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

Currently in my philo class. Turns out both classes are taught by the same teacher. The guy isn't a bad teacher, but he has this tendency to go fairly slowly as if dumbing it down. This is expected for the lower div class, but just annoying for the upper div one. At the very least, i think both classes are going to be interesting. Now if only i could get rid of the annoying guy in my philo of mind class.

In an attempt to find the preview for the Hellsing OVA, I was looking around on the eDonkey servers and such for it. I found something that looked to maybe be promising, and began downloading it. Now, eD2k does this thing where it'll flag files if the people sharing them have the file under a different name than what you are downloading it as.

In this case, I was downloading "hellsing.the.movie.english.spanishsub.manga.anime.avi", but everyone else was sharing it as "[DivX ENG] Trans - Shemale - Gabrielly The Cock Princess.avi".

Good times.

It's a bit past 5am in the morning. I have come home a bit late today. I am now trying to sleep, because I am very tired. It seems, however, that the birds outside my window are all having a very involved discussion, and it only gets louder with every shrill chirp. If I could find my BBs, I would pry off my screen and shoot them all. Guh.

Summer is ending.

I finally received the book my summer research leader guy wanted me to peruse, so I need to start looking through that. I think I'm supposed to start in the labs come July or so, so I need to hurry up and get through the first few chapters. Furthermore, my two Summer school classes start on Tuesday, which should be interesting. One's a lower div Philo class, which should be an easy A. The second is an upper div which I think I will like, though I don't know what to expect of it since it's a summer class.

This book also represents the first HK "international edition" book that I have bought. I generally like to have my books hardcover, and furthermore friends of mine have had problems ranging from entire chapters being missing to homework problems being misprinted, so I avoided these softcover editions for a while. For this book however, I figured since this one wasn't for an actual class, I might as well try the international editions for myself.

So far, I'm not too impressed. The text on the back stating, "For sale and distribution in the People's Republic of China exclusively (except Taiwan, Hong Kong SAR and Macao SAR)." is somewhat daunting. Other than that and a cover page or two, the book is supposed to be entirely the same as the hardcover edition. I suppose I will see soon enough if there are glaring misprints in this one as there were in other books.

In other, less boring news, I have bought a Nintendo DS. I originally wanted a blue one, but I wasn't able to find any place that bundled the blue with Mario DS, so I ended up getting a silver/platinum one :(. Ave, Sean and I then went to Mishka's, grabbed some drinks and hung around playing for a while. Ave had just bought Bomberman DS, so we played that for a bit, along with pictochat and some other stuff. Now, the most amusing part of Bomberman DS is that the splash screen has a little voice that says, "BOMBERMAN!", but it doesn't say bomberman the way we would.
It says, "BOM-BER-MAN".
It pronounces the silent "b", which is funny to listen to. Furthermore, it has a mode called "voice detonation". In this mode, all bombs you lay are remote bombs, and you detonate them by saying "kaboom!" or whatever. This quickly devolved into us saying fairly offensive things to get the bombs to detonate. It's a good thing we did this where there were not many people around.

All in all, I like the DS. I am looking forward to getting Kirby and the Canvas Curse, as well as Puyo Pop Fever. I spent much of my childhood playing both Kirby and Puyo Puyo games, though Puyo Puyo was known as Kirby's Avalanche when I first played it. I played it a bit in arcades while I was in Japan, but without any people to play against, it's not very fun. Mostly, I am looking forward to using the wireless multiplayer on this thing.

Summer has started.

I think I already said that in some previous post or another, but now I know that it's really started. It's been heating up outside, the days are getting lazier, and I'm already becoming quickly unenthused with the lack of work to be done. My boss is sending out the catalogues for the summer classes at our little tutoring place, so I won't be having any money coming in for a little while yet. I'm not particularly looking forward to starting the tutoring again, since summer tutoring for me seems to be composed primarily of teaching JHS kids how to type. Needless to say, this is boring as all hell and serves only to remind me of how much I hated it when I was learning how to type.

I remember being stuck in a room a day or two every week, looking at some asian-looking girl named Kiki telling me to put my hands on the home row, and to type stuff like, "aaa sss aaa sss asa asa sas sas". She'd then chide me on not having my hands arched correctly, and not sitting up straight, and other crap like that. This was actually fairly fun for a little while, while I was doing it mostly for fun. The problem of course with me, a third grader or so, doing it for fun was that I was constantly looking at my hands to hit the buttons. While this did indeed defeat the whole purpose of the exercise, "reason" and "discipline" aren't the first two words to pop into mind when talking about grade schoolers.

So the following year, we moved to a crappier typing program that actually measured words per minute and such, and they put cardboard over our hands. Our goal was something like 60wpm by the end of the year, though nothing was actually being graded. If I recall correctly, there were two girls in the class that ended up hitting the goal first, and I don't remember how many more reached it. I sucked at it something hardcore, and could still barely type by the end of the year.

Now, I did eventually learn how to do that crap, but I don't recall when now. I thought it was during my MUDding phase in 8th grade, but I could still type pretty decently before that. In retrospect, it was most likely during my BBSing phase when I would play Exitilus, LORD, and that one game which was a precursor to Earth 2025.., Barren Realms maybe? I recall that you and your country could save up to buy a Gooey Kablooey at the enemy, anyone remember that particular game? Anyway, many hours were spent doing that, which ended up sharpening my typing skills.

The point of this entire rant is that now I'm forcing these kids to do the same thing I hated so much when I was young. I hated doing the typing with my cardboard over my hands, and I kinda feel bad for making the kids do it as well. I have to say though, the students I had the previous year probably did a lot better than I did in terms of sticking with it. I took every possible opportunity to look under the cardboard to do the typing, even though it defeated the whole purposed of the exercise. After I bully my own students once or twice, they tend to refrain from looking at the cardboard until it looks like I've started to nod off or gone wall-eyed from boredom.

I guess I don't feel so bad about it since I do know that in this case, what I am teaching them is absolutely necessary. Even though I slacked my way through typing in grade school, when I actually started to need to type fast, I put my hands in the same position that Kiki taught me, used the correct fingers to hit all the damn keys, and very quickly went from worthless to 100+wpm between 6th to the end of 8th grade.

This reminds me: I had a family of students composed of a 5th, 7th, and 9th grader I think. I want to say the oldest was a little younger than 9th grade, but really I have no recollection. Basically, they were all quite rambunctious, and every time I worked with them, I had to struggle a bit in the beginning to keep them on task. The nice thing however, is that since they were all brothers and had a bit of a rivalry, once I got them going, they worked their little fingers off trying to get ahead of eachother. Their mother was quite enthusiastic about the whole thing since she was tired of typing their essays, and so offered to do whatever it took at home to help them get this down. Eventually they finished the class, thank yous were exchanged, bills were paid, I went back to school, etc.

Fast forward to a few months later I see the family as I am entering IHOP; the mother goes ballistic on me. She thanks me so much for having taught them how to type, gushed about how they were typing their own essays, even the youngest one, and how she was so, so thankful, and how great a teacher I was and the kids were kinda nodding and thanking me a bit. All in all, I really did appreciate it, and liked that they thought I did a good job, but it was still just a bit embarassing. In a good way though, not a bad one.

Moral of the story : tutoring is a fun thing to do. I enjoy it. It technically does pay well per hour, but one can't exactly just do 20 hours of tutoring a week. Either there aren't enough clients, or you go insane trying to deal with such a workload. I've kinda considered getting an actual job for this summer, since I'd like to save up cash for various things in the future, but I don't know that I really want to give up tutoring. It isn't a whole lot of cash, but that's not really the whole reason I'm in it to begin with. I've considered doing something else, but I don't know that there are a whole lot of typical summer-job type jobs I'd really enjoy doing. Clerking, waiting, selling could bring in more cash, but ultimately what skills I would learn would be inapplicable elsewhere, and the clients would hardly be phased if you weren't there.

What this whole thing was, I'm not entirely sure, but the lateness of the hour grows and my bed sings its siren song to me, coaxing me to sleep. Good night.

Not much has been going on. So far I've gotten an A, and a B-. Not too bad I think, and I think my other two classes are probably going to be a C and a B. In a worst case it'll be a D and a C, but let's not think about that too much.

Looks like first Summer session starts on the 27th or summat, and I will be taking two philo classes. In the meantime I will start looking through material I'm supposed to learn for my research thingy.

It rained yesterday, and today it is cool and overcast. I only wish it could be like this all Summer. I've been slacking on the kung fu lately due to finals, and I think I'll go back this Monday. The hard part about kung fu during the summer is when it gets to be consistently 90-100 during practice. I am a little girl and for some reason my body is not particularly good at dissipating heat. That being the case, things get very uncomfortable very quickly in hot weather.

Lastly, today's random pic is from Japan, if you can't tell. This is the "Beer corner" of some market in Ukima-Funado, which is where Tim was living at the time. There is a story behind the picture, but I think Sean has the ridiculously bad video.

So, at approximately 1230 this morning, I was setting my alarm, dreading the final I had to wake up to, and getting ready for bed in general.

Fast forward to 0815 the same morning; I wake up, get confused, look at the time, and start cursing. Throwing on whatever clothes I can find, I pull a calculator, a pencil and an eraser out of my backpack, I grab Ave's skateboard, which he has generously lent me, and toss it in the back of my car. I get to school, park, start skateboarding to class as fast as I can, and of course nearly die on the way when I hit a bump while going too fast. I eventually get to class, smelly as hell I'm sure, and grab a test around 0830. I then realize I actually brought a pencil and a pen. Wheee.

As it turns out, I ended up finishing the final early, so losing 30 minutes wasn't all that bad. After the test while talking with friends about it, I realized I totally misread one of the questions and did the wrong thing. Damn.

As for good news, I got 10th in the class or so on the final project I was so worried about. This is the amplifier with negative feedback and blah blah blah. About half of the people who got higher than me in terms of score got an unfair advantage due to screwing the bandwidth of the amplifier and reducing the power consumption or cost of their circuit. This angers me.

Anyhow, one more final left, and let's hope it goes well. Today was the first day I've ever been late for a final. Let's hope I don't do such a thing again.

Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees
Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
The zebra stripes along his jaw
Swelling to maculate giraffe.

The circles of the stormy moon
Slide westward toward the River Plate,
Death and the Raven drift above
And Sweeney guards the horn�d gate.

Gloomy Orion and the Dog
Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas;
The person in the Spanish cape
Tries to sit on Sweeney's knees

Slips and pulls the tablecloth
Overturns a coffee cup,
Reorganized upon the floor
She yawns and draws a stocking up;

The silent man in mocha brown
Sprawls at the window sill and gapes;
The waiter brings in oranges
Bananas figs and hothouse grapes;

The silent vertebrate in brown
Contracts and concentrates, withdraws;
Rachel née Rabinovitch
Tears at the grapes with murderous paws;

She and the lady in the cape
Are suspect, thought to be in league;
Therefore the man with heavy eyes
Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,

Leaves the room and reappears
Outside the window, leaning in,
Branches of wistaria
Circumscribe a golden grin;

The host with someone indistinct
Converses at the door apart,
The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,

And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud,
And let their liquid siftings fall
To stain the stiff dishonored shroud.

- T.S. Eliot

I don't know why this, Sweeney Among The Nightingales, is one of my favorite poems, but it is. I want to say that it's one of the first poems to genuinely creep me out, but I guess The Raven did that as well to some extent. In any case, this poem does it even moreso and the subtlety with which it does it enhances the fear that much more. The first time I read it I had hardly a clue what was going on, and yet chills ran down my back. The sad thing is I've never read the entirety of The Wasteland, although I've read Catch 22 quite a few times, so maybe it balances out.

As a college student, and an Engineering/Philosophy major, I sometimes wonder if I don't read enough. Then again, Mark, a good friend and a Comparative Literature major, seems to feel that as a Comp lit major he doesn't actually "make" anything. He analyzes Greek and Latin literature in their native form, and writes essays discussing various things about them in great detail. I spend hours tweaking resistor and capacitor values to make my amplifier meet specs or sometimes I spend hours debugging code that describes how some finite state machine is supposed to work.

I guess what it boils down to is that there's never enough time to do everything you want. I've wanted to learn how to do a billion things but due to whatever reasons (primarily sloth), I don't feel like I excel in much of anything.

People always talk about how "there's always someone better" or "there's always a bigger fish", but for some reason that has always bothered me. If there's always someone better, isn't that necessarily a paradox? If you start going up the chain, eventually you're going to reach the top. I've been over the idea with myself many times, and I end up thinking that the idea is that even if someone is the most awesome chess player ever, there is always going to be something that he isn't good at.
Or something.

In any case, the final stretch of finals is rearing its ugly head and I must answer its call. (By the way, I still type out "it's" all the time when I mean a possessive it. Damn English)

I don't think I've ever worked this hard in a class and yet felt like I was probably going to do poorly anyway. As it is, I worked my ass off for the labs in 180b, and I'm probably going to get a C in the class. I worked my ass off for the project in 110b, and I still feel like I have a decently good chance at not passing the course.

It's so frustrating. I've worked so fucking hard these past weeks, and the results are meaningless.

It's been a very bad quarter all in all, but talking about it more really doesn't help.

So, as for the Summer, I think that things might be okay. I'm taking two philosophy classes over the first Summer session, which means I'll be nearly done with my Philosophy major and my Engineering GEs. I WILL be doing research/bitchwork in Prof. Oklobdzija'a (I can never spell his damn name) lab. It is not paid but maybe there will be side benefits to it. Ultimately I really just want the experience anyway, so no pay is fine. I probably won't be travelling anywhere this summer, and probably not this year, but I think I'll take a long break and travel after I graduate. Then I can spend half a year abroad while applications for jobs are being circulated and such and maybe come home to some interviews. I will be continuing the DARPA Grand Challenge thing I think, though I don't know how much time I can spend on that.

Next school year I should also be working on that, and they say that it will be turned into a project class, 195ABC, which means I would get credit for a lot of crap for doing DARPA. I am probably going to do micromouse as well, because I know several people who are doing it and it sounds like a fun little competition. Not much more to say, I really need to sleep. Finals start this week, my first one is Friday. I'm just waiting for school to be out.

For whatever reasons I've been feeling a want to play Earthbond on the SNES. When I told this to people, they said that they had the rom if I wanted it, but if I'd simply wanted to play the rom, I would have said, "I want to play Earthbound". Ultimately it's never quite the same playing the rom versus playing the actual physical game cartridge on the actual system.

Sadly enough however, Earthbound is now hella expensive. As is Mario RPG, Super Metroid, and Chrono Trigger. I've made a sidenote in my mind to start ebaying around when I have some more free time, but I think it's still going to cost me around $100-$150 for all of them :(.

In the meantime I pulled out my SNES and have been playing some old games since: Mega Man X, Kirby's Avalanche, Secret of Evermore.

Now, anyone who played Secret of Evermore should remember that you had to search around and talk to people in order to get new spells. That being the case, there were some very rare spells that were quite hard to find; possibly the hardest to find was "sting".

I played Secret of Evermore twenty million times as a kid. I beat it god knows how many times and most importantly I made a buncha games that were supposed to be perfect. None of them ever became perfect however because there was one spell that was sorta random to find as I understood it. In this one desert in the game there were fountains strewn about in predictable patterns. In order to get this spell, "sting", you had to find this fucker at one of the fountains.
I spent HOURS of my formatives years trying to do this. In fact, the point at which the game was saved when I busted it out after a hiatus of years, was the closest save point to the desert with speed spells equipped so I could run faster and cover more ground and therefore more of the desert.










Now, tonight, it has finally happened. Maybe something like 8-10 years after the fact, I have finally found the damn spell. I have never seen the casting animation for this spell, EVER. I am about to go over and cast it right now. This, is a moment.








PostScript: The spell kinda sucks, but I already knew that. It was largely the principle of the matter.

Well, I finished that amplifier circuit project thingy and the numbers look like I did everything right. There's a possibility my negative feedback was unstable, but I believe that's largely impossible given the circuit I built.
Furthermore, there was this "figure of merit" thing for the projects which basically is a way of having the students compete to have the best circuit in terms of power consumption or cost. The professor expected it to be somewhere between 0 and 1, and upon calculating my own figure of merit mine turned out to be above 1.
This is good news I think.

Now I'm taking a break at the library feeling a lot less stressed than I did previously. Finishing that project leaves me with but two homework assignments and one last project to finish up. After that are my finals, and then summer. Whee summer.

I'm definitely doing the summer research thing and I'm definitely not being paid for it. I'm ok with that, but now I must find another way to get enough cash for a snowboard and a trip to Japan. Maybe I should postpone Japan for the Summer after I graduate. Actually, Japan sucks in the summer, maybe I'll postpone for the Fall/Winter after I graduate. And now that I think about it, I'll probably have more summer school things to teach than I did last year, so that should contribute well to my recreation fund.

Anyhoo, I've been up since way too early, and I slept way too late, and so I'm gonna go find one of the windowsills on the third floor and take a cat nap.

The school year is almost done. Wednesday is the last day of lecture, meaning Friday is the first day of finals, and also the day of my first final. My last final is Wednesday the following week, after which I am going to throw all my engineering books into the bathtub, douse them in oil, and set it all on fire. That is to say, I am going to go all "Left-eye" on my engineering books.

As of right now however I'm waiting for a student to show up for pre-calc tutoring. This student is a nice enough student and I think I've been tutoring her on and off for a long while now: nearly a year and a half I think, which is kinda crazy.

One of my students is graduating this year and going to UCSD I believe, which is cool. Real interesting kid, I think he'll enjoy it down there, if that is indeed where he decides to go. Makes me realize it's been 3 years since I graduated myself, and another year or so before I must graduate again.

Another one of my students is moving to Norway. Apparently her father has gotten a job there and so the whole family needs to go back across the pond. The mother seems to dislike the idea quite a bit, and I can imagine I'd be somewhat miffed if I had to move to Taiwan during HS/JHS.

Sometimes I wonder whether I should really be tutoring at all. A lot of the tutoring I've been doing this past week has been comprehensive review for finals. Needless to say, it is often the case that the students sometimes have slight gaps in knowledge.
In some cases they aren't so much slight gaps as perhaps exit wounds caused by a 50 caliber round.

Anyhow, it always makes me wonder whether I've really been doing all that good a job in the tutoring and furthermore whether I'm not simply selling off snake oil and good vibes.

My EEC 110b prof said to us on the first day of lecture that he did not have a quiz for us the first day. I don't recall why he said it, but he mentioned that he once had a friend who was a professor at some school on the East coast. That professor tried a few times this thing where he would give students a quiz on the first day. That quiz was covering topics to be learned in the course and was meant to see how well the students knew the material they hadn't learned yet. Then, at the end of the year, the same or a similar quiz was given to see if they students had learned anything yet. That professor told MY professor, "Don't try it unless you are fairly self-assured in your teaching ability".

In some sense that's kinda how I feel, no matter what I do my students just don't retain as much information as I would like them to. Whether this is my fault, their fault, the school's fault, or nobody's fault in particular is in the air, but all the same it makes me feel kinda ineffective.

So a bit about one of the projects I'm working on. One is a project wherein I must design an amplifier circuit with negative feedback using Q2N2222 transistors and caps and resistors. It must meet certain gain, bandwidth, output swing, input impedance, output impedance and certain worst case scenarios. Basically, my circuits does all of that EXCEPT the output impedance, but when I fix the output impedance the only way that really works out well, I kill the output swing and blah blah blah blah blah. Point being, no matter what I do something always goes wrong, and I don't know why the fuck it does it. Kinda like the above. Anyhow, sleep time.

I'm sitting in front of borders waiting for a student. I've got finals to study for, homework to do, and projects to finish. And yet, sitting here watching the people, kids and dogs i can almost stop stressing. There's a group of kids with a puppy and adult golden retrievers. I'm not sure if the dogs are related, but the scene is ridiculously kodak regardless. Man, school sucks.