a monochromatic oeuvre

Amazon Prime for students is brilliant. In the last two weeks, just because if I have the slightest impulse to buy something, I can load up Amazon and get it in 2 days, I have bought:

• 12 pairs of socks (I was running out of clean socks but really didn’t want to do laundry.)
• A Wrinkle in Time (Partly for a class, partly because I wanted it.)
• S-Video Cable (Would have bought it from Monoprice, but it would have cost the same after shipping.)
• Bluetooth Dongle (It was tiny and adorable and I wanted to connect my WiiMote to my media center computer.
• Bathroom Scale
• Scalp Massager Tingly!
• Feed
• Idahoan Mashed Potatoes (Delicious instant mashed potatoes! I would have bought this one but for some dumb reason its twice as expensive. I can justify $16 of mashed potatoes but $36?)

Impulsive purchases are just so easy now. Thanks to my good friends at Amazon and their free 2-day shipping, I am now a much poorer college student, but am enriched by instant mashed potatoes and children’s books. (Good god, I just went through that list and it costs $130. Those little things really do add up.)

I don’t update very much, do I?

Blogs are hard. Oh well. Halloween happened! Here is a picture of me and Dana.

Stick figure ♥.

So I arrived at school expecting to set up my room in about the same way as I had the year before. My roommate and I would have our beds set up in a Captain’s bed style on opposite sides of the room along the shorter wall, with our desks along the longer wall and the refridgerator and microwave in the middle of the longer wall between ours desks.

As I walked into my room on the first day, my first thought was that it felt somewhat smaller than it should have been. I soon discovered that this was because it actually was smaller, as the school had, without informing us, shortened the shorter wall by about 6 inches, supposedly to earthquake-proof the dormitory.

These are pictures of my suitemates’ room, which is set up like I was going to.

The bed is set up in a Captain's style, with the drawers and bookshelf underneath.

The two desks are along the longer wall, with the fridge between the desks.

As a result of these changes, one of the beds no longer fit along the shorter wall (the side with the door), and nothing worked anymore! All my plans had been ruined! After a quick scramble to find an acceptable room design, we decided upon this design (I would try to describe it but pictures would work better I think):

The two beds are lofted and closer together. Mine is along the far side of the room, and Patrick's is in the middle of the room.

The desks and drawers are under the beds, with our work areas in the room between the beds.

A lounge area is set up with a sofa, bean bag sofa, fridge, TV, and video games.

To achieve this setup, I just bought the sofa, and had the bean bag sofa donated to me from my friend. The leather sofa chair I used to have is now in the courtyard outside my room. The only drawback is that our beds are now lofted and relatively close to each other, instead of on opposite sides of the room. This hangout area is pretty sweet though. Fair trade.

Who are you?

I’m Marquis Wang.  I go to school at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, where I am planning on majoring in Computer Science.  I grew up in Champaign, IL, attending the University of Illinois Laboratory High School, which I graduated from in 2007.

I like to keep busy with various programming projects, which range from designing and maintaining my personal web sites to writing small programs or games.  I will keep some of the more complete ones in my sandbox.

Otherwise, my interests vary from moment to moment.  I enjoy playing chess, going hiking, reading books, and going on adventures.

As a student, my employment status changes from year to year, but in the past 3 years, I have been a sysadmin for the University of Illinois’s Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group, a student webmaster for Harvey Mudd College, and I am currently working as a programmer for the Cognitive Computation Group, once again at the University of Illinois.

Why do you blog?

I’m starting this blog as a record of the things that I’m interested in – things that I am working on or thinking about.  I can research things that I find interesting, then document my findings on this blog, so that I can refer back to it as necessary.  At the same time, other people can benefit from the same information, and hopefully give some feedback so I’m not working in a black hole.  Some people say that isolation is the best environment for creativity, but I find that it is far too easy to find yourself in a rut unless you have some outside input.

What exactly is a monochromatic oeuvre?

Monochromatic: (adj) Containing or using only one color; monotonous or lacking in variety
Oeuvre: (noun) The works of a painter, composer, or author regarded collectively; a work of art, music, or literature

Therefore, a monochromatic oeuvre is a collection of art of all one color or type.  Hopefully, the contents of this blog will be at least slightly polychromatic.  The title is a tribute to one of the best comic strips of the last two decades, Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes.  I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to find the exact strip in question.

How can I contact you?

marquis@marquiswang.com