Back in Beijing

What happened in the last few days?

Apologies. I arrived back in Beijing on Sunday afternoon, after Zixiao's father kindly drove me to Zibo train station, helping me for my trip back to Beijing. My trip wasn't too bad, as I remembered to pack food for the train. I had a truly successful and highly enjoyable stay in Zibo.

When the sun set, I immediately left my apartment to try out my new camera (a Canon Rebel T1i) in low light conditions - I think it performed reasonably well. Here is a picture of my bike just outside the main building of Tsinghua University.

It was 7pm at the time, but the floor was still super hot and I was covered in sweat.

On Monday I went back to the lab, amazingly managing to leave the apartment before the overzealous room-cleaning team kicked me out. 

I spent most of my day trying to figure out how I could speed up an experiment. I changed my code for GP regression to handle multidimensional input, changing the kernel function to compute the difference between two vectors in the input matrix, and taking the inner product between itself, i.e. <x1 - x2, x1 - x2>, to represent how "close" two data points are. I tested out my code for just one data point and realised that waiting for minutes for just one prediction really isn't practical.

I wanted to take a picture of the sunset because the weather outside was absolutely beautiful with clear blue skies for the entire day, but I ended up finding one of my friends during dinner and talking with him for just a little too long, completely missing it. I ended up with a shot much worse than I hoped for. The pollution today (Tuesday) is a lot higher, so it's likely I won't be able to see such a nice sunset again.

Probably the last time I'll see these mountains in the east before leaving Beijing.

What should I change for tomorrow?

Plan my day better! Spending too long on a problem without progress kills productivity. Delegating a specific, shorter amount of time for one purpose and focusing all attention on it is far better than spreading yourself thin and trying to do many things at once. This is partly responsible for my failure to write a blog post yesterday. Also, I should really learn more of the settings of my new camera - it appears to really pack a punch in terms of functionality and power.