Freaky!

Okay, so my roommate tumbles into my apartment with thousands of grocery bags. She tells me that someone was following her home while she took the shuttle and was nearly in tears. :( Then she went to call her family.

Then someone knocked on our door. I decided to answer it. My roommate had described the guy as African American, but the guy didn\’t look African American at all. He asked for Shirley. I told him that nobody by that name lived in the apartment. Then I proceeded to ask where he was from and why he was there. \”Hawaii. I came a long way.\” Yeah yeah. I asked him whether he knew Shirley\’s number, but he did not. I asked him why would he even get to Berkeley if he didn\’t know where she lived. Then he gave a sheepish smile and agreed that he probably was in the wrong place. Then I politely apologized and directed him toward City Hall…or some other organization. Then I closed the door.

I felt that I was kind of full of it. I was about to ask my roommate whether that was the guy, but then I remembered her describing him as African American. So I didn\’t say anything. But I felt bad…so I went downstairs and looked around the apartment building. The stairs to the roof. Nobody. The stairwell was empty. I went back upstairs.

I asked my roommate whether he had a white beard. She freaked out. It was the guy. So I decided to check around again. Nobody in the stairs. I looked outside our front door and my heart leapt. He was there. I opened the front door and asked accusingly, \”What are you doing here?\”

\”Oooh I have been evicted…\” he said.

Then as politely as I could, I said that I would call a hostel for him. \”Just a minute!\” I smiled.

I ran back upstairs and ran into my apartment. Then I told my roommate to call the police. About five minutes later (or ten…), the police arrived. I talked to the officer for a bit describing my story. Then he talked to my roommate. Then the police officer went away to talk to the shuttle driver who drove my roommate home.

So freaky.

My first midterm cycle is over…for now at least. For other people (especially those with a quarter system), finals are just starting.

Let\’s share the following haiku:

Midterms make you cry
Raising my blood pressure high
I feel like I\’ll die

Muffins can be adorable…and scary at the same time. Who knew that they can convince you to be muffin-vorous?

Because Christina, Tram, Xing, Hien and Mae went home…because Stacee had stuff to do…because Chris, Cliff, Karen weren\’t picking up their phone…because Lydia was watching Amelie…I decided to watch Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness by myself.

Both were incredibly good. Great black comedies. The first one reminded me of me in junior high. Let\’s repeat this again: junior high sucked. Although my parents weren\’t as menancing as Dawn\’s, life in middle school was just like…\”hell\”. :p

Maybe I am glad that I had Professor Poonen for Math 55 – Discrete Math.

Because Professor Clancy wasn\’t here, Brian the TA took over for CS lecture and he talked about William Kahan, a UC Berkeley professor who taught Math 55 and is the godfather of floating point (he won a Turing Award–the highest achievement for computer science/mathematics–for floating point numbers in the 80s).

One student in his 1999 Math 55 class asked, \”Why do you grade so harshly?! With no partial credit?!\”

He simply answered, \”I\’ve got children and grandchildren. I don\’t want the computers and machinery they\’ll depend on in the future to compromise their safety in any way, just because they were programmed by computer scientists who had guessed without knowing if they were right. It\’s my own form of self-defense.\”

He\’s not talking about the computer games we play. He\’s talking about for example the rocket Ariane 5 which blew up right after its launch, because a computer scientist converted a floating point number (32 bits) to an int (16 bits).

Lesson: If you are a computer scientist, you better have a good lawyer.

*SOBS* :( Depressing week. And it\’s not about social stuff this time. Ironically, I have the most true friends that I have ever had in my life. In the morning, I was making up my EE lab. The good thing was that I was able to construct the circuit successfully, but then I didn\’t understand the rest of the lab. *sob* I burnt my pot with pasta and it was my cutest pot too. :( I only filled the pot halfway with water. Then I dumped my pasta in. Ten minutes later, I came back to the kitchen to discover that it was smoking. :( Then I attempted to get my grade for my EE midterm. The department office refused to give it to me. *sob* I heard someone got an easy 100 on the midterm. *sob* Couldn\’t figure out my CS hw. That\’s why low-level programming shouldn\’t be used at all. Then I wouldn\’t have to worry about saving return addresses and argument values before entering recursion. *sob*

This week\’s Friday Five

1. What\’s your favorite vacation spot?
For me, it\’s not what I can see and do that makes a place my favorite vacation spot. It\’s the people that I encounter along the way. When I was young, I enjoyed the New Jersey shores simply because I was able to experiece the beach broadwalk. I had the best experience in Alaska of all places. ;) The people I met on the cruise…the things we did. But then I guess a vacation spot is somewhere where I return over and over again. Okay, well I go to Lake Tahoe/Reno every winter. Does that count? Okay, better answer: my bed.

2. Where do you consider to be the biggest hell-hole on earth?
Acalanes High School. Never ever going to return there ever again. Never.

3. What would be your dream vacation?
Another cruise! Well, I have been to almost all ports of calls already, but this time…I to enjoy it with other people other than my family.

4. If you could go on a road-trip with anyone, who would it be and why?
My sis. Okay, and you Stacee! I doubt that either of them will drive me crazy. At leat I would drive them crazy first. And…that too…they aren\’t the picky type. No i-have-to-stop-for-the-restroom for the sixteenth time in an hour. And yes they would go along with my crazy ideas…and well I\’d go along with theirs too. For the longest time, I had wanted to go on a road trip after high school, but I still haven\’t gotten the chance. Number one reason: my parents won\’t let me drive my \’93 Acura Integra out for more than a 100-mile trip. I want to drive through California. :p Oh yeah and maybe I\’ll take a side trip to Michigan. ;)

5. What are your plans for this weekend?
I had planned to go visit Kristen at Stanford (SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!) this weekend, but I am not sure. I want to watch Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness tomorrow, but I haven\’t gotten a chance to ask anyone to come with me. If I don\’t, I probably will go home and well…basically mope over this week\’s midterms. Then work on my CS hw, EE hw, CS project, unix hw…and delete people from pictures (see below). ;)

While procrastinating, I decided to do this:

It\’s Tram, Kathy, Me and Xing! What is wrong with that picture?

Update: original is here.

Stacee probably likes this line:

Stacee is right.

Yes, I am very obsessed with my trackers although lately I haven\’t gotten any suspicious domains aka people who are reading my blog when they are not supposed to. Haven\’t noticed that many Berkeley domains with the exception of me checking from the lab. Hmm…so that means Cliff and Chris haven\’t been checking at all.

My latest google search: \”college personal essay\”. I am number seven. For the longest time, I think that my essay was probably the reason that I got into Berkeley and got rejected from UCLA. Berkeley likes quirky, strange people. UCLA likes people who are AZN and loved high school.

Grrrrr…half of all my visits are from google searches for Kiss. Not going to help them anymore. Y\’all hear that?! It took a lot of google searching on my own to find information on them. People should suffer as much as I do. You can go here to find out how AZN one of the members is (and how teeny bopper she is too). Yes that\’s really Jini of Kiss. Go look for a true Korean music fanatic. No doubt, a month from now, my words will be indexed in google. I just checked. Someone came here searching for a rich/poor friend. That\’s it…I need to redo my layout.