My housemate cooked dinner for us today! :) Plus 4 other guests. So 8 total.

But the thing is that we don\’t have a dining table yet. So what we did was take the old box spring that one of the former tenants used. Put that on top of 3 yellow crates that another tenant left behind. And there was a table! All of us sat on pillows, Japanese style. Each person had two dishes plus a bowl and a wine glass. We had turkey katsu, chicken paprika, and guacomole dip. For dessert, Hershey\’s peanut butter cookies and cupcakes. So good! For some reason, lately I have been eating too quickly and I constantly finish my meal way before everyone else.

I also learned how to use the dishwasher today. In Lafayette, my parents never used the dishwasher. My mom used it as a storage space for her large pots. In Berkeley, I always washed the dishes by hand. Soap, rinse, and let dry in the rack. It\’s just amazing what a dishwasher could do…

So there are four things I could do tonight:

Which one should I do? Nothing really appeals to me at the moment. Most likely scenario: NOTHING.

I still have no monitor for my PC desktop. Yet so far, I seem to be surviving okay without one, relying on my powerbook. The problem is that my hands are starting to feel cramped, constrained to this mini keyboard. Not to mention, I don\’t feel ok having just one computer.

Any good deals out there for a 17\”+ lcd monitor? Don\’t need speakers. DVI would be nice.

When I was in the computing cluster the other day, I saw a geeky-looking guy booting a Windows machine into BIOS. It was obvious he was the CCON, the equivalent of the technical coordinator at Rescomp. My desire to fix all the Windows machines there…or just simply to boot into admin mode was too strong. Whenever I see a broken laptop, I have this incredible urge to take the computer into my hands and troubleshoot like crazy. But I have to remind myself that I am not tech support here. I am just another student who gets really irritated when printing is broken and the network is not up. The other day, I spent a good ten minutes figuring out successfully why a fellow student\’s excel document was not opening. Then when encountered with a laptop that would not connect to the Internet. I first checked the task manager for viruses…then I stopped myself. I could get into too much into troubleshooting and it would never end… Stop.

I can influence other people to get their own blogs. :)

b: you know when you said im more talkative today?
me: yessss
b: you shoulda said \”typative\”

[HE SPECIFICALLY REQUESTED TO REMAIN ANONYMOUS BECAUSE HE DOESN\’T WANT TO BE FOUND.]

And out of that conversation, comes typative.com!

Four years ago, I used to \”blog\” more openly and freely. There was no impending disaster of Google finding me. Most people didn\’t have a long enough attention span to read my journal. Back then, I wrote about everything, everything emotional and thoughtful. Nowadays, I find that I have to censor myself. Be plain. Because I\’ll never know who is reading… For some reason, people are often shocked when they eventually read the blogs/journals of people they know. He thinks like that?! It\’s probably the blunt emotions written online. The thoughts that they never knew about. Why are we so scared about things that are there, but we just don\’t know about? It\’s not scary. To me, it\’s almost comforting to read blogs/journals of people I know. At least, I know they\’re human.

Almost every Introduction to HCI methods lecture, the professor forgets about her computer\’s screensaver. Unfortunately being me, I am always distracted by anything moving around. One professor\’s screensaver is the default calming MacOSx rainbow screensaver. The other professor\’s screensaver is unfortunately a slideshow of her family. So while she was lecturing about the Artifact models and the sequence models, I paid more attention to pictures of her daughter doing ballet, a picture of her dogs running after a ball, a picture of someone on a donkey at Grand Canyon, a picture of her kids wearing Berkeley sweatshirts…

I wouldn\’t like to be the professor\’s daughter. To be the one that keeps showing up in class with a goofy smile against the wall.

I agree with social life being a game. It isn\’t supposed to be that way. When we win, we become friends. When we lose, we are no more than aquaintances. There are always people who don\’t try. There are always those that smile and they find the potential within themselves to be someone. Stop letting it become a game.

As quoted from the comments, \”This is why the Internet was invented.\”

To find things such as How to wrap a burrito.

Considering how I never really \”cooked\” during my 4 years at Berkeley, I have been in periods of near-starvation because I was reluctant to pull out my wallet and empty it. Last weekend, I finally gave in and purchased two cooking pots. Not to mention, 12 bags of ramen from the only Asian market in Pittsburgh. Now I can survive.

Next step. What happened to my former workout routine?

When I thought I figured out the bus schedule, I took the wrong route and ended up in an unfamiliar area of large brick houses and a CVS pharmacy. The strange thing about the PAT bus system is that you pay or show your pass at different times depending on the time of day and the direction of the bus. I think it comes from the fact that when someone travels more than two zones (more than three miles I think), it\’s 50 cents more to ride. But I am not sure. So if the bus is going toward downtown, I show my pass when I get on. If the bus is going away from downtown, I show my pass when I get off. Except after 7 pm when I show my pass when I get on in both cases. What\’s so annoying is that the driver controls the back door, so if I am forced to sit in the back, I have to run toward the front to make my stop.

So I ended up walking in circles around the Northern part of Squirrel Hill at 9 pm at night. Interestingly, whenever I saw someone walking toward me on the sidewalk, that person would always deliberately cross the street (to avoid me?) Being a little too self-determined, I didn\’t stop to ask where Forbes was located. So after 5 minutes, I spotted a Carnegie Mellon sign and found my way back. I had landed in an area that was 6 blocks away. I nearly died walking back.

AIM has been one of those things that changed my life, made my life worse, and made my life so much brighter. In CMU, I have begun to realize that AIM is just a mini-tool for most people. It\’s like a mailbox for most people whereas for me, it has been a constant ON of socialization. But the point was, I came across someone\’s AIM profile today. Why is it that there are some people that we are reluctant to get to know? We sometimes don\’t try. And I saw this person\’s profile and saw that we had similar tastes. Same tastes in music, movies and tv. Very oddly the same. But I never really tried because my first impression of him wasn\’t that great. And he never tried. We could have gotten along really well. I lost the chance to make a connection. Missed opportunities?

A few months ago, I volunteered for a fmri study…for 3 hours. As a result, I ended up with a very dizzy headache afterwards and pictures of my brain. Oh and not to mention $30.

Ever wanted to see the inside of my head? I never knew that I was that radioactive…

Three years ago, I was late to my math lecture.

Surprisingly, my parents call me once a week to talk about misc issues. And they always ask the question, \”Are you happy?\” It\’s a hard question to answer at almost any stage of my life. People look at my pictures and often say \”you look happy\”. However, photos are only a capture of the moment of posing and fake smiling. A façade.

Anyway, I just discovered the the option key on my mac keyboard. Option+[any key] produces special symbols. Wow. And it took me 2 months to discover Exposé.

Someone described my living situation is just like the Real World. I almost thought it was. I had arrived at the house with four boxes. No car. No job. Just a fistful of cash and a credit card. I had rang the doorbell and shook the hand of the guy at the door. \”Hi, I am the new housemate,\” I had said.

In Berkeley, I had lived in 3 different places. During my freshman year, I lived in a quad in the Foothill Dorms. One of those big rooms shared with 3 girls and myself. Then my second year, I had the living room while two other girls had the bedroom of an apartment. Then my third and four year, I lived in the living room and my roommate had the bedroom. Here in Pittsburgh is my first time living in a house. A 3 story, 2.5 bath house (with a basement). With 3 other people I didn\’t really know. I am not used to the morning showers almost all of them take (I have always been a night showerer; I am unaccustomed to be locked out of the bathroom for 30 minutes in the morning). Someone asked me if I was the \”PUCK\” of the house, the annoying one. I doubt it. Right now, I think I am the quiet one. The one who slips behind the cameras, heading directly the safety of her room.