wossssup!!! ye, i'm back! gonna do some serious update (soon)!
u know, just thought I shud have one entry while i am in india!
so much to write abt, so many pix to update, i dun even know where to start!
first thing, this year is my ben ming nian...year of the ox, supposed to get good luck, not much good luck so far, but it's THE BEST year i had! so much fun, so much traveling and adventures and meeting new people!
I am in india!!! after all the visa problems, it all worked out. work hard monday to friday, trips and adventures at weekends, non-stop!
got 2 more weeks left, then im heading home, then back to swat. I just can't imagine what's gonna happen, i'm gonna miss london, miss europe, and india...
i was looking at my previous entries...dam, life in the US was so boring...wtf was i doing? gotta start doing more traveling in the US. party hard for the final year at swat.
ye, as i mentioned in one of the entries, i did screw up my cs33 final so bad...fuck.
the following 2 weeks will be really busy...so i'm gonna make nice collages and photo albums and update once I get back home~
PEACE OUT
25th december 2008
now i am already in london, i feel a little distanced to this site... i dun plan to maintain this little blog section as much, but be sure to check out the pix~ lots of travel to come. it's not cool when it comes to xmas...all shops are closed. plus the sun goes down at 4pm everyday. so it's total darkness after 4-ish...long nights...but london is super nice, all the time i spent in the burbs, i felt like my life doesn't exist, i dun exist back there...but right here, all the lights, the hustle, the graffiti and the buses, trains, make me feel alive once again~
wow it's been a long time~ my last entry was like october...been really busy for a while. so now im only a few days from london. one final this afternoon, 2 more on thursday and friday and then im gonna leave this place~can't believe it all happened so fast.the previous 2 take-home finals turned out to be pretty do-able and im guessing these 3 CS finals are not gonna be too bad either. i just can't stop thinking about what's gonna happen after the finals...hoho saturday, depart PHL, maybe a nice nap on the plane. when i wake up, i ll be in europe! gonna spend my first week hanging out with nigga ren and bighead, check out the city, hear some cool english, maybe get some fishnchips, cup of tea...new year plan is to go scotland with middle school friends. it's amazing how friendship formed back then lasts. it feels like people are generally less capable of making 'true' friends as they get older. not impossible, but just more 'shielded' from the outside world as we grow...more concerns, more complications. anyway, there will also be a possible excursion into the highland. this scotland trip was planned by alan, i was lazy on this one so just asked him to book whatever tickets they got. i heard the highlands are a must if one goes scotland.so i really hope the 2nd trip works out too. in any case, i ll definitely do some serious travel this coming semester. got my food allowance, breakfast/dinner provided, so my cash will available for travelling,even tho the stipend given by the college is a little insufficient given the prices in london...o ya, so yesterday i discovered that i double ordered the stuff henry asked me to buy...350 worh of 4G RAM for mac and wireless port...well i had to return one for each. no biggie. i packed my stuff, printed the shipping labels, and thought it be a good idea to try fedex (actually first time). nearest fedex kinko's is on the baltimore pike, kind of a walk, so i normally just go USPS, which is just in the ville, nice folks there too. well, only after this fedex experience did i realise how amazing usps is...fedex had the slowest service i ever encountered. had like 5 people in line, 2 staff working at the counter and it took them 30 minutes to get to me...while i was filling up the order form (at the end of the line), an old man came by.with his mid aged daughter. they ignored my presence and took the little space in front of me. well of course i wasn't gonna stand and watch. so i was like hey excuse me sir i am in line too. he sort of sized me up (quickly) and said o well we got the form done first. (great reasoning, really) maybe just out of habbit, i said oh whatever and looked away.shaking my head. he got a bit uneasy and said oh u wanna get in front, be my guest. o, i m not gonna say no. so i stepped up... it was kinda awkward after that, i didn't thank him. i guess i didn't have to? the whole thing took so much time, i ll spare u the details on how 'dumb' the staff were...shoulda gone USPS as i always had..fast and easy, drop off and go. i left the fedex kinko's and saw that stupid sign "you made the right choice!" o ya, damn right...anyway, i went to target to get some stuff after that, to my surprise, this old man and his mid aged daughter were there too. i think i saw him first, but i didn really care so i kept walking. his daughter saw me and she almost yelled "dad!" well i couldn't see her cuz they were behind me, but i bet 100 dollars she was pointing at me. i looked back after like 3 seconds, he was looking at me, and said hey u needed a ride here, u should have called us~...i thanked him and said it's ok...i really dun understand wtf he was thinking... or was it me? after i got done with shopping, i made my way out. guess what, just as the first breeze of freshair embraced me, i saw a car passing by slowly right in front of me, and inside the car was the very old man...he waved at me...i didn respond and they drove away. very interesting people indeed. i guess my bad temper sort of scared him and im glad i didn fall into any 'asian stereotype' kind of submissive kid, if he ever thought that way. too bad.
29th october 2008
lol looks like i really screwed up my cs33 midterm~ my plan is, sip on some fine scotch, sleep like a dog and go for breakfast tmr morning.life is beautiful after exams!
3rd october 2008
man, i love fridays!done with all my shit, getting started on shitz due next week. oh well, gonna be in houston from saturday to tuesday for a conference~ psssyyyccchhheeddd! guess wot, we gonna stay in HILTON hotel! HILTON! b+tches!!! so we come back on tuesday night, got cs33 due on wednesday, real analysis exam on wednesday, homework due on thurs, number theory due on friday. which means i ll spend a good amount of time from this tiny little vacation on HOMEWORK...at least won't be as bad as last week.
what's today's date?
ya who cares what date it is...ya, so, i think, at this moment, i would say i'm pretty drunk, but not really drunk cuz i can still remember my stuff from number theory class and i can walk in a straight line fo sho, o ye, i can still type english. BUT it feels good now. no more homework no more classes, just enjoying this wonderful saturday night....sundays and mondays=bad. this malibu coconut shit tastes really good. it feels great, finally, after all that nightmare-ish days last week, i finally get to chill and have some sleep. and thinking about going to london next semester is like a main source of will-power for me...I CAN'T WAIT!!!!!!!
thursday sep 25th
2:30am. as im updating this page, i actually have no idea if it is the 25th, or not.
time to me is like a discrete space modulo 7~ lol
now im done with 2 of my homework...2 more to go tmr. gotta wake up at 8:30am to print out poster for presentation, followed by a whole day of classes. time is such a luxury now.
wednesday sep 24th
this is nightmare... im sitting in the cs lab, supposed to be doing group project but i got 2 other homework sets due tmr and another 2 due on friday. haven't had much sleep all this week and it feels like the 100th day of the week..like i dun have a sense of time now.. i only have a sense of tasks. getting one done doesn make it any better. there's always the next one. not sure how long this is gonna last. but...im trying just to hold it together for now...fall break!!!!i need fall break!!!
friday aug 29th
this is the last night at home...i was browsing youtube for cool stuff and found this series of stanford lecture videos on machine learning. pretty cool stuff i have to say. i came across this ICA thingy video in the first lecture, and it was SOOOOOOOOOOOO cool! taking 2 audio inputs captured by 2 (closely placed) microphones respectively, where 2 people in the same room were speaking at the same time, the algorithm perfectly separated the sound for each person! well, this means it will (probably) be able to separate guitar/bass/vocal/drums without having the master tape???!!!
need to check out more on independent component analysis (ICA)
tuesday july 29th
now i am back home, expect to SEE lots of pic updates soon~ promise
thursday july 24th
DAMDAMDAM!!! 7 20TH WAS MY DAD'S BIRTHDAY AND I TOTALLY FORGOT!! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHSHYTE!!!!!!
all these years i remembered to (at least) say a happy bday wish to both my parents, (i think) without fail.. this is the first time...sigh, been away for too long :(
thursday july 24th
so this is what i did this summer: setting up trophic network (ha, i learnt a new word~ trophic network = foodweb), start markov chain monte carlo, let it run, sometimes for days, sometimes for hours/minutes, collect data, put it in R, copy paste some code and BAM, histograms, then either frown (probably a bug somewhere) or smile (good results!)
i basically have all these thousands of lines of code memorized (this is so COOL!!!) you name a variable, i tell you where to find it...the problem with the code is it doesn't use functions :(
i will not go into details on the work i did but hey, the screen output is really cool~
(i forgot which day it was)
NEW AMP DAY !!!!!!!! ENGL POWERBALL
go to the music page and click on the 'AMPS' button in the top menu
tuesday july 1st
feeling some new riffs last night, did a little recording
go to the music page and click on the 'SONGS' button in the top menu
friday june 28th
summer has been painlessly crawling forward. research going well, looks like we just got to the exciting part...4 weeks left, i do hope we get some new results!
got new gears, sold some right after. i'm tired of gears, tired of amps, tired of looking for the most-light-weight-best-tone magic combination...not gonna work.
friday june 6th
a little tune i recorded this afternoon. think michael angelo batio, paul gilbert and michael amott (arch enemy)
ok research started! back to the paleozoic era!! roam with the mammal-like reptiles!!
big day!!PRS singlecut trem 10 top 20th anniversary!!!!
friday may 16th
aite my finals are over. just saw this video on tudou.com, the mayor of guangyuan city in sichuan couldn't help crying during in an interview, when talking about rescuing the kids...
i wish i could be there and let myself be totally struck by the maginitude of the grief. i have been missing out on too many things over all these years, i need to feel it really bad, i need to be part all these!!!...this is something foreigners probably would never see and guys from BBC/CNN would never bother to report...FEEL IT!!!
wednesday may 14th
check out the random walk simulation. my feeble javascript attempt~ featuring probability parameters for directions, thinking of adding another parameter governing the centripetal tendency.
tuesday may 13th
spent some long hours tweaking the newly acquired Engl e530 preamp~ this is a beast once you get the tone right. super heavy super punchy! even thru its built in lousy power amp it still sounds awesome, no noise at hi-gain. do i need a tube power amp at all? maybe i will try to score a peavey 50/50 to go with it, and start building my rack~
monday may 12th
1 hour before math exam, reading some sad news on the earthquake. hope all the kids are fine...
bbc acknowledged the fast response of the government, saying it is "one of the most open and speedy responses to an emergency he [the reporter] has ever seen from Chinese state media."
saturday may 10th
sold my jackson rr1t real fast, for 1100 dollars, not a bad deal. kinda sad that i dun have jackson USA's anymore :( but at least i dun have to deal with storing guitars over the summer~ having cash is always good~ the guy came down to pick it up, had a little chat and seems that my next target should be a mesa mark IV. instant metallica to petrucci tone. engl e530 arrived too, but not in my hands yet, i ll pick it up on monday from the post office but dam, i got 2 exams on monday!!!!
tuesday may 6th
excellent, i got the first spam in my guestbook. this visitor appeared to be from NYU at 128.122.130.135, dig/traceroute/whois doesn't really help since it's within the nyu.edu network, could be a public machine. but whatever, u r on da blacklist~
apparently he/she is probably from stern school of business at nyu. anyone knows anybody from stern@nyu, lemme know~
but i guess at some point i might be forced to take down the guestbook cuz spam is hard to fight :(
thursday april 24th
thursdays have been interesting days of the semester cuz i have my stat seminar, lots of pain and lots of fun.or enlightenment. lately been working on markov chain monte carlo and random walks, where you really get to see results on the spot, that's the one coolest thing about programming!!we are using R, a pretty dynamic language used by statisticians.
the first graph was mcmc, basically alternating between drawing from 2 distributions conditioned on each other and sort of updates throughout. see how the points concentrate inside the contour plot especially the bullseye~ pretty neat~
second graph is a contour of some F likelihood and we did a random walk to find the MLE of the 2 parameters, starting at a point far from our method of moments estimates, and multiplying each parameter by a random draw from F(100,100),update only if we get a larger likelihood, sort of climbing up the hill of likelihood~
tmr is the last presentation of the semester and i ll be doing the final problem. o well, peace to that
monday april 22nd
monday, officially 2 weeks from reading period!!!-->finals--->break!!!!yes!!!
read a whole bunch of new "analysis" and reports cnn and bbc have to say about china/tibet, how china is initializing a new campaign to "brainwash" tibet, in the name of "patriotic education"...depressing as usual
music news: the long anticipated metallica new album shall unleash some kickass material in early may. in the meantime, metallica launched a new website called Mission Metallica to promote its effort, wot many see as a return to their good old stuff. the logo is back to the pre-black album era logo, yes i remember drawing those in middle school~ will see how it goes~
monday april 21st
i thought i was calm. but...i think the media is totally hopeless. CNN u r terrible and weak...look at this article
this is a lame attempt to "cover" wot's going on... you call this news? more than half of the crap is devoted to re-establish wot's already been said in previous reports, i.e, wotever justification you have for mr cafferty...you just wanna fool the audience and make sure they know your lame excuse for your mistakes...o yeah, wot about the protest? perhaps the reader already forgot wot the article is about.CNN you r pro u manage to summarize this so tersely:
Demonstrators also expressed their anger about what they see as biased reporting of the Tibet story by Western media organizations including CNN.
look at that, how magnificently done..."what they see as biased", stroke of genius, totally professional, good job, u shuda printed that out in a bigger font and better still repeat 1000 times...why dun you be more professional and interview some ppl? wot the heck did your reporters do while watching the protests? too busy looking for tibetan victims? why dun you just tell americans and westerners wot the protesters have to say? i m sure they can give you good stories and opinions, or u just dun bother to tell the stories to your fellow americans cuz it's not anti-china??o mind you, they might kick u in the balls cuz it's been too much and ppl r running out of patience
conclusion, epic failed attempt to cover CNN's big biased ass.
a fine saturday morning, i found my city featured in bbc news~ it was the anti-french campaign. look at this pic, i bet 10 dollars this is right outside the carrefour near hong shang square~hoho
...well i was laughing for a while cuz i m just so homesick and missing wuhan so bad...but wot's with the campaign man, this doesn't help anything!same with college kids making funny songs like "don't be too CNN". were you in tibet? do you know wot happened? BBC/CNN made mistakes in reports, is that worse than media hiding information from you? such acts r just purely juvenile...can someone please be serious about it and make a documentary?
oh i had an interesting idea and i dunno where it fits in this entry so i might as well say it now in case you dun bother to read more. so the protesters are trying to snatch the olympic torch, from london to san francisco. ok, wot if, tomorrow, we tell all the security to take a break and we say hey, come and get it. of course they'd go and get it. but now wot, wot ya gonna do now that i gave it to you? run with it? take it home smash it up? or you wanna beat me up? o then you are in trouble, cuz you resort to violence and you made all the athletes and probably the whole world upset cuz you r making it such a big deal. you have problem with the chinese? go talk to them. why snatch the torch and stop the olympic? you r being unreasonable and just making a fool of yourself. change your target!
i had an argument with anne when asked if i would go nyc to join the march on may 4th youth day...i said no, and asked her why would she do so.apparently she just thought we should defend our country...blah blah.but i when i asked wot she would say if say a cnn reporter approaches her and let her say something to the camera, she answered she would tell them to talk to the organizer of the march, the person leading the march...well that just left my jaw wide wide open...after hundreds of the years,
the "nu xing" is still in the root of chinese people. they simply "follow"!be it a march or any other things. maybe i m being extreme. but for god's sake, if you dun even know wot you are gonna say, if you dun even feel ready to present your opinion, why bother going to the march? better off sit down and THINK. i do love my country, every single bit of it. even the government and yet i know they are not the best government at all. this is a very chinese way of loving the homeland, probably not many westerners would understand. but loving my country does not make me ready defend it unconditionally.
i was having a chat with andrew while procrastinating over discrete math homework, as we always do. it was an interesting chat, i started off trying to defend china over the tibet issues and the media bias issues. couple of things made me think twice.
it is a well known fact that western media never put happy news on the tv, all day you would hear about bombing and deaths round the globe. so when we complain that the news focused on the "bad" side of the tibet situation, and why they never reported on how the chinese made tibet a better place (at least economy-wise), the answer is simply they do not do this. they report problems so that ppl know wot to fix, as andrew put it. well now you are gonna say but the news is biased. yeah you got me, bbc is definitely biased. i was never into reading news and stuff but the tibet thing made me start. bbc is now the top of my browser history chart, if not my swatmail. and i did notice whenever they wrote something on tibet, statements from the chinese government or official news agencies would be IN QUOTE, and anything said by the Lama would appear as a normal sentence, UNQUOTED, simply taken as a fact to believe. dude, this is frustrating...at this stage, i simply do not know whom to trust. all i can do it read all the news and articles i can find, on bbc, cnn, sina and o yeah, this cool blog kadfly and i try to understand wot is really going on
on the other hand, we are sort of accustomed to hearing good news on the tv. 7pm everyday, you switch to cctv-1 for news, you will be flooded by those promising economic growth reports from this town and that city...if someone happens to deliver a speech somewhere then we will have to hear a 20minute analysis on the "spirit" of the speech and how this applies to the party, and the benefit of the people blah blah. then after that, you hear a 10 minute summary of world news, well this part is rather similar to wot bbc and ccn are all about. and we never really checked out any other news report in other countries. go ask your parents, your teachers, wot other news do they watch besides cctv and wot other sources of information do they have besides browsing chinese websites? im not blaming anyone. it's just we have language barrier problem, same with westerners. in a sense, we are being manipulated by the media simply because they can happily exploit the language barrier somewhat and feed you their way. so, do not expect the bbc or cnn to say good things about china, because they dun really say good things for anybody.
that's probably why cafferty unknowingly offended china so much by his "goons and thugs". this brings another fundamental difference. freedom of speech. think about it. americans talk shit about their government all the time, wot's the big deal of saying bad things about some other government? but he made a mistake by not specifying wot his "goons and thugs" meant. that is a real problem..wrong words used at a very wrong time.
chinese love their country, a lot. from elementary school education to the youth league and anything else. even though beijing might hate shang hai and shang hai hates everybody, when faced with an external turbulance, we unite within a split second. some might say we are brainwashed by our textbooks and we do not see that we are being manipulated by the government, but i would think it's a historical thing. even back in the days of confuscius, people learnt that the "team" or the "big group" comes before individual, as opposed to the individualism and independence style of the west. chinese regard the ji ti as more important that the self, it's a well accepted fact that sacrificing(or you wanna say compromising) for the "big picture" is a virtue, is a noble act. this mindset is deeply rooted and will always withstand against the test of time. but it might never be accepted or even understood by some westerners. that's why we have problems. the reason chinese act so protective and defensive against the west, as i see it, is because on top of the confuscius thinking, we have just "stood up". it has only been 60 years of peace and independence over this vast land. before that, we saw a long period of colonialization and invasion, for too long, we have been bullied by the west and regarded as the dong ya bing fu...chinese are eager to earn respect and recognition, we'd do anything to prove we are niu bi! when liu xiang got his gold medal, when we got the oplymic 2008, every single chinese takes that as a vivid proof of the country's increasing strength. people were told to study hard and contribute to the country for 60 years generation after generation, now we have it, and we will never let it go. any act to "bully", to "slander" will inevitably make us angry, more importantly, united.
aside from the patriotism thing, we also need to calm down and think. does it help by boycotting the french and launching anti-cnn.com? the west never had a good impression of the communist party and seldom bother to see the chinese people differently. wot we need to do is to show them we are not narrowminded people who make troubles. instead of saying "kill all the tibetans!" (i believe many reacted this way) after hearing they killed some of us, we should really ask why this thing happened!!! why?? why would they be angry at the han for no reason??? we all learnt we "liberated" tibet in 1951, but from what , from whom? like the americans liberated the iraqis?
i am defintely no expert at history, but it was clear that there have been issues and we cannot simply gloss over. it is an interesting time, all kinds of issues are being brought up, nobody can hide anything anymore. so it is time to think and talk. the real waking up for china does not end with its huge economic growth, it should embrace a new era where people really start to think hard.
