“Midterms”

Something I don’t get.. why people are suddenly.. “busy” with “midterms”.

I mean, sure, it means you have to study, but how much more do you have to study for one, compared to keeping up with the material for reading and homework through the weeks? Is it like.. never study at all until you have to? Cause I keep up.. and “midterms” don’t really require all that much more effort than daily studies do.

Knowing that 30% of my grade is coming up.. is another thing. Must aim for an A, not a “B or C”.. and then get a B. haha.

Ongoing Debate: Japanese or Korean?

It’s been like 5 days since I wrote something and I have no visitors, so.. even though I’m swamped with work, I figured I’d spend a couple minutes blogging about something that I’ve been thinking about..

[20:58] <yoshii> dang
[20:58] <yoshii> if i had to choose japanese or korean and only one
[20:58] <yoshii> that’d be like choosing between melody and starcraft
[20:59] <yoshii> thats a toughie
[20:59] <yoshii> probably starcraft.
[20:59] <yoshii> since mel speaks english.
[20:59] <yoshii> LOL
[21:06] <Tomoyoho> o
[21:06] <Tomoyoho> ya
[21:06] <Tomoyoho> i would never be able to choose
[21:06] <Tomoyoho> between japanese and korean
[21:06] <Tomoyoho> EEEEE
[21:06] <Tomoyoho> T___T;;
[21:06] <yoshii> XD
[21:06] <Tomoyoho> Maybe Korean now
[21:06] <Tomoyoho> LOL
[21:06] <yoshii> i don’t even know chinese Q_Q

I love music, and basically everything Asian is in Korean or Japanese. Yeah, I listen to F.I.R. (mandarin), but that’s just one thing..

But.. if I had the choice of learning one or the other, which one would I pick?! It’s even harder for Asian drama watchers.

.. and going to Chinese school for a few years didn’t help a bit. When you don’t use it semi-actively, it just goes to waste. I guess watching shows for familiarity is good, but I don’t have time for that.. hence me not watching Japanese/Korean dramas either. I guess it’d just be a waste of time in the end if I went for either of them.. but I so wish I could understand what they were saying in all the stuff I watch/listen to.

so what it comes down to?

korean = starcraft (image courtesy of susan kim)

versus..

japanese = melody.

i so wish i could understand the things that koreans say and write in commentaries as well as sites/forums, and the same with mel’s website in japanese.. as well as other random music from both languages, although not as important to me.

in the end.. i don’t have time or energy for either.. meh.

The Last of Job “Troubles”, I Swear

I spent a fair amount of time this weekend applying to all sorts of internship positions at.. many companies. It got frustrating at a few points:

Amgen – Done – through Mustang Jobs.. so easy..
Brocade Communications – Not Done – okay.. brocade.com.. now where do I go? can’t find it..
CNET Networks – Done – I forgot by now.
EMC – Done – a somewhat long form.
HP – Done – a very very long form.
KLA Tencor – no internships..? BUT IT SAYS THERE ARE!
Lockheed Martin – Done – sent through Mustang Jobs.
Microsoft – Done – plaintext resumes. For shame, Microsoft, for shame..
NetApp – Not Done – “View all jobs” query returned 0 results. Cool. SHE SO SAID THERE WERE INTERNSHIPS.
Salesforce.com – Done – Applied through Mustang Jobs. thank God.
Sun Microsystems – Done – application through email.. at least I can send my resume pdf.
Teradyne – Not Done – no internships. Why did that guy insist on sending me to their website when I was asking about an internship?
Tyco Electronics – Done – plaintext resumes.
Xilinx – Not Done – HTTP7765: error reading response header (Server closed connection)
Yahoo! – Done – plaintext resumes.

As you can see.. I think plaintext resumes.. were decades go. Where is the technology? Where is the consistency? Where is the engineering thought in all this?

And now I await the swarms of “your GPA sucks” from employers. After having gone through a good amount of college, having seen some total BS classes and professors, I can say that GPA in college almost doesn’t matter as much as SAT scores don’t matter in determining how “smart” you are. 2.7 against a “minimum 3.0” when my major GPA is made up of only like, 8 lower division courses? All of which are quarter-based and a few points on a midterm will determine what letter grade you can get?

Maybe that was all crap and I should have just “worked my ass off” even more than I already did for the past 2 years.

Winter 2008 Job Fair Day 2: Done, Yay?

2nd/last day wasn’t much different, aside from the fact that I had no class so I had nothing to worry about. I said I’d go from 11-2, but Dan’s movie came out and I rushed to rehost it using wget on my server. Then I felt like eating and watching it but that ended up taking like half an hour.. meh.

Got to the job fair – once again, I don’t have proper clothes here, so I wore the same thin sweater that my sister gave me, and a different polo. -_- So informal compared to everyone else. And yes, I’m still wearing my Adidas Barricade 3s (holy shit, 5s are out?) from April 2005. Nonetheless, when I got there, I promptly took a 10-minute trip around each booth to first filter out the companies that I’m interested in – which ended up being CNet, HP, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, LightRiver Technologies (fiber networks YAY!), Microsoft, Radix Technologies, Salesforce.com, Sony, Sun, Teradyne, and ViaSat. Holy shit, that’s a lot of crap.

But what we all expected, came – as we all know, everything’s done online. Job/intern/co-op listings put online, resume submission online, etc etc. My conversations with HP, Sony, Sun, and Teradyne all lasted 30 seconds at most, for that reason. Meh. I have pretty much no chance for a lot of things, but at least some guys still insisted on talking engineering to me even though I already knew I wasn’t “qualified” enough because of my “crappy” major GPA which is only made up of EIGHT classes. When a GPA is made of 8 mostly freshman level courses.. That makes for not so great of a GPA. I need to rework my resume to push me over the top with what I have, because that’s the only thing dragging me down.

Sun only has spring+summer hardware co-op, and I definitely can not just leave Spring. ViaSat is located in San Diego.. eh. LightRiver has no internships, but will accept a loser like me full-time after graduating with no experience! I was happy to hear that – they are located about 15 minutes east of UC Berkeley. I could live with some Berkeley friends. :D

Blah blah blah.. lots and lots of applying coming up. I would head home for the weekend, but job fair stuff as well as being lazy as well as cooking all the time put me a little behind on work. With apps to do, it seems like the hard part has yet to come..

Winter 2008 Job Fair Day 1: Live and learn..

Needless to say, today didn’t go that well. I had a fairly busy day so I could only attend for a little more than a hour, stopping by every slightly-applicable company to get their brochures/fliers of potential job information. I actually talked to only about 6-7 companies.. Xilinx, Yahoo, Tyco Electronics, Amazon.com, Brocade Communications, Calix Networks, EMC Corp.. hey, that’s 7, haha. Anyways, I should have talked a lot more (but didn’t have time to), dressed better (but don’t have clothes here.. who needs clothes), should have a better gpa LOL.. yeah… whatever. Software asian girl at Amazon asked me the difference between an interface and an abstract class. Brain says “yay! easy!” mouth says “uhh”. BAD! I knew that they were both levels of abstraction, with predefined methods and variables.. I did not remember which one actually had implementations and which one did not. =(

The guy in front of me at the Xilinx booth had his resume stuffed in with size 8 font. Seriously.. what the fuck? Trim that shit down. YOU DO NOT NEED TO WRITE “Calculus 1/2/3/4” AND “General Physics 1/2/3” on your resume. It’s fucking implied by being an ________ Engineering major. How far you got into YOUR major is what matters.. too bad he was a senior, had a higher gpa, and looked more spiffy than I did. I’ll be damned.

Tomorrow.. we’ll hope for a better day.

Oh and.. yesterday, I went to an Agilent infosession, with like 35 people. They had prize bags to hand out.. and for some reason.. had like 25 of them. Umm, you don’t hand out “prizes” to like.. 75% of the audience.. it’s not a prize anymore, and makes the rest of us feel like crap. Not to mention “the rest of us” were all sitting in the same area. haha.

Oh, and.. (damn, I can’t stop talking) I left my resumes at home, LOL. Had to print ’em before heading over, and ended up printing a slightly older revision..

Week 1 Over

Finally got my schedule finalized Wednesday night after getting a second add code for ENGR 213 (Bioengineering) – because of the crappy system, if you enter in the code but don’t submit the add (or run into an error while doing so), it just expires your code.. How lame. From this I also figured out that permission numbers to add also bypass you from prerequisites, and that nulled my thoughts of the possibility of 2 different types of permission numbers (waitlist-adding and prerequisite-bypassing.)

Hmm, I’ll post it here since it’s “safe” now.. haha, I remember the bad RO kids would directory stalk for it to find my schedule just to try to counter my easy MVPing. Sillies.. some of which are reading this right now.. (Yeah, I see you)

Yeah, 3 classes only again, and 2 labs – although the 357 lab is more of “work time”, not “completion time” .. 1 hour 3x a week is nothing compared to the 25-35 hours a week I’ll be pulling just for 357’s programs. 357 will be very, very time-consuming for programs, with decent difficulty in the course. 306 seems really complicated too, but that seems to be easing off.. I still want to do well in both tough classes (especially 357 – I’ve been fearing it since ever with all those horror stories!) so I have bioengineering as my 3rd class which should be really easy. PowerPoint definitions class.. what the hell, I could do more productive things with my time than that. Not even going to buy the book. 346 lab is definitely not a pushover like 241/242 labs were. It seems like a lot of time and effort goes into that 1 unit to make sure every figure comes out correctly and documented properly in both my lab notebook and my formal lab reports.

Thursdays off for once is.. really weird. Possibly a bit too relaxed? No way..

I’ve been heading back and forth on my 12-2 breaks MWF, since both classes before and after the break are like.. in the corner of campus right next to home.. thankfully. In Fall, 315 before break was next to home, and physics was all the way back up the hill, which was a gruesome walk. And yes, that means I’ve been cooking and eating rice.. meat.. vegetables.. over and over.. just starting to get sick of that. Didn’t go to Albertson’s this weekend either, since I still have a lot of stuff.

Winter Job Fair is this Wednesday and Thursday – I am more than prepared with my resume done over break. Unfortunately, I don’t have any dress shirts or slacks, since I run on bare minimums in that category here in college and felt that I didn’t need them. I guess a polo and khakis will do. An internship for summer 08 is a 100% must-do – hopefully it won’t conflict with the possibilities of Ming and Julie visiting next summer. I seriously have to get back to Sunrise Telecom because their text-box submit form for resume/cv/coverLetter leaves me feeling icky. I also need to call Redback Networks about the hundreds of new jobs coming in 2008, for possible internships. That place is next to Cisco! :D

Finished my first program and my first lab report today.. A bit slow, but better than at the last minute. Also read ahead plenty in both EE and CS.. let’s hope for good things this quarter!

Okay, my computer just exploded again right when I was going to publish.. and fortunately, WordPress saves every once in a while, like Gmail! Yay for not having to retype blogs.. haha.

Winter 2008 Begins, New Roommate Setup

Where to begin? Winter break was nice – 4 weeks was much longer than 3. Gave me much needed room to rest, study (seriously), explore, hang out, recover from wisdom teeth, run many many errands, spend time with family, barely touch TF2 + Portal.. a little bit of everything.

Needless to say, it was time to go back to school. For some reason I don’t really mind the 2.5 hour drive anymore, although it’s still a bit long to me. For some reason though, the air in the car was hard to breathe =( we were planning to head down Saturday night, but the storm from Thursday/Friday was still settling down so we waited until Sunday, where there was just light rain for most of the drive. It was bad for only about 15 minutes. Ran up and down stairs with a ton of crap that I brought since it was just Munjal and I taking up the entire car, and had to move everything around to accomodate for the new roommate setup. Alex was moving into my room and two new people took the other room – I was retarded for letting them have the keys and collecting nothing more than a mere $50 security deposit. Now I really know the meaning of first months’ rent.

Alex took my spot =( but whatever. Expecting anything just sets you up for disappointment. You formulate ideas and methods to make things work for the better and they always just get shot down in some form. Oh well, I’ll deal. I’m not going to get into it, but this setup is different in almost every way than I had originally intended. I’ll… just get used to it.

I will still continue to think positive.. my new apartment-mates went from cool to just plain awesome. My roommate was napping yesterday so I just left him (and his napping friend) alone and went to eat dinner, except I ate with the new guys (err, guy and girl – a couple at that) and just talked about.. stuff. It was, nevertheless, pretty interesting and fun.. and I could go on forever.

I’m thankful that my mom and I prepared some food in advance to last me 3 meals here. Gives me a little breathing room getting everything with school and the room (and the sat-around-for-1-month dishes) before I actually need to start cooking. I’ve been cooking rice and eating leftovers.

School.. 11am is AMAZING, to say the least. I get really really cold easily, and going early in the mornings my freshman and sophomore winters just sucked. My “normal” sleeping schedule is 2am-10am (even during breaks), so it fits in even better. And to top it off, my roommate also starts at 11, for this one quarter that I happen to be rooming with him, so that works out well. Needless to say, we stay up late but quiet doing our ghetto terminal work.. wait.. he uses JCreator and Notepad =( The other two, on the other hand, start unavoidably early.. poor them.

Got IP assigning and port forwarding up and everything with uTorrent, as well as “proper” caps.. although.. 4 people torrenting on a line with 64 kB/s max upload can go a bit crazy. A little over the top, and all of a sudden you find yourself with 800ms+ pings.

Roommate’s computer is deafeningly loud at night (that’s gotta be at least 35 dB), and the bright LEDs lighting up my entire bed don’t help either.. Need to do something about that. Turning on the heat to 80-85 at night and at random times.. is kinda weird, too. Maybe I’m just wrong for expecting.. “normal-ness”..

Okay, back to school. Funny how when I have a class in a building, it’s always in a room that I had a previous class in before, and not other rooms. EE 306 is crazy packed – there’s 1 seat open and that is for Brim, who is watching football game(s?) in another state. The course seems difficult but doable, and it will be interesting going in with a mediocre understanding of chem and modern physics.

CPE 357.. Nico is cool. The class is cool. I’m really interested in doing well in this class.. and spending 80% of my ~35-45 study hours a week on it. People have said that it has taken them 5 hours a day every day of programming to get through.. I am ready for that. I think.

So I went to crash BRAE/ENGR 213 (Bio for Engineers) and we only stayed for an hour, for a introductory lecture that consisted of reading off PowerPoint slides that would be published online.. yeah. I got my add code and got too into it – I’m supposed to wait until Wednesday and get the co-req’s add code also, and do them both at once. I may have just expired my code in my crappy attempt, in their crappy system.

Went to chem at 12 this morning – packed to hell. 8 trying to crash, and about 5 were on waitlist. There were like 25 on waitlist at the close of registration. I thought I had a decent chance, but practically everyone was there, and she could only allow 2. Sadly enough both guys were there and I had a feeling that I wasn’t much further down the list. Damn it.. should have used my priority.. just for this class.. Instead of saving it for a late-priority quarter which would just be CPE 316/350/329 (aka, upper major classes that I don’t need to worry about.)

About to head to EE 346 lab – first day is always just intro, weeks 2-9 are 8 experiments and week 10 is the lab final.. it’s always like that. I’ve said enough for now..

MAH EYEZ

1995: -100, -100
1997: -150, -150
1999: -225, -225
2000: -275, -250
2001: -325, -300
2002: -400, -350
2007: -400, -325
haha, pretty much every eye checkup was done in november/december times.

I like how the 2007 measurement is off for the .. other eye. (Is it right or left? I don’t even know.) Probably due to several “I don’t know”‘s when he was asking “1 or 2” – even with such a detail-oriented life, I couldn’t tell between the clarity of two lenses.. Nonetheless, my point is made. NO CHANGE in the past like.. 5+ years.

I’m using my prescription from 2000 or 2001. I got new glasses for the 2002 prescription but never actually used them since the old prescription seemed sufficient. And after the first 4-5 years, I thought that my eyes only got worse because I forced myself to wear something more extreme that I didn’t even need. And I was right — although I have a bad feeling of using the “wrong” prescription that “works”.

It also wasn’t helpful that I brought in my OLD (275/250 or 325/300) glasses as my “current” ones so my eye doctor was like “WHOA YOU GOT A LOT WORSE!”. Oops..