Dan Mayer's Blog

It is a wonderfull day. I am in a great mood. I am not realy sure why. I think it was because I made some really good progress on my final 3d project last night. Then my class this morning was cancelled so i could sleep in. Sleeping in this morning was just perfect. I woke up feeling refreshed with a clear mind. I have a few things that i really want to accomplish in the next half a year or so and i think I can if i work hard towards some of my goals.

Today I got stuck and lost in pointers in C++ some days it just makes sense and others it doesn't. I think we are actually doing a horrible design on this little project for Computer organization and that it is so messy and that is part of the problem.

Well who knows what i will do tonight or tomorrow, but I know that this weekend should be full of tons of homework and accomplishment on various projects. I have a very busy week net week but after that it should be a a fairly smooth ride into finals.

Have the best of weekends all of you.

Ahhhh school is insane. I am trying to make sure that i get a good grade in stats. So i am in and out of the office of my prof. He is very good about trying to make sure that students understand. He is working way more than his office hours and doing meetings with professors between times he is helping a handful of students. So i am really happy about my stats professor trying to help out. My senior project is going to crap. It is due in like 14 days and we still have a variety of known bugs. We actually have more bugs now than we did 3 weeks ago, because we changed over a part of the system. Our professor is supposed to begin testing with his students on thursday. This thursday 80 students will be using a system that doesn't really work correctly right now.

I have two exams on thursday so i can't even work on my senior project right now...... AHHHHHHHH. It will be so nice once summer arrives. I have no more courses i should even be concerned about after this semester ends. I just need to really put some major time in at work and accomplish alot this summer to help increase my chances of getting a great job a Google.

Fun stuff going on this week.... None!

On the plus side (note the sarcasm) this girl that told me she would call me later last week so we could go out, never called. Hence I suck and will remain single even longger.... You know you have been single to long when you have a dream that your at a party and the girls you meet in your DREAM are only hitting on the guys around you. (I actually had this dream last night it was quite depressing).

Currently i feel as if school has sucked the life out of me. I am at school. I study, i still don't know the material well enough. I miss work and fall behind on my job. I sleep and i wake to do it again. I have nothing that i truly have a passion for in life at the moment. The insanely conservative turn our society is begining to effect everyones thoughts. Everywhere i turn people are trying to or starting to settle down. They are falling into a routine, something comfortable, and familiar. My roommates are both addicted to cell phones and hardly walk in the house without being on them. The time each day is begining to drag on with no end in sight. I am sure we are going to have four more years with a president I disagree with. I guess I just need this semester to end. Then what? Surrounded by nobody new and a quiet summer with work. Yippie sounds like the perfect thing (note heavy sarcasm...) Yes this is a bit of a down in the dumps post, but hey you can't be perfectly happy all the time and right now i am just in a bad mood, and it has been a bad day. I need more sleep, but i can't fall asleep until to late at night and i have to wake up to early.

I clearly believe that all of the blame should fall on Britney Spears for being one of the hugest tools for the media. WORLD STOP LISTENING TO SHITTY POP MUSIC!

Well the day started bad and got a little better..... Now it is starting to get crappy again, but only because i know i have a very long day ahead of me full of studying tomorrow... I can't wait for it to be friday at about 1:00 pm... it willl be great. Then i can go to work for awhile and work on some stuff i care about!

Anyways today i learned i am at that age where i have to start noticing/looking for wedding rings. I have been talking to this girl in my class for a couple days. Today we were talking in class and she asked me to go study with her after class. I was like sweet i should ask her out while studying... right about that same moment i saw the wedding ring on her hand.... Oh well it was nice to chat with her she is cool. It turns out she was actually one of the PHD students in my combinded undergrad/grad class. So she was a little odler but still important lesson. People i would consider hitting on could now possibly be married. I sure she would have laughed for hours if i had asked her out when she was wearing a wedding ring.

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It is amazing how happy an accidental extra burrito from toco bell can make you. When you purchse 8 burritos between 2 people and low and behold there is 9... it is almost like xmas.

peace,
Dan "Hitting on married women" Man

Alright i have been really busy on my senior project for the last couple weeks so I haven't had time to really get any work done. I did however have a meeting with a CU AI professor who is familiar witht he use of SVMs. He thought i was on the right track and was approaching everything properly. He answered the one last question i had before i can really set the system up to start working on its own for categorization. So that was exciting. Now all i really need is a week or two to really spend some time coding. If i had the time i really think i could make a very impressive first run beta of the entire system. Then with some time i think it oculd turn into a pretty cool application. I am hoping to tweak some of the hard coded values to allow for much more flexability allowing hte system to be set up anywhere and work on categorizing any categories the user wants. The categories are currently hard coded into a few of the functions and in the end that wont be the best way to do things.

Seperate good news is that my senior project just passed a 1 and 1/2 hour live test with 80 law students and a professor with no errors and no problems. That is the longest time the system has been used continously and by far the most users on the system at once. It is really kind of cool to think about the fact that their was 80 law students actively using something that i was a large part of creating. We are going to run a larger more extensive test on monday where the professor will be braodcasting a bunch of questions in class. We will see how that works out in the end, I am excited about it. The site will move soon, but if anyone is interested in looking at what my senior project can do take a look at

http://blackout.cs.colorado.edu/mtroom3/jsp

It is an interactive classroom for the law school, so that professors can more easily get feedback and quiz large classes of students.

Finally a good friend of mine from my research lab was notice by google and they called her up to talk to her and ask for her resume. So that is some pretty exciting news, that they are actively searching out talent. Perhaps as my project matures they will stumble apon what i am doing.

Well finally my horrible week is over. I think i did OK, but not very good on all my tests. Oh well long as i pass all of my classes i will soon get to spend more time on things i care about. I would really like to spend some time on my work project. This weekend i decided i was going to go out both friday and saturday night. Last night was alright, but really not all that special. I am hoping tonight turns out to be a little better. I have heard really good things about the "spotless mind" (actual title is a short novel) movie, and I am planning on trying to go see it tomorrow night if i get enough of my work done.

The law of chapstick:
The probability of loosing chapstick is directly proportional to the need for chapstick multiplied by the amount of chapstick tubs you own. Therefor if your in dire need of chapstick and you own 5 or 6 tubs the likely hood of actually finding chapstick is next to nothing.

I had a variety of dreams last night, one of them i was getting on a schoolbus and i was a child again, and i saw the most beautiful little girl and sat next to her on the bus. She smiled adn then morphed into a much older woman and the image like zoomed out and she was in a wedding dress and I was marrying her. I don't know what it means, but i am pretty sure it relates to the fact that i am a hopeless romantic.

I wrote a song a couple days ago, it was odd. I know i felt everything i wrote at one time, but i dont know if i feel it now. It was like i was finally expressing feelings and emmotions that i had years ago, but couldn't get out or express. To bad I have no musical talent and can't get the music that was in my head to go with the words to ever exist. I am sure that in a few years i will find it and just think it was a poem that i wrote. So how often do you have a realization or finally understand something that was really an issue years ago? It felt good like some weight was lifted off my shoulders after i finished writting it, even though i doubt i will let anyone even read it for years to come.

I am very concerned about the path that our country is heading down, with the very rich now trying to control what is morally right through campaigns and advertising on everything from marriage, drugs, health, and foriegn affairs. I am really curious to how things will look to me in europe and how i see their society and what differences that i notice.

I have plane tickets to Europe now. I have for a couple weeks. It is really exciting to know that it is actually happening. It is currently what i am looking forward to the most.

People deal with relationships in very different ways. I find it odd how some people spend so much time trying to do nothing but get married, and then another set that spends much time trying to avoid any sort of commitment. It seems all the girls i have been interested in lately are very against any form of commitment... or have been much older and married or engaged.

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Tonight i am drinking a new energy drink that i have never had before and I am going to write a review of it tomorrow. I shall now go to the bars and hit on women for the simple fact that i haven't hit on anyone recently and this bores me.

I thought this week wasn't going to be to bad. I was wrong. Apparently I have alot more stuff to do then i thought. I have a project wendsday, thursday, friday, monday. A presentation monday and tuesday. A paper due on monday. Arggg Oh well at least i had a good weekend so that is nice.

I finished up a little project at work today which was nice. I got a little further on my text categorization program as well. I am not sure if this one part of my program is actually running or not though. I will no tomorrow if it has finally finished or if it crashed.

Today i had to wake up 2 hours early to do some senior projects testing. Which sucked bad since on saturday i was out until 5 something. Oh well i will catch up on sleep one day. The only real problem is that i am starting to feel a touch sick. Which means i need to try to get some extra rest so as not to get sick. I already started uping my vitamin C intake.

This was a boring post i am sorry it was so dull.

i woke to go to law school for testing at 7am and i am back from school finally and it is almost 1 in the morning.... ahhh

Yeah 17 hour days!

After recent success with my models i wanted to do some much more involved and usefull tests. The only problem was half of the stuff i was doing by hand. I had written some java software Text2SVM toat would help witht he conversions and such, but i had to give it the names of the files and everything myself. I now integrated Text2SVM more into newsshaker. It uses the database to find out the names of all the categories. It recursively sorts through all the text files in given directories. It is quite nice. I ran into some problems where i was running the entire system out of memory even with a full gig given to java, which would cause way to much swapping and slow the hold system down. I rewrote my code to break up the steps into smaller parts using much less memory and it now doesnt crash and runs 2 or 3 times faster.

I now can go straight from the database to 9 SVMlight formated text training datasets for models. The next step will be to write some code the generates the models using an interface between java and SVMlight. After that i will be writting some code to keep all the results of the testing organized and worthwhile, which i will be storing in the database. The final step will then be writting code that takes many random documents from my database and trys to categorize them, and stores if they were correctly told to be place in the category from which they came. I will then be storing a matrix of attempts to categorize a category and where it was actually categorized. This should be highly exciting because it will really let me see the info I need to know to make my system worka dn to know how reliably it works, and where the problems are occuring. It would let me for instants see if the space between special education parenting is to similiar and close to special education school to be determined, but if combined would serve as a valid and seperate categorization from everything else. School will probably keep me busy for awhile, but it is nice to be making some good progress and see a first beta version coming into very close view. Then i will have a wonderfull testing and development application for text categorization. Hopefully by the end of summer i will have everything generalized to the point that anyone could add categories and begin maintaining a category and seeing how they can get different results with different information retrival schemes, or using diffferent categorization algorythms besides SVMs.

Anyone have some other algorythms worth looking into for text categorization, besides LSA/LSI and SVMs?

Today I accomplished alot on many different programming projects. 3 to be correct. Anyways, I got my comp org program almost done which is nice. I made some really good progress on my text categorization project for work. Then finally for my 3d graphics class i made some good progress on my very simple 3d shooter.

I am happy to have accomplished so much, but on the downside it is 10:30 and i have been programming the entire day on one project or another. Argg...

I swear i will have to do something fun and exciting for all of you soon. Then i will have something worth writting about again, but until then here is a picture of my 3d shooter in progress:

I think you really form a bond with everything in our life more and more. Or with people or things that you have known since you were young... I have a few bad bonds and a few good bonds...

Arggg little is as confusing as:

1) Waking up to alarm in the morning
2) Deciding to sleep through first class
3) Resetting the alarm and going back to bed
4) ?
5) Profit
6) waking up at next alarm getting ready for school
7) about to leave looks at clock
8) Freaking out that your really late to class
9) Realizing your late to class you were supposed to sleep though
10) Use tired brain and realize when you reset your alarm you only moved it forward 10 mins, So you actually didn't sleep through class
11) your up way early for the next class the one your planning to attend.

If only I wasn't a freaking idiot. Oh well that 10 mins seemed really long and was quite refreshing i was hella out of it then. Yes i just said hella, and no i won't stop using that word. Thank you, thank you... Please leave tips in there form of a donation to a charity....

I saw Eternal Sunshine of.... tonight. Flat out it was spectacular. I am glad i saw it. The problem is it makes you think alot about past relationships. Something i have probably been thinking about to much of late anyways. Anyways, i think this movie will have a effect on me for awhile. I am pretty sure that it will be keeping me up tonight.

Anyways as my first responce to the movie, I decided I might as well open up some of my past thought to others. I found a collection of poems that i wrote a couple years ago, and originally didn't think I should release them because they were quite personal. I decided that just because something is personal it always doesn't have to be hidden. I dont know what I think about these now, i dont really think I am in the same place anymore, but it is interesting none the less. Perhaps this will shed some light on my past to some of you that didn't know me at such a different point in my life. So if your interested you can find all of the poems i just realeased at the Wasted Brains Writting section. As a little sample I will include one of the poems below.

Well today i saw Hellboy. It was pretty good, not great. It was really visually stunning though. Some great effects and you can't beat the cool makeup and stuff on the actuall Hellboy. Very cool. It is worth seeing sometime, but you dont have to rush off to catch it in the theaters.

Well more hitting on fun, this time instead of hitting on a married woman, i was hitting on a girl that turned out to have a kid. This scared me. She also had a boyfriend, once i was informed of this i quickly ran away and never spoke to her again... argg must look for wedding rings and kids before hitting on people.

I really dont think i will be that busy again until after the 30th. Then i will have a week of hell that i will call finals. I guess this means i have some time to make some big progress on my project at work. Which is exciting.

Argg i am not tired at all and it is about 1 in the morning. This means i am going to have to force myself to sleep which never goes well and i will end up not being able to sleep. So should I just stay up later until i am tired? Do i actually get better sleep that way?

Ahhh another boring post..... DAMN!

peace,
Dan "Made out of chocolate" Man

Support Vector Machine (SVM) Spam filtering. After working more with SVM and my software to utilize it moving along nicely, I am begining to do work on a spam filter for my email. I have been getting a much larger amount of email in the last couple months. The spam is highly recognizable and simple to see patterns in, 90% of it is related to buying prescription drugs. I figured that SVM should be able to detected this very easily. Since i have already written, a few java email applications, I thought it would be easy enough to write a program that will let me log on and list things as spam and then use that to train and SVM model, which takes far less training data than many other machine learning methods. For now i have done a very simplistic design, the first step will, be building a simple webmail system, it will really only be used to mark as spam, and check the spam folder to make sure there was no false positives. Then I will use my normal mail system to read and respond to the mail. When i first log into my simple webmail all new mail will be download and categorized. I will then be able to submit any missed items as spam. Anything newly categorized as spam or not will be places in either the spam, or real mail section of the database. The database will store who the mail was from, the subject, and the body of the message.

I have now created two folders in my mail system. old and spam. I have moved all my old real mail to the old folder and all spam to the spam folder. I have about 300 spam messages and about 520 real messages. I have finished hte code for the mail checking and sorting using java. I now imported my Text2SVM software and used the to create the orginal model file. Now similiarly to my NewShaker software all that is left to do is have autocategorization. For spam this should be a little simpler since there are only two classification levels. This should let me learn the process that I will need to use for Newsshaker, but at a little simpler level. I created a model using 170 of real mail, vs spam. With it I was getting an 80% recognition on my test data, I think with some simple fixes in the way I am creating my text from my mail, stop listing, and stemming I should be able to increase this rate. I should also be able to increase the rate once I add more training data.

(This was created as a sub project to create and test code that will be used for newsshaker)

Here is my initial design.

Insane the amount of movie watching that i have been doing lately. Oh well it is nice to have the time for it again. It is bad that i dont spend a little more of my time on some productive work though. Oh well i will enjoy a bit of freedom before going straight into more hard work. so what did you just see to make this more of a movie madness weekend?

To start the day off, I watched old school Edward Scissor hands. Tim Burton is truely imaginative and visionary. He has creepy, surreal, but all together beautiful imagery in his mind. It was a great flick, it made me wonder in the end if Tim Burton has found his love, is he married? Has he loved and lost? Does he live a self torturing existance alone, but it pushes him to generate such amazing and emotional movies? Anyways great flick, and as always Johny Depp is amazing.

Then tonight I saw the whole 10 yards. It was ok I guess. I honestly wasn't that impressed. The first version was far better. It was a little force for many of the jokes. The attempts at bad humor thrown in where none was needed also was annoying. Oh well, it was nice to see one of the Friends gang out making movies again. Argggg how i love friends. Tomorrow night i think we will be seeing, Van Halseen (spelling?). Yeaaa for movies. I will have to come up with some video project this summer to work on. Something shorter and quicker to make than Dead Awake.

I didn't accomplish as much as i had planned today. I did however see an old fear grow within me again. It was unintentional and unnerving... I am not sure what I think about it yet. (Yes Dom^2, I am being vague on purpose).

Dream for now and dream again.
For tomorrow I will be dead again.
I wake in a trance.
Do my little dance.
Society will have it's way,
I am just it's whore today.

peace,
Dan "needs some good sleep" Man

Today I am all dresed up. this morning we did our final testing int he law school. At 1 we have our final senior projects presentation. This will really mean that we are done with the majority of our work. Yeaaaa... This means I can continue my string of, seeing an insane amount of movies.

This leads me to I saw Kill Bill 2 last night. I dont want to really say anything because i hate ruining movies for anyone. So i will just say, I liked it. It was good and I haven't decided if I like the first or second Kill Bill better yet, but I will get to it.

Well I guess the end of the year is closing out nicely and everything seems to be going to plan, which is good. At the smae time though it is probably a little boring for my posts. Nothing to exciting and I have been able to avoid breaking down pretty well. Oh well. If your bored you can always dance.... hehe

Wish me luck on my presentation.

Well currently there is a dark cloud hanging over everything I do. It is hard to focus or care about anything else at the moment. I dont know if i really want to discuss it or mention it on such a public forum. So just understand that things will probably not be the same around here for awhile, as I am deeply saddend by the recent event. Thanks for all of your support through out the time I have written and the things I have said.

I just wrote this while posting else where and it seemed appropriate...

Each day people wake and work on their art,
perfecting their craft and polishing out imperfections.
One day a man felt like his piece had begun to take shape,
he began to form his final details and colors,
others gathered around to watch his piece take shape.
As he turned to grab a new brush saturated with color,
his piece was destroyed and came crashing down around him.
His entire life had been dedicated to this creation,
which now was nothing more than the ruble at his feet.
He picked up the fragment closest to him and said,
"It is time, I began to rebuild a new piece."

Well lately to make me happier I have been making dumb photoshops. I have been posting them on a well known photoshop site. Anyways I just made this one to show George W/Dom^2 some of the other artsy things I do. Anyways I also decided that nudity also makes me happier. So I have included a naked woman, and a almost naked man. The almost naked man is my roommate Scott, I hope it maks all of the women out there happier. If you know what is going on our not, I will say that I am doing ok, perhaps even a little better than expected. I am still down and having a hard time studying, but I have been keeping myself busy with dumb little useless activities. Currently I am feeling pretty good, but that means there is an inevitable downswing that is soon to follow. Thank God, for my incredible support network of friends, crew, internet people, and family (of sorts). Hope you find this quickly made collection of images amusing.

It is odd, when you have a bunch of things that bother you. Things that are taking up alot of your time, thought, and energy. Then a larger problem comes along and puts them in perspective and the issues that used to bother you become completely irrelavent. I dont think it will last thought. Soon the new big problem will still be very consuming, but all the little problems that it overshawdowed will begin to appear again as well. That is what will create the truely difficult time. I don't know what could be done to prevent this, or to avoid it becoming an issue. I am sure it is something I will work through as I get there.

Today my groups senior project won an award. (Read about it here.)We were the best in our group of a bunch of other computer science senior projects. It was kind of nice since it was unexpected. It also helped me to feel like I will probably find the kind of work i want to after college. Search world, I am coming!

Seeing old friends can always show the happiness inside of us, if even for a short while. It was a good time when one of my best friends from HS came up to visit on friday night. I had a good time.

I think I am doing fairly well, better than expected to be honest.

Well I guess it is good that school is coming to an end. The problem is that there are finals coming up. I have allot of work to do for various classes and job related work as well. Given the current family situation, I am having an impossible time focusing on the information that is important. I can work on job stuff, because it interests me and I like it, I can work on 3d stuff for the same reason for my graphics class. I can't however focus on statistics or my computer organization class. I tried and tried, tonight was the first day I could get myself to do any stats work, and I only got about an hour done. I haven't even gone to my comp org class since the incident. We have a homework assignment due in that class tomorrow, I haven't even read what the assignment is. I guess long as I pass and such it is no big deal, there are really more important things than grades, and family is one of them.

I have been doing fairly well considering, but Monday was a really low point, I don't really know specifically what made it a crappy day. Perhaps it was just that things are starting to kinda seem more real, and all the other problems in my life are beginning to become visible again. The things that never change still wont change, and the things that i always counted on being there are starting to change and fall apart.

I haven't officially said what the issue is on my blog, most of the people that read it know though. I guess just since i refer to it so often I will said it in its most general forms. My parents are separated and one is with another person and it looks like it is headed towards divorce.

messages to just some people, who may or may not know that something is written to them:

You have always been the best, and I know you will always be there for me in the future. Our friendship constantly amazes me.

You truly amuse me.

You have always been strong on the inside, I am proud of you and always have been.

I wouldn't never give up a moment between us, you have probably been the best thing that has happened so far in my life.

If i was walking through hell, you would probably be the one right by my side to help fight my way through it.

You have shown me, that if your a good person on the inside you can truly do anything. Never stop achieve it all.

Years ago, I would have never believed how much alike we are. I am glad we have become so close, and are so similar.

No one could really ever question your loyalty. Never loose your way.

You have shown me that no matter how different people are, they can become the best of friends.

For you it might have been able to be many people, but for me it couldn't have been anyone else.

You were first relationship even though we were never together, I might still be here just because of you.

You inspired me with the pain you always caused, and taught me to never give more of myself than someone deserves.

I am privileged to be friends, with possibly one of the kindest people ever to exist on the planet.

The creativity within your mind helped me to release more of my own potential.

Your amazing for the fact that you never give up. EVER!

You have taught and affected me more than you will ever know.

That's it, thanks for all of the people above and others who have helped shape my life.

Men: Logic before Emotion
Women: Emotion before Logic

I submit the above as the fundamental difference between men and women.

Two days at school and I can enjoy the sweet taste of freedom. I have my last final is on monday.

I feel a dream building up in side. I don't know what purpose or focus it will be, soon it my completely reveal itself to me. I guess i have a feeling that something it just going to become more clear in my head soon. Perhaps you will be the one that helps reveal it all to me.