Photo Friday - Labuan Bajo

Recently I've been taking a lot of photos as a way to capture the moment and the beauty of the world we live in, and I figured, there's no use in me keeping it to myself, so I'm going to share them, even though they aren't stellar photos by photography principles. I'm mostly going for landscape sort of photos because that's easy to see and take a photo of.
This will be a weekly thing! With a new photo every Friday!

Labuan Bajo: Indonesia

Over the summer I went on a trip to Indonesia to visit family, and while we were there, we did some touristy things as well! I recount the trip in more detail on my travel blog.

It's taken, not given!

One day the floor in my dorm was going to the dining hall to get dinner together, and to get there, we need to cross a small road. As we were walking, a car was coming down the road (rather slowly because it is a small road), and my RA continues strolling down the zebra crossing paying little mind to the car. He then turns to us freshmen and says,

"the right to cross the road is taken, not given."

Now, over a semester later, I'm still not sure if I entirely follow that advice, but I definitely have gotten less careful about crossing the street (which isn't a good thing). And yes, he still is alive (or as alive as you can be while taking 18 chemical engineering credits), one of my friends was concerned for his safety when I recounted the tale.

T9 Hackathon

A couple weeks ago I went to my first hackathon with the intention of trying something new and having a cool experience (even though I had two midterms the following week, better choices could've been made). Unfortunately, overall, it wasn't a super great experience.

I had worked on many teams before, robotics teams, online project teams, general group projects, and I forgot that the trials and hardships associated with those projects would also apply to the Hackathon. So I ended up being a little disappointed when the team I found myself in wasn't even half as motivated as the other teams I had formed in real life.

I am a chemical engineering student, and I quickly realized that most of the people who were at the Hackathon were computer science students. It made me feel quite out of place, and the "recruitment" and mentors available there just didn't work with me, unfortunately. However, I have had experience with programming. I've worked in javascript, python, java, html, matlab, and I touched ruby for about a day, but it's never been in depth. Since it has always been learning a different language from scratch and learning what a variable and a for loop is five times over. So I (naiively) assumed that my team members (who are junior and senior computer science students) would be a bigger contribution to the project than me. I ended up being one of the (two) main coders for the project, and our final product both fell short of our plans (we ended up presenting our wireframe during the symposium), and was underwhelming compared to the websites I had thrown together two years earlier.

While it overall was a bad experience, I didn't come out of it shunning coding, if anything, I became more excited about programming. After the experience, I decided that I wanted to start a coding project, a sort of "choose your own adventure" that runs on websites from github (it sounds extremely clunky now that I'm saying it out loud, but it seems fun nonetheless). And I found out about a second Hackathon happening a couple weeks later that I applied for.

I'm hoping for my next Hackathon that the workshops will provide more learning for me and that the final project ends up being something cooler than what I made a couple weeks ago. And while I'm not a computer science student, I'm hoping that maybe these hackathons will provide some good use for me in my professional career.

• The final product of T9 Hacks 
• Github repository 
• The unfinished website I made two years prior

Snowman Shenanigans

Where I live, it's been snowing on and off for about a week and a half, and the snow has been piling up. Not only that, but the snow has been melting and freezing to turn the sidewalks into ice skating rinks and to form huge icicles from the sides of buildings.

Naturally, when you have a couple feet of snow, one would want to build a snowman. Except, I'm on a college campus, so when there is snow and huge icicles...well, we get narwhal snowmen?

Decorating

Wow, it's been awhile, hasn't it? Recently I've been wanting to get into blogging again, and since this is already set up, I figure I'll at least get started before I put effort into making a new one only to forget about it again.

Since I last posted, I have started a new journey of my life that is called university. For the entirety of the first semester, and a month into my second semester, I left my side of the room pretty much bare of decorations. There is a huge fabric corkboard that covers the majority of the wall in the room, clearly for the purpose of hanging up posters, pictures, lights, etc. Except, I hardly used it. I knew it would have to be taken down at the end of the year, and kind of didn't see the point. The most colorful thing I had on my side was a bright yellow notice for when rental books were due, and a postcard promoting the Adobe creative cloud.

My roommate, on the other hand, totally loved decorating and fully decked out the room when the holidays came around. I was in full support of this and loved it, even though my side was quite lackluster.

Our room during the holidays! My side is on the right.

She even put wrapping paper on our door, but I didn't get a picture of that, however, I did get a picture of the strings of hearts that she draped on our door.

So when I quickly went home one evening, I decided that I would bring some posters and prints back to school with me and to hang on my wall, and I'm really glad I did. It instantly put me in a good mood and it made me really happy. It provided a sense of familiarity and reminded me of what I love. Plus, it makes me side of the room a lot more colorful. I wish I had done it sooner, because I've been struggling a lot since I came to college, and I think this would've made me feel better. No use crying over spilled milk though, since I have it up now, and I'm really happy it is.