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June 27, 2004 - Fahrenheit 9/11
-9:40 pm: i don't see very many movies, especially when they just open. But the controversy surrounding Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and Republican attempts to suppress commercials about it, made the movie irresistable to watch. Being in Berkeley, a definite bastion of anti-Bush sentiment, helped push me into seeing it as well. So i did. $7 at the California Theatre right behind my apt building. And $7 well spent.
-the movie itself is highly entertaining, disturbing and sad all at once. Entertaining for all the laughs that it brought forth from the liberal Berkeley crowd. Disturbing for its many suggestions, both obvious and subtle. Sad for the stories of many soldiers fighting in the war. And of that war, if you didn't question the Iraq war before seeing it, you will question it afterward. Sure it's a biased point of view, but what is presented is very intriguing and quite hard to ignore. I will not say anything specific that is in the movie, but from beginning to end you are presented with video and the narration of Michael Moore. Sometimes the narrative is used to make a point, or to enhance the point. But often times, the video clips speak for themselves.
-the one thing that the movie convinced me of is that Bush MUST be ousted in this year's election. If not, this country seems to be in for much more shit....
June 26, 2004 - another week gone by...
-2:22 pm: my suspicions from june 20th were more or less correct, although the week seemed to have gone by a lot quicker. Unlike the first week, i actually did stuff in lab a few of the days. Cut some tissue samples on the microtome and transfered them to slides. Not as easy as it looks or sounds, and not terribly exciting, but better than sitting at your cubicle all day and doing nothing (actually i spend most of the time relearning MCB130 and MCB150.
-company social life was vastly improved over the first week. Wednesday HR provided a pizza lunch for the interns which was kinda fun, although most of the interns had already met through Nathan's efforts. Still it was free lunch, and nothing impresses college students (and recent college grads) more than free food. That was followed thursday by a company party, which was more of a free BBQ than a party (the only ethanol i saw that day was the ethanol in the autostainer..). Next week we (the interns) plan on celebrating a bday on monday and seeing the Angels-A's game on tuesday.
-next week promises to pick up and i have reasonable optimism that it will. I will be performing my first experiments, the details of which are confidential, but yeah fun hopefully.
June 20, 2004 - time to reset...
-2:58 pm: time for a new week... me hopes it will be more interesting than last week, although i have strong suspicions otherwise. the only productive thing i've done all day was to do the laundry and clean the bathroom, otherwise the day has mirrored a day at work last week: sit around computer essentially waiting for something to happen. Key differences though are that i surf whatever websites i care to at home and i can listen to music. I currently contemplate purchasing some sorta portable music player, be it and ipod/CD/MD player or whatever, to only help with the passage of time at work but also the time spent on BART.
-couple of random things that happened these past few days that i didn't write about. There were birds at PDL building D flying around above the false ceiling on friday. Couple of finches that were making annoying noises. Eventually a maintenance guy came and remove one of the panels in some kinda attempt to get rid of the birds (as if the birds were like going to come to him...). Anyway he gave up, but left the panel out. One of the birds flew out of the hole and got an aerial tour of the building D cubicle area. Sadly, I found the whole situation rather amusing and entertaining, obviously because i wasn't doing anything interesting. As i left around 5pm, i could still hear the other bird....
-David Chu came by yesterday to retrieve his (and Michelle's) remaining stuff. I had a rather extended conversation with his dad about work, grad school etc... pretty good conversation that got me thinking about future plans a bit more.
June 19, 2004 - BLT
-3:23 pm: no it's not the sandwich (which i incidentally do not like), but the 2003 film, Better Luck Tomorrow. i watched it for the first time on may29th, right after watching the Jim Carrey comedy, Bruce Almighty. Since watching it, i've taken a lot of almost obsessive interest in the movie. The movie is about 6 SoCal (presumably Orange County) high school asian americans, with particular focus on the overachieving Ben Manibag and 3 of his friends. On the surface they represent your typical disgusting Asian overchievers: high GPAs, multiple club activities, sports teams, academic decathlons and the like. But there are other things they do: cheat sheet scams, drinking and more serious drugs, robbery and more heinous crimes. They get away with it because, as the narrator says "[their] grades were [their] allibis." Bored with school and things to go on college applications, they do them because they can.
-if you do your internet research on the movie, you'll find that it was the first Asian American film to be featured at the Sundance Film Festival, the first film to be picked up by MTV and that it was made on an only $250,000 budget. The film was widely held in the AA community last year as the key to opening the doors for AA actors in American entertainment media, thus a big grassroots campaign for the film enabled it to average an astonishing $32,000 per theatre for its opening. The film went on to gross just under $4 million in 6 weeks.
-there are two reasons why i've taken such interest in the film. 1) the cast was all AA, and it was quite weird to see them play lead roles in which they were not kicking ass as martial art fools, or playing deliver guys or nerds as unimportant side characters. It is nice to see someone of your own ethnic identity up there representing. Why aren't there more AA's featured in mainstream movies/tv? No audience really... Living in California surrounded by other Asians makes it very easy to forget that the country as a whole is only 4% Asian.
2000 Census Statistics
Total US population: 281,421,906 (2004 estimate is 292,000,000)
Total US Asian pop: 11,898,828 (4.2%)
Total California population: 33,871,648 (12% of US)
Total CA Asian pop: ~3,690,000 (10.9% of CA, 31% of US total Asian pop)
Large movie distributors are skeptical as to whether 96% of the country would pay to see a movie featuring leads from the minority 4%. And can you really blame them? This was the reason for that grassroots campaign.. the movie was a called a test by its director (Justin Lin) to see if ppl were willing watch it, and many in the AA community hoped the film would be able to springboard more AA productions into the American mainstream.
-the second reason: seeing the film reminded me of high school, but also showed me things i missed, some fortunately and some unfortunately. I can only identify with the characters in two regards: i had a disgusting 4.42 GPA and i am an AA. Otherwise we're totally different. I wasn't particularly obsessed with getting into college, so i didn't do much club stuff or athletics stuff at all. My free time was spent either playing videogames or reading random things (there's where lots of my random knowledge comes from). I did not have a social life in high school... AT ALL. So the film was sort of a glimpse into what my high school life might have been like (OK not the violence and drugs parts, but all the club stuff, social life, dating life etc). I know most ppl look back on high school as fun, fertive and easy times, but i don't. All i remember was doing school school school and nothing else at all. And in fact that mentality pretty much continued into college right through sophomore year. All the fun i have had the last two years of college makes me wonder what high school would've been like.
-Beyond my lack of those high school experiences, this second aspect of the film, the experience of some contemporary high schoolers, was meant to be universal, and not what was is experienced only by Asian American students. In this regard, the fact that they were Asian American is irrelevant. We've all heard of the shootings, stabbings, drive bys (hell when i was in high school, we had one of each... no joke) that goes on in high schools these days. We're becoming a more violent society that is increasingly losing sight of consequences. This violence manifests itself at many levels, from violent cartoons and toy guns, to high school mass shootings, to unjustified wars. Parents who see this movie might be made quite wary and paranoid...
-if you get the chance, definitely see this movie. has it all in my opinion: great acting, good characters (including the cute female character), interesting plot, and a twisted ending. And if nothing else, notice how the film (for now) holds a place next to Forrest Gump as a favorite movie.
June 19, 2004 - hail to the weekend
-8:51 am: it's near 9am and i'm not in fremont. wow. to give everybody an idea of what it's been like, here's the average schedule i followed the part working week:
*5:45 am: wake up, shower
*6:00 am: eat breakfast/pack lunch
*6:30 am: get dressed
*6:40 am: leave for BART
~6:47 am: board BART - Fremont train
~7:30 am: get off at Union City
~7:47 am: board company shuttle
~8:02 am: arrive and begin work
~12:30 pm: take lunch break
~1:00 pm: return to work
~4:55 pm: leave work
~4:57: board company shuttle
~5:21 pm: board BART - Richmond train
~6:05 pm: arrive back in Berkeley
*6:30 pm: dinner
*7:00 pm: misc (tv, read, internet, etc)
*10:00 pm: sleep
-getting up at 5:45 am explains why i'm up so early on a saturday. Like my body tends to do, i actually woke up at 5:45 am today, but i returned to bed until about 8:30. yeah my body sets up some regular alarm or something that usually gets disrupted on weekends and makes mondays very fun!
-so like overall the first week could be described as mostly boring, trying to get accustomed and trained. it will probably pick up, but shit felt kinda useless and retarded there sitting and reading. I've been reading a lot about cell surface markers (which ones i cannot specify, else risk breaching the company's privacy/research policies) and general stuff about immunology, histology, and pathology. I wish i had my MCB150 stuff, but i freakin packed it away. The immunology books they have at the company are not molecular based and are kinda old, so they don't discuss stuff in enough detail.
-i've slowly met most of the other interns, and a pretty big chunk of them are from Cal. Just yesterday, there was a large group of 8 in the building C lunch room, and we pretty much compared notes and/or complained. Seems like i'm the least busy of everyone, but then again they've all been there longer. The other first week intern in my building seems like she's not doing much as well. Well friday technically i did more than just read or watch! inserted a couple slides in the autostainer, made a PBS solution, used the microscope... OOOOH
June 15, 2004 - the merciful end, the 2nd day
-9:36 pm: the NBA finals came to an resounding end today with Detroit prevailing. The Pistons were, without a doubt, the better team and are every bit deserving of the championship. For their part, the Lakers looked like they didn't belong at all in the finals. And even though the season ends without the championship, this laker fan is happy to see it end. The season has been nothing but chaos. The day after signing Malone and Payton, Bryant was charged with rape in Colorado. They started the season pretty well, going 17-5. Then it all started coming apart: the trial hearings, the Shaq-Kobe feud, the bitching of Payton about playing time etc etc. All damn fuckin frustrating. This massacre at the hands of the Pistons is the only way to guarantee that this shit won't happen again next season. I, for one, hope that everyone leaves. Bye Jackson, you're not meant to win the 10th. Bye Kobe, you'll be in jail. Bye Malone, you should've retired last year. Bye Payton, be a useless defender elsewhere.
-moving on, so my second day at PDL was pretty similar to the first: boring again. Still in the reading phase of training. At least now i can put on my resume that i'm certified and trained in pre-clinical research GLPs. I met some of the Berkeley interns, namely Leslie (who got me the internship), David Z and Nathan. They've all been at PDL longer than I, but they also seem to complain about boredom and doing more sitting than actual work. I'm beginning to wonder if that's what most people do around that company... as i walk around all the cubicles, it seems like most ppl just sit there doing stuff, not much lab work going on. Seems like an enormous waste of company money.... oh well. While my boredom is expected, the boredom of those other interns who've been there for a bit of time is not very encouraging. I suppose we can take solace in that we are being paid... but crap.
-well it's now 9:57 pm, which means time to sleep... I get up at 6am to catch the 6:47am BART train to Fremont
June 14, 2004 - first day at PDL
-9:37 pm: so the first day went pretty much as expected... i.e. boring. full of lots of reading, orientations etc. The most exciting thing was watching my supervisor section frozen colon for histology for about 40 min, otherwise pretty much sat. it will pick up though!
-i got up at freaking 5:30 am today... to catch a 6:47 am BART train to union city. i got to work at about 8am and left 4:45 and caught the 5:36 Richmond train back to berkeley, arriving shortly before 6:30 pm... looks like long ass days ahead for the 12 weeks! i hope i don't burn out.
June 13, 2004 - one word...... F***
-8:47 pm: sometimes i hate to be right...
June 13, 2004 - so much for lucky lucky LA... back in berkeley
-2:52 pm: well, the lakers aren't completely dead yet but will be essentially dead after they lose tonight's game 4. game 3 was a complete disaster! and i didn't even watch it, opting to play bball instead. after i got home, they were down by 18 in the 4th quarter so playing was probably a lot better than watching them stink it up.
-as can be told from the title, i am back in berkeley! i got back yesterday, bringing mainly clothes and food and not much else. it is kinda odd living here and not being a student, and it is easy to forget that you are not a student anymore, just some random mofo with a useless degree. anyway... after i was mostly settled in, met up with TBP ppl Nathan, Ed, Eddie and Karen + Ed's CES friend at Ed's place to play some Texas hold'em poker! of course i am quite terrible at the game (i am terrible at most games) so i lost all my $5, but i suppose it was $5 well spent having fun for around 3 hrs.
-internship begins tomorrow! the only thing to bitch about is having to get up extremely early....
-check back later for cussing or joy after LA loses the game....
June 8, 2004 - lucky lucky LA, misc
-11:03 pm: well i was watching star trek and the nba finals game simultaneously. LA was down by 6 with less than 40 seconds left, so in disgust i decided to stay on the TNG rerun (which was one of the very interesting sherlock holmes episodes). after that was over, i switched back to ABC to see the final ugly score, and much to my surprise it was tied at 89 with 2.1 seconds left and detroit inbounding. the inbounds pass gets stolen by Malone and the game goes to OT.
-total Kobe/Shaq show in OT, and all owed to Kobe's 31-foot 3 pointer. wow. the series, which was literally seconds away from being 2-0 detroit is knotted at 1 apiece with three games to be played in Michigan. given how much LA is sucking it up and Malone's ACL injury, i'll stick with my original detroit in 6 prediction.
-today i opened an ING direct savings account in the hopes of earning more interest than the crap i get with wells fargo. the current interest rate on my WF account is a negligible 0.20%, so diverting the money to the more robust 2.1% Orange savings account seemed logical. i put in $5000 (basically all of my grad money) which should earn near $50 by the year's end. much much better than the less than $5 i would've gotten with WF. yay.
-it's only hitting me now what i've just lost by graduating. Even though i will be returning to Berkeley on saturday, it will not be as a student, but rather as a person just living there working. it won't be the same; the ppl won't be there, and for the first time in my life, i'm not working for grades!
-so the companies are now calling. punk asses... they could've called three weeks ago. now they all say that they will try again in september when i'm available. hopefully they will call again!
June 7, 2004 - damnit.. calgary didn't win
-10:12 pm: how disappointing that a team from florida for crying out loud won the Stanley Cup. what a disappointing sports season in general, time to look ahead to next year!
June 7, 2004 - Detroit 87 - LAL 75, a whole new wardrobe
-3:04 pm: my suspicions were (unfortunately) correct. seems like the series will be difficult for LA if they are to win, and based on what everybody saw yesterday, looks like Detroit the team that's going to win this thing. my prediction is now detroit in 6....
-yesterday i spent about $300 on new everything.. clothes, shoes, and, uh, even undergarments. this all for my internship because what i normally wear is not appropriate work attire... $300 isn't actually too bad for getting a whole new set of stuff, all made possible by the wonders of outlet malls and Target.
-stanley cup finals conclude today in about two hours... GO FLAMES GO!
June 5, 2004 - what i've been up to....
-10:18 pm: this minivacation between the end of school and the beginning of my internship has been not so boring as home is usually, which is quite surprising. i have less than a week left before i head back to the Bay Area.
-this past week i took 6 hrs worth of driving lessons ($159) to learn (finally) how to drive. driving is much simpler than i had thought, and now i wonder why i didn't bother to learn earlier. well my reason has always been that it wasn't necessary and plus i've never been the type who likes to get out and away from the house. so it really never came around.
-the worst thing i do is change lanes on the freeway... too much drifting while i check over the shoulder. other than that, i supposedly drive fairly smoothly, although i wonder that if i were a passenger, i would probably get car sick hahaha. the freeway is both exhilarating and scary.... i did 74 mph my first time behind the wheel!
-another thing i've been doing is to some kinda exercise everyday! my uncle Roy recently gave my family his weight machine which i've been having fun with. i've also been playing some bball at the old high school. my goal for now is simply not to gain weight as i usually do at home, and i hope the exercise accounts for the extra calories i eat down here.
-TB 3 - CGY 2 (2OT): damn you Lightning for winning today! for some reason, i find myself cheering hard for the Calgary Flames in the Stanley Cup finals. i'm not sure why, but i think the Stanley Cup should be won by a Canadian team, after all, ice hockey IS Canada's sport.
-the NBA finals begin tomorrow, in a rematch of 14 years ago when the LA Lakers and Detroit last played for the O'Brien trophy. being in LA at this time, of course everyone has gone purple-gold crazy. the sportscasters already discount Detroit, and lots expect LA to roll over the supposedly hapless Pistons. I'm not totally convinced this is as guaranteed as everyone down here thinks it is. all of us will get a better idea after tomorrow night's game.
June 3, 2004 - pictures for the may 28th entry... /w captions
-117 project display at LHS on May 8
-a mini reunion of our floor from Freeborn hall (6th floor 2000-2001), May 12
-the dessert platter from our 117 project celebration dinner, May 13
-view of SF from the berkeley marina, May 22
-the Golden Gate Bridge from the berkeley marina, May 22
-Kathy sets up a shot using Cal engineer skills, May 25
-me and Jen on Arch Rock, Pt Reyes, May 25
June 2, 2004 - home
-10:52 am: home has been quite good and not so boring as usual for some reason. perhaps it is knowing that i only have two weeks before i begin my internship at PDL, but hmmm yeah. so after the flight on friday, arrived back at Burbank for the first time in a long time. dinner was at Buko the only awesome Japanese restaurant in Glendale.
-saturday was my cousin and my graduation party complete with 80+ ppl. an interesting experience especially when trying to explain what bioengineering is (i confirmed that despite 4 years studying it, i still can't give a clear definition). the total gift amount was quite shocking... $5.5k with the major 2k contribution from my grandma. now i need to write thank yous....
-sunday Paul and dad headed up to Seattle and the weather began to heat up. yuck
-monday didn't do much which is pretty normal for my times at home.
-tuesday went grocery shopping in the morning with mom and Catherine, then picked up my dad from the burbank airport. then at 3:00 i had my first driving lesson! first time ever behind a wheel, i find out that it's much easier than i thought, and that driving on the freeway is somewhat scary (try going 70 on your first day....)
-so that brings me to now... simply biding my time until i have to go back to berkeley on the 11th.
May 28, 2004 - it's been 3 weeks... with lots of change
-2:37 am: it's been a very long time since i last wrote anything in this blog and in that long while that has elapsed much about my life has changed. In stark contrast to the rest of the semester, my life is on an upswing full of optimism instead of the pessism and despair most of the semester had. I have an internship over the summer working on immunohistochemistry at a local Fremont biotech company and have made plans to go to Hawaii with a group of good friends from Berkeley. This all has happened just this past week in fact right after i went from being a Cal student to being an alum.
-well i suppose i should try to recap what has happened since the night of the TBP initiation. sometime that weekend Daniel took me and some friends to Fenton's after which we saw Van Helsing at Bay street. My my what a bad movie that was nothing more than cheesy CG overload without any plot. TBP elections happened on may 12, and not surprisingly they lasted forever. i'm happy about the results and i'm sure the chapter will be much better than it was under me next semester. Thursday of that week i went out to Macaroni Grille with Germaine and Eileen to celebrate the completion of our 117 project. While we were there, Derek Fisher, my NBA favorite player, hit the miracle 0.4 shot (and yes he was my favorite player long before that).
-all of last week was spent in the finals process (i.e. procrastinating for the particular test that was closest, eating take out, no sleep etc.) that lasted all the way up until last friday. After my history final it felt kinda weird knowing that i had just taken my final final and was completely done with my undergraduate experience. my graduation cheering posse arrived from the LA area around 9 pm.
-grad day was quite tiring; got up really early and had issues with the damn parking. after that was resolved i lined up backstage with the rest of the engineering candidates to receive our BS degrees. The actual ceremony began and i went pretty much the same as last year: boring!! Of course, except for Jen's very excellent speech, which i thought applies to everyone (except for premeds who stay the course). the guest speaker had some interesting words, although i was not particularly fond of his L&S bashing. After the ceremony, went to the bioe reception to take pics with ppl, chat a bit. After that the whole posse and me went to the student store for overpriced memorablia, Steve's for lunch, JCPenney for pictures, the berkeley marina for the hell of it, and west coast for dinner.
-sunday the 23rd consisted of packing the rest of my stuff away and loading it up for the 7 hr journey back to LA. some of my stuff didn't make and ironically it was a good thing, but at the time i didn't know if was gonna stay up there for the internship. speaking of which, monday the 24th was the interview for the internship, in which Jen and Kathy were awesome enough to not only drive me to Fremont but also to drill me with interview type questions. i think both were quite instrumental in helping me get the internship and i am eternally grateful! after the interview we ate a place famous for pie for breakfast (incidentally didn't have pie hahah).
-Karen Y. came over to my place on monday and wednesday to complete the TBP report book! lots of word processing involved and thinking how to do things with help from both Robert and Eddie. the book ended up being like 320 pages long at a total cost of over $100 for getting two copies printed and one sent to Tennessee. weeee upon receiving the book, i got an email from nationals saying it was beautiful!
-tuesday the 25th went to Point Reyes with Kathy and Jen for a nice relaxing (nearly) 10-mile hike to Arch rock. more than the hike there were many interesting conversations, fallen trees, banana slugs, seagulls, deer and many other things.
-i spent the later part of wednesday and all of thursday helping both Jen and Daniel move out of their respective places, taking apart furniture, packing stuff and loading uhauls. i have a sore back to show for it. My reward from Jen was an excellent dinner at Kirala with Jen, Menzies and jen's friend Lisa.
-so how's that for a summary of three weeks! pretty crappy i guess many details left out etc.
May 7, 2004 - TBP initiation and banquet
-11:53 am: TBP's spring 2004 semester came to an end today with the initiation of 40 new members and the traditional banquet. Along with the sense of joy for the new members, comes an melancholy over the effective end of my time with TBP as an undergraduate. Such an end is quite sad for me, particularly because of what TBP has meant to me these past two years. It has been the source of many new friends, many fun activities and many of the most memorable moments of my collegiate career. I will truly miss all of you!
-ok maybe i should write something relevant to the title! the initiation went pretty OK... people had typical reading mess ups (i certainly did lol)... and i hope i pronounced names ok..... The banquet was quite fun and enjoyable as usual, although it was pretty hard to hold back tears knowing that it was probably my last one. I was going to give a bye-bye speech, but i wussed out because i would have definitely broken down up there. I think though i must give one eventually, perhaps on tuesday... and now for pictures!!
May 4, 2004 - buying fishing weights
-12:46 am: the randomness of things we've needed to buy for our BioE/ME C117 project is quite crazy. Springs from Ace Hardware. Springs?! We've also gotten a wood dowel, some large wood blocks, some long strips of wood and even wooden stirring spoons. I also almost bought a wood file. Today's 117 oddity was buying 32 oz fishing sinkers to be used as weights for the springs! Did i also mention we requested and received an air dashpot from some company! Yes you bioes are there... we've got our hands on an actual dashpot!
-Actual all day monday was a bit crazy, although not as crazy as saturday. Began with waking up at 10 to go to Safeway for food, particularly chicken for tuesday's TBP potluck. Then i ate a bunch of leftovers for lunch, proceeded to history. Today was the really weird and totally whack physics. We learned about the flavor and color quantum numbers. Flavor is THE weirdest scientific concept ever. Apparently it's a quantum number for quarks and has possible states of up, down, strange, charm, top and bottom. Also learned about the theory of supersymmetry, which proposes the existence of things like selectrons, whinos and photinos.
-After class, Germaine picked me up and we went to Copeland Sports in El Cerrito Plaza to purchase aforementioned sinkers. Had some extra time, so bought thank you cards for friday and some egg tarts and honey tangerines from Ranch99.
-TBP initiation practice came next. some interesting moments there which i won't reveal per risking a TBP rules violation... but feel free to ask in person.
-Nathan's 21st b-day party followed! Yay! yummy food, cake and good times for our favorite nipple flasher, Nate Cheng, whose actual b-day is wednesday (as well as Karen Yang's). Most interesting thing to come out of the night is that a few ppl have marriage plans already... DAMN i'm not anywhere near that...
-Day ends with the conclusion of NBC's 10.5 earthquake disaster movie. The movie is so tragically unscientific, it was actually funny. In the movie... Seattle suffers a 7.8 earthquake which topples the Space Needle (which is built to withstand up to 9.0) with the epicenter in downtown Seattle. Next an 8.4 earthquake in Redding, which swallows up a train... Sacramento doesn't feel it. 9.2 in SF next, Golden Gate Falls, then the ultimate 10.5 that destroys LA and creates an island out of Santa Barbara County. WARNING: BEGIN NERDY CRITICISM: Seattle area can actual suffer from earthquakes larger than 7.8 but from the Cascadia Subduction Fault which lies underneath the Pacific Ocean (and not underneath downtown Seattle). This thingy is capable of 9.4's and would completely wipe out Portland and Seattle. The subduction of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate would also probably set off a bunch of the Cascade volcanos. A 8.4 in Redding (which is impossible magnitude, no faults long enough for that there) would definitely be felt in Sacramento only 150 miles away. 9.2 in SF is impossible again because there is no fault long enough in the SF area for that. Same for the BS 10.5 that destroys LA. The absolute worse thing is how rifts open up and create the island! The faults that exist cannot do that, they're only capable of moving side to side, not opening up. Blah blah... movie was entertaining to watch only because of how bad the science was... there's actual a lot more bad science than i've bothered to mention. OK me mention one more: they read out the magnitude as the earthquake occurs! OMG that cannot be done, magnitude is determined with data after the earthquake, not during it.
May 2, 2004 - saturday was crazy
-12:55 am: my saturday was extraordinarily long, but for some reason i don't feel that tired. Especially strange considering i got <6 hrs of sleep (which is quite tiny for my weekend standards). Contrast this with last saturday in which i was up from 6:30 am to 2 am. Anyway, instead of 6:30 am got up around 8:30 am, took a shower, printed crap, then headed over to Germaine's to do the 117 project stuff. As usual not terribly productive, but we did get some stuff done. The backboard's looking really good (hmm thank goodness for the girls in the group, us guys can't make these kinds of backboard/presentation things for crap). I did the more manly (ok not really) thing of finishing the holes in the pieces of wood destined to be our spring display. After about only 2 hrs or so of work, we went out for lunch at Gregoire's, this nice French take out restaurant with extremely good food (And uh price to match). I had a very very delicious eggplant sandwich and those guilty fried crispy potato puffs with horseradish sauce (drool...) . Even though the food is kinda expensive, it seems worth every penny to me (which is a rare thing for me to think). Maybe it's just because i haven't had that good of food in a really long time.
-After lunch, we set out on specific tasks of printing pictures and uh finding a saw to cut wood. Not knowing where to find such a bizarre thing, i somehow decide to call Ryan somehow thinking he might have one... No answer. Next Eileen and I wander a bit down Oxford to a painter's truck. Asian FOB doesn't seem to understand English... next we wrap around the block to Spruce and encounter some ppl doing some major remodeling. Eileen boldly asks and they offer use of something. We run back to get our piece of wood (a 48 inch wooden rod from which springs are to be hung), and return. They don't notice us while they drill and converse away in Cantonese. Then Eileen notices some guy across the street trimming his hedges with an automatic hedger. She boldly ask again and the guy offers use of a handsaw! Success! I cut the wood and we return to Germaine's. We glued together the base of the spring display and cut up the pictures. That was the end of project work...
-Next came Capture the Flag with ASME! Germaine dropped me off at HMC, then i proceed to Capture the Flag, which i've never played before and wanted to experience before leaving Cal. Quite fun and soaking wet. I managed to nail Brian one time (even though i was technically out... "oops"). Game is quite difficult so no team scored. The last set of water balloons became a chaotic five minute free-for-all.
-After that, watched the tail end of a Much-Ado-About-Nothing production in front of South Hall. Lasted until about 5:30, then i proceed to Dwinelle to check out if Theatre Rice was going on there. It was, but no one was in line, so i decided to get dinner at Steve's. Yay BBQ chicken! After wolfing that down, got in line and saw Yeh, who was second in line. I began 4th in line, but ended up somewhere like 20th (you know the cutting shit... blah blah). Jen and Menzies joined me eventually.
-The highlight of the show was definitely the second skit that was both funny and somewhat insightful.. Had a whole reverse stereotype thing going. Immigrant Chinese parents raising their son to be a gay actor, rather than the typical straight doctor. Dialogs was quite hilarious, but did bring up the point about parents trying to direct their children's lives too much. Most of the other skits weren't as funny, but the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle one was a bit nostalgic. All in all a pretty good last show for me.
-The fun details of a day in the life of me. Rather atypical, but eh wanted to record it and i'm a little bored right now. I suppose i can now discuss the scariness of having less than three weeks left as an undergraduate... but i'll save it for later.
-9:40 pm: i don't see very many movies, especially when they just open. But the controversy surrounding Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and Republican attempts to suppress commercials about it, made the movie irresistable to watch. Being in Berkeley, a definite bastion of anti-Bush sentiment, helped push me into seeing it as well. So i did. $7 at the California Theatre right behind my apt building. And $7 well spent.
-the movie itself is highly entertaining, disturbing and sad all at once. Entertaining for all the laughs that it brought forth from the liberal Berkeley crowd. Disturbing for its many suggestions, both obvious and subtle. Sad for the stories of many soldiers fighting in the war. And of that war, if you didn't question the Iraq war before seeing it, you will question it afterward. Sure it's a biased point of view, but what is presented is very intriguing and quite hard to ignore. I will not say anything specific that is in the movie, but from beginning to end you are presented with video and the narration of Michael Moore. Sometimes the narrative is used to make a point, or to enhance the point. But often times, the video clips speak for themselves.
-the one thing that the movie convinced me of is that Bush MUST be ousted in this year's election. If not, this country seems to be in for much more shit....
June 26, 2004 - another week gone by...
-2:22 pm: my suspicions from june 20th were more or less correct, although the week seemed to have gone by a lot quicker. Unlike the first week, i actually did stuff in lab a few of the days. Cut some tissue samples on the microtome and transfered them to slides. Not as easy as it looks or sounds, and not terribly exciting, but better than sitting at your cubicle all day and doing nothing (actually i spend most of the time relearning MCB130 and MCB150.
-company social life was vastly improved over the first week. Wednesday HR provided a pizza lunch for the interns which was kinda fun, although most of the interns had already met through Nathan's efforts. Still it was free lunch, and nothing impresses college students (and recent college grads) more than free food. That was followed thursday by a company party, which was more of a free BBQ than a party (the only ethanol i saw that day was the ethanol in the autostainer..). Next week we (the interns) plan on celebrating a bday on monday and seeing the Angels-A's game on tuesday.
-next week promises to pick up and i have reasonable optimism that it will. I will be performing my first experiments, the details of which are confidential, but yeah fun hopefully.
June 20, 2004 - time to reset...
-2:58 pm: time for a new week... me hopes it will be more interesting than last week, although i have strong suspicions otherwise. the only productive thing i've done all day was to do the laundry and clean the bathroom, otherwise the day has mirrored a day at work last week: sit around computer essentially waiting for something to happen. Key differences though are that i surf whatever websites i care to at home and i can listen to music. I currently contemplate purchasing some sorta portable music player, be it and ipod/CD/MD player or whatever, to only help with the passage of time at work but also the time spent on BART.
-couple of random things that happened these past few days that i didn't write about. There were birds at PDL building D flying around above the false ceiling on friday. Couple of finches that were making annoying noises. Eventually a maintenance guy came and remove one of the panels in some kinda attempt to get rid of the birds (as if the birds were like going to come to him...). Anyway he gave up, but left the panel out. One of the birds flew out of the hole and got an aerial tour of the building D cubicle area. Sadly, I found the whole situation rather amusing and entertaining, obviously because i wasn't doing anything interesting. As i left around 5pm, i could still hear the other bird....
-David Chu came by yesterday to retrieve his (and Michelle's) remaining stuff. I had a rather extended conversation with his dad about work, grad school etc... pretty good conversation that got me thinking about future plans a bit more.
June 19, 2004 - BLT
-3:23 pm: no it's not the sandwich (which i incidentally do not like), but the 2003 film, Better Luck Tomorrow. i watched it for the first time on may29th, right after watching the Jim Carrey comedy, Bruce Almighty. Since watching it, i've taken a lot of almost obsessive interest in the movie. The movie is about 6 SoCal (presumably Orange County) high school asian americans, with particular focus on the overachieving Ben Manibag and 3 of his friends. On the surface they represent your typical disgusting Asian overchievers: high GPAs, multiple club activities, sports teams, academic decathlons and the like. But there are other things they do: cheat sheet scams, drinking and more serious drugs, robbery and more heinous crimes. They get away with it because, as the narrator says "[their] grades were [their] allibis." Bored with school and things to go on college applications, they do them because they can.
-if you do your internet research on the movie, you'll find that it was the first Asian American film to be featured at the Sundance Film Festival, the first film to be picked up by MTV and that it was made on an only $250,000 budget. The film was widely held in the AA community last year as the key to opening the doors for AA actors in American entertainment media, thus a big grassroots campaign for the film enabled it to average an astonishing $32,000 per theatre for its opening. The film went on to gross just under $4 million in 6 weeks.
-there are two reasons why i've taken such interest in the film. 1) the cast was all AA, and it was quite weird to see them play lead roles in which they were not kicking ass as martial art fools, or playing deliver guys or nerds as unimportant side characters. It is nice to see someone of your own ethnic identity up there representing. Why aren't there more AA's featured in mainstream movies/tv? No audience really... Living in California surrounded by other Asians makes it very easy to forget that the country as a whole is only 4% Asian.
2000 Census Statistics
Total US population: 281,421,906 (2004 estimate is 292,000,000)
Total US Asian pop: 11,898,828 (4.2%)
Total California population: 33,871,648 (12% of US)
Total CA Asian pop: ~3,690,000 (10.9% of CA, 31% of US total Asian pop)
Large movie distributors are skeptical as to whether 96% of the country would pay to see a movie featuring leads from the minority 4%. And can you really blame them? This was the reason for that grassroots campaign.. the movie was a called a test by its director (Justin Lin) to see if ppl were willing watch it, and many in the AA community hoped the film would be able to springboard more AA productions into the American mainstream.
-the second reason: seeing the film reminded me of high school, but also showed me things i missed, some fortunately and some unfortunately. I can only identify with the characters in two regards: i had a disgusting 4.42 GPA and i am an AA. Otherwise we're totally different. I wasn't particularly obsessed with getting into college, so i didn't do much club stuff or athletics stuff at all. My free time was spent either playing videogames or reading random things (there's where lots of my random knowledge comes from). I did not have a social life in high school... AT ALL. So the film was sort of a glimpse into what my high school life might have been like (OK not the violence and drugs parts, but all the club stuff, social life, dating life etc). I know most ppl look back on high school as fun, fertive and easy times, but i don't. All i remember was doing school school school and nothing else at all. And in fact that mentality pretty much continued into college right through sophomore year. All the fun i have had the last two years of college makes me wonder what high school would've been like.
-Beyond my lack of those high school experiences, this second aspect of the film, the experience of some contemporary high schoolers, was meant to be universal, and not what was is experienced only by Asian American students. In this regard, the fact that they were Asian American is irrelevant. We've all heard of the shootings, stabbings, drive bys (hell when i was in high school, we had one of each... no joke) that goes on in high schools these days. We're becoming a more violent society that is increasingly losing sight of consequences. This violence manifests itself at many levels, from violent cartoons and toy guns, to high school mass shootings, to unjustified wars. Parents who see this movie might be made quite wary and paranoid...
-if you get the chance, definitely see this movie. has it all in my opinion: great acting, good characters (including the cute female character), interesting plot, and a twisted ending. And if nothing else, notice how the film (for now) holds a place next to Forrest Gump as a favorite movie.
June 19, 2004 - hail to the weekend
-8:51 am: it's near 9am and i'm not in fremont. wow. to give everybody an idea of what it's been like, here's the average schedule i followed the part working week:
*5:45 am: wake up, shower
*6:00 am: eat breakfast/pack lunch
*6:30 am: get dressed
*6:40 am: leave for BART
~6:47 am: board BART - Fremont train
~7:30 am: get off at Union City
~7:47 am: board company shuttle
~8:02 am: arrive and begin work
~12:30 pm: take lunch break
~1:00 pm: return to work
~4:55 pm: leave work
~4:57: board company shuttle
~5:21 pm: board BART - Richmond train
~6:05 pm: arrive back in Berkeley
*6:30 pm: dinner
*7:00 pm: misc (tv, read, internet, etc)
*10:00 pm: sleep
-getting up at 5:45 am explains why i'm up so early on a saturday. Like my body tends to do, i actually woke up at 5:45 am today, but i returned to bed until about 8:30. yeah my body sets up some regular alarm or something that usually gets disrupted on weekends and makes mondays very fun!
-so like overall the first week could be described as mostly boring, trying to get accustomed and trained. it will probably pick up, but shit felt kinda useless and retarded there sitting and reading. I've been reading a lot about cell surface markers (which ones i cannot specify, else risk breaching the company's privacy/research policies) and general stuff about immunology, histology, and pathology. I wish i had my MCB150 stuff, but i freakin packed it away. The immunology books they have at the company are not molecular based and are kinda old, so they don't discuss stuff in enough detail.
-i've slowly met most of the other interns, and a pretty big chunk of them are from Cal. Just yesterday, there was a large group of 8 in the building C lunch room, and we pretty much compared notes and/or complained. Seems like i'm the least busy of everyone, but then again they've all been there longer. The other first week intern in my building seems like she's not doing much as well. Well friday technically i did more than just read or watch! inserted a couple slides in the autostainer, made a PBS solution, used the microscope... OOOOH
June 15, 2004 - the merciful end, the 2nd day
-9:36 pm: the NBA finals came to an resounding end today with Detroit prevailing. The Pistons were, without a doubt, the better team and are every bit deserving of the championship. For their part, the Lakers looked like they didn't belong at all in the finals. And even though the season ends without the championship, this laker fan is happy to see it end. The season has been nothing but chaos. The day after signing Malone and Payton, Bryant was charged with rape in Colorado. They started the season pretty well, going 17-5. Then it all started coming apart: the trial hearings, the Shaq-Kobe feud, the bitching of Payton about playing time etc etc. All damn fuckin frustrating. This massacre at the hands of the Pistons is the only way to guarantee that this shit won't happen again next season. I, for one, hope that everyone leaves. Bye Jackson, you're not meant to win the 10th. Bye Kobe, you'll be in jail. Bye Malone, you should've retired last year. Bye Payton, be a useless defender elsewhere.
-moving on, so my second day at PDL was pretty similar to the first: boring again. Still in the reading phase of training. At least now i can put on my resume that i'm certified and trained in pre-clinical research GLPs. I met some of the Berkeley interns, namely Leslie (who got me the internship), David Z and Nathan. They've all been at PDL longer than I, but they also seem to complain about boredom and doing more sitting than actual work. I'm beginning to wonder if that's what most people do around that company... as i walk around all the cubicles, it seems like most ppl just sit there doing stuff, not much lab work going on. Seems like an enormous waste of company money.... oh well. While my boredom is expected, the boredom of those other interns who've been there for a bit of time is not very encouraging. I suppose we can take solace in that we are being paid... but crap.
-well it's now 9:57 pm, which means time to sleep... I get up at 6am to catch the 6:47am BART train to Fremont
June 14, 2004 - first day at PDL
-9:37 pm: so the first day went pretty much as expected... i.e. boring. full of lots of reading, orientations etc. The most exciting thing was watching my supervisor section frozen colon for histology for about 40 min, otherwise pretty much sat. it will pick up though!
-i got up at freaking 5:30 am today... to catch a 6:47 am BART train to union city. i got to work at about 8am and left 4:45 and caught the 5:36 Richmond train back to berkeley, arriving shortly before 6:30 pm... looks like long ass days ahead for the 12 weeks! i hope i don't burn out.
June 13, 2004 - one word...... F***
-8:47 pm: sometimes i hate to be right...
June 13, 2004 - so much for lucky lucky LA... back in berkeley
-2:52 pm: well, the lakers aren't completely dead yet but will be essentially dead after they lose tonight's game 4. game 3 was a complete disaster! and i didn't even watch it, opting to play bball instead. after i got home, they were down by 18 in the 4th quarter so playing was probably a lot better than watching them stink it up.
-as can be told from the title, i am back in berkeley! i got back yesterday, bringing mainly clothes and food and not much else. it is kinda odd living here and not being a student, and it is easy to forget that you are not a student anymore, just some random mofo with a useless degree. anyway... after i was mostly settled in, met up with TBP ppl Nathan, Ed, Eddie and Karen + Ed's CES friend at Ed's place to play some Texas hold'em poker! of course i am quite terrible at the game (i am terrible at most games) so i lost all my $5, but i suppose it was $5 well spent having fun for around 3 hrs.
-internship begins tomorrow! the only thing to bitch about is having to get up extremely early....
-check back later for cussing or joy after LA loses the game....
June 8, 2004 - lucky lucky LA, misc
-11:03 pm: well i was watching star trek and the nba finals game simultaneously. LA was down by 6 with less than 40 seconds left, so in disgust i decided to stay on the TNG rerun (which was one of the very interesting sherlock holmes episodes). after that was over, i switched back to ABC to see the final ugly score, and much to my surprise it was tied at 89 with 2.1 seconds left and detroit inbounding. the inbounds pass gets stolen by Malone and the game goes to OT.
-total Kobe/Shaq show in OT, and all owed to Kobe's 31-foot 3 pointer. wow. the series, which was literally seconds away from being 2-0 detroit is knotted at 1 apiece with three games to be played in Michigan. given how much LA is sucking it up and Malone's ACL injury, i'll stick with my original detroit in 6 prediction.
-today i opened an ING direct savings account in the hopes of earning more interest than the crap i get with wells fargo. the current interest rate on my WF account is a negligible 0.20%, so diverting the money to the more robust 2.1% Orange savings account seemed logical. i put in $5000 (basically all of my grad money) which should earn near $50 by the year's end. much much better than the less than $5 i would've gotten with WF. yay.
-it's only hitting me now what i've just lost by graduating. Even though i will be returning to Berkeley on saturday, it will not be as a student, but rather as a person just living there working. it won't be the same; the ppl won't be there, and for the first time in my life, i'm not working for grades!
-so the companies are now calling. punk asses... they could've called three weeks ago. now they all say that they will try again in september when i'm available. hopefully they will call again!
June 7, 2004 - damnit.. calgary didn't win
-10:12 pm: how disappointing that a team from florida for crying out loud won the Stanley Cup. what a disappointing sports season in general, time to look ahead to next year!
June 7, 2004 - Detroit 87 - LAL 75, a whole new wardrobe
-3:04 pm: my suspicions were (unfortunately) correct. seems like the series will be difficult for LA if they are to win, and based on what everybody saw yesterday, looks like Detroit the team that's going to win this thing. my prediction is now detroit in 6....
-yesterday i spent about $300 on new everything.. clothes, shoes, and, uh, even undergarments. this all for my internship because what i normally wear is not appropriate work attire... $300 isn't actually too bad for getting a whole new set of stuff, all made possible by the wonders of outlet malls and Target.
-stanley cup finals conclude today in about two hours... GO FLAMES GO!
June 5, 2004 - what i've been up to....
-10:18 pm: this minivacation between the end of school and the beginning of my internship has been not so boring as home is usually, which is quite surprising. i have less than a week left before i head back to the Bay Area.
-this past week i took 6 hrs worth of driving lessons ($159) to learn (finally) how to drive. driving is much simpler than i had thought, and now i wonder why i didn't bother to learn earlier. well my reason has always been that it wasn't necessary and plus i've never been the type who likes to get out and away from the house. so it really never came around.
-the worst thing i do is change lanes on the freeway... too much drifting while i check over the shoulder. other than that, i supposedly drive fairly smoothly, although i wonder that if i were a passenger, i would probably get car sick hahaha. the freeway is both exhilarating and scary.... i did 74 mph my first time behind the wheel!
-another thing i've been doing is to some kinda exercise everyday! my uncle Roy recently gave my family his weight machine which i've been having fun with. i've also been playing some bball at the old high school. my goal for now is simply not to gain weight as i usually do at home, and i hope the exercise accounts for the extra calories i eat down here.
-TB 3 - CGY 2 (2OT): damn you Lightning for winning today! for some reason, i find myself cheering hard for the Calgary Flames in the Stanley Cup finals. i'm not sure why, but i think the Stanley Cup should be won by a Canadian team, after all, ice hockey IS Canada's sport.
-the NBA finals begin tomorrow, in a rematch of 14 years ago when the LA Lakers and Detroit last played for the O'Brien trophy. being in LA at this time, of course everyone has gone purple-gold crazy. the sportscasters already discount Detroit, and lots expect LA to roll over the supposedly hapless Pistons. I'm not totally convinced this is as guaranteed as everyone down here thinks it is. all of us will get a better idea after tomorrow night's game.
June 3, 2004 - pictures for the may 28th entry... /w captions
-117 project display at LHS on May 8
-a mini reunion of our floor from Freeborn hall (6th floor 2000-2001), May 12
-the dessert platter from our 117 project celebration dinner, May 13
-view of SF from the berkeley marina, May 22
-the Golden Gate Bridge from the berkeley marina, May 22
-Kathy sets up a shot using Cal engineer skills, May 25
-me and Jen on Arch Rock, Pt Reyes, May 25
-10:52 am: home has been quite good and not so boring as usual for some reason. perhaps it is knowing that i only have two weeks before i begin my internship at PDL, but hmmm yeah. so after the flight on friday, arrived back at Burbank for the first time in a long time. dinner was at Buko the only awesome Japanese restaurant in Glendale.
-saturday was my cousin and my graduation party complete with 80+ ppl. an interesting experience especially when trying to explain what bioengineering is (i confirmed that despite 4 years studying it, i still can't give a clear definition). the total gift amount was quite shocking... $5.5k with the major 2k contribution from my grandma. now i need to write thank yous....
-sunday Paul and dad headed up to Seattle and the weather began to heat up. yuck
-monday didn't do much which is pretty normal for my times at home.
-tuesday went grocery shopping in the morning with mom and Catherine, then picked up my dad from the burbank airport. then at 3:00 i had my first driving lesson! first time ever behind a wheel, i find out that it's much easier than i thought, and that driving on the freeway is somewhat scary (try going 70 on your first day....)
-so that brings me to now... simply biding my time until i have to go back to berkeley on the 11th.
May 28, 2004 - it's been 3 weeks... with lots of change
-2:37 am: it's been a very long time since i last wrote anything in this blog and in that long while that has elapsed much about my life has changed. In stark contrast to the rest of the semester, my life is on an upswing full of optimism instead of the pessism and despair most of the semester had. I have an internship over the summer working on immunohistochemistry at a local Fremont biotech company and have made plans to go to Hawaii with a group of good friends from Berkeley. This all has happened just this past week in fact right after i went from being a Cal student to being an alum.
-well i suppose i should try to recap what has happened since the night of the TBP initiation. sometime that weekend Daniel took me and some friends to Fenton's after which we saw Van Helsing at Bay street. My my what a bad movie that was nothing more than cheesy CG overload without any plot. TBP elections happened on may 12, and not surprisingly they lasted forever. i'm happy about the results and i'm sure the chapter will be much better than it was under me next semester. Thursday of that week i went out to Macaroni Grille with Germaine and Eileen to celebrate the completion of our 117 project. While we were there, Derek Fisher, my NBA favorite player, hit the miracle 0.4 shot (and yes he was my favorite player long before that).
-all of last week was spent in the finals process (i.e. procrastinating for the particular test that was closest, eating take out, no sleep etc.) that lasted all the way up until last friday. After my history final it felt kinda weird knowing that i had just taken my final final and was completely done with my undergraduate experience. my graduation cheering posse arrived from the LA area around 9 pm.
-grad day was quite tiring; got up really early and had issues with the damn parking. after that was resolved i lined up backstage with the rest of the engineering candidates to receive our BS degrees. The actual ceremony began and i went pretty much the same as last year: boring!! Of course, except for Jen's very excellent speech, which i thought applies to everyone (except for premeds who stay the course). the guest speaker had some interesting words, although i was not particularly fond of his L&S bashing. After the ceremony, went to the bioe reception to take pics with ppl, chat a bit. After that the whole posse and me went to the student store for overpriced memorablia, Steve's for lunch, JCPenney for pictures, the berkeley marina for the hell of it, and west coast for dinner.
-sunday the 23rd consisted of packing the rest of my stuff away and loading it up for the 7 hr journey back to LA. some of my stuff didn't make and ironically it was a good thing, but at the time i didn't know if was gonna stay up there for the internship. speaking of which, monday the 24th was the interview for the internship, in which Jen and Kathy were awesome enough to not only drive me to Fremont but also to drill me with interview type questions. i think both were quite instrumental in helping me get the internship and i am eternally grateful! after the interview we ate a place famous for pie for breakfast (incidentally didn't have pie hahah).
-Karen Y. came over to my place on monday and wednesday to complete the TBP report book! lots of word processing involved and thinking how to do things with help from both Robert and Eddie. the book ended up being like 320 pages long at a total cost of over $100 for getting two copies printed and one sent to Tennessee. weeee upon receiving the book, i got an email from nationals saying it was beautiful!
-tuesday the 25th went to Point Reyes with Kathy and Jen for a nice relaxing (nearly) 10-mile hike to Arch rock. more than the hike there were many interesting conversations, fallen trees, banana slugs, seagulls, deer and many other things.
-i spent the later part of wednesday and all of thursday helping both Jen and Daniel move out of their respective places, taking apart furniture, packing stuff and loading uhauls. i have a sore back to show for it. My reward from Jen was an excellent dinner at Kirala with Jen, Menzies and jen's friend Lisa.
-so how's that for a summary of three weeks! pretty crappy i guess many details left out etc.
May 7, 2004 - TBP initiation and banquet
-11:53 am: TBP's spring 2004 semester came to an end today with the initiation of 40 new members and the traditional banquet. Along with the sense of joy for the new members, comes an melancholy over the effective end of my time with TBP as an undergraduate. Such an end is quite sad for me, particularly because of what TBP has meant to me these past two years. It has been the source of many new friends, many fun activities and many of the most memorable moments of my collegiate career. I will truly miss all of you!
-ok maybe i should write something relevant to the title! the initiation went pretty OK... people had typical reading mess ups (i certainly did lol)... and i hope i pronounced names ok..... The banquet was quite fun and enjoyable as usual, although it was pretty hard to hold back tears knowing that it was probably my last one. I was going to give a bye-bye speech, but i wussed out because i would have definitely broken down up there. I think though i must give one eventually, perhaps on tuesday... and now for pictures!!
-"the Asians" including the stereotypical
peace sign
-me and (some of) the boys of TBP
-me and (some of) the girls of TBP
-me and (some of) the boys of TBP
-me and (some of) the girls of TBP
-there are of course more pictures... which
can be accessed on the TBP website with the relevant clearance!!
hehehehe
-12:46 am: the randomness of things we've needed to buy for our BioE/ME C117 project is quite crazy. Springs from Ace Hardware. Springs?! We've also gotten a wood dowel, some large wood blocks, some long strips of wood and even wooden stirring spoons. I also almost bought a wood file. Today's 117 oddity was buying 32 oz fishing sinkers to be used as weights for the springs! Did i also mention we requested and received an air dashpot from some company! Yes you bioes are there... we've got our hands on an actual dashpot!
-Actual all day monday was a bit crazy, although not as crazy as saturday. Began with waking up at 10 to go to Safeway for food, particularly chicken for tuesday's TBP potluck. Then i ate a bunch of leftovers for lunch, proceeded to history. Today was the really weird and totally whack physics. We learned about the flavor and color quantum numbers. Flavor is THE weirdest scientific concept ever. Apparently it's a quantum number for quarks and has possible states of up, down, strange, charm, top and bottom. Also learned about the theory of supersymmetry, which proposes the existence of things like selectrons, whinos and photinos.
-After class, Germaine picked me up and we went to Copeland Sports in El Cerrito Plaza to purchase aforementioned sinkers. Had some extra time, so bought thank you cards for friday and some egg tarts and honey tangerines from Ranch99.
-TBP initiation practice came next. some interesting moments there which i won't reveal per risking a TBP rules violation... but feel free to ask in person.
-Nathan's 21st b-day party followed! Yay! yummy food, cake and good times for our favorite nipple flasher, Nate Cheng, whose actual b-day is wednesday (as well as Karen Yang's). Most interesting thing to come out of the night is that a few ppl have marriage plans already... DAMN i'm not anywhere near that...
-Day ends with the conclusion of NBC's 10.5 earthquake disaster movie. The movie is so tragically unscientific, it was actually funny. In the movie... Seattle suffers a 7.8 earthquake which topples the Space Needle (which is built to withstand up to 9.0) with the epicenter in downtown Seattle. Next an 8.4 earthquake in Redding, which swallows up a train... Sacramento doesn't feel it. 9.2 in SF next, Golden Gate Falls, then the ultimate 10.5 that destroys LA and creates an island out of Santa Barbara County. WARNING: BEGIN NERDY CRITICISM: Seattle area can actual suffer from earthquakes larger than 7.8 but from the Cascadia Subduction Fault which lies underneath the Pacific Ocean (and not underneath downtown Seattle). This thingy is capable of 9.4's and would completely wipe out Portland and Seattle. The subduction of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate would also probably set off a bunch of the Cascade volcanos. A 8.4 in Redding (which is impossible magnitude, no faults long enough for that there) would definitely be felt in Sacramento only 150 miles away. 9.2 in SF is impossible again because there is no fault long enough in the SF area for that. Same for the BS 10.5 that destroys LA. The absolute worse thing is how rifts open up and create the island! The faults that exist cannot do that, they're only capable of moving side to side, not opening up. Blah blah... movie was entertaining to watch only because of how bad the science was... there's actual a lot more bad science than i've bothered to mention. OK me mention one more: they read out the magnitude as the earthquake occurs! OMG that cannot be done, magnitude is determined with data after the earthquake, not during it.
May 2, 2004 - saturday was crazy
-12:55 am: my saturday was extraordinarily long, but for some reason i don't feel that tired. Especially strange considering i got <6 hrs of sleep (which is quite tiny for my weekend standards). Contrast this with last saturday in which i was up from 6:30 am to 2 am. Anyway, instead of 6:30 am got up around 8:30 am, took a shower, printed crap, then headed over to Germaine's to do the 117 project stuff. As usual not terribly productive, but we did get some stuff done. The backboard's looking really good (hmm thank goodness for the girls in the group, us guys can't make these kinds of backboard/presentation things for crap). I did the more manly (ok not really) thing of finishing the holes in the pieces of wood destined to be our spring display. After about only 2 hrs or so of work, we went out for lunch at Gregoire's, this nice French take out restaurant with extremely good food (And uh price to match). I had a very very delicious eggplant sandwich and those guilty fried crispy potato puffs with horseradish sauce (drool...) . Even though the food is kinda expensive, it seems worth every penny to me (which is a rare thing for me to think). Maybe it's just because i haven't had that good of food in a really long time.
-After lunch, we set out on specific tasks of printing pictures and uh finding a saw to cut wood. Not knowing where to find such a bizarre thing, i somehow decide to call Ryan somehow thinking he might have one... No answer. Next Eileen and I wander a bit down Oxford to a painter's truck. Asian FOB doesn't seem to understand English... next we wrap around the block to Spruce and encounter some ppl doing some major remodeling. Eileen boldly asks and they offer use of something. We run back to get our piece of wood (a 48 inch wooden rod from which springs are to be hung), and return. They don't notice us while they drill and converse away in Cantonese. Then Eileen notices some guy across the street trimming his hedges with an automatic hedger. She boldly ask again and the guy offers use of a handsaw! Success! I cut the wood and we return to Germaine's. We glued together the base of the spring display and cut up the pictures. That was the end of project work...
-Next came Capture the Flag with ASME! Germaine dropped me off at HMC, then i proceed to Capture the Flag, which i've never played before and wanted to experience before leaving Cal. Quite fun and soaking wet. I managed to nail Brian one time (even though i was technically out... "oops"). Game is quite difficult so no team scored. The last set of water balloons became a chaotic five minute free-for-all.
-After that, watched the tail end of a Much-Ado-About-Nothing production in front of South Hall. Lasted until about 5:30, then i proceed to Dwinelle to check out if Theatre Rice was going on there. It was, but no one was in line, so i decided to get dinner at Steve's. Yay BBQ chicken! After wolfing that down, got in line and saw Yeh, who was second in line. I began 4th in line, but ended up somewhere like 20th (you know the cutting shit... blah blah). Jen and Menzies joined me eventually.
-The highlight of the show was definitely the second skit that was both funny and somewhat insightful.. Had a whole reverse stereotype thing going. Immigrant Chinese parents raising their son to be a gay actor, rather than the typical straight doctor. Dialogs was quite hilarious, but did bring up the point about parents trying to direct their children's lives too much. Most of the other skits weren't as funny, but the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle one was a bit nostalgic. All in all a pretty good last show for me.
-The fun details of a day in the life of me. Rather atypical, but eh wanted to record it and i'm a little bored right now. I suppose i can now discuss the scariness of having less than three weeks left as an undergraduate... but i'll save it for later.