Last Saturday I walked across a stage and received my degree. I managed to pull off Magna Cum Laude afterall, and feel pretty satisfied with what I accomplished while an undergrad. Now I’m planning on relaxing for the summer so that I can feel rested for graduate school. I feel like no matter what I do, I’ve always only finished “the easy part.” I’ve revamped the information on the site a bit, and will start looking for a new site theme since I’m at a new chapter in my life.
Category: Professional
On March 29 I officially quit running the hiramvillage.org website. I did that for three years, and in anticipation of graduating decided to let go of that job so I can focus on all the more pressing matters at hand. In light of all the complaints I received back when the Village Council told me to shut down the forums on the site, I have opened a new site called www.hiramforums.org which is completely unaffiliated with the village’s site.
Whether or not these new forums continue to exist is based largely on whether or not there’s actual activity on it, since the cost of registering the domain and hosting the site is coming out of my own pocket now.
Here’s a summary for my past week. Last Saturday I was touring Philadelphia with the other doctoral admits at the University of Pennsylvania. We went to a trendy place for dinner (the Continental) and it was a good time. Then Sunday I was flying back to Cleveland, and hurrying to finish a project for a class. Monday I was still rushing around trying to finish things and get caught back up. Tuesday I presented the project and that night it seemed like the world was ending. Hiram lost power, we got what had to be almost a half inch or more of ice from the freezing rain, and the college closed for break.
Now I’m in Columbus for the break. On Monday I’ll be visiting OSU’s computer science department. Friday I’ll be visiting Purdue, and from the way things are looking I’ll be able to make a final decision about grad school soon. Since I actually have evidence of grad school professors looking at this site, I’ll hold off on passing judgement publicly until I’ve made my decision.
In other news, I looked at the site visitation statistics and there was apparently a visit from a Commodore 64. Fascinating!
Part of the syllabus for my art history class is a term paper covering some form of ethical issue. After searching for something to write about, figuring “controversial” is my ticket to a B or better, I’ve decided on censorship. My paper might be more aimed on whether or not those who call themselves artists should be exempt from depicting what would be a felony for anyone else. As an example, and the focus of my paper are the works of Jock Sturges, whose work is primarily photos of nude children. For him to do it, it’s art. If I did it, I would be committing a felony and being labeled a sex predator. I wouldn’t do it anyhow, I personally disagree with the notion that it’s not wrong.
In other news, Kent State and Purdue both accepted me into their doctorate programs as well, so my record as of today is 4 for 4, with 5 not yet heard from.
Ohio State University has just accepted me into their program as well, and will be considering me for a fellowship. I’m 2 for 2 on acceptance to graduate schools that I’ve heard from.
Yesterday, I received an e-mail titled “CIS UPenn.” I hadn’t expected to hear from UPenn (or anywhere, really) before early March, so I thought for sure it was a rejection letter. I was wrong! I’ve been accepted to UPenn with the offer of a 4 year fellowship. I’ve looked into housing prices both on- and off-campus, and I think I can do fairly well on the stipend they’re offering. Now I just have to wait and see about the other 8 places I applied to!
The paper I wrote with the help of my advising professor from the summer has been accepted to the MCURCSM 2007 conference. The paper is titled “SCALES: Learning Multimedia in a Mixed-Paradigm Language.” I have a week to make a few edits to improve the paper before it is published, and then another week to create a presentation because I have to give a talk on the paper on November 3rd. In light of all the other stuff I have to do, it’s a mixed blessing. Now I have a publication to help with graduate school applications, but I also have yet another task to commit time towards that I don’t have. Here’s the abstract for the paper:
Learning functional programming is difficult, especially with the sparse amount of software assistance available. Text editors and command line compilers are frequently the tools provided for the most popular languages. We believe a better Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with built-in multimedia features would help a student learn functional programming in a more efficient and productive manner. For this reason, we have started development of an Eclipse plugin named SCALES to provide such a system. We explain the development of the IDE thus far, and show library functionality by providing examples of Sierpinski’s Triangle, the Towers of Hanoi, and Frère Jacques.
So the REU is coming to a close, just a week. We didn’t get as far as I would’ve liked but such is life. In addition to the 3D and 2D graphics libraries I wrote, I’ve also created a simple 3D world, consisting of a board (of customizable size in the x- and y-directions) divided into cells where a user can create, move, and remove blocks, balls, and disks. In the process of creating this, I managed to contribute to the scala programming language, a new feature concerning multidimensional arrays was added because of me!
I’ve started reading the Harry Potter books, and have made some pretty good progress on them. I guessed the ending to the seventh book before I read ANY of the books though, just went off of what I’d heard about them, and my girlfriend will back that up.
So far the summer’s been pretty eventful. My research so far has led to me writing some simple graphics libraries, both in 2D and 3D. In the process I’ve learned the Scala programming language pretty well, although I’m not too sure how I’ll use it in the future. My crash course in 3D graphics should be helpful for my second IRC, coming to a Hiram near you mid-November. Aside from that I’ve been to Indianapolis (set the first, third, fourth, and fifth place records for a speed-shooting game at the arcade) and I went to Chicago and visited a friend from the Cayman Islands that graduated a year ago.
In my spare time I’ve starting writing a few little pieces of software. Nothing special or commercial-worthy, just a fun little project for me to practice some programming skills not stressed enough in undergrad; file i/o, user-interface design, things like that. Not sure when I’ll be done with it, but someday there’s going to be a post on here announcing the project’s release and it’ll be up on the downloads page, both in compiled form and as source code.
Got this e-mail today out of the blue, with regards to the hiramvillage.org site i run:
Cory,
Just wanted to say I just discovered the site, and compared to many others I visit dealing with local governments it’s one of the best. I really like the newsletters, quick to the point and informative. Nice job!
Nick Ciofani
District Outreach Representative
U.S. Congressman Steve C. LaTourette