Capricious Me

I’m done. All the paperwork and all that – DONE. I’m officially Dr. Niu now, but not the useful kind of doctor who can save your life. I’m the kind of doctor that could possibly help you troubleshoot your computer problems.

So I’m off to China on the 14th before I start the next stage of my life – employment with Yahoo. This academic year’s been very travel heavy. Let’s see (for those trips that required a plane ticket)…

- Multiple trips to Seattle for interviews
- NYC in November
- Singapore and India in April
- Denmark and Germany in May (with an accidental excursion into Sweden)
- Boston in June

So that’s 4 countries, 3 american cities so far. This was probably my last year to travel as freely as I did… once I start working all this can no longer be. Siiiigh.

It’s been a good year though. Next year, I foresee a lot of Boston in my future. :)

Got one signature on the cover sheet already.
Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have two more.

And then, on Thursday, I’ll hear that bell ring!

I spent a lot more time than usual this year in Palo Alto over winter break because my cousin was visiting and Grace came for a second visit. (Personally, I think Grace should just give up the East Coast and move over here so she can eat yogurt and good asian food all the time…)

We tried out Little Sheep Hot Pot, which I’d been looking forward to for a very long time because of the promise of hot pot (duh) and 羊肉串 (lamb skewers). The hot pot was Mongolian style, supposedly, so it didn’t have the 麻辣 flavor that I’ve been craving. However, this did make the broth very drinkable. I despair of ever finding the sichuan hot pot that will make me hate and love my meal at the same time in this country.

Mike and I did the usual food visits – pho, beef noodles, sichuan, etc. My cousin, Grace and I watched K-dramas by night and went out to eat (always on the lookout for the perfect pot of 水煮鱼) and shop during the day. Not to mention, worst of all, I’ve fallen to the wiles of Torchlight.

All this means I wasn’t as productive in my own work as I wanted to be, although I did spend some time at Parc before Grace came. There’s a lot I need to do in January. It’s going to be a pretty short amount of time to do all the writing and data crunching that needs to be done in time for the Feb deadlines, but what’s life without challenges?

I think I’m too cynical to make resolutions, but I will endeavor to be a better grad student and graduate before I’m too old to remember anything before grad school.

I’m on a mini-high right now because my user study data actually seems to support my arguments. ^_^

Don’t you love it when raw data turns into meaningful figures???

Well, it’s set. I have my quals committee and they’ve agreed to a date and time. As I said yesterday, I can no longer be in denial. I have a month and a half now to put together a proposal that must convince the committee that I am worthy of continuing my PhD studies.

Augh.

One of my favorite scenes in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is when the female Cardassian is skeptical that Miles O’Brien can do a proper job of being a good scientist because on Cardassia, all scientists are female. The males are simply too emotional for science. Only in sci-fi, right?

Two NYTimes articles (recent, earlier) have been making me think about the low rates of women in computer science.

Admittedly, I never really though about this problem until I got to grad school. Wellesley was all female, so I never thought too much about it. When I got to Davis, I would have these “I feel like I’m at summer camp” moments when I’d suddenly realize that I was the only female in a group or a class. Aside from those jarring moments when I actually thought about it, I never really cared because it didn’t affect me or my life in anyway. I thank Wellesley for that. When I attended the Grace Hopper conference for the first time, one speaker, Fran Bermon, said something that I fiercely hold to. “Don’t be the woman computer scientist. Be a computer scientist.” I agree. Yes, be aware that as a woman some things will be harder. However, don’t handicap yourself before you even start by putting too much emphasis on “woman” and not enough on “computer scientist.”

Society now accepts technological prowess, so it’s not fear of being labeled a nerd, I think, that keeps people away. Test scores show that females do just as well if not better than male peers. Computer science is a field with great relevance and influence on the world. So why aren’t females flocking to this field as they’re flocking to economics, life sciences, political sciences, and all the other fields previously dominated by men? I think this perception that it’s so difficult for women, which does have some basis in reality, is what keeps a lot of females from entering into the computer science or other science fields. Who wants to try something that brings unnecessary hardships when similar rewards can be earned by going into other fields? Why would you want to enter a field where taking maternity leave might be considered a sign of weakness or lack of dedication and could jeopardize your tenure if you desire a family? But even earlier than that, why aren’t females flocking to a thriving field, or even trying it? Is it the notion that programming is boring and that’s all you’d do? Is it fear of failure? Indifference?

I’m skeptical that “geek chic” or the Obama presidency is going to lead to a drastic change in enrollment numbers or the number of women seeking to enter academia. However, I’m hopeful that all the attention may bring about changes in the established traditions of career advancement and maybe even in the way computer science will be taught.

Woohoo!! Just received acceptance notification from UPSEC 2008 for my workshop paper about phishing vulnerabilities on consumer electronic devices with significant concentration on the iPhone. Yay yay yay!

( Details about paper here. )

My summer internship’s all set. I’m going to Microsoft Research (which is pretty much my dream internship) from April until July. Woo!!! I was also interviewing with some other companies, but one of them wasn’t really a top choice so I dropped out of that process as soon as I got my MSR offer. I was waiting on another company, but their interview process was dragging on much too long and when they asked me to schedule in a third phone interview I decided to save myself the trouble and chose MSR for sure.

I’m so excited!! My housing situation looks awesome. I’ll have to commute ~15 miles or so from downtown Seattle to the Redmond campus, but I’m living smack dab in the middle of downtown Seattle. I’ll be so very close to that little crepe stand that I enjoyed during PAX and a few blocks away from the international district.

MSR!!! I can’t possibly describe how happy I am about this. For me, as a security student, to work with the groups that consistently publish in the top conferences is an unparalleled opportunity. I’d go to the middle of nowhere to work for them. Yay!!!

Hehe Mike cooked dinner tonight all alone with no intervention from me, to make up for making me wait for him because he needed a ride home. :-D He made roasted potatoes and steaks. Mmmm… Maybe I’ll post pics later.

I just got my workstation hard drive replaced. I’m using a Dell workstation that was purchased in 2005. It had a 120 gb hard drive that started to “misbehave” and all the e2fsck in the world couldn’t fix it. Luckily there’s still warranty on it, so the awesome sys admins got me a replacement within like 2 days. I got a 250gb drive instead, because they no longer make the 120gb ones. (I love the constantly shifting standards in the computing industry!) Seems like I need a new fan now. It’s a quiet hum for a while and an hour or two into it, it starts making these horrible grinding noises that makes me think it’s going to explode into cloud of dust. Except the fan’s clean and there’s no dust. I spent a while reinstalling and reconfiguring everything. It’s pretty awesome that Ubuntu’s made these things so effortless. And on that note, I can’t wait for the next release of kubuntu, which I think will have kde4.0 all figured out for it. It’s present in the Hardy Heron alpha releases already… I would test it myself, but I tend to have pretty bad luck with alpha releases. Esp. when the nvidia driver’s involved.

Ah, smart spammers… smart. I’ve recently noticed that some of my comment spam contain author links in the form of http://*.archive.org/[0-9]*/spammysite. There are ~290 occurrences based on a quick sql query.

Whether archive.org, a very reputable highly ranked site, is crawled or not is not an issue. It doesn’t even matter if they use “rel=nofollow.” They are being exploited as enablers for spammers, who use archive.org’s caching service to extend the otherwise short lifetime of their spammy site. Rather brilliant act on the part of the spammer.