You're Asian, you must be smart, right?

My hair is getting to the point where even I think it's excessively long. Normally the situation would be as simple as getting a haircut, but I do hate haircuts so and the time is hard to find. Now if it were currently Autumn (Fall sounds so plebian) or Winter, I might let it grow out: the problem is that Central Valley Summers are oh-so-mild and I do believe that the ever moderate sun and heat of the season might cause a bit of annoyance while doing much of anything outdoors.

Also, for every day without a haircut, I believe I am looking more and more like a vagrant.

I am considering just grabbing some scissors and my electric razor and seeing if I can manage not to kill myself. On the other hand, given experiences I've previously had and my tendency to have accidents at absolutely horrible times, well, I think the sentence speaks volumes without the help of elaboration.

In other news Memorial Day Weekend was ridiculously productive. I finished the simulation of my processor for my EEC180B class. Now I just need to finish implementing a few commands, and then port it to hardware. I have not however even come close to finishing my Philosophy of Law essay nor my Electronic Circuits final project.

Needless to say, I'm not particularly enjoying school at this point in time and I'm fairly tired of the quarter system as well. In any case, just a year more to go and then I get to work my ass off in industry and wish for the good ol' days of college again. That or I'll be working a job in China unsuspectingly supporting the New World Regime that will be in place to economically enslave the world by 2020.

My math teacher went off today about the gamma function in mathematics. Basically his problem is the fact that Gamma(alpha) is equal to (alpha-1) factorial. He felt that was a stupid problem that could have been easily fixed by redefining alpha within the equation, and I think he might be partially right on that.
The funny thing however is that he became quite upset about this in class. The way he was going off about it you would think that he was talking about saving the lives of children in Sudan or something. I don't think I've quite ever seen anyone get so worked up about a mathematical equation.

So, last week I posted about my new broadsword. It is nice, I have been playing with it. The problem now lies in the fact that I have to bring it to school on Mon and Thu since I have no way of getting home before Kung Fu and grabbing it. This isn't too much of a problem except that the blade is about 27.5 inches, and altogether the thing is around 36 inches long; way too long to just shov in my backpack. I also would find it more trouble than it would be worth currently to try and shove into a duffle bag which I would have to carry along with my backpack. All of this being the case, I now have the sword tucked down my back between my back and my backpack.

I am a ninja, hwa.

Anyway, it's weird because the sword is large, obtrusive, and makes clanky noises in it's scabbard as I walk around. I haven't been accosted by police or library staff or such yet, so maybe this will turn out alright.

In other news, Ave and I went to the MU on Friday to play some pool and such. So pretty much the first thing that happens once we get our cues and start racking is two guys who look like they actually know what they're doing come up and ask if we wanna play a game of team 9-ball. Long story short, we agree to play at some point but they want to play for cash. We tell 'em we'll play a game of team 8-ball for fun, they say "sure", and we play a game. Ave and I get ownt something fierce, and are thankful that we didn't put any money on the game.

The guys were cool though, they gave me a bit of shooting advice and told us about the upcoming tournaments and the UCD Pool Club. I don't think I'll be doing any tournaments anytime soon, but maybe I'll join the club; I have been meaning to play the game more and that would give me both a reason and a discount.

After pool me and Ave played video games. That is to say, I played video gameS, and Ave played Pump It Up. ("Dude, Ave's playing Pump It Up", "Oh god, Ave's playing pump it up? I'm so surprised.") This wouldn't be worth mentioning except that he actually gathered a small crowd of people to watch him go epileptic and press buttons faster than most people can generally manage.

Of that crowd there was a middle-aged caucasian woman who actually watched for a long while; she was there during his first song, and was still there when I came back during his final song. She stood there mouth agape, apparently awestruck by Ave; I found this amusing.

In some sense I kinda compare it to some person watching a man throw back two bottles of some hard liquor in a matter of fives of minutes. The spectator is impressed for they have no experience with this kind of thing and think of the discipline and such that it must take. I, the friend, am jaded and almost somber because I know the horrid history of alcoholism and abuse behind the feat. Next time, on behind the scenes.

For lack of better things to do over the weekend, Ave, Ed, Diana (Who hasn't a website) and I decided to make cookies. This involved going to the store, seeing what we needed, and seeing what we needed to buy for the cookies. After some discussion about crap and the merits (or lack thereof) of using margarine versus butter, we got all the ingredients we needed for making some Chocolate Chip Cookies and some Butterscotch Chip Cookies.

Or so we thought.

Turns out we were misled as to how much butter we thought we had and so though we needed something like three or four sticks altogether, we had but one, maybe two. Fooey. So Ave and I ran to the store to grab some butter since Diana and Ed were doing most of the mixing and crap like that.

Ave jumped out of my car at the entrance while I went to park it, and so I went to meet him in the butter isle. A cursory glance revealed some cheap-ass stuff to be had; as Ave put it, "Dude, ninety nine cents for four sticks or so, sweet." So we bolted towards the registers, bought the butter, and went home to finish making the cookie dough.

We then melted the appropriate amount of butter, mixed it all in, and as was putting the remnants into the fridge, he remarked that there was no need to pay him back since he got the butter for so cheap.
"How cheap was it Ave?"
"Like, ninety nine cents, it was awesome."
"That cheap? What's the package say?"
"Uhhh.., something something vegetable shortening. Ah crap."

Of course that wasn't exactly how the conversation went, in fact I don't think there was any query at all, but whatever. Who can really be expected to remember crap like that? In any case, that account of the weekend's conversation can't be as bad as Tim's first attributing a quote (search for fable) to me in one post, and then subsequently referring to me as a girl (search for fable again) not more than a month or so later.

Anyway, Ave, in his money-saving haste, accidentally picked out margarine and we'd already put it in the cookie dough. Luckily the cookies were spared and things turned out alright.

After making the cookies we proceeded to play "TMNT : Battle Nexus", which is a game I have been mostly happy to play. The main problem with the game is that it's really freaking long, and not all that much changes as you progress in the game.
That makes it kinda boring.
Furthermore, the story starts off with some reasonable goodness (a lot it seems to be taken from the Japanese manga I once had), but then it quickly degenerates into seemingly random events and vague attempts to tie it all together.
This makes it confusing and contrived.
However, it is fun to play for a while, and it has the original arcade game, so altogether it's a game worth renting for a little while.

This ends mostly with Ed getting tired of walking over, putting bits of cookie dough on the sheets, putting it in the oven, then going back ten minutes later to repeat.



This is simply one of many such cookies.

That is my new chrome broadsword for kung fu. I was considering getting a combat steel one originally, but I figured that since it was my first sword, I was probably going to be putting it through some shit and as such I should buy a cheaper sword so that I don't ruin a nice one. It's a 27.5 inch one, and normally cost $50, but we got a 30% discount and so it only cost me $35, yay.

The handle is kinda nice, the cloth works well but I think there's too little of it. It came off while I was twirling today and I just re-wrapped it with the same cloth. If it comes off once again, I may have to get a longer piece so that I can wrap it in more than just one layer.

I have indeed already nicked the blade. I got a bit overzealous and started chopping up small branches on trees in the privacy of my own yard, and since it's not a terribly strong metal, it has a nick or two on the blade now, oh well.

In other news, I went to see Star Wars : Revenge of the Sith with Sean and Ave.

Altogether, the movie was worth seeing. We saw it at 0010 the day it opened. We left Davis around 2140, got there around 2200, and the line was quite long. Some news crew was there, and there weren't as many greasy nerds as I thought there might be. Apparently people had been waiting since noon or some crap like that, but despite the unwavering nerdiness of others, we still managed to get seats that didn't suck.

The movie itself was about what I expected, if not a bit more. I went in expecting and hoping for two hours and thirty minutes of bloodythirsty lightsabre, spaceship and other kinds of battling and Lucas delivered. The script was fantastically crappy in many places, but that was to be expected. The funny part about that was even Ewan McGregor, a generally pretty good actor, choked on some of the lines because the lines were just so bad. Altogether though, there was not much room for Anakin to ruin the movie like he did the last one. He was pretty angsty in the beginning half, but after "he gives into his douche-ness", as Sean put it, he does a pretty okay job of being pissed and vengeful.

Lucas did an overall good job with the movie though. Even with knowing what was going to happen, the parts of the movie that were intended to be suspenseful were still suspenseful; the sad parts of the movie were still sad. Jar Jar Binks made all of two appearances and I don't believe he said a single word. C-3P0 took over as comic relief and even then he only made a few brief apperances thankfully.


PostScript

There is one particularly memorable moment in Episode III that I feel I must mention. At one point while Anakin is being pissed about something and being all dark-sidey, he starts yelling at someone about Obi-Wan and how Obi-Wan had turned the person against him (Anakin). The shot then pans up to Obi-Wan standing on the ramp of a spaceship with hands akimbo and feet about a shoulder width apart.

I really wish I had a picture of this to show you, because it was quite homosexual. I don't mean homosexual the way that kids nowadays use the word "gay" and "fag" and stuff; I mean it was really homosexual.

Anyway, that is all I wanted to say.
Good fight, good night.

I e-mailed a professor of mine from last quarter about maybe working
with his team over the Summer as an undergraduate researcher, and he
e-mailed me back, surprisingly, with an affirmative response. I don't
know what I'll be doing, how much I'll be doing it, or even if I am
going to be paid, but I meet with a grad student tomorrow and
hopefully some of that will be cleared up.
If this is working out the way I hope it does, I should be able to
help out with one of their current projects rather than being
relegated to some crappy thing on my own. Furthermore, the money I
make from the summer will help me to buy a skateboard, a snowboard,
boots and snow gear, and maybe a ticket to Japan for sometime within
the next year.
As I said though, I have no clue what the hell is going on and as such
I am crossing my fingers and hoping that things work out well
tomorrow.

In other news, I did worse than I thought I would on my Philosophy of
Law essay, which sucks. I also did pretty poorly on my Electronic
Circuits midterm, which really, really sucks. I am now quite tired of
school, and as such am counting the weeks until class is over. The
quarter is just half over and I can't wait for it to be done.

Also, I've never been a huge fan of the Star Wars series, and yet I am
seeing it late Wednesday night or early Thursday morning depending on
how you look at it. I will be in Sac waiting in line with Sean, Ave,
and a bunch of greasy nerds with light sabres at 2200 this Wednesday.
Let's hope I get through that in one piece.

It's a somehow warm and overcast day today, and it's been raining on and off throughout. This past week has been a little hectic, but things seem to be getting overall better. The quarter at UCD is about halfway over, which could be good or bad. Really it's seeming pretty bad because though I have yet to two of three midterms, I have a very bad feeling about both of them. Read that one a few times, it'll make sense, I swear.

I just finished re-reading the whole of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and now I am wondering what book series to read next. I never did read the Dirk Gently series by Douglas Adams, so I might do that.
I did however just re-watch the entirety of the anime Hellsing. I always liked the series, but really never liked the ending. It seemed too cliff-hangy to me. Turns out, I never actually finished watching the series and ended on the one before the last episode. No wonder I thought it ended on a cliffhanger though some others told me just the opposite.

I think I may have found myself a research position for over the summer, though I have little to no idea what will be involved with it. It's with a previous professor of mine whom I talked to on a few occasions. Cool guy, smart, does a lot of interesting crap, so I hope I can learn a fair amount from him and his group. Like I said though, I've only talked with him about it through e-mail, so I really don't know what's going on with it or what I will be doing, or even if it will be paid. I should be talking to one of his grad students soon though, that grad student also happening to have been a TA of mine whom I got along well with, so things should turn out ok.

Beyond that, I don't really know what to say. I've been feeling quite tired lately, though maybe that's been due to stress more than anything else.

I did see Sugano Sensei, my Japanese teacher from HS, at a skit thingy on campus. I wanted to talk to her, but I had class and the skits wouldn't be ending until class was half-over. I keep meaning to visit her at school, but time is lacking and I really don't know what I'd say.

Well, the weather outside seems like it's calmed down a bit; at the very least it shouldn't be raining for a little while. That being the case, I believe I am going to step outside and take a ride around the neighborhood.

Midterms went okay I suppose. Already got my math one back and I got a 60/70. The average was a 56/70 though, which just angers me. I was hoping to nail the midterm with a perfect, but I just couldn't figure out one question. Oh well, maybe I can still manage an A in the class.

My Digital Circuits II midterm was just lame. I'm pretty sure I did okay, but all the same it was lame.

My Electronic Circuits II midterm was the one I just finished, and I don't think anyone really felt awesome about it. I was the first one out, and that was 5 minutes before class was over. I'm just crossing fingers over that one.

The one thing I do feel pretty good about however is my Philosophy of Law essay about kidney selling. I think I'll get at least a B, though I don't think it'll be impossible that I might nab an A on it. We will see.

Anyhow, now that midterms are over, the time for slacking some more has begun. I think I'm gonna go take a nap before my next class.

The movie was good. I was entertained by the whole thing though the story was different from that of the book in some ways. This seems reasonable though since Adams has introduced different characters and change importance of characters in each incarnation of his novel/radioshow, so whatev'. One thing did bother me more than mildly though; the movie did seem a bit too involved in trying to create some romance between Arthur and Trillian. As someone who has read the series, Trillian had never been more than a passing interest for Arthur and never some sort of true love of his. As such, it just seems weird to try and force anything between them, since Arthur's actual love was demolished along with the Earth. Am I being too nerdy now? I think I'll stop.

Anyhoo, I am now re-reading the book (anthology), which is helping me out in terms of getting over a right shitty previous few weeks. There isn't too much more to say than that the books are just great. I am enjoying them quite thoroughly for somewhere between the third and umpteenth time, and still there are things I find that time has mucked up such that I don't know exactly what's going to happen in some parts.
I'm now at the portion where he first speaks with Fenny in the train station. I make note of this because I've read this chapter many a time whilst reading the novels, and for the first time this chapter has actually been noteworthy to me. Weird how experience does that to you. So, I will leave you with the lines that so made me think about things past. I would highly recommend to anyone that they should read the series, I will gladly loan it to anyone who promises they won't destroy my copy.

"Perhaps," she added, "it wouldn't have gone so well if it wasn't for her." She gave a wry smile and dropped her hair forward over her face again.

It was perfectly true.

He had to admit it was perfectly true.

So, it looks like I'm getting sick. We'll see how bad it gets, but currently it's reminiscent of when I came down with a 24 hour flu and had to miss a midterm last quarter. The timing on the other hand is impeccable, since I have midterms today, Monday, and Tuesday.

I've got Probability Theory today, which I'm not too worried about. The class is going much better this time around, and I feel like I understand all the material quite well.

I've got Digital Systems II on Monday, which angers and confuses me. The class itself isn't so bad; the labs are sorta fun, there isn't much homework, and the lectures are only twice a week. The last quiz however sucked ass, and so I can expect the midterm probably will as well. Also, the midterm is open book, but I currently lack a book for a reason I don't really wanna bother talking about here, and so I'm in a bad position. Hopefully I can grab one from reserves tomorrow, but it seems like the book has been either on hold or checked out for an awfully long time.

Lastly I've got Electronic Circuits II on Tuesday, which just scares me. The class is kind of a scary class about transistors and stuff and.., yeah. Dunno what to expect from that. I will probably sleep little on Monday night and study like crazy both Monday and Tuesday. We will see how it goes.

Anyhow, hopefully this cold goes away pretty soon because if I have to miss a midterm this quarter, I might just be entirely ass-fucked.

So I took an Upper Divison English Composition Examination on the 23rd of April and I swear it was probably one of the most incoherent essays I've written in a while. The article was one by some freelance writer entitled something I don't really remember. Something along the lines of "Could I have some quiet please?" or some crap like that. The article was about how music had infiltrated the everyday life of people to the extent that supposing you simply wanted silence while swimming, shopping, working out, you would be subject to music anyway. He gave examples of grocery stores, gymnasiums, and some public pool or another which had music pumped into the pool through underwater speakers.

The article had a valid point and I agreed with it to some extent, though ultimately the problem was that there was no way to enforce some sort of "please quiet down" ordinance. The prompt asked, "Has the author of this article convinced of his view at all? Why or why not and to what extent? Should the freedom to play music stop at another person's ears?" Why I remember that so well is quite obvious: it's a really freaking stupid essay topic. I sat there reading it wondering why they would have me write about something so inane. They weren't asking for views on both sides and whether the law had a right to interfere, they weren't asking for some sort of careful analysis of the article and its nuances, they were asking me a question that any fucking grade schooler would know the answer to.

I don't remember actually having a homework assignment on this, but I'm sure some kid somewhere got a worksheet when his class learned about the Bill of Rights. On that worksheet is a list of activities, such as, "Writing a story", "kicking a dog", "not voting", "protesting against a war", "threatening the president", "arranging a boycott", "arranging a sit-in", "homosexual conduct", "masturbation", "reading a book about Hitler". The child would then be asked to list what actions were protected under the Bill of Rights, and maybe even a short blurb about which article it fell under. The sad thing is, most of the things I wrote above would take more thought than "listening to music a little too loud".

That being the case, I had really no clue what to write for my essay. I tried writing an outline, but my brain just stopped working after reading the topic, and in retrospect my paper was really wishy-washy and had no point. I wrote about some crap and agreeing with the author, but feeling it was unenforceable and ultimately unconstitutional and maybe I mentioned something about freedom and God knows what else. I'm not sure if it was more bullshit, doublespeak, or the verbal equivalent of plugging my ears and going, "lalalala, I can't hear what you're saying".

Anyhow, the ultimate result of all this was a paper with good grammar, spelling, varied sentence types, and okay style, but without a real point.

Turns out that's what they wanted I guess. So yeah, I passed, no more upper div English for me, but man I wish I could have my essay back. Or at least the essay prompt. Both were really bad.

http://www.uglykids.info

I really don't know what to say about this. I'd advise looking at the "testimonials" bit though. All I have to say is, "huh?"

This blog will be changing web addresses from http://awhyaneyandtwoens.blogspot.com to http://yawnyou.blogspot.com. This change stems from the realization that no one really "got" the first name and the first name was a pain to type. We hope that we will continue to receive your patronage and wish you all a good day. Thank you.

I am in discussion right now and we are debating moral legalism using nose picking as an example. This led into my ta saying that he felt picking was necessary and not all that disgusting. He then proceeded to tell us about a friend in grade school who did not pick and eventually the boogers grew beyond the nostrils and crusted around the nostrils and nose.

So a while back I joined Team Aggie Spirit which is the UC Davis DARPA Grand Challenge team. That was maybe a month or so ago and since then I've put in time every weekend and even some weekdays into the electronics aspect of the team. Primarily I've assisted in the design and attempted improvement of the ultrasonic sensor system, and the manufacturing of various other components required for the car. Things like..., power supplies, microcontroller boards and crap like that. It's been fun doing this, and I've learned a lot in the process, but it's been quite tiring, and I haven't been helping nearly as much as some of the other members.

Now, why is it that I mention this? We have a "check-up" of sorts today, which involves taking our vehicle in its current state over to some place 20 miles or so from Sac. Once there, our car will be taken to a large flat area, be given some waypoints to follow, and two trashcans it must go past in order to do so. To put it simply, our car was nowhere near completion 24 hours before the deadline. I got to the shed where people were working on the car at about 9pm last night, and I stayed until 4am working, and trying to get everything together. There were those there who had been there since Saturday and had been taking naps during slow times at the shed.

All in all right now many people feel very frustrated. I don't know the final word on how well the software is handling the sensors and the GPS inputs, and how well the car is doing in terms of obstacle-avoidance, but I have a bad feeling about it in any case. The car should be testing about now, or within the next hour or two, and I'm wondering if this is the end of the group. If we don't pass this checkpoint, then we're out of the running for this year's race. A lot learned too late I guess.

At least I learned how to solder.

The site is being redone a bit, and I guess I'm going to start posting
about stuff again soon. At school right now waiting for my next
class. I have an open-book quiz coming up for my Digital Systems II
class, but I have no book. I am hoping to get one from reserves for
the duration of the class. Let's see if this works out.