It looks like it is becoming a tradition – another vacation ends with a guitar video. This time – a short slow blues in Stefan Grossman’s style. The usual apologies for the sound, video and playing quality apply.

2. Professional

I was accepted as a student member to the Chartered Institute for IT (former British Computer Society). For the next two years (at least) I should be reachable through this e-mail: manfredas.zabarauskas@bcs.org.

 
3. Studies

Without getting into the gory details, the outcomes of the Lent (read: second) term in Cambridge can be summarized by:

Conway's Game of Life

Mandelbrot set (1280x1024)

1. a wallpaper “spit out” by ML depicting a rather standard Mandelbrot set fractal (on the right),
2. an animation “spit out” by Java depicting eight-hundred generations of the spacefiller pattern in the Conway’s Game of Life (further on the right),
3. and an insane amount of material to prepare for the upcoming exams; both broad and not as shallow as I expected.

I am still extremely enjoying it, even though the amount of my spare-time has decreased. (As an afterthought – I still had time to play basketball for Blues, Lions and my college, so maybe it was not that bad).

 
4. Internship

Over the summer I will be working as a Technology Analyst for Morgan Stanley, in their Innovative Data, Environments, Analytics & Systems (IDEAS) group.

Sunrise over Canary Wharf

During the interviews Morgan Stanley really left a very good impression both at the level of knowledge of the people working there and the communication and culture inside the company. We will see if that applies in day-to-day situations. In any case, I have nothing against spending the summer in Canary Wharf and seeing the investment banking industry from inside.

It will surely give me more things to write about in this blog, so be sure to check back once in a while.

Competition: internship offer packs from Morgan Stanley and Citigroup.

Gel electrophoresis of Senecio vulgaris, S. squalidus and S. cambrensis DNA strands.

Post-vacation status update: apparently I did have to discuss plant evolution through polyploidy in my exam! What were the odds…

Anyway, here’s the video. Oh, yes, and while we’re at it – happy New Year to you all.

"Well done! - joint shortest traditional (and practical :-) sort for the OS1a prize tick". Cambridge, 2009.

# Copyright Manfredas Zabarauskas, 2009.
# MIPS routine that reads an array of ten integers
# and prints the sorted array to console.
.text
main:   sub $t7, $sp, 40
l_read: li $v0, 5
        syscall
        sw $v0, 0($t7)
        add $t7, $t7, 4
        bne $t7, $sp, l_read
l_out:  sub $t8, $sp, 36
        sub $t7, 40
l_inn:  add $t8, $t8, 4
        lw $t2, -8($t8)
        lw $t3, -4($t8)
        ble $t2, $t3, no_swp
        sw $t2, -4($t8)
        sw $t3, -8($t8)
        move $t7, $sp
no_swp: bne $t8, $sp, l_inn
        beq $t7, $sp, l_out
l_prnt: li $v0, 11
        li $a0, 10
        syscall
        li $v0, 1
        lw $a0, 0($t7)
        syscall
        add $t7, $t7, 4
        bne $t7, $sp, l_prnt
        li $v0, 10
        syscall

A status update: apparently I have been awarded the Simon Gray prize by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. That, a KAL industrial scholarship, a couple of other prizes… I almost regret having to leave.

Anyway, here’s the video. Try to figure out which is worse: my playing or my webcam’s video quality.

"Green Card"

It all comes at once.

A couple of days ago I received a call from Lithuania – there was a letter from U.S. waiting for me at home. After some discussion it became clear that I was one of the 100 000 selected to compete for 55 000 DV’s (”Green Cards”).

After some short initial joy, problems and worries started to creep in: one has to cross the U.S. border in six months after getting a DV – something which I’m not keen doing at all, because I’ll be studying in Cambridge University at that time, and since I’ve worked quite hard to get there, it’s priority #1 in the list.

One possible solution would be to go to U.S. for the summer and then comeback for a school year, but… we’ll see how that goes, it might introduce some additional problems (about which I’m not fully aware at the moment). It would be nice to visit some old friends though…

Anyway, I’ll try to keep the whole process documented here as well – it might give someone a good estimate of trouble involved in getting a DV (and help me to track the overall progress as well).

Thanks for reading and stay tuned – there will be more.

Boston, U.S.A. (09/2007)