Tinypliny's Journal

02/12/2011 19:07 #53600

Up for some hip-hopping?
Category: dance

Verve Studio is starting up some really interesting classes in March including a hip hop class with Micheal Burton, a popping class and a hatha yoga class with T. J. Veith in addition to the breakdancing classes with Shane "Depree" Fry.

I am pretty interested in taking the hip hop with Michael Burton because I really want to incorporate some hip hop flavour to my stick-like salsa.

The current schedule is for Thursdays. They need 3 more people to offer a class on Mondays... Who's up for hip-hopping with me?

tinypliny - 02/15/11 00:34
Sorry about so much whining about budgets. I don't think I have ever had a more expensive month as this one...

tinypliny - 02/15/11 00:33
Ideally, I would love to be in all the classes but it's all getting a bit too pricey for me.... It's not very practical to break my budget so I need to make some hard choices.

heidi - 02/14/11 21:10
I'm thinking that yoga class with t$ would be good. It fits my schedule and is walkable.

02/12/2011 15:16 #53594

I just did a baby-freeze
Category: dance

in breakdancing class with Shane "b-boy Depree" Fry today.

I was in suspended animation floating in an orbit around Uranus. That, and I have somewhat sore elbows.

02/11/2011 22:48 #53592

Salsa PMT-style
Category: dance

First there was the Cuban on1
Then there was the NYC on2
And now, there is the one and only Buffalo onPMT...

02/11/2011 02:36 #53587

Virabhadrasana III
Category: dance

I can't hold this pose for more than 3 seconds rooted on my right foot but I can hold it for 2 minutes or more rooted on my left.

And, in a rinse-and-repeat of old news, I am still super-clumsy in the intermediate salsa class. I am just not fierce enough. Anyone know of extreme bare-hands/knife street-fighting classes in the city? I vaguely remember seeing a small sign quietly saying "extreme"-something between the Chinese eatery and the tattoo place on the west-sidewalk in the block between Utica and Bryant on Elmwood. Wonder what it was...

metalpeter - 02/12/11 14:21
I need to explain the Tea Cups that was a joke of course.... But there is a group I have seen a few times and may have put some pictures on here of called The Peking Acrobats (not sure if I spelled that right like the place in China). The thing with acrobats is a lot of their moves are like are about total body control strength and balance. I don't mean that you can squat 300lbs or you can bench press 400lbs. The type of strength they have is they can hold body positions and lift or move their body with say and arm so they are in balance. I forget the exact feat but like one of them is balancing cups on a plater and it gets to be two and three and keeps going. I think the guys do a thing where they put a bowl on there head and balance one on the end of their foot and toss it up they are pretty cool..... That type of thing is what I was referring to... In terms of the balance on both sides hopefully with practice you will get them equal or pretty close.........

tinypliny - 02/11/11 18:06
Tea cups?! I am glad you are not my yoga teacher...

metalpeter - 02/11/11 17:25
Well you have to practice it until you can hold it on your bad side as long as you can on your good. I know things like that are a combination of strength and Balance.. Now on a less serious note once you get that down it will be time to try the tea cups on the feet next...HA

02/09/2011 06:13 #53577

Computing frustrations
Category: i-tech

I just need a computing platform to perform many operations (~2000) on a small dataset in a reasonable amount of time without dragging my system to a standstill every time. Is that too much to ask? Apparently, it is. The options I have are dismal.

- Get a computing account at UB's center for computational research. This is easier said than done. There is so much bureaucratic red-tape and craziness involved in just getting a puny account that it makes sense at this point to accept that I will never be able to use their resources.

- Buy a laptop that will run linux and then R on top of it efficiently utilizing all the processing cores and the memory. This is a difficult proposition because R doesn't utilize all cores natively. It's a pain to figure out how to set up linux to utilize all cores with R and make the processing efficient - with my minimal level of expertise. So I am stuck with a spiked up CPU load and system freezes every time I run an analyses. Should I be spending close to $1.5k for such misery. In the end, maybe I will have to.

- Get a mac. NO. Their hardware is appalling. They get away with such mediocrity because of their sheep fanboy base that is blind to the fact that their hard-drives and memory fail with the frequency of a rainstorm in an Amazon forest. I like well-functioning software but if I have to be queuing up at some service center (however fanciful its name) for repairs or replacements every few months, I don't think I will ever wander close to such a product.

I wish things were not this complicated.

tinypliny - 02/12/11 20:32
Aarrgh, I wish computing power were not so expensive...

tinypliny - 02/11/11 00:33
Hmm... I checked my code again. I don't know if I have enough knowledge of S+ to tweak my code so much. (e:carolinian) - I found some useful answered questions at StackOverflow. Thanks! There is a package that makes R use multiple cores under ubuntu. I am going to take the fedora out and put ubuntu into my main laptop and give the data-crunching another whirl (its nearly 400 X 15 data points - not really a huge dataset).

Learning how to write code in C will not really solve my problem. I fear I will be stuck in non-progress mode for ever. R is based on S+ and many PhDs (in statistics/biostatistics/systems engineering) across the world write packages that carry out algorithms and models for R. If I go the C route, not only will that involve learning how to code all those algorithms but also code the options for the algorithms and all the underlying basic statistical procedures that underlie each statistical model. In a sense, it will be like learning to write an equivalent of the R framework, its packages, its command-options AND its code in C or C++ - that is something so daunting, I don't even want to go near that solution! :) I am sure if you made a statistical package repository based on C, they will name it after you! :)

carolinian - 02/09/11 15:03
StackOverflow is a great place to get answers to these kinds of things.
:::link:::

While the easy solution is to throw more hardware at it, if that's not available, you could spend some neurons and learn C and write the program in C, and you could probably get it done all on one core with your old hardware and save some $$$.

paul - 02/09/11 09:51
Is it possible that its your prog? 2000 calculations is not that crazy. How big is the dataset? Perhaps you can find ways to make it more efficient.