I am going to see Kerry today. Special guests Bon Jovi and…actor Ted Danson. Live Broadcast here!

edit: it was amazing. I had a blue ticket so I was part of the VIP section, which meant that I got to stand right next to the stage. What was annoying was that it took forever to get in. The ticket said that doors opened at 3 pm, but they didn\’t start letting anybody in until 3:30 pm. I finally got inside by 5 pm. I heard Rusted Root, some female rock band where one was pregnant. Then several speakers including Ted Danson (why gray hair why), the current lietnant governor of PA, a linebacker for the Pittsburgh Steelers… And special musical guest Jon Bon Jovi (he only played two songs, one of which was a rally song).

And of course John Kerry. Can we say that PA is Kerry country? What bothered me about the rally was how vicious some people were. Well, only when the t-shirts were being given out. As the promoters threw out the t-shirts, people would lunge and fight for them. In fact, one flew my way, but the people behind us grabbed the t-shirt out of our hands. Miffed.

The crowd was huge, taking up all the open space on the CMU campus. Fortunately, it didn\’t rain as predicted by the weather people. The entire rally was awesome. It was so much better than the McCain Rally I attended 5 years ago.

Found these videos from someone\’s xanga. :)

Although I am sure you can apply this to any college, it made me miss Berkeley for what it was. Carnegie Mellon is the third in the nation of hours put into studying. Berkeley…was…Berkeley. Sometimes you don\’t know how much you miss something until you leave it.

This promotional video was so good. As is this student video.

I went shopping today. By myself. In the rain. And a credit card.

I wanted to buy winter clothes to prepare for the coldest winter I would have to endure so far. Coming from California, I have more \”summer\” clothes than winter clothes. I have 10 different colored long-sleeved shirts, two sweaters (one of which I don\’t like and wear only if I don\’t have anything else to wear), one down jacket, three pairs of jeans, one pair of sweats, one thin gray pants, one baggy blue pants, one winter jacket, and all my assorted button shirts, tank tops, t-shirts. I think I just listed my entire wardrobe. The strangest thing that I kept coming across was that most of the stores just didn\’t have my pants size. It was either size 10, size 12, size 14. Maybe I was just browsing through the sales rack too much, but what happened to people my size? Did the store just put out more larger sizes or did the smaller sizes just sell out? And why can\’t more pants come in \”short\” length.

Sometimes I think I treat myself too well. I spent over $150 today on clothes, gloves and groceries. And a pair of light bulbs.

Did I always want to rebel against the mainstream? I don\’t know what\’s up with my style, but I prefer not to do things most people are doing. And yet that is almost contradictory to my constant desire to be accepted.

I like watching movies that most people don\’t watch, attend art shows that most people don\’t see, walk in areas that most people refuse to walk, say things that people would not normally say, and don\’t succumb to peer pressure. Well, usually. Ok maybe not. My choice of clothes is relatively…normal.

But is it because rebelling against the mainstream culture perceived as a good thing? One of my friends told me several months ago that he admired the fact that I stood up for my own values–I stubbornly refuse to bow down to my friends\’ pressure…

My 6th grade teacher\’s motto was don\’t be normal, be different! I adopted that motto for a few years to justify my outcast status in school. Being different is good. Right? But ultimately, it\’s all about not caring about what others think and so many of us are stuck worrying about ourselves…even though nobody cares because they are worrying about themselves.

So I have a presentation for my Methods class tomorrow. Public speaking is one of my least favorite things to do. I once had to give a short 4 minute talk to 300+ freshmen. Not once, not twice, but thrice. 900 people total. Every second seemed like an hour.

Compressing an hourlong digital video (in raw format was 14.5 gigs) took my powerbook 4 hours. But I ended up with a 569 mb video.

So I don\’t have curtains on my window in my room…

This is often a phrase coming from me: If we pay so much to go to this school, we should be given free food every day, every hour.

Because I was interested in the mbti, I attended a mbti class at 9 am today. But thankfully, they provided a mini-breakfast of muffins, croissants, and fruit salad. The typical CMU catered breakfast. Then today when I had felt moody and slightly grumpy, I entered the Perlis Atrium to discover…a chocolate fountain. Sorry no pictures because I was being my social anxious self. Yes, a chocolate fountain. Technically it was like a chocolate fondue, but a fountain with strawberries, oreos, pretzels, biscotti and rice krispies treats to dip. But that wasn\’t all. Cheese (blueberry cheese, cranberry cheese, brie). Artisian bread. Crackers. Assorted vegetables and fruits. Ranch dressing of course and some funky orange sauce. Then small roast beef sandwiches. California rolls. Shrimp with cocktail sauce. White cake. Champagne, red wine, etc. Sprite and Coke. Did I just die and enter heaven?

Oh this was for the 25th anniversary of Robotics at CMU. But that anniversary was entirely irrelevant for me at that point. The guard at the exit wouldn\’t let us bring food out so I was swallowing my cake in a minute. Because we were late for my next class, the people I was with…made me run across campus with cake churning in my tummy.

After a hectic week of TWO midterms, I was rewarded with a cancellation of a homework (yay go methods! thankfully we don\’t have to create KLM models by hand…) and not having to go to the seminar dinner. As part of the hci program, we\’re required to take a seminar class where our \”grade\” is dependent on our attendence. Half of us are randomly selected to go to a pizza dinner afterwards so that we could ask questions of the speaker. The rest of us have to submit 2 questions that we would ask. Anyway, I was disappointed with this week\’s speaker. The talk was about how people failed to make correct responses in survey because they had a lack of information. DUH? What bothered me was that correct responses means that a survey is a test and not a survey. Even a flawed survey would have significant data of how a user thought. So no results should be discarded.

So I went back to the house to finally relax. Of course, that meant that I was unproductive for the rest of the day. I did however figure how to use internet sharing on my laptop so that my desktop could access the Internet (albeit very slowly). At this point, with the laptop occupying my room for two months, my desktop was sooooo noisy. But I did transfer over my mp3s over to my powerbook so that I could later exploit the power of OURTUNES. And I came up with this.

And knowing that I was going to be unproductive, I went to see the debate at 9 pm. The debate party was at this \”bar\” called Church Brew Works. The weirdest thing was that it was a bar/restaurant inside a former church. My first thought was how ironic it was, with the huge brewery canisters in the altar. The tables were made out of the former pews. Do you really expect alcohol to be so prevalent in a church? To me, it seemed almost like sacrilege. And yet in Pittsburgh? Not surprisingly, it was quite a liberal crowd. And because the debates were shown on two tvs and three huge speakers…it sounded like Kerry and Bush were giving sermons. I had trouble hearing. But since some organization called Moveon Pac was sponsoring the event, there was free chicken wings and pasta. It was fun to watch the debates with people booing when Bush spoke and clapping when Kerry hit the marks. There was also a huge cutout of Kerry on one side.

Unlike my Berkeley days when I lacked any courage to go to office hours, I go to the office hours for my statistics TAs every week. Of course, taking this undergrad course had impact on my self-esteem. First of all, it\’s an undergrad course (a stat course I neglected to take at Cal). And second of all, I really am struggling with the material.

I haven\’t done any calculus for more than 4 years! What is an integral again?

So I go to this TA office hours and ask for help. At one point, he asks me and the other student there for our e-mail addresses so that he could send us more information about certain questions. So I give my cmu.edu address without much thought. I leave the office hours early, because I realized that I had to spend some time reading the book myself and it would be a waste of time sitting there not knowing what I was doing. Also a classmate had told me how he had said, \”I don\’t know math.\” Hello? This is a statistics class??? Also, during the office hours, he asked another stat TA for advice. Wait, what?

So a few hours later, I check my e-mail and receive an e-mail from him. Note that his e-mail is only addressed to me (apparently, he doesn\’t know my name because I never said so) and not to the other student. In the e-mail, he first apologizes for not keeping track of time and then he explains two stat problems. Then he says to e-mail him if I have any questions. And THEN he also leaves his phone number as another method of contact. Wait, a phone number?!?! Maybe I am reading too much into it, but who would leave a phone number to a student? And by reading the area code, it\’s definitely not a landline. It\’s some place in New York (yes I am a stalker). A definite cell number.

When I was a RCC, I knew never to reveal my cell number to residents, because they would bother me endlessly. There was one time I was called out of my apartment at 11 pm. Note that I have this sympathetic side, I couldn\’t say no to a plea for help. But it drove me crazy.

Well at least now I know his name. It\’s Kevin. He\’s blond.

Seth saw The Incredibles in the Bay Area. He saw THEM.