Miguel's Blog

What is Success?

2011-10-02T11:10:00.000-07:00

What is success? The question can be answered at different levels of abstraction; in the detailed manner in which I will talk in this post many of you will have different beliefs. However, truth is this blog is as much for my own mental sanity as it is for those who might read it. As a disclaimer, I don’t know which set of goals are better than others for the unknown purpose of life, but if I show antagonism to certain goals it’s because people acting towards them have hurt me.

Success to me is very intertwined with happiness, recognition, and being cared for. In terms of academics I have given up in my quest to become the best in a particular field, mostly because I realized how nearly impossible to reach that goal is and I need to set goals that have a decent probability of being fulfilled and bringing me happiness. I realized that family matters to me tremendously. A job is supposed to sustain your family comfortably and allow you to provide a useful service for your community, not be the central part of your life, even if it’s where you spend most of your time. My goal in terms of academics has been humbled to being good enough to get a job through which I could support my family comfortably without prioritizing my work.

However, how does someone with family oriented goals fit into the modern world of university life? Quite horribly. The women surrounding me, particularly my ex-girlfriends, have different goals than mine. I don’t know how it happened that I my goals turned out so different from those of other college students, but it pains me daily. The fast paced, sleep with random people at parties, never feel reliable or stable with someone lifestyle is something that I feel I will never be able to understand. I have tried it, specifically after my last break-up, but it’s not who I am as a person. I respect a woman too much to be able to sleep with them after having met them for the first time at a party, plus women like that remind me of all the pain I’ve suffered and ruin any possibility of me being turned on for them.

My future is blurry, I don’t think I will find someone like me anytime soon, not at least until I leave college and women start freaking out about not being married. Even then, however, they do it not solely because it’s what brings them joy, but partially because society is forcing it due to their age and it’s no longer acceptable to go around sleeping with men. Why can’t others find the same satisfaction I do in a warm home where you can feel comfortable and safe that the other person will always be there showing you care and appreciation? The beauty of falling for someone, giving them the power to make you more happy than you could make yourself or destroying your heart, is that you trust them to always be by your side and never use the power for wrong. I might be hurt, but I’d still give my heart a thousand more times in hopes of finding someone that doesn’t lie, in the general sense of abusing my trust, to me.

So did I answer my question in the above mess? Probably not much better than that success is being in circumstances that make you feel happy daily.

New Model Same Job

2011-08-13T01:53:00.000-07:00

I was hired today to continue working at my lab throughout next semester. I'm very excited, particularly since I never got around to collecting data for my experiment. Additionally, I am building a new more extensive bottom-up computer simulation model of visual perception decision making in single motion, reaction time motion detection decision task. That's quite a mouthful. Regardless of how sophisticated that sounds, in the event that you're not experienced with reading neuroscience publications, the field is pretty much in its child states. I remember as a kid how I imagined that one day I would read in a book how the brain worked. Now I've grown up to realize no one knows. It's an odd feeling to know that we don't even know how the brain decides which way a bunch of dots are moving...

Anyways, projects mentioned in my earlier posts have been placed on hold for now. No one on the team seems to really want to continue, or at least an unspoken consensus for a break has occurred, so I don't know how that's going to work out. I've put too much code and effort into the second project, so I'd at least want to see that through.

Layout is Almost Finished

2011-08-04T09:23:00.000-07:00

The layout is almost finished, as expected Internet Explorer (IE) compatibility took the majority of the time, that was absurd. Worst part is I'm not even sure if its something we need, the current project targets a young audience, and I don't know a single person my age using IE. However, according to W3C 23.2% of internet content is being displayed through IE, so I guess its the correct thing to do. Still have to tweak a few things, but I should have the layout complete by the end of today.

I'm a little afraid that we are using relational database technology, because if this project generates the traffic it has the potential for, I am going to face a headache. At least if I face the headache I will be happy we succeeded.

New Project

2011-07-31T02:14:00.000-07:00

I am very excited to say that I am currently working full time on a side project. It's one of those toilet moment ideas, please excuse the connotation, and I think it is extremely fun and has some potential. The new project is basically building a LAMP site, whose purpose I will slowly divulge throughout my posts. The only clue I will give now is that it is a humorous site. This is not our main project, but I personal consider it a nice resume builder, and at least a great experience if nothing else.

The idea, having evolved about six hours ago, has progressed rapidly. Built the use case and class diagrams already, so I plan to move on to coding soon. Need to first review SQL a little, planing on doing that tomorrow, if not tonight. My expectations for tomorrow are: join diagrams complete, PHP template complete, and finish learning SQL.

Headache of deciding a DBMS

2011-07-30T02:47:00.000-07:00

After a week of research into object database management systems (DBMS), I've defaulted back to believing that a simple pseudo-key/store noSQL DBMS might best fit my purpose. Particularly I am looking into Cassandra which offers easy scallability and load balancing.

The ~60 Mb cap for storage shouldn't be too much of a problem as I can't images many users submitting images of that size. The idea of launching without videos was proposed today. If we take this route, then we will simply have to use embedded videos. I'm not too happy to delegate our video hosting like that, and I'm afraid it might lead to a lower reputation, but I can't seem to find a decent DBMS to handle video blobs.

I will start working with Cassandra tomorrow, that is, I will attempt to install it onto my computer -- running an Apache server. This also means I have to learn Thrift. It seems like every week or so I have to learn a new syntax. Kinda glad that we decided to start working late tomorrow, this gives me the morning free to read.

First Post

2011-07-29T03:02:00.000-07:00

Falling asleep seems to be impossible tonight. My friends suggested earlier today that I should have a blog, so I decided to not waste time laying in bed and create this.

I am a student at the University of Pennsylvania. Although I am currently declared as a Biomedical Engineering major, I believe that I will be switching to Computer Engineering when fall semester starts. My passion for computer science started when I was in eighth grade; I wanted to become a website designer. However, like many young bright students are, I was soon told by society that I should aspire to become a doctor, and so I pursued the medical sciences. To be candid, I quite enjoy biology, but ever since tenth grade AP Biology I haven't had the same motivation. The idea of working in a wet lab for the rest of my life scares me.

Speaking of labs, I currently work at Dr. Joshua Gold's decision making research lab at the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Neuroscience. My work centers around understanding random-dot kinetogram motion detection. Specifically, I model subjects data through the expanded LATER model, not to be confused with other papers published under that name. Perhaps I should change my models name. Either way, I analysed the original LATER model with added variables and came up with a new way of predicting perceptual learning gains. Currently we are at the stage of human trials, since seeing the model correctly simulate my data is nearly meaningless.

Back to the subject of what it is I'm going to do with my life, I currently am designing and developing a software as a service (SaaS). We, my two other partners and I, are currently in the designing stages of development, which basically means we are making a bunch of different diagrams to represent what we offer and how we offer it. We haven't even gotten to the fun diagrams such as a UML class diagram. I will admit that it is difficult to develop an idea between a group because each person has their own idea of what should be offer; however, I value my team and I feel that in the end, after countless hours of arguing late at night, we actually greatly improve the product. Three brains think better than one.