Week of 4/2

Hi pals! Welcome to another installation of Keeping it Up With the Beavers. Just kidding. But I come bearing some good news! After months and months of waiting, we finally got our Caltech emails and logins. Even though there's only like two months before school ends, I think that there's a lot of things I can do with my email before they expire it. For instance, I already obtained free Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha accounts. I also got a Caltech VPN! This is honestly pretty exciting-- and I'm planning to file for an ID card so I can brag about it to my friends. Highly exciting!

On Thursday, we had Club Rush. The campus was closed, and the bus didn't initially come. I had to help with my club, National Arts Honors Society (NAHS) while we were waiting for the bus, and my fingers were smothered from the chocolate dust on the tiramisu tortes. Mr. Lee had originally arranged for a 12:50pm rendezvous time for the bus, so I planned to leave the booth and go to the front of the school at around 12:48pm. Unfortunately, they had left earlier, and so me and a few other people were left behind at school. That was no matter though, since Dr. Hassibi was also waiting for us for too long and just straight up left. None of our questions were answered, but we did start planning out the presentations that are supposed to take place at the end of the semester. I'm still not sure how the presentation itself would work out organization-wise, but I think I have a general idea of how I want my presentation to be like. Riveting!

We tinkered with the code we had for the Q-tables and I think I figured out a way to recreate a new Q-tables with new game function settings. I tried to run it on Tuesday in Mr. Lee's room, but since Q-learning takes up so much memory and is so slow, we barely made a dent in the learning process before we had to go. I'll have to arrange for a longer period of "training" time for the Q-tables to update the Q-values, otherwise this learning process will be near impossible for us to use. Regardless, this is a pretty exciting discovery since we were stuck on it for ages! I patted myself on the back that day. I emailed Dr. Hassibi to see if he could come over to help us, though.

I had a really bad day yesterday! I had a dentists' appointment afterschool, but Mr. Slimp hit me with a last minute appearance of prominent coach Teja Vepa. He's apparently here to help us prep for states and nationals, but I'm kind of confused as to why he's here since we already have our own coach. Whatever, the more the merrier. Plus he's over-qualified. But anyway, my car engine died when I was trying to get to the appointment, so I had to ask Mr. Silver to help jumpstart my car. He also just got into an accident, so it was awkward waiting for him to exchange insurance information before I could actually get help. As soon as he came over to help, though, I tried restarting my car again and it actually worked this time. That was super awkward to tell him that I didn't need his help anymore. My car also ran out of gas mid-way to the dentists' office...yeah it just wasn't that great of a day.

We didn't really do anything else, so I have a few drawings I made in the past week. The first one was inspired by a song called "Midas Touch" by Zacari. I realize that the character is making hand symbols reminiscent of that made by that one Satan statue. Let's just keep it symbolic with that! :). The second one was inspired by ballet dancers and flamingos. I tried to make tropical plants but it ended up looking like weed plants. oops.