Finding the Right Place

It has been a bit over two weeks since I got here to Princeton and so far I’ve had a lot of fun. Something I enjoy about getting to know new towns is finding those places that are really unique and valuable. And by this in no way I am telling about tourist attraction. Actually, quite the opposite. I want to know the places of any kind that have quality – places were locals spend their time and enjoy it. It’s all about getting the real scoop out of the town. I mean to be honest I really doubt that locals in, say, Paris spend their spare time in the Eiffel tower.

In any case, not long ago with the help of my iPhone I found a place that definitely falla in this category. Its a sandwich joint close to the Princeton campus called “Hoagie Haven”. It’s nothing fancy, they just do what a sandwich joint is supposed to: they make great sandwiches. And they do it simple and with style. They are just a family run bussiness and they dedicate to make their customers happy. The best of all are the prices – when my friend Manuel and I discovered it we got two huge sandwiches, fries and a drink for each and the whole thing was ten bucks. That’s what I’m talking about. That day made regret every opportunity Ive had a subway. For sure the place is always full with customers.

And that’s what I mean, those are the places Iike to discover. In every city there are places a – not necessarily food places – that are really valuable. It’s just about finding them.

Filed under: Life

The Life Outside the Neards Realm (a.k.a. MIT)

Believe it or not I have once more been left out without internet here at Princeton. For some random reason the network administrator blocked me again because according to him my computer was behaving “maliciously” – whatever that means. He even suggested that the easiest way to solve my connectivity problems was to wipe out my eystem and reinstall it from scratch!! I couldn’t believe that the person in charge of maintaining the network said such thing. In all I’m really dissapointed at Princeton’s infratructure and the way is managed. In any case I’m tired already of complaining about this as therenis really no point to it, I just have to face the reality: I miss being at MIT where real nerds can take care of a network the way it should be done. I am only one week full of crazy math away from getting back. For now I’m off.

Filed under: Internet, Life

Lost & Found

Today my friend Manuel and I finally got around taking some time aside to go jogging. We used Google earth to find a loop that would fit our running skills – none of us has run in the last couple of months so we are both out of shape.

We started from the door of our dorm and went mostly through parts of Princeton that we somehow knew. However after a while we left all that familiar zones behind and were now trying to remember the street names of the route we designed. After a while of running we started to get the feeling that we were in the wrong place. Regardless, we kept going in the same direction as we thought that there might be an easy way to patch our route and get back to somewhere familiar. That thought didn’t last too much longer so I stopped and decided it was better to follow our steps back. However in that moment my friend Manuel yelled “Hey look at that!” I couodn’t really read the sign he was pointing to due to my bad sight but after getting a bit closer I made sense out of the blurr, it read “Institute of Advanced Studies”.

Although we might have thought that we were lost, this by far one of the places I really wanted to get to see now that I am here in Princeton. The place were Albert Einstein, Emil Artin and JAnd if I would have tried to find it o purpose it probably would have taken me way longer Thant what it actually did.

Filed under: Life

No Internet, no fun

Once again, for some random reason, I have been disconnected from Princeton’s wireless network. It feels as if part of me was missing. I mean half my life happens one way or the other through the internet: from reading the news and working to keeping in contact with my friends and family it all happens on the cloud. In any case, regardless of what it means for me to have Internet (or not) is not that relevant. What shocks me though is the way Princeton manages it’s network. I mean, to begin with in order to get connected a paper application must be filled out giving a bunch of data (some of which could actually be accessed automatically if this was done by a computer program – like the MAC address). Not only that, but it takes the university an average of 4 days to process each application! I mean really?! I am tempted to think that I’m spoiled with MIT Internet services, but still a paper application??!! I had never seen such an inefficient system in the era od information and I even less expected it from a tier 1 university in the US.

Besides that, not much has changed. I’m still studying like crazy to learn some of the contents tought at the seminar I’m at and in general enjoying the summer in this afkwardly technological place. Hopefully tomorrow (or in four days) it will get fixed. Until then (hopefuly soon).

Filed under: Computers, Internet, Life

Math math and more math

That much math? No, even more. In this program at Princeton I have learned in a week much more than I have learned in semesters of classes at MIT. It is impressive the amount of material that we are trying to cover. For sure, I won’t dare to say that I understand every single detail of what is going on. However I have a much better idea of what is going on in certain advanced topics in mathematics (specifically in Harmonic Analysis) which is kind of awesome. This has been only the first week, there are still other two awaiting. I am excited to see what other things I will be learning. For now, I need to start sleeping earlier and drink less coffee.

Filed under: Life

Omniscient, Embedded Methodologies for Web Services

As soon as you look at the title of this article you may ask, “what in the world is this guy talking about?”. Before answering your question, I must say that this is one of my papers in web technologies development and is very interesting. You can check the pdf version of it here. Pretty awesome right? Sure – I guess.

Going back to your question, the answer is: I have no clue about what is said in that paper. In fact that paper was not even written (directly) by me or any other human being, instead it was randomly generated using an algorithm (which is awesome as it generates even the custom references of the article at the end – I even appear in some of them). A second question you might ask is “Why would anybody ever spend time designing such a program?”. For real, I have no clue. However the three MIT graduate students that put their brains to design such a thing perhaps thought it would be interesting to send randomly generated papers to conferences and see what happened. I can imagine them regarding this as a silly joke that wouldn’t work. I guess that they would have never expected to actually get one of their papers accepted. The whole story is hilarious and is explained in details here. You can even got to that webpage,  input your name and get a scientific paper written by you! Give it to your friends ant tell them you are about to publish in an important journal! You could even ask them for the favor of proofreading it, well, that would be a bit mean. However, anyone in their right mind should figure out these papers are complete nonsense after the first few lines – or not.

My question to you is, have you ever spent time doing something this ridiculous/hilarious? And if so, what? I’m curious.

Filed under: Life

Coincidences

The last couple of days, besides being full of more math than I have seen in semesters, have had many interesting coincidences. My trip to Princeton started off by me returning from Dallas and getting stuck at Atlanta’s airport for a night. The details of this annoying night involve the fact that I was confused regarding the layout of the airport terminals and a misunderstanding on the departure time of my fight and a Korean woman who lost her luggage and could barely speak English and was looking for help. No comments on that.

Fact is that after finally getting a flight and arriving at Boston I repacked my stuff and hopped in a bus to New York. The only thing is that I was a bit scared as I didn’t know exactly the procedures of getting between NYC and Princeton. Regardless, I decided to not worry as I would figure it out somehow. Who would have thought that, after chatting with my neighbor-in-seats, he turned out to be Abhinav Kumar: One of the youngest math professors at MIT. It was really fun to just chit chat with him on that setting. To make things even better, he was also headed to Princeton. My fears were erased of getting lost somewhere were gone as I just followed him – he had done this trip multiple times before.

More coincidences? Well, yes. It turns out that here in the program at Princeton there happens to be another Venezuelan besides me. Although this might not necessarily sound as such a coincidence for many, the math community  back home is very narrow. Most of the people that do serious math outside of the country usually know of each other. He realized I had to be Venezuelan after overhearing a conversation of me and my father on the phone. Even better, that same phone call generated yet another coincidence. Another girl from the program asked me if I was Venezuelan. She was based on my accent and choice of Spanish words to base this, yet she was not Venezuelan. She mentioned that she had a bunch of Venezuelan roommates and that’s how she knew. It turns out that these “roommates” are my friends from back home from math olympiads. Apparently she even dated one of them. Random – I know. In any case, I don’t know what to say, too many coincidences for too few days. I’ve got nothing else to say. Let’s see what happens tomorrow.

Filed under: Life, best friends, bus, coincidences, dated, interesting coincidences, math, meeting, missing my flight, MIT, NY, Princeton, random, random professor, Venezuelan

From Professor to Student

During the past three weeks I played the role of an instructor, T.A. and Latex master at the math seminar for high school students. Its funny as now I am in the other side of the curtain – I am assisting a seminar in Analysis and Geometry which will be taking place during the next three weeks at Princeton. It is a huge contrast in my different ways. For one thing I am now the student, I don’t row the show anymore and I have no idea what’s happening behind the scenes. Also, its my first time in such – how to say it – Harry Potter-ish university. When I got here, in the middle of a thunderstorm at 11 p.m., walking through firefly illuminated fields, it was truly as if I was nearing Hogwarts. In any case, I will be spending some time here so I’ll probably need to adjust being on a place completely isolated from the city.

Anyway, talking about Princeton and comparing it to Hogwarts (and really having not much else to say for today) reminded me that the new Harry Potter movie came out. I haven’t seen it nor I have heard any comments about it, but what it looks like is the more movies from Harry Potter that come out the more action they have in them. Enjoy the trailer:

Filed under: Life

Long Days

It has been a very long day, actually, days. Starting from Saturday afternoon, when a I left dalls, up until a couple of hours ago I was on the road pretty much the whole time. It was eventful and hectic. There are so many interesting/weird/cool and not so cool that happened that I don’t know where to start.

One thing I know is that I finally got to Princeton and I’m really exhausted. I have three weeks ahead of me waiting full of serious mathematics. I’m not really sure if I’m ready for it but I really need to catch on my sleep. Tomorrow when my internet is configured (here at Princeton I need to fill a paper application to get internet… weird and YES I’m blogging from my iPhone once more) I will tell some of the highlights of the cool and not so cool things I went through these past two days. But now I need to sleep. Till tomorrow.

Filed under: Life

Connect the Dots

So… I am done with my work. Finally. After three weeks of working day and night I can rest and look back at all I did. The latex template I described in “Smart Latex Typesetting” was a success: We now have a finalized version including all the materials used during the seminar that spans for over 350 pages. Also, the students seemed to like the classes that I taught and as for me, I had a lot of fun teaching them. However, there is something else that is keeping me excited. For the first time in a very long time I have started to recognize – and do – things that I (believe) am passionate for, things that involve a mixture of my different skills that I really enjoy doing. It’s been a period for me to get back in track, use the tools I have gathered from many different fields and make something cool out of and have fun in the way. It is just the beginning for me, but for once it fells like looking back and “connecting the dots”. And what I mean by this is best explained by one of the most influential entrepreneurs of the 20th century in his speech to Stanfor’s graduating class of 2005, Steve Jobs. He has served as an inspiration to me and his wise words are worth checking out. If you are a young person like me and are still confused about life then watch on.

Filed under: Life, classes, connecting the dots, done with my work, fun teaching, Latex template, look back, pass, passionate, recognize, rest, students, Success