I Made A Thing

Instead of downloading Matlab for oodles of dollars, we decided to try Octave as a computational program. It's one of those free open-source alternatives. It operates right in my terminal (which is interesting), and the exciting part that I wanted to share was that I wrote a script for it and it works and I feel so cool. The script is simple. It's literally three lines. It formats a bunch of numbers I plug in into a matrix (so I don't have to worry about semicolons), puts the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of that matrix into two other matrices (by a built-in function), and returns just the diagonal matrix of eigenvalues.

It's way easier than that sounds. It's seriously extremely simple. But I did it and I'm so proud. I want another excuse to write a script. Just so I can feel cool and programmer-like. Especially since I'm limited in my problem-shooting with this other program by my programming abilities. I'm not sure how to make the program able to find this library of values. I'm sure it has something to do with paths, but I really don't know anything more than that and my ignorance is burning my brain.

Yesterday I saw a thesis defense by one of the students of my professor. I saw him in the kitchen earlier that day, and asked (by way of making conversation), "So are you going to the thesis defense later?"

He looked at me kinda funny and said with an awkward chuckle, "Yeah, yeah....they uh, they make me go to those."

I realized my stupidity later with an appropriate amount of painful embarrassment, but hopefully he thought I was joking. Are you going to your own student's thesis defense? Aha. Ahahaha. Ho ho. So funny.

And my grad student just left for the weekend, so I'm stuck doing a bunch of reading. Yay. I think I'll do it not in this basement office. The lack of windows is really, really bothering me. Even if it's raining every day, which it is. Ithaca is very rainy. I lamely imagine it to be like a greener, fresher London.