I graduated from high school on Sunday, June 8th. I'm officially free.

My only question is, what's up with the graduation/commencement aspect of the ceremony? The last time I looked, graduation meant "Conferral or receipt of an academic degree or diploma marking completion of studies." Commencement, on the other hand, means "A beginning; a start."

I understand commencement is supposed to be the "start of your life," but that's stretching things a little far.

Why do I bother?

I just saw a beautiful thing.

I was browsing on sun.com, looking at things I can't afford- namely, Sun servers.

I found one. It's psychotic. It's the Sun Fire 15k Server.

• Number of processors: Up to 106 UltraSPARC® III Cu 1.2-GHz processors.
• System Interconnect: 150 MHz Sun Fireplane[tm] redundant 18X18 data, address, and response crossbar interconnect.
• CPU/Memory board: Up to 18 Uniboard CPU/Memory Boards, each holding 4 processors and up to 32 GB memory, providing up to 576 GB memory per domain, and common design across the entire Sun Fire[tm] 3800-15K server family.
• MaxCPU Boards: Supports up to 17 MaxCPU boards, each with 2 processors.
• Redundant System Controllers: Automatic system failover of System Controllers, automatic failover of clock and management functions, with no service interruption to users.
• Availability: Full hardware redundancy, Hot Swap CPU, Memory, I/O, Power and Fans, Upgrades, Online upgrades, Journaling file system, Concurrent maintenance, Full data integrity, Redundant network connections, Redundant storage connections, Hardened operating system kernel, Hardened I/O drivers.
• Dynamic System Domains: Up to 18 fifth-generation Dynamic System Domains allow secure, fault-isolated, dynamic partitioning of resources within a single server.
• Operating System: Solaris [tm] 8 Operating Environment (10/01 or later).
• Power/Fan: Full redundancy of power and cooling systems.
• Storage Space: Might I add it has over 250 terabytes of storage space?
• Price: Might I also add that it starts at $1,252,330.00?

Damn... I want me one a those.

I swoon in admiration. Damn. I must be a geek. I showed the description to a friend who works as an IT consultant. She gave me a funny look and said, "I must not be a geek. That doesn't turn me on."

Sigh. Is there no hope left for the world?

Wow. I never dreamed learning HTML would be so easy.

I had started learning a few simple tags (bold, italicized,
breaks)
by posting on a friend's forum page, which uses phpBB. Most of the BBcode is similar to html, although it uses [] instead of greater-than less-than braces.

Then, last night, I decided I wanted to play around. I'm rewriting one of the school websites in GoLive 6.0, but I wanted to learn html. I suddenly had the realization that GoLive was too complicated and too user-friendly. I wanted sweat, blood, and tears to be involved in my test web site.

So I slaved. And boy, does it actually look decent. HTML isn't that hard (not like Perl)... I made tables and everything.

Life is good.

Guess who's going to MIT!

I was accepted to MIT, Stanford, University of California-Berkeley, and Harvard- but MIT won out. Happiness is mine now.... and I have, thankfully, no regrets about my decision. I plan to dual-major in biology and computer science- you probably figured that out already based on the contents of this journal.

Sweetness!

Geekingly yours,

lakmiseiru

P.S. If you haven't heard of MIT, I have some information. Just follow these easy steps:

1. 1. Reach your hand behind the computer.
   2. Pull out the widest cord. The screen should go black.
   3. Call your systems administrator. Tell them "I pulled the power plug out."
   4. Listen as they rant and rave. Then ask them where they went to school.
   5. If the answer is not MIT, repeat steps 1-4 with geek friends until it is.
   6. Hit your head against the desk.

I wrote two programs I'm pretty proud of. Here's the information; if you want the programs, send me a message. They're both written in Perl during spare time at school.

Knote: This program allows you to annotate installations, etc.

Deltaseq: This program converts genetic data from GenBank, lowercase, and uppercase sources to FASTA format.

Source available. Just message lakmiseiru.

Last summer I had an internship at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. I worked on annotation methodology for the Human Genome Project. My programming skills at the time were pathetic (and still are).

We used Apollo, a genome browser written in Great Britain. It's available on SourceForge; the install is pretty easy. Apollo requires Gene Finder Format (GFF) to display data.

I wrote a script in Perl at Baylor that annotated data from a polyA finder in preparation for conversion to GFF. I was checking my former boss' home directory (well, technically, her binaries subdirectory) and I found my program, unmodified, in it!

I guess she liked it enough to keep. I feel proud.

So you're probably wondering what this means...

For my senior project (senior year of high school, that is), I'm studying the significance of introns ("junk DNA") using bioinformatics (which hopefully you, the reader, have heard of).

I have a system at school running Red Hat 7.2. Sadly (or not, as you please), I have been forced to use an iMac keyboard, but I was able to find a three-button mouse at home... thank goodness. I run most of my jobs in-house, as that saves me data transmission to larger servers via ftp and allows me to run command-line wrapper scripts that I couldn't run on webforms. I've had to install various bioinformatics software packages myself, and this was not always easy... but they all run. For now.

If you're curious about anything else, read on or talk to me.

So this is the sum total of my life so far, hmm?
Pretty snazzy.

I will probably be writing in this journal on a variety of topics... so be warned.

Most of them will, however, have something to do with something. I hope.

Prosefully yours,

lakmiseiru