:: My Divided Soul ::

Dear Jersey City,

I think it’s time for us to break up. It’s not me, it’s you. I admit, you were there for me at a time when I was desperate and needed someplace, anyplace to live near my new job where I could also keep my drumset. I appreciate the fact that you gave me what I needed when I needed it.

By the same token, our relationship was really started on a lie. You see, that broker who introduced us claimed that you were safe, but it turns out you were most definitely not. The evening you told me those loud bangs were just fireworks? They were gunshots. Four of them. I later found out that someone was shot just at the end of the block. That did not make me feel safe. It has been a long road to recovery to get over this lack of security and I’m still paranoid in ways I never was before I met you.

It also turns out that you are extremely rude. For example, where I come from, when driving to pick up a friend, one generally parks the car, gets out, and goes to knock on the door. Apparently, you think it is perfectly legitimate to instead sit in the middle of the road and honk the horn repeatedly until the person comes out. This plan has several problems. First of all, since everyone does this to get the attention of others, no one thinks the honking is actually for them and so it takes much longer for people to come out, which leads to more honking. Secondly, this leaves the road blocked, meaning people behind you can’t get to where they are going. So what do they do? That’s right, they honk, too. Actually, you seem to like to honk a lot, now that I think about it. What I find particularly amazing is that you sit in the middle of the road, even when there is enough space for three cars on the side of the road only two feet in front of you.

Now this activity during the day wouldn’t be so horrible. I could tolerate it at 2pm or even 5pm or 6pm. But at midnight? No, it is simply unacceptable when I am trying to sleep before a busy day of work the next day. One day, I even tried to complain to you about this behavior. You were out at around 10pm not just honking intermittently, but actually leaning on the horn non-stop for over a minute. Given that I wanted to go to bed, I decided to go out and tell you to pull over to the side of the road and go up to the door and knock. When I tried to tell you this, you simply rolled up your window and continued honking. I then lightly tapped the window of your car with the palm of my hand in frustration and walked away. You proceeded to get out of the car and yell at me, telling me how I was disrespecting you and how I should “never touch a black person’s car.” It was around that time that I realized we just didn’t understand each other and that we likely never would.

Jersey City, you also need to bath more often. Despite the street sweeper coming four times a week, you were still very, very dirty. I’m not sure why the little “yard” in front of my place became a dump. I found food wrappers and bags in there all the time. Once, my landlord cleaned out the trash in the evening around 7 or 8 and by 8 the next morning, there was more trash there than the previous night! I don’t understand why no one taught you about the magic of the trashcan. It is in fact a can meant to hold trash. It works quite well. In fact, some people put trash bags in them, which are then taken away in a large truck to a place that holds only trash. I never understood the need to disrespect my place and dump your litter all over the place.

You also lied to me about how convenient you really were. Originally, your PATH train was to be able to deliver me to Manhattan in about 21 minutes. On a day I would drive to the train station and then take the subway after you, I should have been able to get to work in about 50-55 minutes on an average day. It was that way in the beginning, but it quickly got worse. Eventually, I was lucky if I ever got to work in under and hour. Sometimes, it was closer to an hour and 20 minutes. A lot of times, these delays were due to your PATH train, which would consistently stop in the tunnel for no apparent reason for an extended period of time. Let’s also not forget that the train often smelled, would sometimes have no air conditioning in the summer, and would be packed fully of pretty rude people like yourself.

So with all these things in mind, I think we need to go our separate ways. I have found another who knows how to treat me well. Closer to work, nicer, and pretty. I’d say I’m sorry things have to end this way, but I’m not. People say you are getting better, that you have your positive qualities now and that with a little more time, you could be the things I want. But I can’t wait for that. I of course hope that things do get better and that you are able to work through your problems. I won’t be there to find out, though.

Sincerely,

Kamal

bbsummerparty08-22, originally uploaded by kamalaboulhosn.

Every year, Bloomberg throws a gigantic summer party with all the trimmings. I always have my camera in tow for these things, so take a look at the pictures.

Around a decade ago, I was introduced to Orange County Drum and Percussion via the playing of my favorite drummer, Chad Sexton of 311. In particular, I was drawn in by the snare drums. OCDP makes these vented snare drums, generally around 20-ply maple with 4 2″ holes, meaning they are extremely loud.

I vowed those many years ago that someday I would finish my bachelor’s degree, I would finish my PhD, I would get a good job, and then, finally, I would buy that drumset I wanted. So last April, I placed an order for the new drumset, knowing it was going to take a long time to get. Let’s just review the time line for getting this drumset:

1. April 4: Initial payment for drumset is cashed
2. July: Have not yet receieved paint samples for drumset. Turns out they were lost in the mail.
3. August: Receive paint samples and choose one.
4. September: Still no drumset.
5. October: Still no drumset.
6. November: Still no drumset.
7. December: Still no drumset.
8. January: Still no drumset.
9. February 13: Drumset finally makes it to the east coast.
10. February 17: I pick up the drumset only to find out they forgot to make the 13″ drum.
11. April 12: Missing drum finally arrives!

So after one year, one week, and one day, I get my entire dream drum kit. It has been an absolute blast to play. For starters, here is a schematic of the new kit:

You can also look at several pictures of my new toy. If you hear some loud banging in the evenings, you know it’s just me!

When Milind moved to Austin, TX, we said that it would be a great idea for me to come down and enjoy SXSW. Last year, I wasn’t able to go because I was in the middle of training and couldn’t leave my desk, let alone the city. This year, however, I did actually make it. Our schedule for three days straight was basically this: get up at 11:30am, get to downtown by around noon, party and listen to music until 2am, go home and sleep and do it again. In our time there we saw about 25 acts. I was amazed by the consistent good quality of the bands there. Rather than give you a full description of of every band we saw, I’ll just give you what I see as my “best of.” If you can make it down next year, I highly recommend it.

• Best Show:The Whip. This band out of Manchester, UK put on a simply spectacular show. Kind of electronica/dance/rock. Extremely high intensity. Their album came out in the UK on March 24. Luckily, you can find it on iTunes.
• Second-Best Show: Delorean. This electronica/dance band out of Spain was our first show of the festival. We were lucky to have wristbands, as people without them or badges were not allowed. Was a high-energy start to our festivities.
• Best Cover That Wasn’t Really a Cover: “Guerrilla Radio” performed by Tom Morello. Why is it that Rage Against The Machine songs done in a completely different way work so well? Tom Morello prefaced this song by saying it was a song of revolution that has been sung throughout history. As he’s strumming along on his acoustic guitar playing this very nice, folky song, he sings “more for Gore or the son of a druglord…” It is at that moment that I realize what he is singing and I stare in amazement. Song was complete with a harmonica solo.
• Most Pervy Performance: Son of Dave. Former Crash Test Dummies member in a smoking jacket with an array of harmonicas, a loop machine, and a microphone by his foot. A little into the show, he says he’s getting lonely, so he invites a couple of people up on stage to sit next to him while he takes off his jacket and mentions it’s getting a little “pervy in here.”
• Most Awesome/Awkward/Random Show: YB. We see a disproportionally large number of Asian people waiting in line. Hoping we might find some Jpop, we walk in. Instead, we get to see Korea’s most popular rock band. It seems they have already sold over 2 million records. The show was basically a history of the last 50 years of American rock as they moved through many different styles. They thankfully skipped disco. Most people in the audience were singing along in both English and Korean. Only felt slightly out of place.
• Band Member Most Likely to Get Me Slapped By Randa or Make Me Feel Inappropriate: The cellist from Ra-Ra Riot. Nothing more to say on this one…
• Craziest Live Performance: Foxy Shazam. Keyboard player continually jumped on top of his instrument. I’m also pretty sure his sideburns have their own zip code. Of the albums I’ve purchased since going to SXSW, this is probably the one I’ve listened to the most.

Just for the sake of completeness, here is a list of just about all the bands we saw: Delorean, Peel, Saul Williams, Scouting for Girls, Foxy Shazam, Sixpence None the Richer, Black Before Red, Elevation, YB, Son of Dave, DJ Rekha, Tom Morello, Serj Tankian, Billy Bragg, Ben Harper, Ra-Ra Riot, Le Loup, Oz.Eagle.Lion.Man, In Case of Fire, The Cribs, Sia, NERD, Manis, The Whip, Rascals, The Wombats, James Yuill, The Teeth, X.

I just wanted to mention quickly that I posted new pictures from a very eventful Saturday last week. You can find pictures from Flushing Meadows with Randa, Bruce, Virginia, George, and a number of other people and game night with the one degree of separation that is Chethan and Tara. Enjoy!

One of the advantages of using a good hosting service for one’s website is that he can see the search terms that people type into places like Google that get them to the page. Sometimes, they make sense. Sometimes, they make you wonder how the search term got the person to your site. And sometimes, they make you lose faith in humanity, as people search for some very weird stuff. Let’s just have a look at some stats from August 2007:

In total 778 different phrases got people to my website. Given the widget’s popularity, I’m not surprised that the phrase “radar in motion” made up 23.1% of the month’s search keyphrases. That’s pretty typical every month. My Radar In Motion website is the second site that comes up when one searches for the phrase in Google, behind only the Apple website with a link to my website.

The first non-radar keyphrase to get people to my website is “divided clothes.” This one seems to come up ever month for some reason. Is this some kind of clothing company? If so, they need to do a better job, as my site comes up first for this phrase on Google. “New Sevendust” also tends to be a popular phrase. Unfortunately, the weblog entry leading people to my page for this search phrase is over a year old and refers to the band’s previous album.

My philosophical musings get some attention with search phrases like “do people really change?” and “what is an apology?” I can’t claim to be an authority on either topic, so I hope people haven’t used the information on this site for anything important.

I have also been very interested in parasites who steal pictures from other websites and use them as their own without any credit. Some people don’t seem to know what it is (”what is picture stealing”). Some people want to do it (”steal pics from profile”, “steal pictures of peoples websites”). Many people want to stop it like I did (”stop stealing my pics”, “how to stop picture stealing on internet”, and “find out who is stealing your photos”). Others are the parasites I’m talking about (”steal pictures of peoples websites” and “stealing photos from computer”). And others seem to have other intentions (”pictures of people stealing”, “pictures of not stealing”, “men stealing computers pictures”).

I have several song lyrics on my website from bands like lostprophets and Live. It seems the search for the artists of songs based on a line leads some people to my weblog postings: “i have no regrets standing on the rooftops song ,” “i look at my daughters and i believe lyrics.” Of course, this results in slightly misheard lyrics: “this is how we get now everybody scream now,” “standing on the rooftop everybody screams his long out,” “our love is like water beatin down and abused for being strange.” Some people just make mistakes: “our love is like water pearl jam.”

Then there are the search phrases that make me wonder what people were after:

• “pics of chance or kamal”: First prize, lottery ticket; runner-up prize, me!
• “immigrants have freedom of speech means what positive”: I wonder if he did the same thing replacing “positive” with “negative.”
• “request for putting mobile cell on silent mode”: Does it require a call to the cell phone company, perhaps?
• “stories of my death”: They apparently have internet in the afterlife.
• “cartoon video sex ferr”: Umm…..yeah.

I have recently been extremely intrigued by the ongoing competition between Airbus and Boeing. The two companies have taken decidedly different approaches in their next generation of passenger airplanes. In essence, the difference boils down to this: Is it better to take lots of passengers between large airport hubs and then have them fan out from there to destinations or is it better to fly people longer distances with the hopes of having more direct flights?

Airbus has taken the former approach with the development of the A380 Superjumbo, set to become the largest passenger airplane in the world. This mammoth jet requires airports to make some modifications to in order to handle its two levels of entries and gigantic wingspan. The project has fallen horribly behind schedule and already exceeded budget by billions. In fact, Airbus’ parent company has reports a substantial loss for the first time ever.

Boeing, on the other hand, is betting on the fact that people will want to take direct flights as much as possible, resulting in the development of the 787 Dreamliner. It’s designed to be extremely fuel efficient and carry people farther than any other plane. The first test flights are scheduled for later this year and delivery of the first completed aircraft will be in 2008.

Airbus has had no choice but to develop a competing aircraft, the A350. The plane is still five years away, and that’s assuming Airbus manages to stay on schedule despite the setbacks on the A380. It’s also worth mentioning that Airbus’ problems have led them to want to lay off people in their German plant, which has led to widespread strikes among their workers in France.

I have been following the developments very closely, especially now with the command “BA Equity CN” on The Bloomberg (yes, Bloomberg’s main product is called “The Bloomberg”). Every day there are new orders announce for the A380, A350, and the 787. However, as I watch the orders come in, I tend to see “Boeing wins plane order” and “company cancels order for delayed A380″ more and more. It would seem Boeing is going to beat out Airbus for the first time in quite a few years.

I’m not exactly sure why I find the story so interesting or feel a desire to write about it. Perhaps it is based in the fascination in airplanes my grandfather instilled in me many years ago. Perhaps it is because I find it intriguing when two completely different mentalities in design go up against one another. Whatever the reason, it is a story I will continue to follow closely.

It has now been nearly three months since I last updated this weblog. It’s not that nothing has happened in my life; quite the opposite. The problem is that life has very much been in transition so I haven’t felt in a place to write definitively on where my life is until now. I suppose this is natural when one is moving into a new chapter of his life.

The first thing to report is that I finished my Ph.D. at Cornell. Yes, I am now Dr. Aboul-Hosn! I wrote my thesis this past semester, which didn’t turn out to be too bad. It incorporates the work I’ve done since my second semester, which started as a project for the first class I took with Dexter. Actually, that is an interesting story that exemplifies my belief that things always work out for the best.

When I first got to Cornell, I was assigned to TA CS 381, the introductory theory of computing class. The class had six TAs assigned to it, which turned out to be too many compared to the honors version of the course, 481. Consequently, I was reassigned. At the time, I wasn’t very happy about it, or more accurately, I was nervous about it, as I wasn’t sure I had the knowledge in the area to TA the honors version. Dexter was teaching the class and I’d say it went just fine. He suggested I take his graduate class in the spring semester and I did. As a final class project, I worked on the KAT-ML theorem prover, which turned into a paper I presented in Kazakhstan.

In the fall semester, I continued working on the theorem prover and Dexter became my advisor. Terese came to Cornell and we started working on adapting the theorem prover to work for category theory. Some interesting aspects of that problem led to the exploration of the formal representation of the relationship between theorems, proofs, and tactics. Ultimately, this is what became my thesis A Proof-Theoretic Approach to Mathematical Knowledge Management.

So this means that a simple little thing like changing the course I was TAing, which was unpleasant at the time, turned out to be one of the best things to happen to me.

I’m also happy to report that I have found a job. The job search was quite overwhelming, with several interviews in which I was asked 30+ minutes of technical questions. This is just not a scenario in which I excel. What was also annoying was that sometimes the interviewers didn’t know the answers to the questions they asked. One interviewer presented me with a question and I gave him a solution that he immediately rejected as incorrect. However, upon inspection when I got back to my office, my office mates and I determined that my solution was in fact correct. The solution I presented wasn’t complex or incomprehensible, either, so I don’t think that was the problem.

For future interviewees, there is one thing I discovered: almost all the companies ask variants of the same three or four questions. Here is a sample question you might see if you interview for a software engineering job: You have an array of n numbers containing all of the numbers from 1 to n + 1 once with the exception of one of them. Determine which number is not in the array. This can be done in linear time.

So, I’ve now gone two paragraphs talking about getting a job without actually mentioning the job I got. I will be working at Bloomberg in the Research and Development Department in New York City. The job sounds quite interesting and very challenging, which I like. This means that people like Chethan can be expected to be bothered…often.

Finding a place to live was a challenge. I got spoiled when I moved to Ithaca. My mother and I came up one Friday, got the local paper, called a place, visited, and signed the lease right away. I had a place to live without an hour and a half of my first trip to Ithaca. I have to say that it was a completely awesome place, too. The market in the NYC area is a bit different. My constraints are a little unique because I need a house due to the drumset. This severely limits the places in which I can live. I ended up with a house in Jersey City. At first, I was a little nervous as Jersey City doesn’t exactly seem to be the greatest place on Earth. However, the place I’ll be renting is quite nice and an article from New York Magazine helped reassure me.

Friday night, I got to go out and celebrate my new job with Lee and several other friends. I was finally able to celebrate in the way I had always planned to when I got a new job. With the thesis done, a job lined up, and a place to live found, I could relax and let go. Upon arriving at the bar, I opened a tab and bought drinks for the people I came with. Then, any people they were friends with, or friends of those friends, or other people I saw there I knew, were added to my tab for the rest of the night. I had a great time talking and dancing with some people I knew and others I just met. When it was all said and done, I had spent $200 that evening. It was definitely one of the best nights I’ve had, so thank you to all of you who were there to celebrate with me!

I have no idea where I’m going to be in two months. I might be in Boston, I might be in New York City, I might be somewhere in Pennsylvania or Virginia, I might be on the west coast. I guess that comes with the territory of being graduated. Before I left, one thing I wanted to do was visit Chethan in New York City. It’s become a bit of a habit for me to go to the city around October. My impression of NYC gets better every time I see it. Might not be a bad place to move to if I find a job there.

In an attempt to avoid the needs for cohesiveness as much as possible, I present the highlights of the trip in this convenient bulleted list:

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art: This place still humbles me every time I go there. I just can’t get over the intricate nature of the works on display there. It is a reminder of a time when there was beauty in even the simplest of items. Our society today seems to be in way to big of a hurry to worry about details of day-to-day things.
• Chapel of Sacred Mirrors: I still get chills entering that place. I’m not sure what it is about Alex Grey’s work, but it manages to touch me in a very deep and meaningful way.
• Halloween adventures: Chethan informed me that I was required to come up with a Halloween costume for a party we’d be attending. It has been at least four years since I’ve worn a Halloween costume. Nevertheless, I did my best. I took a box of Frosted Mini Wheats, spread red ink over it, and put a large hatchet through it. Yes, I was a cereal killer.
• Out late: And I mean late. I’m usually not one to stay out into the wee hours of the morning. However, how can one not do so when in New York City where, you know, things actually stay open? I got back to Chethan’s at 4am. Note that it was the end of Daylight Savings Time, so for all intents and purposes, I got back at 5am. The night was filled with some lovely Long Island iced teas, fun conversation, and memories of I-Town (that’s pointing at your eye and then putting your hands in the shape of a “T”). Most interesting occurrence of the night was the hours spent talking to a group of women who were quite attractive. Kamal meeting a woman in a bar? Now that’s just not normal! The conversation was nice until one of them told me I was “too nice of a guy who was never going to have a lasting relationship because of it.” I could say some things about that, but I think I’ll avoid it.

Overall, I’d say it was one of the best weekends I’ve had in a really long time. Chethan and Tara say I should move to NYC and I have to say the thought is crossing my mind. Feel free to look at some pictures from the weekend.

It is so nice when family and friends can get together to celebrate a happy occasion like two truly happy people getting engaged. Lots of family (including Sittee!) made it to New Jersey to share in the joy of my cousin Dalal’s engagement to Mykel. Take a look at all the festivities.