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Neutralizer
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Name: Ed
Country: United States
State: California
Birthday: 7/4/1986
Gender: Male
Interests: Tennis, listening to music, doing stuff, forum posting, losing stuff, sticking my head in my computer, watching TV, programming like mad, sleeping for long periods of time, IMing, slacking, idling, staring at the ceiling while trying to sleep, memorizing trivial facts, attempting to memorize pi (3.14159265358979323), collecting bookmarks
Expertise: Computer games, humming, hacky sack, talking for long periods times, rambling on and on with one breath, TI-83+ calculator games, procrastination, directional hearing aka audigy skills, channel surfing, insomnia, getting a headache, tweaking, jumping the stairs, degaussing, fluffing up trivial essays, writing completely pointless things, sarcasm
Occupation: Student
Industry: Medical
Message: message meEmail: email me
AIM:  sAtVeN
MSN: ask me
ICQ:  36256135
Yahoo:  ask me
Jabber: edchen
Member Since:
1/27/2003
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| Black Holes and RevelationsYes, I'm well aware that the title is that of the new Muse album (which is awesome by the way). Regardless of the title, I think it appropriately sums up this week as a whole. (Also for some reason, I always write around Thursdays and Fridays. I suppose that makes sense because that's when my problem sets are done.) The black holes represent the timesinks that I've had this week, whereas the revelation represent what I've learned this week from starting homework during the weekend. It means I don't panic to finish and turn in my EE120 homework. The world feels happier and calmier when I do that. It's like I'm in control of the world.
With that problem solved, next problem was why the hell was my computer blue screening when I come out of hibernate. I need hibernate. Shutting down computers sucks ass. It takes too long and doesn't take advantage of my Raptor's awesome speed in recovering from hibernate. (The Raptor is an enterprise-class hard drive for the less tech-savvy). Not to mention it makes me green because I can save on electricity rather than leaving my computer overnight. I don't even know why so many people leave their computers on. Hardware components for the warranty are specced to run a specific amount of hours per week in order to model normal use. Leaving the computer on and the hard drives especially means that the hard drives don't last as long and you have a better chance of data failure. I've tried clearing up the hibernate system file and running Chkdsk, but nothing works. Thankfully, the beautiful resource available in WinXp, System Restore, saves my ass again. And it didn't even mess up my Half-Life 2 installation that I did.
So apparently I'm eligible for HKN. I didn't even know my GPA was high enough to make it. Oh well, it looks fun. Something else to tack on to my oh-so-busy schedule.
I should seriously weigh the amount of receipts I have at the end of the semester. It should weigh up in the pounds. Yes, that's how much I eat out. There's no food, and I go to Asian Ghetto. To try all the different foods in the different stores because variety
is good. Unless you go to Gypsy's because I can't justify getting
anything else over a Pollo Calzone. And not everywhere in Asian Ghetto even gives out receipts. (I wonder why a lot of the Asian stores don't give out receipts. That's quasi-shady... like tax evasion or something.) I think I can tell how much I've eaten out in a week based on the amount of change is on my desk. Right now there are exactly 7 quarters, 4 dimes, 2 nickels, and 2 pennies on my desk. If I plug that into Matlab (I kid, I use Matlab as my calculator since my TI-83+ is out of batteries), I get that I've eaten out 5 times this week.
Anyways, I probably should get some sleep. I have averaged about 6 hours per day for the whole week. I know that seems a lot, but I'm one of those people who needs more sleep, especially if I have to wake my lazy ass up at 7 in the morning to go to my 8 AM class. I can put my awakeness into an equation:
(amount of energy that I have in the morning) = (time that I woke up at)(amount of sleep I got)
The later I wake up, the more energy I have despite getting less sleep. If I wake up earlier, I have to compensate to get the same energy level by getting more sleep. I'm dependent on the weekends to recharge during which I wake up late and get plenty of sleep so that the energy that I have is overcharged and replenishes my energy storage for the week. Since it is early Saturday morning, I should probably go to sleep since I couldn't go another day on 6 hours of sleep. Not to mention I need to the strength on Saturday for studying for midterms. Oh yeah, my midterm schedule sucks ass, take a look:
Tuesday, 8:00 AM: Math 55 (A midterm at 8 in the fucking morning. Bastards.)
Tuesday, 6:00 PM: MCB 102 (I am two weeks behind on the reading. Yay.)
Wednesday, 1:00 PM: Bioeng 153 (What the fuck is going on in the class? I'm confused.)
Good luck everyone on your respective midterms!
Edit: Wow, I didn't expect this thing to be so long. Half of this crap is filler anyways.
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| Welcome to Hell, Part DeuxI wonder how many parts like this there will be. I'm sure you can guess that this is going to about my hellish EE120 homework. The difficulty of the homework seems to come in a periodic cycle. First week, it was ridiculous with the hardest problem set I have ever faced. Second week was so easy that I finished an hour before it was due. And this week... the problem set sets a record for the fucking hardest problem set ever. Somehow I doubt that record will hold over the course of this semester.
First of all, I started this problem set very early on Wednesday at 6 PM and worked until 1:30 AM, only taking an hour break for dinner. At this point, I'd like to digress and mention how awesome it is to live on southside, get too lazy to cook, and go to the Asian Ghetto for food. Anyhow, I wake up groggily at 7:10 to get ready for my Tuesday Thursday 3.5 hours of almost continuous lectures. Thankfully, a nice chilled Starbucks Caramel Frappucino greets me in the fridge. Yet with the combined forces of coffee and my will to stay awake, I could barely pay attention in class. What was nice about doing the EE120 homework was that I was no longer confused in EE120 and knew what the professor was talking about now. That's a good feeling especially since many of the proofs that he did today were really amazing. Fourier domain rocks. Again, I digress. After class (12 PM), I worked until 4:30 when I started panicking and realized that I needed to go to turn it. 4:40 PM... rushing up across campus to Cory... 4:45 PM... started printing... 4:49... running up to Foothill... 4:55... running back down after photocopying... 4:57... my homework is turned in. What really scared the shit out of me was that I walked into the turn-in room and the drop box for the homework was unlocked. I thought my watch wrong and the GSI had already collected. All my hard work would have been for nothing... Fortunately, the GSI just disappeared somewhere and I deposited my work on the stack of other homeworks.
While it may seem like it turned in on time, I failed to finished a problem. I just didn't have the incentive due to the grading system. The grading system for the homework was that I get a 1 for the problem if it is 100% correct, 0.5 for being correct for more than half the problem or for more than half the parts, and a 0 for having less than half the problem correct or less than half the parts correct. Problem 9, the one that I didn't do, had two parts. I had no idea how to do either one, and even I had a vague idea (which I did), there was no way I could get part (a) 100% right to get the 0.5 credit. Especially with 3 minutes remaining, it just wasn't feasbile to even bothering attempting the problem. The same case applied to many of the EE120 students that I talked to. It's kinda sad when a problem set takes this long, and people still turn it incompleted.
Because of this incident, I realized that it is imperative that I start my homework on Sunday. I really want to get more sleep. I don't want this semester to kill me in terms of health or sanity. I suppose I can put this semester into a relation of some sort. Let n be the class number after the department (i.e. n = 120 for EE120). So as n increases, class hours t_c decreases, but homework hours t_h increases. Right now, t_h/t_c is between 2 and 3.
Enough about academics though. <insert game talk here>: What I think is really awesome is that in EVE Online, I managed to kill a cruiser with an interceptor. That's freaking awesome in terms of the game. Especially since the cruiser was one of those fast, close range cruisers designed to take our smaller ships. It was so satisfying killing that thing because I thought I was a goner for sure while my alliance mates watch from a distance without helping me... bastards. I think a good analogy would be like one fighter jet with just machine guns trying to take on a lone medium-sized ship. Or ants killing a praying mantis (which I've seen before by the way; the praying mantis was being eaten alive by an army of ants).
I suppose I can let my mind zone out for the rest of the week and have an early weekend starting today with the season premiere of Grey's Anatomy and the Office.
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| Career FairFirst, I'd like to mention that I did not get owned this week because the fact that I started my work early. However, I'm still tired from just staying late to get the done. It's kind of sad that I wish for the weekend to start by Tuesday just because I think about my long problem sets due Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. It'd be awesome if my problem sets work themselves out and it's magically the weekend. Interestingly enough, JD mentioned that in this show or something, the Asian had a super power to turn back time. I would love a device that gave me more time in the day or slow down time so I can finish my problem sets, play games, and sleep 10 hours. I should befriend Superman or something so he can fly around the Earth and turn back time or something.
So the highlight of this week was the career fair. I wasn't really prepared for it since Tuesday night I was still working on my problem set and I just didn't have the time to revise my resume. On every MWF, I usually read the MCB 102 textbook at the Chemistry Library after my classes, but on this particular Wednesday, all reserve copies of the book was checked out. Since it was Engineering and Biotech day for the career fair, I felt it was unfair that I should waste the afternoon and instead, headed to Cory to revise my resume for printing. I printed 15 copies and went to the career fair. It was crowded as I entered. There was so much there, swag included. The place was dominated by booths for either EECS or bioengineering. My resume was geared for EECS despite being bioengineering as well just because I have almost no work experience in the bioengineering field nor have I taken sufficient courses in bioengineering to have a strong resume in that field.
I walked around the career fair for big name companies that I might be interested in working for. Previously, I noticed that Microsoft would be there, but I was disappointed that it was just an empty booth. From across the room, I noticed Amazon.com's distinct logo. I walked up to the recruiter and greeted him, lightly discussing summer internships with him. He seemed like a nice guy and asked to take a look at my resume. I pulled out my resume from my backpack and handed to him. From there, everything changed. It was like I entered the twilight zone where the recruiter became this devious creature, hell bent on lowering my self-esteem as much as possible. He started blasting me with ridiculously hard programming questions that at one point I knew the answers to, but not anymore. It was CS61B material, but since I waived out of that class with my AP CS that I took in high school I was even more clueless than I should be. I wish I had a video camera to record myself because I was probably shuddering and sweating through each question. This felt like interview questions. This felt like blacklist questions. The recruiter seemed disappointed at me and told me he'd look over the resume and let me know. I walked away in shame. I felt scarred for life. I don't think that I could give out another resume. I hoped that Amazon.com didn't have a blacklist. I mean they had my resume now. They could add me to the list of stupid people who shouldn't get a job Amazon.com (Microsoft does this).
After that horrible "interview," I tried my best to avoid the Amazon.com table. I went out of my way to avoid that table just because I didn't want to be reminded of my failure. It was too painful. My self-esteem going into the career fair was very high just because I felt pretty good myself in regards to my work experience and knowledge in courses. Amazon.com had crushed that to almost nothing. Although I met with Homestead.com and gave them my resume because they were very nice and accomodating to me, but that didn't recover my self-esteem in the slightest bit. Afterwards, I talked to a friend about my traumatic experience without even mentioning the company. He instantly knew it was Amazon.com, just because prior stories from past EECS seniors told of them getting pwned by the questions from Amazon.com. At least I wasn't the only one... but I still I feel crushed by them just because these were questions that I knew before, but the knowledge has now been covered with rust. I guess now I have motivation to brush up on my programming skills and try out some freelance programming.
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| Welcome to HellWhat exactly is going through hell like? Up until recently (when I mean recently, I mean 30 minutes ago), I didn't realize how convenient my life was. Everything just works out in the end... until I attempted the horror known as EE120 homework. A week ago when I glanced at the homework, I thought to myself that it just was EE20 review and that I shouldn't worry about the first homework of the class. I severely underestimated the homework. I think the beginning of my problems is that I have ADD. Well, not really ADD. I just get distracted by fun games like DarkStar One. That game is so addicting that despite promising myself to stop at 6 PM, I kept playing until 10. At that point, I decided to start my homework, and that's when things went horribly wrong.
The first thing that I noticed was that the homework was long. I'm talking about mid-semester type of homework. I looked at the first problem and was already overwhelmed by the amount of rust over my brain. It's been almost a year since I took EE20. That's much too long for the poor memory of my brain. It took a quick review of complex numbers in order for me to understand the problem. I attempted to work faster so I could meet the self-imposed deadline of finishing at least half of the homework problems by 11:30 so I could catch up on some sleep, especially since I had an 8 AM class on Thursdays. I was so wrapped in my work that I didn't realize that it was 12 already. I shrugged it off and decided to just live with 6 hours of sleep and work until 1 AM. By 1 AM, I did indeed reach my goal of finishing half of the problems. I set my alarm for 7 AM and went to sleep.
The next day I woke up to horrifying screech of the garbage truck crushing the trash that has been accumulating in the apartment complex. My next horror was the realization that the garbage truck comes after 8 AM and that I had a class at 8 AM. I looked at the clock and in my half-asleep state read it as 6 AM, causing me to breathe a sigh of relief. However, my vision cleared up, and I read the clock as 8:19 AM. I jumped out of the bed after being shocked with so much adrenaline. I hurried to class to find that the professor has only written on two boards. Unfortunately, there were no side seats available within viewing range (since the professor writes in very light chalk), forcing me to scoot to the middle seats blocked by sleeping people and lazy people who cluttered the aisle with their backups. As a result, I made enough of racket trying to find a seat for the professor to notice me coming late. I thought that after ordeal, the class would be fine, but again to my horror, time has somehow force. The professor lectured on and on, and the clock turned slower and slower. What the hell was going on? Eventually, the class ended, and I overjoyed headed by to my apartment to take the shower that I missed. My next class was in 30 minutes, which kept from eating a breakfast at all.
Throughout my next EE120 lecture, I was starving, bored, and sleepy. Lacking the large cups of coffee that I usually get to offset my lack of sleep, EE120 was a bore; I just couldn't wait for it to end. After 2 hours of absolute boredom, the class ended, and I went to lunch, deciding that after lunch, I would go to Soda to work on my homework there and utilize the MATLAB available there. (For some reason, MATLAB does not seem to work on my new system. It instantly closes when I try to run. I suspect that it doesn't play nice with the dual core.) I logged onto the Soda machines and typed 'matlab &.' To my horror, a message from Instructional EECS Support said that matlab was unavailable on the current machine. I shrugged it off and finished off the non-MATLAB portions of the homework. I packed up and headed towards to Cory to use the Instructional machines. Unfortunately, I haven't changed the default password for my EECS named account on Windows machines, which meant that I was forced to use Instructional UNIX machines in Cory. I looked up the available machines and found only 4 UNIX machines with MATLAB on it in 199 Cory. I rushed over to Cory, hoping that at least one of the machines would be open for use. Luckily for me, there were two machines open, but some bastard screen-locked one of them and left so I was forced to use the other. For some reason, I couldn't figure out how to change the resolution on the UNIX machine, and I was forced to deal with retarded scrolling mechanism in order for the screen to accomodate a bigger resolution than it supports. It was even more annoying was that I was forced to use the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) over the Java Desktop Environment (because the Java Desktop Environment was running on crappy XServer), which lacked a taskbar for me to alternate between windows. What really pisses me off about the CDE is that it looks exactly like Windows 3.1. Why the hell would anyone want to copy the Windows 3.1 GUI. It sucked ass. Basically to switch windows, I had to keep shifting the windows back and forth to uncover the windows that were underneath. Finally, after finishing my first problem in MATLAB, I went to print the figures only to find MATLAB accumulating java errors. That's just great. I'm running MATLAB on a crappy machine that can't print. Fortunately, there happened to be a free Windows machine available, so I decided to send my MATLAB files over to the new machine. Much to my dismay, I found my fileserver offline because I woke up too late to bother turning on my computer. No problems. I'll just send it over email. By this time, it was already 4:30, and I started to panic since the homework was due at 5 PM, and I still needed to photocopy it.
Finally, the homework was completed at 4:45 PM, weighing in a hefty 17 pages of text, figures, and MATLAB code. I don't think I've had a homework was nearly that long. I don't think I've had a first homework that was nearly that hard. With 15 minutes left, I sprinted towards the Foothill Computing Center for free photocopies. Halfway up the hill, I realized that it was impractical to sprint up the hill. I felt like I just ran the mile. As photocopied towards a deadline, I realized how incredible slow photocopiers. As soon as that was done, I zoomed back Cory to turn it in at 4:55 PM. Man, was that close. Despite still turning it on time, the day still sucked. Combined with tiredness and sleepiness, I was late for class, had technical difficulties, and nearly killed myself panicking and rushing back and forth.
At least, I'm done with no homework due tomorrow. As of now, I'm temporarily turning in my thinking cap and going back to play DarkStar One.
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| Papers, flights, and random thoughts meant to be jotted downSo finally summer classes are over. They're done. It's been a very quick summer, seemed like it went fast as I procrastinated on my papers. My final paper for Eng 190 was 51 pages long. This thing was no joke, especially at single-spacing and font 10. This thing was a monster of the paper, but still one of my greatest written accomplishments ever. Even if I take out the fancy diagrams and figures, I still end up with a good 40 pages of solid writing. I think that's pretty amazing.
So on Friday, I was finishing up my paper. Realizing that it was the debut day for Snakes on a Plane, my friends and I went to the UA to see it. Obviously, we were driven because we were all forum whores who knew about the internet phenomenon of SoaP and wanted to see whether it lived up to its hype. If I were to summarize the movie in two words, it would be "badass motherfucker." I went into the movie with expectations of a crappy comedy, yet I came out shocked and thrilled. Definitely, one of the surprise turn-outs of the year. The acting was solid, and the horror was real. It was so great, I got myself a nice mini-poster to fill up the sparse walls of my apartment.
Having a bunch of E190 students proofreading in the same room is kinda interesting. That was exactly what I did Friday night after watching SoaP. Sunthosh, Tim, and I read our papers and then realized that we were tired and hadn't had dinner yet so we had a premature celebration for the completion of our paper by going to In'N'Out. After not eating for way too many hours, I was able to scarf down a 4x4. Damn, it was good.
We were having a discussion about why there was so few people at the theatres to SoaP. I think I went there at a decent time, Friday 6:45 PM. We ultimately came up with one idea. SoaP is such a ridiculous movie that most people don't want to see it because they expect it is bad. They're waiting for their friends to see it so that they can determine for themselves whether it is worth it to see what the hype is about. Unfortunately, many of their friends have the same mindset so in the end, only diehard fans and SoaP cultists enjoy the movie. I'm predicting that SoaP shoot up next weekend in the box office sales once everyone realizes from the reviews this weekend that the movie isn't so bad but badass.
Ironically, the horror of SoaP did not deter me from flying back to San Diego just to visit my family. I think my goals while I'm home is to relax from the burnout of finals, enjoy doing nothing, and learning to cook better. Meanwhile, I can enjoy doing nothing with the new satellite TV that my parents got. I never realized how much Time Warner Cable charged for TV until I compared their rates to satellite. Not only is the satellite picture quality better than coax, it's like $30 cheaper. I even get a nice menu system with a channel guide that I can select shows from. Time Warner Cable just leaves me to pour over the Sunday TV guide in order to find something to watch. I'm thinking of getting a nice dual tuner DVR to go along with it just because my mom hates changing the tapes in the VCR and forgets to do it sometimes.
At the moment, I'm currently occupying myself with moving my old P4 computer from my cheap Enermax generic case to my better-built Enlight case. The Enermax case is so cheap that I can bend the case with my hands. I guess that's what I expect from cheap aluminum. At least, the Enlight is made of solid steel, making it very structurally sound. It supported the weight of my dad, which is about 150ish lbs. It seems very simple, but the job is rather tedious, especially when I'm tired from 4 hours of sleep after staying up until 4 AM trying to finish my paper.
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