended nothing!

So when I decided to create a new avatar for myself, my traumatizing experiences with English class led to me write the following disclaimer: “I intended my work to be experienced as it has been created. I enjoy the way it looks, and this work has no further meaning beyond its initial appearance.”

Then I looked at my new piece of work, the Outline:

Yes, I did make it the way it is because it looks nice. But it very obviously contains additionally meaning, much of it inherited from its sire, the Stuyvesant Techtonics (Stuy Tech/Techtie) logo (the Tech):

I wanted to retain the nature of my work, the hexagonal power button symbol that represents the melding of electronics and mechanics that is robotics. I discarded the dramatic red bar, standing out starkly against the black and white, because that was what Techtonics was when I made the logo—a bold sliver of a team, surrounded by uncreative soulless career-seekers. But I do not need such an iconoclastic representation; I’m a pretty quiet guy. Besides, taking out the red just makes it work better for my website. I removed the sharp caps in the bar and the five-sixths hexagon as well. Techtonics was an intense, competitive team; I am a person.

Of course, this means that I will be finally phasing out the remnants of my previous logo, the Indoor:

which has made its presence known only in its favicon form , which is now replaced with . The new logo resized surprisingly well.

Previous iterations of the Indoor have looked like so:

That last one is from 2003 or 2004. I believe I stole it from another website, because I remember it as originally animated. Please forgive me, other website. I was young, and you have done me a great service for the original art that has served me for so long. However, scioly.org, which is where I first began to use it, had and still has a very strict requirement on avatar file sizes, due to hosting costs. I cut all but one frame from it and simplified the palette. I eventually shaped the frame to look like my own planes, and animated the image once more to arrive at the final product, but I still wonder how the original looked…

Also, I found this amusingly terrible GIF bunched with the collection that the Indoor came from:

Wow. The things I did at the age of 13.

Now, you might ask, why do I need a personal logo? I really don’t. I don’t have that much of an ego to want a pictograph that represents me. The real issue was that I was using my Techtonics logo everywhere; my Gravatar, my chat services, my computer login, etc. It was my only work of art that was at all notable. In fact, it was my only work of art that could be said to be a work of art.

However, I didn’t agree with the new Techtonics leadership after I left and they took the team over. I took issue with their interpretation of the principles of Techtonics (which is that there are none), as well as the low priorities they placed upon the various activities Techtonics traditionally participated in. I didn’t want to be using the same logo that represented people with whom I disagreed.

And that is how I know I am not an English teacher. My little picture actually represents real live people now.

Check it:

C’est la Z @ Blogspot

And there was the essay—a quick scan (250 words minimum) of some deeply personal episode of my life into a desperate indirect plea to an anonymous admissions officer.

I doubt those in my generation really understand what sort of lossy compression the Common App asks of us to apply to our lives. Its goal is to concentrate a K–12 life, a real, live person, into a file, sandwiched within the confines of a manila folder. This is what looks like: Common Application 2010. That’s the paper copy, a perspective of it I’ve never personally seen¹. It really is just five pages. Imagine that: you, on three (3) sheets of paper.

And yet, here I am again, applying for a transfer offer. Some schools publish their own application, or request a supplement to the Common App. What those schools asked of me last year helped me turn those mental tools I once used to solve equations, catch Frisbees, or inspected music with, on myself. I identified parts of me that weren’t crafted by the Common App assembly line: the one on which people are produced who can perfectly sum up hopes and dreams in a 250 words minimum personal statement.

Regardless, Common App dispenses with soul-searching and self-discovery, and for us transfer applicants, even with the open-ended choice of essay topics offered to high school seniors. Instead, it presents a straightforward demand for an enumeration of “reasons for transferring.”

Right then. A straightforward essay prompt deserves a straightforward answer, which I will administer immediately, along with a bulleted list of reasons:

I wish to transfer to so that I can be happier. With that said, the following are more specific reasons:

• It’s lonely – Not lonely as in I can’t find friends or a party to go to, but because I’ve yet to find anyone with whom I could hold a prolonged conversation with on, well, anything to do with my everyday work. With the exception of upperclassmen and graduate students, who have received a college education and are prepared to enter work with the said education, does nobody really build robots or write software for fun? I really don’t have much more appetite for video games, guns, or the usual (politics, religion and school). A friend suggested that I was suffering intellectual starvation—but I wouldn’t dare call it that. Firstly, it’s extremely pretentious to claim oneself as intellectually starved, and secondly, if you feel intellectually starved, you’re not trying hard enough. You’ve got the Internet.
• GT spirit is obnoxious – “Only at Tech.” The epitome of closed-mindedness of Georgia Tech students. Walk with a group of friends and start linguistically analyzing a tongue-twister somebody had just improvised. “Only at Tech.” Figure out that it’s implausible to fit $9 billion in denominations below $20 inside a standard shipping container, as presented in some TV show. “Only at Tech.” Maybe it was cute, clever, or something you fancy to find in xkcd², but that’s no reason to be so closed-minded and elitist. Heck, OAT is even a website. I, of course, appreciate QDBs—the classy way to capture campus humor. I run my own for Stuy. My reply to “Only at Tech?” “Which Tech?”
• I’m still in high school – I like that GT is the closest I’ll ever be to the real American college experience, with the football games, the fraternities, and the parties. After all, I suppose that I never did experience the suburban high school fantasy of Sixteen Candles³. Even with the bit of regret I feel about that, Stuy has certainly primed me for the bureaucracies of college and of life. Requesting budget allocations from a committee? Online course registration? It’s all déjà vu to me. Now, with the college apps I’ve placed upon myself, I feel more than ever that I’m still living my life as a superannuated high school senior. Also, the real American college experience? It got a little old already.
• I love engineering – I also love computer science, building robots, and getting into discussions on finance, economics, and linguistics. So, I’m looking for a better education. Is there something wrong with that?
• Big, public, metropolitan – I associate much of my life with a 3,000-student school in downtown Manhattan. I’ve really had enough of the big city school. I came to Georgia Tech because it was the best education I was offered (I was rejected from nearly everywhere else I had applied to). The huge campus and the callousness with which the administration treats undergraduates is beginning to get me down a bit. The astoundingly huge lectures, nigh-unavailable professors, online homework and RF clickers—hey, they’re all things I could actually stand (though not necessarily enjoy) if it weren’t for the worst travesty of the public university: major restriction. I mean, what kind of a horrible system would prevent students from taking a class he wanted to take?
• Gender… imbalance – I’m all for the egalitarianism and meritocratic spirit GT admissions tried to show—I doubt they consider naught but the SAT Math score; heck, I think the essay was even optional—but trust me on this one. Diversity is not something you can skimp on. Other guys, textbooks, and Skype contacts (the three most common sources of dialog for the average GT student) make for terribly monotonous conversation after the first week.
• I got mugged and stabbed – Only at Tech!

If only I could express my anguish seeing my friends elsewhere having the simple things at college like having fulfilling conversations with other students. If I could go around showing everyone that yes, one can be quite clever even in places beside the Georgia Tech campus. If I could explain the shock, humor, and self-reflection of surviving a stabbing, and more, all within a personal statement… well, then I guess I wouldn’t now be applying for a transfer.

Maybe I was better off with one of these?

1. except maybe on my older sister’s desk, from a generation past of Stuyvesant strivers
2. possibly all three, of course
3. see the story of Pajama Day at Stuy

Raxo is, as described, a way for me to learn about all the compsci stuff I’m interested in: graphics, low-level assembly generation and optimization, and design.

Raxo uses AsmJit for Raxo’s equivalent of vertex shaders, rasterizing loops, the image buffer postprocessing/filtering, and maybe more. AsmJit generates actual executable functions from calls to its API at runtime, then allows them to be called from your C/C++ code. Why is this useful? It allows conditional branching (if, while, and for statements) to be eliminated from inner loops—the parts of the software that are executed millions of times every second, and that need to be as fast as possible—whenever they can be determined ahead of time.

For example, if you have a set of say, 8 lights in a scene to be rendered, but not all of them are on. A non-JIT compiled renderer would need to check through each light to see if the programmer has turned on the light, every time the lighting equation needs to be calculated. That could be once per vertex or even once every pixel! Raxo, however, can recompile its rendering function so that it generates lighting equation code only for the lights that are on, eliminating wasted CPU cycles evaluating those ifs and mispredicting branches.

This of course means that state changes are expensive. But then state changes are expensive with hardware too—much more expensive.

Having AsmJit prevents me from having to write a lot of parts of the library in C++ template metaprogramming. Using templates would allow conditionals to be evaluated and optimized out as the code is compiled. But then Raxo would be extremely difficult to understand and use, not to mention state changes would be impossible. How would you like to use a renderer that you have to make a new instance of from another class, just to turn on another light in the scene?

So, I avoided hardcore C++ templates, even if it meant having to generate assembly code. After all, I can abstract assembly generation through my own API, but it’s very hard to hide an ugly template API. See Anti-Grain Geometry if you want to see an example, as the API for it entails using nested templates parameters to generate an entire 2D graphics pipeline (filters, transforms, geometry transformation, etc.). Though I must say, AGG is blazing fast, accurate, and extremely high-quality. It is definitely a library that inspired me to write Raxo.

Raxo is also currently using PixelToaster as a floating-point color framebuffer (get this: Raxo—and my final project for the Stuyvesant course—renders to single precision floating point pixel buffers, for precision and dynamic range beyond those displayable with a computer screen). In addition, a separate file format, SPRx (Single Precision Raxo err… something) was developed based on Industrial Light & Magic’s OpenEXR HDR image format. In comparison, SPRx is significantly simplified because EXR was so much more than I needed.

Well, guess what. I got in somewhere else. I didn’t like it very much. And I got stabbed here.

Link: Georgia Tech student stabbed in Midtown
Link: GA Tech Student Stabbed Near Campus (they got my name wrong¹)

You see what happens when you get rejected from the school of your choice? This happens. I hate this fucking place.

I can’t believe I didn’t apply to Brown.

I’m leaving tomorrow.

1. No surprise there, but I actually do have quite a bit to say about FOX News’s skills at hunting me down

It’s a good article for those of us involved in clubs and teams, especially as officers. Leaving behind a dedicated core of officers and a mindset for leadership is particularly important for competitive teams. Their performance at tournaments when they represent Stuyvesant mirror the abilities of the officers of team to recruit, train, and organize.

Aside from that, I really take issue with how little exposure Stuy’s Science Olympiad team receives, especially in the Spectator.

I competed in SciOly for seven years (since 6th grade at middle school), and I’ve learned more about physics and electronics by building competitive devices for it than in any class. As a captain of the Stuy team, I took care of my share of recruitment and finances. SO was second only to Stuy itself in its impact on me. Now I help run a twelve thousand user community website for Science Olympiad and I volunteer at tournaments local to my university.

All the same, Spec covers Stuy SO less than Key Club, even though they’re about the same size and SO certainly does more for Stuy’s image and community impact. That’s not to mention kids in SO genuinely care about their education, not the line they could put on their college apps (BURN).

While I was on the team, the sort of questions we got from Spec and Standard were along the lines of, “why didn’t you guys win first at so-and-so tournament if your team has Stuy kids in it?” (As an aside, the Standard was worse about that snobbery.) Well, if maybe we got a bit more name-dropping, we might have some more cred with the elite Stuyvies¹, some clout with the administration², and some more SU/PA/AA money³.

Stuyvesant’s newspapers need to realize that they are more than tabloids for SING! gossip or tirades against the Teitel administration. They actually matter to the community, and need to take responsibility when. The newest Science Olympiad president, Wei-Jean Chang, has been doing a great job getting the word out about the team, with the stuy.edu news posting, gratuitous advertising, and huge head start in the school year, which are all things our team has lacked.

Still, the team’s image has not gained the lustre of respect that Math Team has among the student intellectual giants of Stuy nor among the science departments and administration, except with the superb biology section of the team. It will be a long while yet before Stuyvesant Science Olympiad attracts the wünderkind frosh and has its own course and classroom set aside⁴.

1. So then the best and brightest at Stuy won’t think Math Team is the only place for the biggest nerds
2. Maybe our SO program then can get the supported as well as those at other schools
3. So the SO team can actually afford to build robots and airplanes they need to compete.
4. Granted, a class just for SO may not even suit Stuy’s loose, student-run SO team

One of these days, you guys can just do the entire issue on this stuff. Even though I’m now an alum, I still now feel your pain when the Teitel administration slowly degrades Stuyvesant to just another ghetto city school. This must be what my sister (Bicentennial class of ’04) felt when she heard about my servitude at Stuy.

It may be elitist to say, but I really do believe that Stuy students deserve every privilege they’ve had in the nearly two decades since the new building. It’s not just because I now think of Stuy as “that college I transferred out of,” or that our students are superior to any others, but because it’s a damn shame to strip away tradition and trust from a name that stands above high schools and prep academies, and among universities and institutes.

When this administration takes a step towards turning Stuy into the minimum security prisons that house those who are unfortunate enough to attend zoned schools, it justifies it with shouts (ears closed!) that we are in the big bad city, and a comparison (minds closed!) to those “other” NYC public schools. Why can’t we be compared to private academies or college prep schools? Other top-ranked Specialized high schools in the nation? Heck, I invoked this petty comparison just by having a website with “Stuy” in its name, which a few teachers didn’t enjoy. “This would never fly even in Bronx Science,” I recall (and paraphrase) one Ms. Weinwurm rationalizing robotically.

No, but really, you should do a whole issue on it sometime. It’s pretty much the core of Spec, as it were; it’s the only story that runs every year without fail.