Cool as the Bee’s Knees

I highly approve that is totally a car music song. I have put this on many a "mix tape" CD's and even today keep it on playlists for the car or the gym (hah... the gym! <--joke)

really people is this a song that needs to be played in the car as you are driving somewhere?
maybe i can understand having the CD for the soundtrack (MAYBE) but to take it in your car and listen to it there for everyone to hear... wow

I moved to a new apartment recently and while it is located facing a large intersection in a college town and we usually hear the rowdy peoplea round 3am. I think the view more than makes up for it. We are open to two sides of our apartment and love it.. the weird thing is that people who drive by and have their radio/music playing in their cars... no matter how soft or loud it is... somehow through some wave harmonics and a series of echoes and diffractions we hear their music quite clearly in our living room as well as in my bedroom..

just recently it was  Every Breath You Take -- The Police

4 hours from now I will be done with the second year of my college career. And while it has had its ups and downs... ups socially, and downs academically.. I am quite satsfied with my experience thus far... And while this next final will be for the one and only class I will ever fail at college. Discrete Mathematics had kicked my ass hard and i accept that. The professor is a dumb donkey who does not teach and expects that everyone should know the material by haven taken his optional prerequisite class... but in the worst case scenario with a big O(approaching infinity) that is colllege. retaking a discrete math class (which i find to be very interesting by the way) doesnt seem so bad.  (that was a discrete math joke... it was hilarious)

hope everyone else is enjoying their summer while this mid june 60deg weather has hit san diego... =)

So 1.5 years ago, I was a lowly college freshman entering the uknown terrain that is known as college. While everyone thinks college will be this great utopia of learning and discovery with endless drinking parties, intellectual discussions with peers, I could go on...

But after being here for this long, and the second quarter of my second year coming to a close. I think now is a best of time to reflect on what I have learned... really learned (not just pretended to learn) till now

• Experiences are worth more than material things - cheesy but true
• Vanity can go a long way to help you - A lesson I've learned from Jeff P. Looking good boosts confidence.... and we can all use a bit more confidence (unless you have a napoleonic ego)
• Importance of family and friends - the friends I have here ground me everyday, the family I have at home give me a place to go back to, and the friends at home really come through at times of need (you know who you are)
• TV Internet is the biggest waster of time - unless something intellectual is happening, the internet will suck your brain dry
• Study time DOES NOT start 30 minutes before the test
• Spending a Friday/Saturday night inside playing cards (sober) is actually quite fun
• College requires more time management than actual intellect
• Procastination can SOMETIMES help in a crunch
  
• Professors are way more accomodating than we have been programmed to believe
• Sitting in the front of the class automatically makes me a better student
• The only person who cares about my college success (and the only one who can make it happen) is me
• Money budgeting
• Stick to your beliefs, they WILL be tested
  
• Take classes outside of my major, just for fun
• Live beneath my means
• Sleep is underrated
• Home-cooked meals never tasted so good when you were a child
• Tea

and the biggest one

• Happiness is a decision, not a reaction
  

Any more to add? So I have been proscrastinating a bit too much lately... seeing that the one final I am horrified to take (physics) is on monday (5 days) and I've barely started studying. O-Chem can go suck it...(I don't need to study for that! Bwahahhaha)

Good luck on finals everybody!

Ahh the first day at a new job is quite nerve-racking don't you think... Well considering that I've only had a couple of jobs, I should not talk. Well I went in for a lab meeting where graduate students display what they are currently doing in their respective labs and ask for help/criticism new perspectives from other people. Right when it started, I knew that I was not going to understand a single thing he said. and I was right!

DNA polymerase - CHECK
Protein complexes - CHECK
Gene expression - CHECK
Geno/Phenotype - CHECK
p/z -score - CHECK
p-score histograms, statistical differentiation of gene expression in natural and grown protein complexes of e. coli - ???  I really only understood the first 5 minutes of the 25 minute lecture and even that... I'm second guessing myself.

So this is a BioInformatics Lab, focusing on the wetlab (chemicals and stuff) and the computational side of system biology with loads of programming and statistics.... and since I haven't finished my CSE courses, or evens started taking my stats classes, most likely i'll be in the wetlab cleaning dishes or using the pipet to pipet THOUSANDS of microwells each with a single pipetter... just to spite me.. I know they have a multitip pipetter but they just dont want me to have it... just to make me work harder..  =)

While it has been a quite long time after my last post at this blog, I feel as if I finally have time for it. With this quarter at school being one of my busiest with classes and endless homework all culminating a morale-crushing week of midterms, only to be followed up with more homework and reading that only deadens my soul further. Enough talk about school though.

It seems like because of school, other aspects of my life are hindered. I should have noticed this in high school, or probably last year, that I, the robot among men, too have a limit. There is a limit at which I just break down or continue at harm to my health. Social activities with the opposite sex are the first to go as they seem somewhat irrelevant to the master plan. Then goes the social activities outside of classmates, then goes the study sessions, then lastly the normal interaction with your everyday people starts to fade. It's almost like I have a dollar and each time i do another assignment or assign myself more time to do schoolwork, more and more of that dollar goes towards school, and less of it goes towards the things i really want right now...

Things that I really want:
- join a club where I can meet smart people, not like book smart, but like people who i can have an intellectual conversation with
- volunteer/work at a bioinformatics lab on campus
- learn mandarin (i can't think of a more daunting difficult task)
- start another archery lesson
- go to the gym
- buy clothes that actually fit and stop wearing the same 4 tee-shirts over and over
- make a schedule
- to be more confident around people i dont know
- to be more productive so i have time to hand out with new people
- to not sit in front of my computer for more than 10hrs a day
- to read an intellectually stimulating book (something that is higher level than Ender's Game  lol)

The list can go on forever... but it seems like im wasting time doing the things I hate... and not allotting any time to the thing i really want to do. Maybe I should try some things with a new schedule and try out some balance in my school:fun ratio...

    I've never seen fog like this in my life. San Diego last night and La Jolla today has experienced a serious plague of fog. Not just like the normal fog I remember in Fremont, or even the freak sudden fog I remember in San Francisco. This fog is dense. Like marshmallow dense and it does not cease to amaze me how cold it can get with just a little fog. Walking back from physics lecture today reminded to me to always dress warmer than necessary and not wear just a tee shirt, jeans, and flip-flops....... well nevermind that becuase that is what everyone wears all the time in san diego.

    I realized I wanted to take a picture of this amazing fog engulfing the spaceship library, or even as it poured over the constructions sites' fences looking like a chemistry lab gone wrong. I then realized I have a crappy camera. Good on its own right... it is a good Canon 6 MP camera that we got a few years back for cheap--and the zoom stopped working because a relative sat on the camera.. However, I would like to point out that I would use a nicer camera for everything.. I love taking photos its just that I have never owned a "nice" camera and therefore would not know how to operate one or adjust the settings. I  have noticed however that a lot of people on posterous happen to have really nice photos up..

    So... I want to buy a camera and take this vis arts class on campus but i dont want to pay too much for a camera.. the camera they recommend is  " In addition, students are responsible for providing their own camera. A recommended camera is a Digital SLR with full manual control and RAW file capability. Minimum requirement is a digital camera of 7 Mega Pixels, or higher, with manual exposure and focus controls."

    If anyone know what these mean.. please get back to me and tell me what type of camera i need to buy.. I dont even know what most of the words mean in the description.

    So I have to get to my next class-- and i really want to take a picture of the fog before I go.

my friends are gonna bash me again for sounding "un-American" but whatevs...

so if you havent seen the movie Sicko by Michael Moore... watch it now (read this first if you want)
Basically, he goes around the world and shows how much better health care is in other parts of the world compared to the good ole USA. Simple and less brainwashy than Fahrenheit. HOWEVER I would just like to say that I have never had faith in the American Health System nor will I ever condone it's behaviors in denying people medical help (his examples are a bit extreme as most people do get approval from their insurance companies) I do agree on the fact that other countries have generally healthier people with less fat people, and less people with diseases in every category.

Now I know that I will not stay in the USA for my whole life. It has been a fun ride and Im grateful that a US citizenship can open doors anywhere, but as per my personal goals in life I can not live in a country that is against what I believe in (maybe that can change... cmon Obama!) when you watch the movie you get this overwhelming sense that everyone is better than an American (not true) but still... how can these countries.. those that we thought we were better than with all our technology and superior culture... how can they be better than us in every aspect of culture (other than in n out and funnel cake) and be healthier... Moore brings it all back to the the ca-a-ash and the American greed for more - i think even better than that is the guy with the amazingly cool accent that says that the government can only be powerful if we let it demean us, make us unhealthy, and give us false hope. It seems like we are in a constant state of unpleasantness (1984-esque) that we can never achieve a happy lifestyle with people intruding in our way telling us to work 3 jobs and get on food stamps just to feed and house yourself then lose sleep and go on medication and support the system of meaningless drugs...

Another point here is why I want to work in the medical field (although I know I will not become an MD doctor) I want to work in the field that can hopefully change this god-awful system

enough of this rant and floating my own boat.... an interesting topic that needs to be addressed at a later date after tofurkey has been digested

went to the gym.
     No joke. After (19*365) + (5 for leap years) + (37 days since i turned 19) = 6977 days of life I went to a gym for the first time ever. I casually went to the gym last year to play racquetball with some friends; however, not once had I ever lifted weight let alone sat on an exercise machine (what are they called ??). Yesterday night, some friends were going to the UCSD gym (which is ranked in the top 5 best gyms in southern California odd?) to play dodgeball in an actual league and everything. I tagged along and with another friends went into the weight room and started to 'workout.' Whatever that term means... I'm used to waking up early and going to a half hour intense cardio run, not prepared for 20-30 minutes of tearing my non-existant muscles in hopes of gentrificating them to desirable goods =).
     Guys at the gym really crack me up. Im here this awkward skinny bloke (is it ok to use that word in the US?) taking commands from a girl in the weight room as what to do with 15 pound weights (as i can with GREAT effort lift a 25 weight) (are they called dumbbells?). and every single other person lifting weights are these guys who think they are all that by lifting massive weights and staring at themselves in the mirror, never laughing and becoming robotic slaves to the workout routine. I on the other hand was cracking up every time I lifted a weight and my arm hurt FROM A 15 POUND WEIGHT!  Ahhh I bask in my physical weakness.
     However weird it may seem. I used to be a little overweight (healthy, as my aunt puts it) and after coming to UCSD, I shed 40 pounds by walking 3-4 miles a day just to go to class (also the GREEN MACHINES had an effect as well) So now that I'm a little on the skinny side I really would like to go to the gym and put on some 'good' muscle weight. Hopefully, I can do it by going to the gym a little more often than once every 6977 days.