Hella: why?

Hella (HEL-ah) adv., Very, extremely, in large quantity. “There’s hella candy in the cabinet.” “That girl is hella fine.” “That jacket is hella clean.” (Also: helluv) [Etym., combination of “hell” and “of,” Berkeley]
Wow, California slang is hella jankity... (Link jacked from Dave's profile)

Screwing the RIAA and living to tell about it

MIT students have an answer.

holy sh*t. someone famous living here?

The governor of California might be moving here. According to a front-page article in an abandoned copy of the Palo Alto Daily News I just picked up, someone named Arnold Schwarzenegger, a quiet SoCal politician most famous for promising to "pump up California", is looking for a home in Atherton. Described by many as a simple, humble man, Schwarzenegger is eschewing the governor's official mansion in Sacramento to live with the common people he promises to represent as he schedules California's budget crisis for termination. In Atherton, one of the wealthiest cities in the nation, where he can move into a $7 million-home neighborhood with the five people in the Bay Area who actually voted for him. Then, like many of his constituents making the Central Valley-Silicon Valley commute, he can choose between driving his Hummer to the Capitol or taking his private jet. After all, he says, an hour by jet isn't much different from spending an hour in traffic.

Anyone have any idea how the PADN can come up with 72 pages of news every single day? Granted it's mostly ads, but still... I shudder to think about a 72-page Stanford Daily...

You haven't lived...

...until you've watched the sun come up.

From Sweet Hall.

The second floor cluster has windows all along two walls. So you can watch the sun set... and come up... all without getting up. So it's no wonder the EE grad students and CS geeks prefer to close the blinds, to hide from this natural light (or blackness) outside. But it sure beats the windowless raptor pit.

At 8 AM, the morning sun casts a soft golden glow on the empty chairs and idling workstations, as if beckoning to those of us still there.

It's recursion!

In my artsy mood (or even as a techie), this is just plain cool. Ripped off of Erika's kitten of doom.

Octoberfest

It's a warm 70-degree day. The sun is shining.

And yet, it's fall.

So? say the Californians. My apologies, but growing up somewhere where there could just as easily be snow on the ground in late October, I'm still impressed. (In fact, on the left you can see just how balmy it is there right now.) As I was biking back from Gates, a gentle breeze was blowing the few leaves that had started to fall alongside me almost cinematographically, as if straight out of a movie scene.

Up until now I hadn't really noticed that fall had actually begun. After all, here in NorCal we still have green throughout the winter. So what changes in the fall, you ask? My parents lamented that you don't get the leaves changing in the fall here, but they're just in a Midwest winter-induced denial. In all fairness they have high standards: New England and Michigan falls where the leaves explode in a vibrant cornucopia of orange and red. It is truly breathtaking--for about a week. Because that's all it lasts; within days, leaves go from green to red to on the ground, as if they all conspired to jump off the trees on the same day. I distinctly remember the days when it was just raining leaves in our backyard, much to our dismay as we had to collect them all before they got buried under a foot of snow.

But here fall is much slower, and for a good month or two you can watch individual leaves slowly turn colors. I'd never seen this before, and it really is beautiful--the streets are lined with green, yellow, orange, and red. And if you don't believe me, come check out GovCo--where we actually have trees of the non-palm persuasion--or go up to Hoover Tower.

Now if only I didn't have a paper due tomorrow so I could go enjoy this...

it's just like xanga, only better

Now you can get e-mailed when I update my blog using the yellow form on the left. As Yune pointed out, it doesn't e-mail you the instant I update--for that you need to keep clicking Refresh every few seconds. But it should coalesce a day's random rants into one notice within 24 hours. A nice happy medium for Windows users that I'm fond of is WebMon, which lets you check a bunch of pages with one click, whenever you're in a procrastinating surfing mode anyway--or you could set it to check for updates every minute if you're that obsessive I suppose... but in that case you might need help.

CS around the clock

Sigh. I got up at 8, went to CS class #1, went to work on a problem set for CS class #2, went to class #2, went to lunch (at Tressider, mind you), went to class #3, napped for 20 minutes in the Gates library, worked some more on class #2's problem set, went to office hours for class #2, then went to Monday Meeting for the CS class I'm course helping, then went to grade for class #2, then came back to work with a study group on said problem set for class #2. I think I spent 9 hours in Gates today. I feel so dirty...

Grading problem sets, let me tell you, is a singularly annoying experience mitigated only by the fact that a) I was getting paid, b) I was getting food, and c) we were joking around the whole time. Key insight: If you expect sympathy on a pset, you're not going to get it by writing pages and pages of indecipherable cursive. In fact, if you want to be appreciated as an engineer, forget cursive altogether. Please. The sooner, the better. On the flipside, just because you went to the trouble to typeset it in LaTeX (a cryptic tool used by profs to do all those equations in psets and exams in that ugly font), or printed out a stylish cover page for this 3-page opus, doesn't make you right either.

So right now, it's only fitting that I be amused by things like this: How NOT to install computer hardware

Secrets of the GRE

Amazing secrets the test makers don't want you to know about!

1. The San Jose test center is right across the street from Saratoga's Japanese shopping nexus. Yes, that's right, you can take your GRE and get a teapot, ramen, and melon soda just like I did.
   
2. You're not supposed to eat in the waiting room or the exam room... but there's no one looking when you're on your break.
   
3. The key they give you for your locker opens everyone else's too.
   
4. That annoying squeaking you hear taking the test is that one girl taking the TOEFL having a nervous twitchy foot she can't hear through her headphones.
   

Now there's an idea...

I suppose if you're really desperate, but still... ouch! Granted, I don't really know how bad Korean accents can be, but is this the only way?
A Short Cut to Better Spoken English

Unequivocally assauging my trepidation

After some fervid last-minute studying, I must say I feel much more erudite now than I did before I embarked on this capricious GRE binge of mine. It's well known that above all, ostentatious words engender the verbal section, so why do I feel like such a pedant for memorizing them? Sorry, I meant no ostentation here. My blog's just ordinarily so laconic that I thought it'd be laudable if I tried to use all the top 20 GRE words, many of which lack the propriety to ever use in all but the most garrulous of conversations, in this loquacious-sounding entry. Over the past three months or so, I've vacillated between apathy and zeal (or some might even say, zest?) for preparing for this exam, which I'm taking tomorrow... or later today. In 12 hours. Woo...

But it's all good.

The CS department only cares about my math score (what? techies don't have to write...), for which I'm soo grateful. Maybe I should write my essays about monkeys, and as Rose suggests, "big fat whores", just for fun.

The simple truth of college life: procrastination = blogging

I got back to my room 40 minutes ago with a simple goal: take a 10-minute nap, then finish the CS 221 problem set. As you've probably guessed by now, the nap became 20 minutes, and I'm still not motivated to finish the pset. Maybe blogging will get my creativity going... then again, maybe it'll lead me into a spiral of distraction for another hour until I realize that I still have a pset due in 12 hours...

It was an emotional moment today at 4:57 PM as a whole bunch of us from CS 242 appeared outside what my professor happened to call the Lockbox to turn our problem sets in. It didn't help that the way he said it I just kept thinking of Darrell Hammond and a certain SNL sketch, back from better carefree times. Times when we only joked about electing incompetent leaders with no experience. More importantly, times when SNL was actually good...

The one good thing about job searching is free stuff. Companies are hiring again, and they're willing to splurge for the pizza to boot. So I've found myself among the herds at info sessions for Microsoft, Google, and the like. The format is the same: we all cram into a Gates conference room to listen to casually clad recruiters tell us why we want to join their elite club, then we all mob him or her at the end, striving to give away our resumes and make a good impression on the recruiter in the hopes that he/she will remember our faces a month from now when our painstakingly formatted resumes have been scanned into a database.

But fall recruiting season so far has yielded: two T-shirts, two pens, a yo-yo, a mousepad, post-it notes, a light-up keychain, and...a pocket PC! I rarely win anything, but I did win a nice shiny new Toshiba PDA. Not exactly the sort of thing I'd splurge on with my limited funds (oh do I sound like a grad student already) but always nice to have. So now I can tap away in the middle of lecture, surreptitiously checking my e-mail, or check my calendar like some sort of true Valley geek.

In other mobile news, I've discovered I can log onto AIM on my cell phone. And, sadly, I am guilty of having sent a remarkably lucid message while barreling down Santa Teresa on my bike. Supposedly my icon should change to a little cell phone. But I don't really know if this whole text messaging thing is worth the trouble. But it is cool... something else I can do in those lecture halls without wireless...

Wow, people still read this... maybe I should post...

So here I am sitting at the Tressider Lair on the slowest night I've ever seen. No complaints from me. Since I was a dolt and left all my homework behind at the dorm, I figured it's worth an update.

Being back in the US is great. I can blow my nose whenever I want, walk down the street eating a candy bar and not feel like I'm committing a sin, walk down the sidewalk without getting run over by bikers (well, maybe not)...

I settled on only 11 units of real classwork. But probably 3 or maybe even 4 of them are CS221. (Units are the greatest lie ever in the engineering department.) But don't worry, I'm taking 4 units of dance to get back up to the respectable 15. On the side I'm working as a CS106 course helper, tutoring E40, and oh yes, making preparations for The Future. This means I have a GRE in two weeks I need to cram for, and career fairs to traipse through for a Plan B.

Senior year sucks. So somehow it's fitting that every Thursday there's Senior Don't-Call-It-Pub Night.

But in other news, I finally caved and got a cell phone. It's a basic crappy phone (and the subject of a big usability rant in my first CS147 project), with, alas, no camera. But what can I say, I'm still sitting here in the Lair, waving my phone around like I'm sweeping for a bomb trying to get enough signal to collect IMs I received. And, I must confess: I was texting while biking. I claim to have a good excuse though.