Saturday, August 30, 2008

Torrey Pines 9th grader passes Computer Science AP Exam, skips high school class

From Carmel Valley News/Del Mar Village Voice August 28, 2008 page 21
Torrey Pines 9th grader passes Computer Science AP Exam, skips high school class

By Vic Wintriss
When Sean Kemper tried to enroll in the Torrey Pines Computer Science Advanced Placement class, he was informed that, as a freshman, he was not eligible to take the course. Torrey Pines High School policy does not permit freshmen to take advanced
placement courses. The Computer Science AP exam is given each year in Java, a popular, Object-Oriented computer programming language that Sean had been learning at Wintriss Technical Schools, in Carmel Valley. He felt confident that since he had
been studying the language for two years, he was prepared to take the exam without taking the formal high school class. Sean signed up for the May exam and recently learned that he had passed with a score of 4 out of 5, sufficient to qualify for college credit. “It was easy,” Sean said.

Sean, along with his brother Ryan and friend Matt Allen, have been attending WTS learning to write fun game programs such as Tic-Tac-Toe, Pong and Asteroids and controlling robots from teacher Stanley Kurdziel, who works as a Java programmer
for Leap Wireless in San Diego and is a volunteer teacher at WTS. “I knew he would pass the test,” Stanley said.

The trio, calling themselves Team Squirrel, recently won second place in the International Autonomous Robot Contest, held at the Del Mar Fair.
They put to use all their classroom learning to program, in Java, a Sun Microsystems SPOT controller to autonomously guide a Roomba vacuum cleaner through a maze and race against other robots through an obstacle course. Sean’s brother Ryan is planning
on taking the Computer Science AP exam this year, in the seventh grade.

Wintriss Technical Schools offers after school and weekend classes in Java to kids starting in the fifth grade teaching Java in a unique, kid-appropriate, fun-filled way.

For more information, visit http://wintrisstech.org

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Over the ex

I didn't expect to be writing another entry on this topic, since I felt like I should have been over my ex long ago; However, for the past few weeks I'd been thinking of her frequently and (once again) wondering what I could have done differently. I even IM'd her and told her I missed her. (don't even recall the response, but it didn't break from the predicted negative reaction)

Today, thankfully, that all changed... in a blink!

While my Dad was living with me last year, he read a book titled Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. He said it was good, and left it with me - I added it to the "reading queue" section of my bookcase, which unfortunately doesn't get much attention. Today I was reminded of the book through a random IM conversation, actually talking about another book and Blink was mentioned as somehow similar. That was enough to get me to pick it up and take a look.

The book starts off talking about a situation where the Getty museum buys a fake sculpture for almost $10 million dollars. They didn't realize it was a fake through fancy analysis or extended research, which was done before purchasing the sculpture, but instead it was the first impression that a number of experts had when looking at the piece. They couldn't explain it, but the piece didn't "feel right" to them. That reminded me of something my MoM said about seeing the ex and I together almost one year ago. She was visiting San Diego for my birthday and it was her first glimpse of us in about 3 months. It's quite interesting to me that she had that impression, as she was probably 50 feet away at the time and the ex and I were shopping for stuff for my birthday party in a cheerful way. Post breakup (a little over one month after the costco encounter), when my MoM told me about her impression, I didn't really believe her.

I continued reading, and coincidentally, the next section was on relationship analysis. The topic was the research of a fellow named John Gottman who uses extremely analytical techniques to analyze the interaction between newlyweds. He records couples for 15 minutes and asks them to discuss how they met and anything contentious in their relationship. Then he reviews the video using an amazingly rigorous analysis. It turns out that after watching only 15 minutes of the couples talking he can predict with 90% accuracy whether they are together 15 years later.

The analysis is fairly strict and isn't fooled by couples who are very polite and appear fine on the surface. For instance, the example couple in the book is like this, they are joking and laughing while talking; however, some of the actions have deeper implications. When she rolls her eyes, that indicates contempt for him, one of the worst things for a relationship - and when he ignores what she is saying and rephrases his previous point, that indicates defensiveness, also another bad sign. As I was reading this, I realized that despite the idyllic nature of the three and a half year relationship, that it definitely had fundamental problems from the beginning as well. This was an amazingly great realization for me, as I was having a lot of trouble categorizing it as a bad realationship and understanding why it had to end. And even if it was bad, I was having trouble rationalizing how that didn't imply that there was something wrong with me. During the time we were together, no one ever said to me that they saw any problems with our relationship, in fact it was exactly the opposite. She has strong charisma and pretty much everyone I knew loved her immediately upon meeting her. Even after the breakup, only one friend said that they didn't think she was right for me (and she got that impression from a super tiny set of data, as Gladwell calls it "thin-slicing"). Despite this, and the fact that I was extremely happy with the relationship at least 98% of the time, I'm highly confident that at any point during the relationship we would have resoundingly failed Gottman's 15 minute analysis.

Why? To start off, she was never happy with the story of us meeting, so if we had started off with that, she would have been throwing unhappy signals immediately. I thought it was a cute story, and tried to modify in some way that she liked, but never did find a way to do that. Then we could have discussed any simple meaningless thing we disagreed on, and while there were only a handfull of things (ranging from the movie Memento to proper significant other board game behavior), we would have been stuck on that topic until the 15 minutes were up (and probably an hour if they didn't stop us). I don't think we ever once resolved a disagreement, no matter how small, during the entire relationship. We never really escalated disagreements, but we didn't resolve them either. I tried many different ways to get resolution, but pretty much ended up always giving in and just avoiding any future related conflict. She never gave in at the moment, but often apologized later. I thought that was good, but I suppose for a relationship to be healthy that can't be the only possible way to resolve a disagreement.

I had been repeating to myself for a year that there's nothing I could have done to keep her from leaving, but I never quite bought into it. My normal way of thinking about life is that if you want something bad enough then through persistence, creativity, hard work, and luck you can make it happen. So that makes it tough for me to understand that something like the relationship I had thought of as the most important in my life, would be completely outside of my control. However, that's what the truth turned out to be. The relationship wasn't "right" from the beginning.

Of course, when I told some friends about it taking nearly a year to get over her, then they started saying "oh yeah, that's fine - I'm surprised it didn't take longer"... LOL - But I suppose they were just trying to help me before when they said things like "Just get over her. Stop thinking about her"... That's friends for ya =) I think I'll return to my previous opinion of not weighting friend's opinions on people I'm dating higher than my own.

So now, with the weight of the relationship lifted from my shoulders, I feel free to go on living my life. In the end, I can't fault myself for not realizing the relationship was doomed, it was good while it lasted and I now can also believe that it set the foundation for even better relationships in the future. Funny thing, while I was grasping at straws, trying to encourage the ex to give our relationship another chance, I bought a book by John Gottman called The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work - I pretty much had put it into the "I'll never read" category, but now that he's played a key part in me getting over her, I may have to read it one of these days.