So you might have noticed the emotional swings reading through the past week's entries, and a big part of the reason why has to do with my introvertedness. My capacity to socialize is being worked to the limit at this program, and this has made me stressed, anxious, tired and depressed at times. My emotions get the best of me when I'm faced with an assignment that, when sat down with for the first time, I have next to no idea how to do. Frustration builds up, and by 8 o' clock all I wish is to be in my bed alone, watching smash vods on youtube.
It wasn't until the middle of week 3 when Alex Jeng, one of our instructors, inspired me to tell someone about these struggles that I'm having. In every one of his lectures, Alex gives us these "productivity tips" that have been really useful. Everytime he gives us wisdom, I imagine him as Rafiki, giving advice to all his Makersquare cubs. One of the productivity tips this week was "don't suffer alone," basically advising us to tell someone, anyone, if we were having some problems that we're bottling up.
This surprisingly relevant advice had me thinking. When I was having an anxiety attack after day 1 of the stressful Chatterbox sprint, I decided to tell Jeff, one of our fellows, a bit about the unease I have been having and told him I wanted to talk about it the next day... only to blow if off because I felt perfectly fine when I woke up and worked on the sprint with a fresh mind.
So when the jitters started up again on the very night of Alex's productivity tip, I decided it was actually time to speak up to someone about the subject, at least to let the higher ups know what is going on behind my mind.
Again, the next day, I felt perfectly fine. It's like I'm on a menstruation cycle that comes and goes every other day. Even though I didn't feel the need to talk to someone anymore, I thought of Alex's tip and forced myself to sit down with one of the fellows, Casandra, to talk about my problems. It went great! It was very relieving to let all my bottled troubles out, and it was comforting to hear that someone could relate what I'm going through. Casandra told me she is free anytime to to talk about any issues like these and told me she'll be my MKS therapist.
Be careful what you say Casandra, you don't know what you're signing up for
There's one big thing that happened during this week that I left out. One of the things we have to do for Makersquare is to present something tech related for 5 minutes. Both cohorts gather after dinner each day to watch one person present. Instead of picking a later date to present and dreading the day to come, I thought it'd be nice to present early and get it over with.
Throughout my history I have had a fair number of presentations/speeches I had to give, usually for a class assignment. Being a self-conscious person, I've always dreaded speaking in front of people. Practicing the speech beforehand doesn't help much -- when I'm on the spotlight my mind goes blank and forget everything that I was going to say. I have never gotten above a B- on my presentations.
Well.. this one was different. I decided to pick something I'm passionate about for my subject -- Super Smash Bros. Melee. It was titled "The flaws in the design of Super Smash Melee, and how they make Melee so great." I filled my powerpoint with gifs and images.
... Huge success! Talking about something I was passionate about really helped me deliver the lines. Never in my life have I been applauded that loudly for... anything. I killed it real good. I destroyed it. xD1x's screams of "DESTRUCTION!!!!!" rang in my head and I couldn't stop grinning. I felt elation and a body high that I've never felt before, and that high continued throughout the night to keep me awake for a long time
I made it bois
#SaturdayReport:
I woke up at 7:30 and was freaking out because I was going to be late. I parked my car at 8:20 and hurried to the ROC only to remember on the way that class starts at 9:00 instead of 8:00. Where is my mind?
Took some cohortmates down to Koreatown to let them experience the K-town life. We had a great time drinking soju bombs (soju + beer... so good), playing drinking games, and getting silly. The manager kept giving us free stuff because Korean bars love foreigners coming to their bars, as they are rare in the scene.
Saturday's Toy Problem:
Warning: super duper hard and frustrating.......
Island Count
Given a string representation of a 2d map, return the number of islands in the map. Land spaces are denoted by a zero, while water is denoted by a dot. Two land spaces are considered connected if they are adjacent (but not diagonal).
(!!!) NOTICE: Newline characters in the inputs have been replaced with <br /> tags to make the value easier to read. In other words, when you see a break, it's actually a
\n
character. Check your console when submitting to see the input for yourself.
Examples
| Input | Output |
|---|---|
mapStr:.0... .00.. ....0 | 2 |
mapStr:..000. ..000. ..000. .0.... ..000. | 3 |
mapStr:..000. ..0... ..0.0. ..0... ..000. | 2 |
mapStr:0...0 ..0.. 0...0 | 5 |
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