A Great Four Years

After four years of teaching, I officially quit my job. It still hasn't hit me emotionally, which is strange because I always get depressed at the end of each school year. But I guess I've just been too focused on the reason why I'm quitting, than what I'm actually saying goodbye to (if that makes any sense...). I'm sure it'll hit in the next week, or in August when everyone's going back to school without me.

I have been so blessed to work at such a FANTASTIC school, with wonderful students and a faculty/staff that can't be beat anywhere else. 

My classroom quickly became quiet and lifeless. I hate empty classrooms, they make me feel so...empty!

I suppose my new classroom will be my home as I go from 250 kids to just 1. :)

Cowabunga, Dudes!

The other night we got together with some friends and had a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle marathon party. We watched the first two movies and ate homemade pizza- very appropriate for such an occasion. Travis and I even sported some "totally radical" TMNT masks.

Travis's favorite ninja turtle was always Donatello, which makes sense seeing he's the brain of the gang. I can't remember which one my sisters assigned me to be growing up. It was probably Rafael since they're always saying I show the least emotion of them all.

New Ward

On May 1, we had a multi-stake conference with all the married student stakes in Orem and Provo. The five married stakes were combined into three larger stakes, and several of the wards (like ours) were dissolved completely. Our ward members were mostly sent back to one of the seven conventional family wards that our ward boundaries encompassed, in three different stakes. The double-chapel church building where our stake used to meet will now house six single adult wards from Spanish Fork and Payson.

Last Sunday was our first week in our new family ward. It's definitely different! There are deacons (well, a few or them) passing the Sacrament, and there's even a few high priests! :) We're told the ward was already pretty big to begin with (they just moved to a different church building because the ward was too big for their old building), and with the additional 35 families coming from our old married ward, now it's huge! We have over 500 people in our ward, and we fill the Chapel, the overflow, and the entire cultural hall! Packed! We really will miss being in our student ward, but we're also excited to get to know everyone in our new ward. We already know our neighbors really well, and the people we've met last week and today all seem like really great people, too.

I can't really think of any photo to accompany this post... So here's a picture of our new church building from Google Street View. :)

My HTML/JavaScript Chess Game

For my optimization class last semester, I built an entire chess game using HTML and JavaScript. I also wrote an artificial intelligence algorithm to play as a computer player. My algorithm only does a two-ply (easy setting) or a three-ply (hard setting) search. It has about 20 different parameters it uses to score each move and decide which move it should take.

For my optimization class project, I also created a real-value genetic algorithm to optimize these 20 parameters and find the "best" settings for the computer player.

With more computing power, the computer player could be increased to a three- or four-ply search. But even with just the two-ply search I ran my genetic algorithm on, it took a pretty significant amount of computing time! We had 20-30 cores cranking away for about 2 weeks. Here are the stats after completing the genetic algorithm:

Total Generations:	31
Total Players:	128
Games Played:	1,832
Turns Taken:	637,900
Processing Time:	3,830 core-hours (160 continuous days)

There are still a few small bugs that need to worked out in the game (castling sometimes doesn't work properly, en passant isn't possible, and a stalemate is treated as a checkmate). But overall, it's been a fun project to work on!

Click here to play a live demo!

(Of course, this game is fastest in Chrome, and awfully slow in Internet Explorer.

Pop!

We started out with a goal to take a picture of me every couple of weeks throughout the pregnancy. We started out doing well, but kind of stopped after week 15. We decided to pick up again today at week 25. It's kind of funny to see the difference between the two photos. :)

15 weeks

25 weeks

We finally broke down and went shopping for maternity clothes a week ago. I tried to wait as long as I could, but Travis noticed I was stretching my shirts, and we didn't want that. But, they are so much more comfortable! :) Baby's doing well, and is very active. Travis has now been able to feel his kicks, which has been really special.

It's A...

We went in for our 20 week ultrasound and we are thrilled to announce...

It's a bird! No, it's a plane! It's a.... SUPERMAN!

Everything looks good and we're very excited (although we were already certain it was a boy)!

I made the announcement to my classes over the last couple of days and asked for a class guess regarding the gender. This was the first time I even made mention of my pregnancy. Here were some of the responses I received:

"I called it!"

"You want to know how I knew? It's because of that one day you wrote, 'Yo como pizza', on the board, and you were like, 'Mmmm...that actually sounds good right now...', and I thought, 'Yup! She's pregnant!'"

"It's because of the way you rest your hands on your stomach! I've seen you do it before, and fat people don't do that, just pregnant people!"

"Wait, before we guess, what have you been craving? That says everything about the baby!"

"I didn't want to say anything because, when I was a boy, my father taught me this lesson about not saying anything until you were absolutely sure..."

The classes who guessed the gender correctly get to take an upcoming test on Wednesday instead of Monday. So, half of my classes will be taking a test on Monday. But I might just be nice and have them all do it Wednesday.

The pregnancy has been fine so far. I'm really liking the second trimester more than first. :) And it's been fun to feel the baby move; even though the movements aren't strong enough for Travis to feel anything yet. We even saw our baby wave to us at the ultrasound! Anyway, we're super excited. :) Now we can start thinking of boy names...

Pi Day

Pi day is one of the most important holidays (Travis would probably say THE most important...) of the year for our family (3.14). We celebrate it with our friends every year, and what better way to celebrate Pi Day than by eating pie? We always make too many pies, but I guess that's part of the fun. :) I made peanut butter, tollhouse, and grasshopper pies. We also had chocolate satin and a fruit pie.

Speaking of pi, I thought I'd take a snap-shot of one of Travis's homework assignments. Just because it's so...Travis.