Rachel Cheng.info

on haitus

My sister’s graduating in May

Finally have my own apartment in DT, allows for more productivity! I can now juggle between full time student, side projects, portuguese lessons, field trips, and planning out a contract for the summer (and not to mention, i’m going to Brazil this summer!).

So this year’s been fun and exciting, learning a lot, and enjoying exploring the notions of design, creation, and analysis in the course of mathematics & computer science. Also love hearing the teachers’ musings on life, academia, and random etceteras. They always seem to be uttered just at the right time and place, so lyrical to a moment.

Definitely miss my old town - DT here always feels like I left my old town just a bit too early. It’s like ‘just right when you settled in, it’s time to leave again’.

Progress was slow, but i got all this done over break:

• verb conjugation dictionary program
• CSS style sheet maker program
• network set up: local intranet access to my hard drive / website
• decorated my room

these are the 3/4 hack points to something more substantial (all in respective order):

• connecting the GUI to database or integrate with XML, rather than separate tables each in its own file
• create a complete site, and not only style sheet
• allow global access to my webserver
• just a few more touches…

and then of course, new projects for consideration next quarter:

• multi-touch applications

whoaaa i’m on google’s first page when you search ‘rachel cheng’. not cool. well, in a couple of weeks i should be off.

There are many jokes that fly right over my head because I haven’t seen this movie or that TV show… Over the 10 years that I’ve lived in America, I’ve gotten to know a lot of quotes, characters, and scenes without seeing the actual movie. The other day, my friend Travis brought over Star Wars, and it was crazy to see Yoda!! He’s this funny old guy that likes to mess with people! I see why people like him haha! These moments are like minor revelations - a new connection is made, the world makes a little more sense, and the room gets a little brighter.

Here are a couple programs that i’m particularily proud of:

1. regressionLine.py - a program that takes data and plots them on a graph, draws the Standard Deviation and Regression Line, and outputs the data and values.
2. verbConjugator.py - a program that receives an English verb, pronoun, and tense form and outputs the translated form in Portuguese with a sample sentence.

My favorite analytical tools in Statistics class:

1. Quantifying chance and our expectation
2. Recognizing anomolies as bias or chance variation
3. Being able to find useful information from a data set

A couple of concepts I found most amazing in Ecology class:

1. Dividing subprocesses and large processes in ecological modeling
2. A mathematical expression of a complex system: a recurring process confounded with continually changing initial conditions

I’m excited for what the new year will bring. I will be studying in a program called “Computer Science Foundations” and learning Mandarin. In my individual learning contract I’ll be studying CATIA (computer-assisted design software) and creating some tangible objects. I also got myself set up for the Spring doing some programming for real-world applications, and also to advance my Portuguese when my instructor gets back in March. Summer I’m striving to do a study abroad at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, and hopefully set myself up for an internship with a company in Brazil =]

=) Revamping the site