well... I haven't posted to my old site since late July. I've probably lost all of my readers ... not that I had any to begin with. Anyhow, now is as good a time for change as any. I guess I've gotten too caught up with various things in my life and I should get back into the habit of taking a moment out of my day or week or whatever to stop and reflect on the past events.

Obviously, this is a new site for me. I've hosted my website previously on my school's server, but since I've graduated, it's time to move on. I've put on my old posts up here for you to enjoy into posterity.

Tuesday, July 20, 2002

Sorry I haven't been updating all that much recently. I guess my obsessive
self has found something different to spend my free time doing. In
some sense my mind has been reeling... spinning in overdrive since I left
school and started work. I've been dreaming, planning, and plotting the next
few years of my life.

It all started about a month or so ago, before I starting work and after
I left school. My parents wanted me to read Rich Dad, Poor Dad by
Robert Kiyosaki. They had read it, and so had my neighbor who gave it
a big thumbs up. So I went to Barnes and Nobles with my mom and found that
the Rich Dad, Poor Dad, series consisted of five books. So my mom
bought them all for me on the spot. Before I read the books, I assumed that
I'd be working until I retire at the ripe old age of about 65, just like
everyone else. Just like my parents are going to do. After reading the first
three books, I decided that my goal would be to retire in 10 years. (It took
the author 9 years to go from broke to retired.) After reading the
fifth book, I moved up my schedule to 5 years and figured that I'd be able to
do that if I invested $1000 a month and made 50% on my investment after
taxes. What I mean by retiring in 5 years is that I'd be able to quit
my job and invest for a living, the idea being that investing takes a lot
less time than 40 hours a week.

So how am I going to retire in 5 years? Well, saving one grand a month
would be pretty easy considering that I'm living at home with only a few
expenses. Making the 50% a year, on the other hand is going to be the tricky
part. I decided there were two avenues I could take, and I'm going to milk
both of them. 1) Stocks and their derivatives. 2) Real estate. The first
step is getting into stocks since I don't quite yet have the capital and
the credit for real estate just yet. But here's the catch. Learning how to
make at least 50% a year after taxes is going to require that I spend a lot
of time and money on books, courses, and seminars. I expect to spend a couple
thousand on those types of products over the next few years. What that gives
me is the knowledge and the opportunity to possibly make my goal of quitting
in five years. On the other hand, I can try to save money and not buy all
those expensive educational products (that might end up just being a rip-off
anyway) and go at it on my own basically. But, as I see it, doing so would
render my dream a pipe-dream since it's very unlikely that I'd be able to
learn how to make huge consisten profits on my own.

So here's the plan. I've already spent a couple hundred bucks on books on
stock trading and I've already been reading them obsessively lately as my
friends already know too well. Over the next year, I'm probably going to
end up spending a couple thousand more on educational products while
putting a couple thousand into an investment account. Basically, the
quickly I learn how to make large, consistent profits, the quicker I can
retire. Once I save from my job and make from investments about $150 grand
and have a history of making large, consistent profits, I should be able to
quit my day job and devote my energy into investing.

But as I've mentioned before, at this stage of the game, I think the
wisest investment for me is education. That's education about how to make
lots and lots of money.

There. I've said it. These are my goals and I've written them down and now
all of you know what it is. I know nearly all of you are thinking that I'm
insane, and that I'll probably end up wasting a lot of money, giving it to
hustlers and sharks who make bold claims about worthless products that
promise to be the 'be all, end all' solution to investing. And I agree, that
might happen. But for the chance to retire in my 20's, I'm willing to make
that bet. If any of you out there are with me, let me know and we'll take
this journey together.

A warning: I'm going to try to keep the money talk out of this page since
I know most people don't like talking about money. (I personally believe that
if you don't like talking about money, then you'll never have enough of it.)
But I'm going to warn you that I might be able to hold my tongue very well.

---

Thursday, June 20, 2002

I gotta say, I work wasn't that bad today. I was able to get through
the day without counting down the minutes. It's not that there was
anything different about work today, it's just have I'm starting to get
used to Visual C++. You see, I didn't learn it in school, but I learned
C++ (or ANSI C++ as implemented by gcc if you want to get technical).
I figured learning Visual C++ (which is Microsoft's flavor of C++)
wouldn't be too different. Boy, was I wrong. I'd never programmed a
windows application before, and it's a completely different paradigm.
What I learned in school was how to program procedure-driven console
applications. Visual C++ is event-driven windows applications. Just
adding a graphical user interface changes things a lot. Anyhow, by today
I was starting to change my programming mindset from a procedure driven
one to an event driven one and things started to make sence. Of course I
still don't have a good handle on Visual C++ yet, but I'm getting there.

---

Tuesday, June 18, 2002

News Flash: At the World Cup, Korea beats Italy 2-1 in overtime.
Korea moves up to the quarterfinals against spain. There's one for the
homeland.

To read more, go to ESPN.

---

For the second straight day in a row, I spent most of the day seated
in from at a desk staring at the same glowing square foot. I wish I could
at least see a window from my desk. Maybe I should start going earlier
just so I don't have to stay until 6. I dunno... 9 hours at work is a
long time.

Btw, I got a new email address.
samuelahn@directvinternet.com. Start sending me email to that address
since I don't know how much longer my HMC address will last. I should
also move this page over to my free web space from my ISP.

---

Monday, June 17, 2002

Last Friday, I received the DSL gateway from DirecTVDSL and got it all
set up. It took only about a week instead of the 3-4 weeks they told me
it was going to take. So that made me happy. My router and everything works
fine with the DSL Gateway, so I have the router plugged into the gateway,
one of my computers plugged into the router, and my laptop connected
to the router wirelessly (maybe you wouldn't really call that connected, but
the laptop is happily chatting away with the router). Soon, I'll plug
in my old linux box and probably get a web server going or something.
One thing that is dissappointing is that I'm only getting about 800kbps
downlink speed whereas I'm paying for 1.5Mbps. I guess I'm too far from
the central office to get 1.5Mbps, so maybe I'll change to the 750kbps
plan for about 10 bucks less a month. Anyhow, that's cool and all.

Another thing happened last friday. After driving back from San Diego,
my car died on me. It wouldn't start. It wouldn't crank or anything. So
I got it towed to Pep Boys and they told me I needed a new starter, but
they didn't have one in stock. They said they'd be able to get order one
and have everything fixed by about Saturday at noon. So my mom goes
back to pick up the car on Saturday at noon while I'm away at the seminar
but they said that the starter they got was deffective. They'd be able to
get a new one and get everything fixed by saturday night. So we go
back on saturday night and then they tell us that the other starter they
got was the wrong size. So they said they'd have to get another and it
would be done by Monday. So today I go to Pep boys and they have the
correct starter but they haven't installed it yet. The receptionist said
I could wait about half an hour and they'd install it for me. Before
the mechanic installs the starter, he tests the one on my car which is
supposed to be dead, and it works fine. Another test later, he said it's
not my starter but my battery that's bad. So ... after all that I end up
just getting a new battery. It was extremely frustrating. Steve had to
give me a ride to work today and came with John and Joon from the beach
to pick me up. (Sorry I broke up your little beach bash.)

Speaking of work, today was my first day. I guess it wasn't too bad.
It wasn't exciting, but it wasn't too bad. My hours are going to be
from 9am to 6pm (but it's flexible, I can come in any time between
7 and 10 as long as I put in my 8 hours of work a day). And it looks like
it's going to be pretty busy. There's always work to be done so it doesn't
look like there's going to be any time sitting around waiting for the
supervisor to tell me what to do. Like I mentioned, lunch was provided.
It's catered. Today we had ribs, rice, bread, and salad. Not bad at all.
Not great, but not bad. What's kinda funny is that a number of the
programmers were playing some first-person shooter during their lunch
break. Can you imagine? I got back from lunch ready to get to work, when
I notice a bunch of explosion sounds coming from somewhere in the room,
followed by a programmer shouting instructions to another programmer
on the other side of the room. "You go around the right, I'll get him from
the top!" Another thing that's interesting is that they company hired
one other programmer this summer. Another mudder from my class.

This being my first day of work, I learned a very good reason to be
very interested in investing. Because it would simply suck to work in a job
like this for the next 40 or so years of my life. Someone I had lunch
with a few days ago feels that the 9-5 job is one of the worst possible
tortures available to man.

Anyway, It's about 11pm now, and I should get to bed soon. I'm a working
man now and I gotta have a working man's sleeping schedule.

---

Sunday, June 16, 2002

It's been a pretty busy week. I had lunch and dinner with various
people. Hung out with Steve and John Park (recently back from West Point)
and Joon Kim a number of times. Visited Joon in Santa Barbara. Went to
pick up my brother in San Diego and ended up spending the night there
because the 5 freeway was blocked off because of some police chase. And
I went to an investing seminar organized by

Rich Dad's Seminars yesterday. The seminar cost $295 and went from
9am to 6pm and covered subjects from sales to intellectual property to
incorporating to tax loopholes to real estate investing to stock investing,
etc. At the seminar, I bought two boardgames for about $300 total.

Since I've started reading those Rich Dad books by Robert Kiyosaki,
I guess I've been a little preoccupied with the idea of money and making
money. It seems to me that a little bit of studying now in the areas of
financial education will result in differences of hundreds of thousands of
dollars in the next few years. Consider the fact that most of the richest
in America don't get rich by making a big salary (sports stars are the
exception). They make their fortunes by building companies and selling them,
either privately or in the stock market, and by investing. And yet, most
of Americans still live under the impression that getting a secure, high-
salary job is the best way to go. I've been learning that it isn't
difficult to make lots of money easily through various types of investments,
it just takes a bit of studying. The most important investments you can
make is your time in financial education. All this begs the question
that if making money investing is so easy, then why don't more people
do it? I would guess that most people who try to invest don't take the time
to learn how to invest, and end up losing money. They don't learn how to
invest because the subject of investing is damn boring. For me, though,
all this is starting to get pretty exciting. I'm learning to play Monopoly
in real life with real money.

Anyhow, despite the fact that I'm reading all these books on how to get
rich, I wouldn't consider myself greedy. It's not so much that I want lots
of money so that I can buy lots of luxuries; I want to retire a few years
(or decades) earlier than most people so I can spend the time doing things
I enjoy rather than being cooped up in an office. I want to be able to
work fewer hours while making more money. And of course I want to be
"comfortable," whatever the heck that means.

The two games I bought at the seminar are pretty interesting. I was
trying to play the first one with my brother last night. It's more of
an educational product than a game, though, since it's very complicated
and designed to reflect the real world. This game is like Monopoly on
steroids. Sure, there's real estante in this game, but it's only a small
part of it. You can also invest in businesses (pre-IPO or established),
stocks, CD's, mutual funds, etc etc. Everything is recorded on your
financial statement where the real game happens. I explained it to Steve
and he said it was everything he hated about being an econ major rolled into
a game. And that's the point, to make it more interesting to learn the
boring basics of investing.

In any case, I'm still in the studying and planning stages of getting
rich. I guess it's a good thing I don't yet have the money to invest because
there's still a lot left to learn. The first thing to start with is a
personal financial statement. Gotta get my accounting down.

---

Thursday, June 13, 2002

I start work in a few days, on June 17. I guess I didn't really have much
of a summer break, but I guess I should start to get used to that. No more
summer breaks for me. Oh well... I've been keeping myself busy. I finished the
first three Rich Dad books (Rich Dad Poor Dad, Rich Dad's Cashflow
Quadrant, Rich Dad's Guide to Investing). And I've seen some
high school friends. I helped Steve and his family move this weekend. And I
visited Joon with Steve and John last night. Good times, good times. I
should be getting DSL in a few days ...

I should prepare myself for work. I hope it's not too painful.

---

Thursday, June 6, 2002

Now that I know I'll probably be living at home for the next year or
few years, I took the liberty tonight of ordering myself some broadband
internet. Up to this point I've been using AOL on a second phone line and
naturally, after having gotten used to the ethernet at school, I can't
stand dial-up. I spent a few hours tonight looking up the broadband options
I have and found out that there is no cable internet in my area, but a few
DSL options, namely DirecTVDSL, Earthlink, VerizonOnline, and some other
smaller providers. In the end, it came down to Earthlink or DirecTVDSL
which had the same price ($50 a month)
for the same level of service. I ended up choosing
DirecTVDSL despite the fact that I really would liked to have chosen Earthlink.
The only advantage offered by DirecTVDSL was that it's $30 for the first
3 months (and $50 a month thereafter). It makes me a little uneasy to be
getting internet service from a company that specializes in satelite TV, but
oh well. I guess they've expanded. It also worries me that I had to connect
not with your typical DSL modem but with their proprietary "gateway" hardware
which they provide at no cost. I also ordered a router/print server/wireless
access point from buy.com so I can share the connection with the various
computers I have at home. I hope their gateway doesn't confuse my router.
Anyway, it'll take them 3-4 weeks to get all the DSL stuff set up with
the phone company and all that. Hopefully all this will live up to the hype.

---

Wednesday, June 5, 2002

I accepted the job offer this morning. So starting June 17, I'll be working
at Laserfiche as a Software Systems
Engineer (a.k.a. programmer). Benefits include medical, dental, vision, and
lunch. That's right, lunch is provided every day! There are few things in life
better than free food. I don't know what they usually serve yet, but
somehow it wouldn't surprise me all that much if it was pizza everyday
since it's a software company and some people would say programmers live
on pizza and mountain dew. I hope
not.

---

Tuesday, June 4, 2002

In the July 2002 issue of Sport Compact Car, Christian Rado
writes on page 28 about driving cross country to get to his various drag
racing events. About getting food on the road, he write, "But racers
can't live on Waffle House alone, which is why
we've orgainized an informal database of 24-hour Korean barbecue
places across the country. Korean BBQ is the road food of the gods
because the waitress brings you whatever you want raw and then you cook
it at your table. Like your beef well done?
Let it turn to ash. Like it red? Wave it over the grill and eat it, cold blood
and all. My favorite is a place just off I-495 in Alexandria, Virginia called
Yechon. It's awesome 24-7."

It's good to see Korean BBQ get some recognition.

---

News Flash: I just got a job offer from the company I interviewed
with yesterday. They want a decision by tomorrow morning. Oh happy day. I
guess I don't need a kitten after all. I'm sure some money flowing into
my pocket will serve just as well. (Note: cross-ref guestbook)

---

Monday, June 3, 2002

I had an interview today for a programming position. Damn, I seriously
hate interviews. I wish I could get a nice job handed to me on a silver
platter. Anyhow, I'm going to keep my fingers crossed until I hear back.

---

Sunday, June 2, 2002

I should give a little update on what I've been up to before I lose all my
readership. I have been relaxing at home. Haven't really been looking for a job
too hard, but fortunately I got a call for an interview tomorrow for an entry
level programming position at Laserfiche. I've been reading a lot. I've been
reading the Rich Dad Poor Dad series. I finished Rich Dad Poor
Dad and Rich Dad's Cashflow Quadrant a few days ago and am currently
reading Rich Dad's Guide to Investing. I'm going to try to reading
more books about investing before the end of this summer. I intend to be
rich when I grow up, and not by having a high salary.

---

A few nights ago, I had a nightmare, the kind where you wake up in the
middle of the night sweating. I was driving downhill on a mountain road
near Yosemite. I recognized it from my camping trip there a few weeks ago.
Only, I wasn't driving my little japanese import, I was driving a big rig,
an 18 wheeler, a semi-tractor trailer. And the sheer weight of the truck
combined with brake fade rendered my brakes useless. So I was speeding down
the mountain without any brakes and barely making the turns.
I swear, I felt like
I was going to die. Finally, when I got to a flat straightaway, I was about
to bring the truck to a stop. Then, I woke up feeling like crap.

---

Thursday, May 30, 2002

On Tuesday, I got new tires for my car at Costo. Bridgestone Potenza RE740.
That was the only tire they had in my size. Tirerack.com categorizes that tire
under ultra-high performance all-season tires so I was happy, though the
tire was not exactly cheap. Today, I finally got those Koni sport shocks
I had lying around for a long time installed and got a frontend alignment.
Afterwards, I took my car for a short drive. First impressions? The new
tires don't seem to have as much traction as my bald Pirelli's which is
bad, but they probably have 100 times the wet traction of my old bald tires
which is good. Also, these new tires don't squeel when they lose traction,
the just make sort of a scrubbing noise. This is very good since tire squeel
attracts attention, and that's the last thing I want when I'm sliding my tires.
The new shocks make a very nice different, particularly because my old shocks
were shot (or at least that's what they told me the last time I look my
car to the nissan dealer). The car seems much better planted, by which I mean
there's much less motion when the car goes over bumps. This is particularly
noticeable going over speed bumps, since before the car would sort of rock
over the speed bump. This also means that the car maintains direction much
better when going over road irregularites when turning at high speed.
Finally, I want to say that the car handles more neutrally (less understeer)
at the limit, though maybe it just feels like that because the tires have
less tration. I just find that the rear is a lot more eager to step out when
I brake midcorner. It was a little startling at first, but I like it.

One odd thing that changed is that I used to get wheel shimmy (my steering
wheel would shake back and forth) between 75 and 80 mph. Now I get wheel
shimmy around 70 mph though it's much less pronounced.
I'd like to get rid of it for good.

All in all, all this was a fairly significant investment, but I'm reasonably
satisfied with the way it turned out.

---

Monday, May 27, 2002

Isn't It Ironic? Don't you think?

Sorry I haven't written for a while. I've been doing a bunch of random
stuff. Last Monday, I went to Magic Mountain with about 8 other Pathfinder
people and I went to Yosemite from Tuesday through Friday. I had a great time.
I would like to go back sometime and finish that Halfdome trail. It's more
than 17 miles round trip, walks by two different waterfalls and ends at a
point looking over the entire Yosemite valley. I got within a mile of the peak
and turned around since we wanted to get back to our campsite before dark.
One guy in our group, Joshua Sanchez, made it to the top, but only because he
sprinted ahead of the group like a madman. There's no way I would've been able
to follow him at his speed.

Anyway, I got my transcript a few days ago. I got the best grades in college
I've ever got. I had about 7 classes totalling 22 units and I got my best
grades for any semester. 3.60. Last semester I got my lowest grades at 1.87
and I only had 5 classes. Isn't it ironic? I feel better now. I thought I was
getting stupid, but apparantly that's not the case. Now I don't really have
to worry about the karma of ever decreasing grades hang
over my head.

---

Wednesday, May 15, 2002

The setting: Last night at Ducey Gym at the Pathfinder study break.
Someone (I can't remember who) pitched the whiffle ball to me. I swung the
bat, hit the ball clear across the gymnasium. The ball hit the backboard and
went in the hoop. That was pretty cool.

When I was in elementary school, I did little league baseball and
basketball. I was absolutely horrible. Unathletic. Uncoordinated. Weak. Etc.
I was a shame to my team. Needless to say, I didn't do that very long. I
think I did it for a single season. Anyway, so that was the last I played
baseball for a while.
A few years later, my little brother joined little league baseball,
and he's pretty good. So occasionally I would go with him to the batting cages
so he could practice his batting. And instead of just standing there watching
him bat, I'd get my own cage and practice batting myself. And since my brother
was in little league for a while, we did this quite a few times. Now, despite
the fact that I never play baseball, I can bat pretty dang well.

---

Tuesday, May 14, 2002

Today, I spent a fairly significant chunk of time organizing a bunch of
Pathfinder photos I got from various people so I can compile them into a
CD to distribute to the seniors in Pathfinder. I also went to the
Pathinder Wiffle Ball study break. And I emailed out a few more resumes.
I'm still hunting for a job. Why do I say this? I don't know. I'm pretty
sure I had something better to say when I started typing, but I can't remember
anymore. Oh, if you'd like a copy of that CD, let me know.

---

Monday, May 13, 2002

I went to the beach this afternoon with some Pathfinder seniors. I had a
good time.

You know what I think is cool about this thing I write here on the
internet? It's going to be around for a long long time. For one thing,
there's some company that takes snapshots of everything on the internet
every now and then, so this'll be stored in their archive somewhere. But
even besides that, it'll be around as long as I keep a place for it. For
example, I plan to take this to some other space on the web after I graduate.
People can misplace journals or throw them away or whatnot, but it's harder
to do that with something that's online.

The summer after I graduated from high school, I created my first website.
It was something of an experiment with advertising on the web as there were
several companies that paid you for putting banners on your site. I ended
up making a few bucks, nothing significant, and those web advertising companies
went out of business. But what's really surprising (and I this is the
biggest lesson I learned from it) is that the page is still around
despite the fact that I haven't touched it in several years. I can't even
remember the password I need to update it. And it gets tons more hits than
this stupid little page. In the less than 4 years it's been around, it's
gotten more than 164,000 hits from around the world! It's odd to think that
even today I can read a whole collection of stuff I wrote in highschool.
You can take a look at the page
here.

---

Sunday, May 12, 2002

I'm basically done with my work. I just have some loose ends to tie up.
Now I've got one week until graduation, and not much planned. I should look
for a job during that week. Sigh ... I wish I had gotten an offer already.
This sucks.

I went home this weekend. It was very odd. It's going to take me some time
go adjust to living at home. No more staying up late, and waking up late.
No more reason to stay up late since there's nothing going on. No one to
chat with. Everyone else is asleep. No homework due the next day... that's
the biggest thing. For basically the past four years, I've always had a
million things to do. Now ... I don't really have anything to do. That's
going to take some getting used to.

You know... I think I might be getting better grades this
semester than I have since I was a freshman. Well, I'm keeping my
fingers crossed.

---

Thursday, May 9, 2002

I just got back from the Pathfinder Spring Banquet... my last Pathfinder
banquet. At the banquet, this one verse rang true: "'A new command
I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one
another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you
love one another.'" John 13:34-35.

I have become convinced that the one thing that makes Christians different
from the rest of the world is our capacity to love each other. I have
also become convinced that it's a sad thing when (as I'm so guilty of)
we don't demonstrate that love.

---

Tuesday, May 7, 2002

Last Sunday I had dinner with Steve Park at Platt. We both had our
Theries of the Good Life final paper to write that night about (naturally)
our theory of the good life. Steve asked me what my theory of the good life
was and I told him that I'd find out once I wrote my paper. Well, I wrote
my paper and I guess I figured out what my theory of the good life is.
But you'll have to wait a few days to read my conclusion.

Here is a portion of our conversation on a different topic.

Steve: "Would you like to be a freshman again?"

Sam: "I wouldn't want to go through another four years of this, but
I wish I had it to do over again."

---

Sunday, May 5, 2002

When I was younger, my mom did the laundry on the weekends. When the
laundry was done, she would ask me or my brother to bring it to the
living room to be folded. I would stuff all the laundry into that big
black garbage bag we used as a laundry bag, sling it over my shoulder and
haul it to the living room. Whenever I did that, I always had the urge to
say, "Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas."

Today's Quote: Read
the Acknowledgments section in this scsh manual.

---

Saturday, May 4, 2002

You know, when I was in high school, a friend of mine commented that
she could not imagine me falling in love, as if I were incapable of
love. I know I don't have any sort of emotions, but seriously,
isn't that ridiculous?

---

Thursday, May 2, 2002

I took my Financial Econ final today and I think I did pretty well. That
made me happy.

I got a rejection email from a company I interviewed last week for a
summer internship that I thought I had a pretty good chance of getting. That
made me sad.

The orange juice at Platt at dinner was better than usual. I had two
glasses. That made me happy ... whatever that means for a person like me.

---

Wednesday, May 1, 2002

Sand Ripples

I just turned in my Sand Ripples final project for my
Scientific Computing Class. The assignment was to use a computing to
model some phenomena so I worked with Jordan Kwan and Peter Lamb to
model sand ripples using a discrete cellular automata model. Here's the
resulting paper for those of you who're interested. I just thought it
was cool enough to be worth sharing. :) Yes, I'm a nerd.

A Computer Simulation of Sand Ripple Formation

Dang, I gotta remember not to eat a lot of chips in a single sitting. Argh, I
feel sick now. And it doesn't help that I'm working on my final project for
my History of the Future class.

Today's Quote:

Reporter (to Mahatma Gandhi): Mr Gandhi, what do you think of Western
Civilization?

Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.

---

Saturday, April 27, 2002

The Consumer Culture

(disclaimer: I admit that oftentimes my spending habits aren't the smartest
and some people may consider me hypocritical because of what I write here.
Ultimately, this is what I believe, and like so many things people believe,
it isn't always reflected in my lifestyle. Also, I realize that I directly
and indirectly attack certain types of people in this essay [though
noone in particular] at the risk
of alienating myself from those types of people. I can accept that.)

One thing that's happened to me during these four years of college is that
I've come to distrust advertisements and large companies in general.

My Closet

Let me start this essay with something somewhat unrelated. In my
brother's blog, my brother
wrote that clothes can say things about the personality of a person, and
then he went on to analyze the contents of his closet. Let me do that here. The
newest article of clothing in my closest is a pair of jeans which my
mom bought me about two months ago because I attended her to the mall.
She would've bought me more since she doesn't like the way that I dress
but I refused. Before that, I bought a pair of dress shoes and a dress shirt
during winter break, again at the insistence of my mother. Before that,
I bought a pair of jeans at the end of the last school year because I
needed jeans for the Pathfinder Spring Banquet and I didn't own a pair.
Besides those, I own a collection of plain white (under) shirts (6 for $10)
and boxers my mom bought for me at Price Club. I own a collection of
free shirts with corporate logos that I got at various career fairs on
campus, and some other clothing (pants and shirts) I've owned for years.
Oddly enough, a portion of the
newer clothes in my closet are hand-me-downs from
my younger brother, who tends to dress better than me,
clothes that for some reason or another he
stopped wearing. On a typical day, I'll wear jeans or an old pair of khakis,
a white t-shirt (either plain or with a corporate logo),
and a sweater. People who know me probably recognize me by my sweater, that
same black zippered sweater I wear almost every day. It admit it's rather
sloppy, but fortunately for me, I go to Mudd where there's plenty of people
that dress worse. I don't like buying clothes and I try to avoid the mall.
I don't know exactly what the way I dress says about me, but maybe
it says exactly what I'm going to say here.

McDonald's

This morning (or afternoon, rather)
I woke up after the dining hall closed so I ate at McDonald's,
mostly for nostalgia's sake. When I was younger, going to McDonald's was a
treat I rarely got.

I remember when I was a perhaps in Middle School, I heard a preacher
comment that McDonald's is not in the business of selling burgers. They're
in the business of selling their name. It made little sense to me at the
time since all I really knew about McDonald's is that I went there and bought
burgers. But now, the statement makes perfect sense. Who honestly goes to
McDonald's for the food? (I know most of you don't usually eat at McDonald's
but humor me.) The food (as I was reminded today) is absolutely
horrible. The only reasons that people eat at McDonald's is because of
habit (they've eaten there since they were kids), because it's convenient
(it's the fastest of fast foods), and most importantly, because McDonald's
does such a good job with advertising. It's that advertising I find
interesting. First of all, I think it's interesting to note that in McDonald's
commercials, the food tends to be almost an afterthought when compared with
other commercials. Also, based on the McDonald's commericals I've seen, I
would guess that significantly more than half of their advertising budget
is spent advertising Happy Meals. Who can forget that red and yellow clown
Ronald McDonald? And even the happy meals in those commercials are downplayed.
The emphasis is on the toys, and how magical and fun McDonald's is. The
intention seems to be to ingrain the McDonald's name and logo into the
minds youngsters and associate it with something happy and fun, thereby
ingraining it into the American culture ... that is in America. In Korea,
they try to ingrain it into the Korean culture, and in other countries, they
try to ingrain it into the culture of the respective country. Apparantly,
their advertising strategy seems to be very effective seeing how
McDonald's is almost synonymous with fast food. And all this has nothing to
do with food.

In that video that Steve mentioned
we saw in our Theories of the Good Life class, there was a clip from a
conference titled Kid Power. The conference had nothing to do with
empowering kids. It was about advertising to kids. The conference speaker
in the clip said that if you don't brand people by their 18th birthday,
then it's already too late. I'm sure this is the premise on which all of the
McDonald's advertising is based.

(exercise: Compare and Contrast McDonald's which has good advertising and
bad burgers with In n' Out which had bad advertising and good burgers.)

The Nature Company

In my Political Economy of the Environment class, we had to read an
article titled "Looking for Nature at the Mall: A Field Guide to the
Nature Company" by Jennifer Price in the book Uncommon Ground.
In the article, Price talks about her experience when she encountered the
Nature Company at South Coast Plaza in Irvine. The Nature Company has 124
locations in the US, and 22 locations in other parts of the world. They
sell nature oriented goods like inflatable penguins and other toys, rocks,
nature videos, nature "inspired" music, music of indiginous people, and
other gifts and doodads. She says that at the Nature Company, shoppers
sometimes feel uneasy about the store and manipulated into buying something.
After all, the name "The Nature Company" seems like an oxymoron since nature
shouldn't be something you can package and purchase. Right? And a nature
store in the mall of all places? Why would the patrons of these large
upscale malls be looking to purchase nature at the mall? The fact is that
there is a fair bit of manipulation going on in The Nature Company stores.
With carefully crafted window displays of streams and rocks, with slightly
darker lighting and more pronounced shadows, with a very earthy color
scheme, the stores themselves are designed to look like an oasis in the
mall and to ironicly promote a feeling of uncommericalism. The
aisles are narrow and the shelf carefully cluttered to keep patrons in the
store as long as possible, exploring the shelves and playing with the goods.
All this to stimulate that impulse purchase. After all, nothing the store
sells really has any purpose. According to CML, The Nature Company's parent
company, The Nature Company sells products for stress relief.

However, the specifics of The Nature Company wasn't exactly what interested
me in the article. It just served as sort of a case study of the mall in
general, since the entire mall itself is built to be just as manipulative
as The Nature Company, it's only more ironic with The Nature Company because
it's The Nature Company.

The Mall. Palaces of Consumerism. (and frankly a place I can't stand.)
Price writes, "the mall itself specializes in the strategic marketing of
things people don't really need. It can be hard to find something you do
need. Why, for example, in the entire acreage of the mall, can't you find a
bar of Dial soap? ... It's been statistically proven that the longer we
stay, the more we buy. Hence, no Dial. No drugstores,
Safeway, or dry cleaners. Necessities encourage beeling, goal-oriented,
quick-exit shopping." Most people already know that there are no windows
or clocks in Casinos so that gamblers would have little sense of time and
end up gambling longer. Similarly, the mall is built to get you lost.
"The upscale mall pulls in shoppers through a few well-spaced entrances,
and keeps us rambling around inside (the current average mall visit lasts
three hours) to stimulate the impulse purchase."

Affluenza

The video Steve and I saw in our Theories of the Good Life class
was a PBS special about a disease they called affluenza which is basically
the habit of people to spend so much as to make themselves unhappy which
so characterizes our society.

Hmm ... become unhappy by spending too much. That's an unfamiliar idea,
isn't it? ... especially in a society where shopping is supposed to be
a fun and relaxing pasttime.

The video starts by interviewing a couple who'd gathered $20 grand of
credit card debt and faced bankruptcy. Because of their financial situation,
the argued often and were close to getting a divorce. Ultimately, they
were able to get a handle on their financial situation after going to the
Credit Councilling Bureau who consolidated their debt and taught them to
save. They admitted to having a more fulfilling life after learning to spend
less. In this situation, it's easy to see how spending too much made
this couple unhappy.

At the other end of the spectrum was a stock broker who decided he'd be
happier by spending less. He saved more money, retired early, and then
travelled the country speaking at conferences teaching people to spend less.
According to the video, he spends only $7 grand a year and gives the money
he earns from speaking engagements and book sales to charity.

The most striking portion of the video was that on advertising. The video
claimed that people were caught up in the consumer frenzy is because of
advertising which preaches to them from the day the first glance at a
television that buying these products would make them a better person.
If they buy these clothes, or this car, or this fragrance, they'll
be happier, more beautiful, cooler, more accepted, more romantic, etc.
etc. etc. The ads imply that without those products, people are essentially
worthless. Since we're bombarded by so many advertisements during our
lifetimes, many Americans grow up buying into that message. The video
demonstrated this by interviewing a few high school students who said they
felt that their classmates would stare and think badly of them if they
weren't wearing the right things. We define
ourselves and people define us
by the things we buy. Price (from the previous section) sums it up
saying, "in an urban society of comparative anonymity and an abundance of
commodities, we use the things we buy to define ourselves. The clothes, the
sound system, the books, the computers, the kind of car and the bumper
stickers: these have become key tools not only for keeping busy but for
creating distinctive self-identities."

What makes me uneasy is the fact that when I buy brand name goods, a
significant portion of what I pay for that good goes to advertising.
I pay the company to tell me that I want their product. It also
makes me uneasy that oftentimes the price of a good doesn't pay for the
good, it pays for the name stuck on it. It makes me uneasy is that
people buy into what the advertisers tell them, believing that others are
somehow inferior because they don't buy the right clothes,
or drive the right car, or
look the right way, or shop at the right places. It makes me uneasy that
people will buy a million things they don't need because advertisers tell them
that they need it. Or because society as a whole buys into the advertisers
and society thinks they need it.

Here's something interesting to consider. The video talked about an
organization called the Adbusters
which makes ads and promotes campaigns urging people to spend and consume
less, watch less TV, and not to buy into advertisements. These "uncommercials"
are intended to fill a typical 30 second commercial slot, but TV networks
refuse to air it despite the fact Adbusters will pay for the airtime just like
any other commercial. I guess the networks wouldn't want to risk losing other
advertisers by airing an uncommercial.

The video left viewers with the message that one should consider whether
or not it would be worth the extra work required to pay for a product
before buying it.

After watching the video, the class had a short discussion about its
contents. To me the message seemed pretty self evident. I've long
felt that people are too caught up with making money and spending money.
A lot of the people who spoke seemed to feel the same way and agreed with the
message the video conveyed. What was surprising to me was the fact that
some people seemed to be offended by the video and made defensive comments
arguing that these people who made the program
shouldn't tell them how they should or shouldn't
spend their money. All I'll say to that is advertisers have been telling
us how to spend our money our entire lives.

Politics, Economy, Sustainability, and Environment

According to the video, the last president that urged the country to
spend less was Jimmy Carter. And he lost the reelection by a landslide.
Since Carter, no president has made the mistake of telling people to spend
less. Instead, they promise to grow the economy and increase the GDP
so that people make more money, spend more money, and have more stuff.
Unfortunately, an increase in the GDP doesn't mean an increase in the standard
of living. It doesn't mean that society will be happier and live more
fulfilling lives. It does mean that companies will make more money. It
does fit into the teachings of consumerism.

Most people know that Americans spend more and consume more per capita
than any other people in the world. What most people don't know, is that
the world can't support a world full of people living like Americans.
That means if everyone in the world consumed as much resources and made
as much pollution as the typical American, the world would soon run
out of resources and become so polluted that either people would die, or
the rates of consumption would have to decrease sufficiently so that it
could be supported by the earth. In biology, this idea is called
carrying capacity. A particular pond can only support so many frogs. Similarly,
the earth can support only so many humans living at a particular standard.
Thus, trying to make Americans consume more while believing that
in an ideal world everyone would live like Americans is irresponsible, not
to mention that situation is impossible for the long run.
Knowing that, bringing up the standard of living to equitable standards
worldwide would require that Americans consume less.

Naturally, this message isn't found outside environmental research
papers and academic books. The media will never say anything like this
since they want the public to spend lots of money purchasing their products
without concerns about the resources consumed and polution caused
in making the product. Politicians will never say it because politicians
would lose donations from companies and support from their consituents
who believe that it's their right to consume as much as possible.

Conclusion

I've rambled on for a while trying to make a few points.

Don't trust everything you see on TV. We get a very biased
view of the world from the media because they want to sell a product.
Advertisers want to sell you whatever they sell, and the media
wants to sell space to advertisers. Thus they won't give you any sort of
message that goes against the consumerist ideology. Because of that,
consumerism has become so ingrained in our society, which gets its view of
the world largely from watching sit-coms and commercials, that the message of
spending less is foreign to most people and offensive to some. Politicians,
for the same reason will spout irresponsible ideas promoting consumerism
in the name of economic progress to appease the money-grubbing goals of
corporations and fit into the ideology the people have come to accept.
Know that unbounded economic growth is impossible and that teaching it is
irresponsible. The toll on the earth should be accounted for since
refusing to do that could result in dire consequences for future generations.
Be wary of advertisements. They are trying to manipulate you in a very real
way. They only say that you'll be cool if you buy their product because
they're trying to sell you that product. Their product probably won't
make you cool, except maybe in the eyes of other people that bought into
the advertisement (which unfortunately is a lot of people). Basically, what I'd
like to boil this down to is the idea that while everyone would like you
to think that you'd be happier by spending more money and owning more
stuff, the reality is that stuff usually doesn't make people happier.
People tend to have more fulfilling lives when they spend less effort
making and spending money and spend more effort participating in community,
whether that community be family or friends or local groups. The goal
should be less about amassing stuff, but about appreciating the things that
you do have and connecting with the people around you.

---

Wednesday, April 24, 2002

Sat on by a Ghost

You know how sometimes at night when you're trying to sleep, you wake
up and lay there for a while not being able to move a muscle, and you
struggle and struggle and you can't move and it gets hard to breath
and it feels like a big fat ghost is sitting on you? Don't you just hate
that? Yeah, I hate it, too. It happened to me again last night. Dang,
I wish those big fat ghosts would keep to themselves when I'm trying to sleep.
Sheesh.

---

Tuesday, April 23, 2002

Down to the Wire

I find that I'm at an interesting point in my life. I graduate on May
19, though my semester actually ends on the 11th (that's when the profs need
to turn in senior grades). I'm still looking for a job, and it has me
worried. I'd like to get a job before I graduate, which leaves me about
three weeks or so.

Up to this point my life has been pretty tightly structured.
Before college, of course, I lived with my parents and I did what my parents
told me to do. I went up through the grades like every one else.
Elementary school. Then middle school. Then high school.

At the end of high school I guess I felt something like I do now.
College brought new freedoms and new responsibilities. I wasn't living
with my parents anymore. I was free for the most part to spend my time as
I liked. But still for the most part I had to follow a pretty rigid schedule,
but more than that I knew where I was going to be in the next year. That is,
I'd still be in college.

Now it's different. This is the point where paths seem to diverge.
This is the point where I'm faced with decisions that will affect my life
in ways that I can't even imagine, and yet it seems like I didn't leave
myself with a lot of choices. What's frightening for me is that I don't
know where I'll be a year from now, or even two months from now.
Where will I be working (assuming I find a job)? Will I be living at home
or will I need to find an apartment? What will I do with my free time?
Who will I hang out with? What will I do for fun? Will I be living alone
in a tiny apartment with no friends around? What will being in the work
force be like?

It's frightening and exciting. I can't really believe that I'll be out of
Mudd in a month. Only three more weeks of work to do... or maybe more like
two.

Despite the fact that I can't really say that I enjoyed being at Mudd,
it cetainly molded me in a lot of ways. I'm sure I'm a different person
now than I would have been if I'd gone to a school like Berkeley, even
if only by a little bit. I can only hope that I'm a better person.

I certainly learned a lot here. And not just about computer science and
math. I learned about discipline and hard work. I learned about stress
and trying to keep sane with a million things hanging over your head. I learned
about spending my weekends doing homework and about never leaving a
single city block for months on end. I learned about going without TV, going
without knowing what's going on outside this little bubble, not knowing
what's news or what new, not being bombarded by the media. All in all I'd have
to say it was a pretty lonely and lifeless existence, but hey, that builds
character, right? It builds character but not personality, something
I've probably lost over these four years.

Yes, I learned a lot but my lessons came slowly through countless mistakes.
A semester hasn't gone by where I didn't wish to do it over again. Each
semester I reflect knowing there were a million little things I should've
done differently, only to make the same mistakes in the next semester.

At the beginning of this semester I had decided to work harder than
all my previous semesters since I felt it would be bad karma to end on a
low note. For the most part I've been able to do that. I had about seven
classes this semester (22 units) since I needed exactly that many to
graduate, so this was probably the semester with the heaviest workload for me.
Even so, I wouldn't be surprised if I get the best grades I've gotten in
the past few years. Of course, graduating was a strong motivating factor.

So what now? Well, I still don't have a job offer. Hopefully I'll
be able to have something waiting for me by the time I graduate, even if it's
just a summer internship. I'd like to go to grad school and perhaps get my
Phd. What I see myself doing is working for a year or two while taking some
classes at perhaps a UC school to bring up my GPA. And to take all those
classes I didn't have time to take here ... databases, compilers, advanced
OS, advanced algorithms, graphics, etc etc. Then I'd go to grad school.
Believe it or not, I really find this stuff interesting.

Anyway, I'm going to have to focus these last few weeks. I've got seven
classes to deal with. That means I have two papers (three if you include
the clinic final report), three finals, two projects, and my clinic project
left to do. And I gotta find a job on top of that. It's going to be
a hectic few weeks. I can't wait until it's over.

---

Here's an interesting fact. There's a new porn club at Mudd. It's called
Adult Entertainment Enthusiasts. From the rumors I heard before, the
administration was against such as club since they didn't want to be
giving money to a club that would be spending it on porn, and they said that
they wouldn't fund it since the minimum age to watch porn is 18 and not
everyone on campus is 18. The people
founding the porn club countered with the fact that there's a microbrewery
club (they brew their own beer) and you need to be 21 to drink. So ...
I guess now we have a porn club, though I guess it goes well with our
queer club (PRISM - People Respecting Individuals Sexuality at Mudd) which
I believe previously held that role. Oddly enough, it appears that the three
founders of the porn club are female. Who woulda thought. Am I the only
one here that thinks it's a little wrong to have a college fund a porn club?
I know colleges and highly educated people tend to be more liberal than most,
but imagine the college literature listing our clubs and assocations.
People interested in the college will see the porn club next to our chess
club and ultimate frisbee club and linux club and queer club ... I wonder
how well a straight club would go down here. Maybe we could call it MHA
(Mudd Heterosexual Alliance) or Mudd Gay Bashers for short. Nah, I don't
think people would like that.

Today's Quote: The Tao of Programming. I first read this last summer when I was
programming all day at my last internship, and it felt very appropriate at the
time.

---

Monday, April 22, 2002

Of all the ridiculous things ... The
American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Robots.

---

Tuesday, April 16, 2002

Heh heh. Apparently, my brother
has been bit by the car bug.

So ... I gave my clinic presentation today. It was about a 20 minute
presentation split among the four people in my group. I got the first 5
minute chunk introducing our team and our project. That's 5 minutes of
talking in from of a crowd of more than 100 people. You know, I'm not
all that good at public speaking, but I enjoy it. I get an adrenaline rush.
My heart beats faster. My mouth gets dry. My breath gets short. It's
a rush. And all the while I know that the worst thing I can do is perhaps
make a fool out of myself in front of a large group of my peers. I mean, it's
not like you're asking a girl out on a date. That's where you can
really be shot down. Public speaking is easy compared to that. So, yes,
the presentation went reasonably well, and we got treated to lunch afterwards.

Today's quote: "I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous."

---

Monday, April 15, 2002

There's this guy one of my math classes who's apparently a Pitzer student.
He's worn a kilt to the past three classes. That's pretty bad in and of itself,
but the first time I noticed him wearing the skirt, we was also
wearing a chinese
shirt, black with white trim, kind of like a kung fu uniform. Now that was
absolutely horrendous. An a kilt with a kung fu shirt. *shudder*. Don't get
me wrong, I'm perfectly fine with cultural awareness, but if I
were Chinese or Irish, I would've been thoroughly offended at that outfit.

Recently I've been spending a bit more quality time with my punching bag.
So much so that my legs are sore and a little bruised. But, I'd say that my
kicks are getting rather powerful. They're damn ugly, but powerful. I think
it's rather interesting to note how different training styles result in
different skills. My brother who has been training in the standard tae kwon
do style 3 years longer than me has become quite a bit faster than me despite
the fact that he weighs slightly more. He can do pretty high kicks
effortlessly. I, on the other hand, quit tae kwon do almost 4 years ago
and stopped training for a while. But, about a year or so ago, I got myself a
punching bag and have been kicking and punching that for a while. The result?
My kicks are ugly, without form or style. Lacking in focus. Slow. But all
that's made up by brute strength. That's the difference between training by
kicking the air or those split focus targets, and kicking the punching bag.
I wish I could have practiced more with those focus targets, but since I didn't
have anyone to train with, it wasn't really an option for me. But now I think
I'll start to try and get the speed and form back into my kicks.

A kind of interesting result of my training is that if I were to try to
kick someone and he dodged, I would have a rather long recovery time. In
tae kwon do, speed in kicking is everything. You can essentially jab your
foot and recover fast enough that it doesn't matter whether the kick connects
or not. If I don't connect, I'd be helpless for a split second. I'm a little
interested to see the implications of that in sparring. I suspect that it
would cause me to kick only when I know I'll connect.

I also practice punching on the bag. Last night, while punching the bag,
I tore my left bag glove. I suspect that the sweat from my hands were
deteriorating the stitching.

At the beginning of the school year
I'd bought a pair of bag gloves and trained with them, though recently I've
been trying to drop my dependence on them. I bought the gloves since attacking
the bag barefisted would result in bruised knuckles and peeling skin.
With the gloves, I trained my punching and now I've become able to punch quite
a bit harder than before, though I had to change my punching style a bit to
prevent constantly twisting my wrist. It wasn't uncommon for me to hurt my
wrist when punching the bag since I didn't wrap them like boxers do.
Fortunataly, I haven't injured my wrist since I've changed my punching style.
I then realized that my knuckles were my weakest link in punching. Phsycally,
I was capable of punching harder and my wrists were able to take the power.
Unfortunately, my knuckles aren't able to absorb the punishment. Now
(especially with my torn glove), I'm going to be practicing bareknuckle.
Eventually, I imagine I'll be able to harden my knuckles to the point where
they're impervious to my punches on this (harder than human) bag.

Now what I wish I do is spar. My dodging and blocking have gone to almost
nothing (my blocking was never that good in the first place). If only I had
a partner to train with.

---

Tuesday, April 9, 2002

Lesson for the day: never make a freindly wager with a gambler.
In fact, never make any sort of wager with any sort of person that
involves any sort of money.

Well, I've sent out a bunch of resumes today to a bunch of different
companies. I hope something will come back positive. I know I've told this
to a number of people, but I've decided that if I don't find a job by the
time I graduate, I'm going to join the military. Yeah, a lot of people
have said that it would be a waste of my life, and that may be true. But as
I see it, there's nothing wrong with it as long as I get a challange
worthy of my level of education. That means no footsoldier duty for me.
And if I can learn a lot of technical stuff, gets lots of valuable job
experience, and get the government to pay for a large chunk of my grad school,
that seems like a pretty good deal, despite the fact that I'd be
handing a few years of my life over to the government on a silver platter.
Hopefully it won't come down to that, but if it does, that's my backup
plan. I'd rather do a challenging job in the military than a monkey job at
home.

Interestingly, from a discussion I had in my discussion group in my
Theories of the Good Life class, I gathered that I put a lot less weight on
freedom than did the other group members. The other group members argued that
a task is more enjoyable if you chose it over something else. I argued that
a task is just as enjoyable regardless of whether it was forced on you
or chosen by you (assuming you ended up doing the same thing). For example,
I would argue that I would enjoy the Simpsons just as much if I were forced
to watch it as if I chose to watch it. In both cases, I end up watching the
same show so I don't really see why it would be more enjoyable if I had
a choice in the first case. If in fact having the choice does make the task
more enjoyable, then one could easily force someone to do something with
a little more enjoyment by giving him the option of doing something you know
he's not going to choose. For example, if a parent wants his kid to rake the
lawn, he can give the kid the choice of either raking the lawn or going
without dinner.

Anyway, my point is that joining the military and then being forced to
say work on computers all day would not be any less enjoyable than
having a choice and choosing to work on computers all day. In fact, if I
know what I'm going to be forced to do, then I do essentially have a choice.
I think for me, just like some people would give up some pay to do what they
want to do, I would give up some freedom to do what I want to do.
(Is that an oxymoron?)

But again, hopefully it doesn't come down to that.

In other news ...

Let me introduce my clinic project for those of you who didn't take
the time to read the intro webpage linked in yesterday's post. At
Harvey Mudd, we have this thing called clinic that computer science majors,
engineering majors, and some math majors do in place of what other
colleges might assign as thesis. What happens is that a company has some
project that they want a team of students to work on
and gives the project to the college. At mudd, we get put into
teams of 4 or 5 students, plus a faculty member, and we get assigned to a
corporate project. My project happens to be for Qualcomm.

Qualcomm has developed a technology for wireless phone they call BREW
(Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless). It's basically an environment
that allows a single program to run on a variety of wireless phones
(analogous to the way that Java programs can run on a variety of operating
systems). So as a developer, I can write one solitaire program and expect
it to run on a bunch of phones powered by the Qualcomm chipset. The
user of the phone can actually download the program from the phone's
wireless web directly onto the phone for a small fee (like $1.50 for a
game). This service has already been released in South Korea and is
being rolled out in San Diego. Keep your eyes open for ads for BREW. Anyway,
compiling a BREW application requires the purchase of the commercial ARM
(Advanced RISC Machines) compiler which sells for the low, low price of
$1500 for BREW developers. Unfortunately, that's still a bit steep.
Our project was to adapt GCC (GNU Compiler Collection, a free compiler
written to work for a variety of languages and a variety of operating
systems on a variety of processors) to compile BREW applications, thereby
eliminating the need for the expensive ARM compiler. Fortunately, most
of the work required to get GCC compiling for the ARM processor was
already done. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work for BREW applications, and
we didn't know why. So basically, this project ended up being something of a
huge debugging thing. We looked for the places that GCC wasn't working quite
right, and wrote code to work around that. After banging our
head against the wall for a while, we finally got it to work during this
past week. We can take an BREW application written for the ARM compiler,
compile it using GCC, copy it onto the phone and watch it run. It's very
satisfying. Anyway, I just thought it was worth announcing to the world, as
this project has been consuming not an insignificant amount of my time during
this school year.

If you want to learn more (as improbable as that might be),
you can come to my clinic presentation on Tuesday, April 16 at Galileo
McAlister on the Harvey Mudd Campus at 11:00 am.

Today's Quote: "Grelb's Reminder: Eighty percent of all people consider
themselves to be above average drivers."

---

Monday, April 8, 2002

Going back to my headlights, I got the other bulb in, and the light
is a bit brighter. It's most noticeable when there aren't any street lights,
but I still gotta say that the light isn't as bright as the standard lights
on newer cars, presumeably due to newer D.O.T. lighting standards.
I would have to say that the difference is mostly cosmetic, and I given the
chance again, I think I would opt for the cheaper lights. I've read
that a few years ago before the D.O.T. changed their standards, the headlight
standards in America were far behind those in say Japan and Europe. So,
for example, the lights on the 240sx in Europe were far better than those
on the 240sx's bound for the United Stated because the European standards
were better than in those in the US. And the European lights were illegal in
most of the US. A few years ago, the DOT updated the lighting standards so
that now there is some overlap in the US and European standards so that
manufacturers can design one light for both Europe and the US.

A guy on the 240sx mailing has been trying to organize a group buy for
the 240sx headlights from a German Nissan dealer since the German lights
built to European (aka E-Code) standards are far better than the US lights.
Besides having a different beam pattern, they're made of glass rather than
plastic which gets yellow and cloudy with time. Also, the German lights are
for left hand drive cars unlike the lights on say Japanese 240sx's (note,
when I say 240sx, I mean S14's in general. I know the car isn't called 240sx
outside of the US). The side the driver sits matters since the beam pattern
is higher on the passenger side than on the driver side to reduce the amount
of glare to oncoming traffic. Anyway, so this guy has been trying to organize
the buy since last summer. The dealer in Germany originally quoted a price of
about $600 per set (that's two headlight housings per car). However,
recently that dealer raised the price to about $800 per set so the guy
organizing the buy is currently looking for another dealer.

I mention this because I would like to get those headlight housings.
Technically, they would be illegal in the US since they don't conform to the
US DOT standards, but it would take a keen eye to notice that they're
different, and anyone that knew anything about E-Code lights would know
that they're better than the US DOT lights.

Oddly, I've recently been noticing that it seems that cars with the
technically inferior sealed-beam headlights have brighter lighting than
mine. My guess is that since you have to replace the entire housing when the
bulb burns out, most sealed beam lights on the road are actually built to the
newer DOT standards. (This contrasts with lights like mine where you only
replace the bulb when it burns out, leaving me with old housings.)

But this is not what I really came here to say. I just thought I'd
add a little to what I wrote last time.

What I really wanted to talk about, is something that the assistant
teacher for my "History of the Future" mentioned in class today. He works
full time at a web development company and teaches this class alongside the
regular Pomona professor in his free time. He mentioned today that one thing
that his company does when hiring is a google search on the names of their
applicants. He points out that a lot of information about a
person persists on the web. And with a person's resume, his company can
typically tell which information is actually about the applicant and which
is about a different person with the same name. In fact, he went so far as
to say that the company actually hired someone upon finding favorable results
about a person on the web, and actually refused to interview someone based on
the findings from the google search.

To demonstrate, he typed in the name of a student in the class and found
out he was an athlete for CMS (he found the results from a game played at
UCSD at the UCSD website) and that he played baseball for a highschool in
Hawaii. Of course, for people working in the web industry, he would be able
to find a lot more information including previous work
since (of course) they work on the web.

As a person that's currently looking for a job, this frankly frightens me.
I wonder whether this web page of mine will reflect favorably or infavorably
on me. I'm actually considering striking all occurences of my name out of this
page so that it won't show up when a person searches for my name on a search
engine.

Naturally, I became curious to what actually does come up when I search
for my name on google, and I found some sites that actually did refer to me.
Interestingly enough, this site wasn't one of them. So you guys don't
have to do the search yourselves, I'm just going to list the pertinent results.

My brother's website.

A CS 5 website
saying I was a tutor for the class


Jeannie's website

The results to the autocross
I participated in

The KSA staff page
(Note: I did not write or say anything on this page. It's all made up)


The intro page for my Qualcomm clinic project

The results of a
programming competition I competed in

I found some more stuff when I searched for my email address.

The website for
the CS 70 class saying I was a tutor

A
post I made about PHP on the PHP online manual.

It's interesting to consider that some of this information will stay on
the web years and years down the line for anyone willing to go through the
trouble of a google search.

Today's Quote:

Boren's Laws:

1) When in charge, ponder.

2) When in trouble, delegate.

3) When in doubt, mumble.

---

Monday, April 1, 2002

One of my headlights on my car burnt out about two weeks or so ago so I
had put in an order for a set of PIAA Platinum Super White bulbs on
www.autoseatle.com. Finally, after
about a week and a half of waiting, the bulbs came in today. So, I spent
about 20 minutes installing the one that was burnt out. It was a lot harder
than it should have been. Replacing the bulb required unbolting the entire
headlight housing so that you could get at the bulb. Oddly, replacing the
high beam bulb is a much simple matter. When I try getting the other bulb on
tomorrow, I think I'll go about it differently. Maybe I'll find an easier way.

Anyway, so now I have an old standard halogen bulb on my left side and a
new PIAA Super White bulb on my right side. The PIAA Super Whites, for those
of you that don't know, are not intended it imitate the color of HID lights,
but are intended to be a bit whiter and brighter than standard halogen bulbs.
And sure enough, the new bulb is a bit whiter and brighter. Unfortunately,
I can't quite yet convince myself that the difference in price
is justified (I paid about
$78 for the pair including shipping whereas I could've gotten a pair of
standard bulbs for about $20 at the auto store). Maybe if I were looking to
make my car stand out by making my lights look "cool" it would be worth it, but
I just wanted to see better at night, and the difference is not as noticeable
as I had expected. The brightness is still not up to par with the standard
headlights of newer cars (probably due to the update of DOT lighting standards
in recent years). My guess is that my old cloudy plastic headlight housings
are absorbing much of the light. I would probably notice a bigger difference
if I get new housings. I think I'll also aim the lights a bit higher so it
doesn't seem like the light is just shining at the floor a few feet in front
of me.

Oh well. Maybe I'll appreciate the new lights better when I get the other
one on and drive around a night for a while.

Wednesday, March 27, 2002

The prof told an interesting story in my Scientific Computing class.
Sometime during the mid or late 40's after World War II, Life magazine
published a series of photos of the detonation of an atomic bomb as seen
from above. With each photo was the time after detonation and a scale so
that you could see the blast radius with respect to time. A mathematician
(actually a fluid dymanicist, I can't remember the name) looked at those photos
and came up with an formula relating the blast radius to time, density of
the surrounding air, and energy of the bomb. Knowing the density of the air
and having time and radius measurements from the photos, he was able to
calculate the energy in the atomic bomb. His solution was remarkable clever,
simple and elegant. Being a mathematician, he published his results in a
math journal. Soon afterwards, the FBI came knocking at his door since he
had just published extremely sensitive, top secret information, and they
thought there was a security leak in the government. Afterall, who would
think you could find how much energy was in an atomic bomb by looking at
a bunch of photos of an explosion, since those photos say nothing about the
chemistry involved. Sure enough, they found that his math was sound and that
he didn't get the information from a security leak. I wonder what would have
happened if the math he used was so esoteric that very few people in the
world could understand it. Would he be able to convince a jury of laymen of
his innocence if they couldn't understand the math, and especially during
a period of time when the entire country was itching to find spies?

Today's Quote: "Fashion
is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it
every six months."
-- Oscar Wilde

---

Tuesday, March 26, 2002

Sigh.

You know, I would consider myself a pretty even-tempered guy. I don't have
mood swings. I don't get angry easily, I don't get upset easily, I don't
get depressed easily, and I don't get happy easily.
But when my mood does change, it usually lasts for a while.

Today's Quote: "A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in
such a way that you look forward to the trip."

---

Wednesday, March 20, 2002

The more I think about it, the less I want to enter the work force when
I graduate in a few months. I don't want to go straight to grad school
either. It would be nice if I could just relax for a while. I dunno...
maybe it would be nice to go train Kung Fu in a temple in China for a year
or something. (shrug) Oh ... what am I going to do???

Today's Fortune:

Langsam's Laws:

1) Everything depends.

2) Nothing is always.

3) Everything is sometimes.

---

Tuesday, March 19, 2002

(quote) Dear Samuel:

Thank you for your interest in Teradyne. Our recruiter enjoyed the
opportunity of meeting you on campus at Harvey Mudd and learning about your
academic preparation and career goals. At this time, Teradyne does not
find a match between your background and our requirements. However, your
information will be retained in our active database for two years.

Thank you, again, for considering Teradyne; and we wish you success in the
completion of your studies and the pursuit of your career. (unquote)

(quote) Dear Samuel,

Thank you for your interest in a position at ESRI. Both Dale and I enjoyed
speaking with you about your past and current work experience. You have good
experience and education but unfortunately, at this time we do not have a
position in the software development group thay that could make best use of
your experience and abilities. We enjoyed meeting with you, however, and
should you be interested in ESRI in the future, we hope that we will have
the opportunity to meet with you again.

Thank you again for your interest in ESRI and we wish you success in your
professional endeavors. (unquote)

Sigh ............. I've gotten a lot of these.

---

Friday, March 15, 2002

I saw an interesting thing in the sky today. I thought it was the northern
light but unfortunately, it wasn't. As I would coming out of the
dining hall about about 6:40 pm, I noticed a bunch of people staring up
at the sky. So I saw these weird lights and ran to my room to take some
pictures. It looked pretty neat. Because of the long exposure, most of the
pics turned out a bit fuzzy. The white dot to the left of the lights is the
moon and the building in the picture is Atwood. What I saw is explained

here.

I also took some pictures at Mt. Badly earlier today. I'll post them in a
few days. I think this page deserves a photos section.

Today's fortune: "How come wrong numbers are never busy?"

---

Wednesday, March 13, 2002

This morning I woke up feeling like crap. My nose was stuffy and I had a
massive headache. I felt like I was carrying an anvil on my neck. My
headache went away in the afternoon, but I'd decided to skip my classes
and stay in bed. So that's what I did all day except for a short lunch.
Dang, I blew about a gallon of snot out of my nose and it's still stuffed.
My trashcan is filled with snotty tissues.
How much mucus can a single nose make in a day? I also coughed nearly that
much phlegm out of my lungs. Sigh... fortunately, I'm feeling better now than
I did in the morning. I intend to be healthy by tomorrow morning. Whether or
not my body will cooperate with me is a different matter.

This night, Steve and I went to short three hour "retreat" up at the
house of our professor Steve Smith who we have for Theories of the Good Life.
His house is at Mt. Badly so I took a short detour through my favorite road
on the way up.
We spent the first hour getting to know people. The second hour was spent
talking in small groups about what where we want to be a few (or so) years
down the line if we could end up doing anything; a sort of fantasy life.
I said that I'd have a nice family and I'd be a writer for a car magazine.
The third hour we spent talking about death. The idea is that dying or
coming close to dying really teaches you a lot about how to live. It clears
up your priorities and focuses your effort. I think that's part of the
idea behind our paper due friday about what we'd do if we only had a year to
live. On the other hand, you can't really live with the idea that you're
going to be dead in a year because then you start living for the
very short term. Still, the fact is that we're not as immortal as we'd
like to think. We'll all be dead in about 60 years give or take and we
might even be dead a lot sooner than that. So ... maybe the better question is,
"What would you do with the rest of your life if you found out that you
had a disease (let's call it mortality) that's going to kill you in 60 years?"
Would you be doing anything different than what
you're doing now? I ask this because a lot of us seem to be going through this
world oblivious to the fact that our time on earth is very limited.
60 years might not be enough
to do everything you want to do, so perhaps it's about time to get your
priorities straight.

Today's Fortune: "First Law of Bicycling:
No matter which way you ride, it's uphill and against the
wind."

---

Tuesday, March 12, 2002

Groan. I caught a cold over the weekend so I'm all sick and achy.
I hope I feel better in the morning. I don't want to be sick during spring
break. On the bright side, I also got a haircut and a digital camera
over the weekend. See?

Oh, how vain I am to put a likeness of myself on my webpage! Actually,
my mom got the digital camera for free from the school where she teaches.
Ideally, she's supposed to use it for class, but since she doesn't know
how to use it, I get it. It's not the fanciest camera, but it's good enough
for me. :)

This past friday night, I went to visit my brother at UCSD. On Saturday
morning, I participated in the "Car Rally" which was organized by the church
my brother goes to in SD. We get put into groups of 4 or 5, we get a list of
clues, and we drive around SD finding the places the clues are pointing to.
I was pretty cool. Joon would probably call it another one of my quirky
trips, going on this daylong activity with a bunch of strangers... but it was
fun. SD students seem to be quite a bit more fun and open than Claremont
students. And oh so many koreans! (My brother goes to a korean church) There
were probably more koreans at this activity then there are in the entire
five colleges here in Claremont. So yeah, it was fun. I met some interesting
people and got to see a bigger world.

Groan. My cold is making me delirious. Groan. Three more school days until
spring break. AND SO MUCH WORK TO DO!!! AARGH!!!

By Steve's request:

Some things that make me happy.

1. A job well done.
   
2. Helping people with their problems.
   
3. Talking with a friend late into the night about what's on my mind
   (or what's on their mind)
   
4. Steamy hot showers.
   
5. Finding out that a class is cancelled.
   
6. Sleeping enough to feel rested but not too much to feel groggy.
   
7. Seeing a rare car on the highway.
   
8. Driving through beautiful scenery.
   
9. Camping.
   
10. Close friends who'll happily sacrifice for me.
    
11. Understanding difficult material.
    
12. Massages and back rubs.
    
13. "Experiencing" God.
    
14. "Clicking" with new people.
    
15. Compliments.
    
16. Giving people rides.
    
17. Gratitude.
    
18. Friendly people.
    
19. Bright and happy mornings.
    
20. Hearing from people I haven't heard from in a while.
    
21. Good food (e.g. Double Double) with good company.
    
22. Doing something I've always wanted to do.
    
23. The smell of kalbi.
    
24. A song that I can relate to.
    
25. New experiences.
    
26. Clear, smogless skies.
    
27. Majestic forests.
    
28. Rereading what I write and finding it to be surprisingly insightful.
    

Some things that make me unhappy.

1. Bad grades.
   
2. "Chats" with police officers.
   
3. Insomnia.
   
4. Cliquish people. Arrogant people.
   
5. Criticism.
   
6. Narcissism.
   
7. Waking up in the afternoon or in the middle of the night.
   
8. Having to be stingy.
   
9. Staying on campus for long periods of time.
   
10. A wasted afternoon (e.g. vegging in front the TV watching daytime TV).
    
11. Having something I really want to say but being unable to say it.
    
12. Being in the middle of a large group of people and having no one to
    talk to.
    
13. Having to be politically correct.
    
14. Garish web pages.
    
15. Liberal people who insist I take their view. (I always thought liberal
    people were supposed to be open and tolerant to different ideas.)
    
16. Not having a car.
    
17. Being sick.
    
18. Pens that are out of ink.
    
19. Broken pencils.
    
20. Having no quarters when I want to do my laundry.
    
21. Broken Tekken 3 machines.
    
22. Good looking meat that tastes like plastic.
    
23. "Crunchy," undercooked, underwashed, pasty steamed rice.
    
24. Sour kimchee.
    
25. Having lots of time and nothing to do.
    
26. Drivers to complain about traffic or road conditions or otherwise get
    angry while driving.
    
27. Bird crap.
    
28. People who talk really loud when I'm trying to sleep.
    
29. Spoilt food.
    
30. Itching.
    
31. People who dissappear while chatting.
    
32. Rereading what I write and finding it to be surprisingly banal.
    

I think Steve just wanted three of each, but I guess I got carried
away. This is actually some good brainstorming for the paper that's due
Friday in my "Theories of the Good Life" class about what we would do
if we only had 1 year to live.

I took that same personality test that Steve'njeannie took. And
according to that test, I got some pretty interesting personality disorders.
I won't go into the details, but some highlights are that I'm
"Schizoid" and "Avoidant."
Yep. This test says I'm a schizoid. Oh well. Learning that I'm have a
handful of personality disorders doesn't make me unhappy (like Steve) since
I've come to accept and embrace my personality disorders.

By the way, did I mention that my cold is making me delirious? Umm yeah,
I think I did.

Today's Fortune:
"Everyone knows that dragons don't exist. But while this simplistic
formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the
scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact
wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of
existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to
discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the
problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the
mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all,
one might say, nonexistent, but each nonexisted in an entirely
different way..."

Today's Other Fortune: "Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, and a dark side, and
it holds the universe together..."
-- Carl Zwanzig

---

Wednesday, March 6, 2002

Someone must really hate me. This past Friday when I went up to the
KSA retreat, I parked my car along the street near Pomona College. Before
I parked there, I was careful to look for parking signs and stuff to make
sure you didn't need a permit or anything. I looked and there were no
signs of any sort and there were other cars parked there. When I get back,
there was a parking ticket under my windshield wiper. But this time not from
Campus Security; it was from the City of Claremont. Apparently, it's only
one hour parking between 2am and 6am. How the f was I supposed to know
if it's not posted? The fine is "only" twenty dollars, but I might contest
it just on principal.

Today's Fortune: "If A = B and B = C, then A = C, except where void
or prohbited by law." -- Roy Santoro

---

Sunday, March 3, 2002

This past Friday and Saturday, I went to a KSA (Korean Student
Association) retreat. Nothing much
interesting there; we spent a few hours talking about the "issues" of
being a Korean-American and the rest of the time playing games. I did
discover a pet-peeve of mine: being a passenger on a winding mountain
road, especially being in the back seat where I can't see the road and
enjoy the scenery. I get absolutely frustrated thinking, "Damn, I wish
I were driving."

After that, spent the night at home and went to my home church in the
morning. Before coming back to school, I packed a Calvin and Hobbes
book in my backpack. Back at school, I went to the clinic workroom to
spend some time working on my clinic project. Unfortunately, I spent the
entire two hours I was there reading the Calvin and Hobbes book
cover to cover, including all the commentary and stuff written by the
author/artist Bill Waterson.

When I was younger, I remember being intrigued by the Calvin and
Hobbes comic strip. On the Sunday LA Times, it was the first (and
often only) thing I saw since it was on the first page of the comics
section which was wrapped on the outside of the newspaper. I remember
noticing that it was "different" from the other strips in the paper and
I always enjoyed reading, though oftentime just for the pictures. Watterson
obviously spent a bit more time drawing the comic than others. As a kid, I
got the jokes, but somehow figured that there was a lot in the strip that I
didn't quite catch. The writing was subtle and philosophical.

Even through Junior High I read the anthologies, but it seemed a bit
different reading it today. I'm convinced that Watterson was absolutely
brilliant. In his commentary, he states his conviction of the comic as an
art form and really fought to prevent Calvin and Hobbes from being
over commercialized which would've resulted in the stripping of some of the
personalities from his characters, despite the fact that it would have resulted
in lots of money for him. The writing is subtle and philosophical
and reflect a great power of observation Watterson had of this world.
He avoids gags and one-liners going for more profound humor. The situations
Calvin finds himself in is often a metaphor for everyday life.
Oftentimes the stories had a distinct moral. The
artwork itself has much greater depth than other strips. It is stylized in
such a way to emphasize the each strips point. For example, Watterson
would pen Calvin's imaginary world much more realistically than the
"real" world in the comic.

In fact, reading this book reminded why I wanted to be a comic artist.
Well... obviously that hasn't happened and it's probably a good thing
it hasn't. I probably would've been a insult to the genre... though with
all of the bad comics out there, I'm not so sure.

Today's Fortune: "In any formula, constants (especially those obtained from handbooks)
are to be treated as variables."

---

Thursday, February 28, 2002

By Steve's request, my favorite
vegetables are:

1. lettuce: because lettuce makes good salads. (and you can say things
   like "Seeya lettuce," or "lettuce, mang," or "lettuce go to thine
   abode whereat the sage asketh inane ponderances.")
   
2. cucumbers: because I like pickles and korean pickles (i.e.
   cucumber kimchee) and relish (i.e. diced pickles).
   
3. corn: because it's fun and interesting to see how it doesn't change
   when it goes through your system. Appetizing, ain't it?
   

My inane question for you all is, "What is your favorite kind of weather?"

Personally, I like it warm and breezy, or cool and sunny, with
clear or partly cloudy skies."

Today's Fortune: "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."

---

Wednesday, February 27, 2002

I have a bad memory and a short attention span. Oh, woe is me! Maybe I
should ask the good doc for some ritalin.

I got a parking ticket a few days ago
because I never got a parking permit from my school.
I never got a parking permit from my school because I didn't have all the
paperwork necessary when the parking permit people were here on campus at the
beginning of the school year, and I never bothered to go get it from them
at their administrative building (and I don't know where it is). I never
bothered to get it at the administrative buildling because the campus
security never write tickets in the lot where I park... or so I thought.
Another thing that sucks is that I got the parking ticket when my car had a
flat tire. Those bastards. How heartless can you be, writing a parking ticket
for a car with a flat tire? Parked on the very far side of the lot no
less! The odd thing is that I didn't get the ticket put under my windshield
wiper, it got sent to my school mailbox. How the heck did they know it was
my car when it wasn't registered with the school??? I swear, they're after
me... them bastards... well I will have the last laugh! I
WILL have the last laugh!!! HA HA HA HA HAAAA!!!

I know I'm supposed to be doing homework right now. But I don't want to
do it. So I know what I don't want to do, but you know what?
I don't know what I want to do. If I didn't have homework I needed to do,
what would I want to do? If I had money to spend, what would I want to spend
it on? If I didn't have to go to school, what would I spend my days doing?
Why does everything seem so pointless now?

Today's Fortune: "Every time I think I know where it's at, they move it."

---

Tuesday, February 26, 2002

Would You Subscribe To This Journal For a Buck a Month?

Consider this interesting conjecture. We college students probably know the
internet better than 99% of Americans over 30 years old. That is to say,
we know how to surf the web, we know how chat and send instant messages,
we send lots of email, we know where to download movies and music,
we buy things online, and we
might even keep track of our finances and pay bills online. Why is that
significant? What does it mean that a number of my friends and I have
our own personal webpages?

People have been saying for years now that the internet will change
everything, and certainly it will. Through the internet, I can
communicate with the person across the street just as easily as I can
communicate with a person in another country. Who knows, some stranger
in Europe might be reading this and reacting to it! Probably not, but
think of the implications if I were the Patrick Henry, or the Albert
Einstein of my time. During the atom bomb project, America collected a
group of the greatest scientists to work in a single building on this
miracle bomb. Suppose they didn't have to be in the same building to
collaborate. Imagine how much more quickly discoveries can be made if
scientists didn't have to work at the same college to collaborate.
Obviously, with the internet they don't have to. Already engineers are
working together across continents. Computer Scientists worldwide have been
working together to create the internet technology for years in the IEEE.

What does it mean for people like us? There this notion of the global
village being tossed around. With the creation of the internet, the world
shrunk once again, just as the telephone and the airplane shrunk it before,
though the populations hasn't quite yet embraced its new size.
Communication is now at a state that it's never been. Look at this webpage!
Anyone can publish any sort of drivel and possibly be read by any number of
strangers anywhere! In fact, soon enough, we'll be able to publish our
drivel and charge people to read it out of some soon to be created
internet (international) bank account (Today's Journal Entry: $0.25,
Click here). Clearly, this thing is going to dramatically affect the way
we interact with the world.

Consider this. With the rollout of IP version 6 (that's internet
protocol for you non-techies, we're currently at IP version 4 [IPv4] and
IPv6 is starting to be supported) it will technologically possible to
connect to the internet each and every computer, PDA, cell phone,
automobile, DVD player, washing machine, toaster, mailbox, etc etc etc.
Why is this important? Beats me. Imagine getting voicemail from your
toaster when your bread is done. Also, with 802.11b (the wireless
ethernet protocol), the things connected to the internet don't physically
need to be wired to it (imagine surfing the web on your cell phone, or
your TV automatically getting connected to your house as soon as you
lug it through your front door). This mysterious network will even change
the way we interact with our appliances.

Ok, so this probably doesn't mean a lot
to you people, but the fact is that connecting the whole world is going
to have significant consequences on today's society just as the invention
of the movable type did in the 15th and 16th centuries. We just can't
imagine what those consequences are going to be.

I would argue that the technology is already in place for most of these
things to happen. At this point in time, the limiting factor isn't the
technological difficulties of getting the world wired, it's the social
difficulties of teaching people to take advantage of it. We've got the
moveable type cranking out books, but most everyone is illiterate. Indeed,
with the creation of the internet, a new type of literacy was created,
web-literacy. (Screw computer literacy, since you don't really need to
know how to use a computer to surf the web.) And that's just the reading
end of the equation. It's not inconceivable to think that say two generations
down the line, elementary students will be taught HTML (or some descendant)
alonside the three R's (ooh ... reading, writing, arithmetic, and web).
Furthermore, we can't really
expect all of our parents to suddenly go out and start surfing the web
just because a bunch of kids told them it's the next big thing. As
we're the first generation to really become immersed into the web culture,
we're going to be the people causing these changes as we grow and take the
power. We're going to be the people using the web to educate younsters.
We're going to be the people using the web to change the way we think
about business. We're going to be the people using the web to change the
way we think about literature and the arts.
We're going to be the people using the web to change the
way we think about people, society, and the world.
Inventions like this don't come around
every generation, or even every century. To be the leading wave of people
using the internet in every day life is going to prove to be very exciting.
Fundamental assumptions about the world are going to change because of us.

During our lifetime, the world will change enourmously.
This period of cultural evolution might be the most significant we've
seen yet!

---

Tonight I saw one of the most stunning things I have ever seen in the night
sky. The full moon hung almost directly overhead, so bright that the sky
could almost be mistaken for early morning. Around the moon was a giant
glowing halo; a circle of light. The diameter of the halo could easily have
been 50 to 100 times that of the moon. The inner edge of the halo had a
reddish tint which faded to blueish-purple along the outer edge. It was
like a giant glowing rainbow encircling the moon.

---

Monday, February 25, 2002

The weekend is over. The work pours in again. Oh the insanity!
I wonder if there's some way to really reduce the amount of work I need to
do while still getting the units that I need. I really gotta learn how to
work more efficiently. I'm starting to feel guilty about not being able to
put as much work into clinic as I'm supposed to. Hmm... what to do ...
what to do???

I dropped by America's Tire today to get the new tire for the flat.
Instead I got a used tire for the flat since the attendant recommended that
I buy all 4 new tires at the same time to get even wear. That saved me some
money in the short run. Dang, it feels good to have my car on the road again.
It was very hard not being able to drive for three whole weeks. Now if I
only had somewhere to go, and time to go there.

By the way, this is the comic that so irked
Joon.

Today's Fortune: "Experience is that
marvelous thing that enables you recognize a mistake when you make it again."
-- F. P. Jones

---

Sunday, February 24, 2002

Regressing

I decided to just replace the flat tire instead of all four. The other
three will come later. So I'll be dropping by a tire place tomorrow morning
to get that done...

So now I have a choice on what tire to buy. Naturally, I looked up on
www.tirerack.com to see what tires were
good for my car. I've done this before but I'd forgotten a lot of the stuff
I'd read before. So I read the specs and customer reviews and prices for a
bunch of summer tires and decided on Kumho Ectsa Supra, size
205/55VR16 (the stock size).
Yes, it's a Korean tire, but it's got good reviews and the
people who bought it tended to be pleasantly surprised. At $70 per tire, it's
all the cheapest of the ultra high performance tires (which happens to be
just below max performance and R-compound race tires). I suppose it might
be a little pointless for most people to research tire choices, but I
figure it's a fairly heavy investment and I'll be driving on them for a
year or so, so I might as well do some research. But of course my research
didn't just stop with tires. I looked up some suspension parts and now I have
that same feeling I did when I installed that spring seat. Damn. Hopefully
the feeling will quickly pass and won't distract me for too long. I gotta
keep focused on school work now. No time to worry about my car. Hopefully,
the tire place will have the tire in my size and hopefully it won't end up
being too expensive with the tire and the mounting and balancing. Sigh.
I wish I had more money. I with I had more time. I wish I were as passionate
about school.

Today's Fortune: "Things will be bright in P.M. A cop will shine a light in your face."

---

Saturday, February 23, 2002

I got the spare tire on my car now so I can drive it around, though
I'll need to get a real tire on there soon. I'm trying to decide whether
to just get one new tire to put on the wheel that's flat, or replace all four.
My tires are bald so I'll need to replace them soon anyway, but I'm rather
broke, and tires aren't cheap.

The Pathfinder Spring Banquet was tonight. The guys were cooking this
time, so I cooked with Richard, Jordan, Jon, Karen, and Brad, though
Jon and Karen didn't actually go to the banquet. I think our food turned
out reasonably well, though it was the presentation that made our table
special. I think these cook-yourself style banquets are getting a little
stale. A lot of guys didn't go because they didn't want to cook, and
the entertainment isn't what it used to be. Before we'd have a number
of groups go up and give elaborate performances, but now we get a lot
fewer. I don't know why. Anyway, I have no point. It's late and I'm
tired.

Today's fortune: All whites look alike.

---

Friday, February 22, 2002

Friday's are Harsh

I've done homework on Friday for the past few weeks and frankly, I'm
tired of it.

I'm always looking forward to the moment in the week when I'd be done with
classes and with homework. On Friday afternoon's, my last class ends
at 4:00pm, so during the week, I'm always counting down till then.
"Only four more days to go. Just gotta get through this test and these
few homework assignments." "Just two more days to go. One more reading
assignment and a class and I'm done." "One more day to go." Suddenly,
Friday gets here. I finish my class. The due date for the next
homework assignment is at least three days away. And I'm relieved.
And then I realize that I've got nothing to do. I didn't make any plans.
No one seems to be around. There might be some parties, but I don't like
parties. The best thing to do is actually homework or maybe get drunk.
And I realize that this
moment of the week that I've been waiting for is not the moment when I can
suddenly relax and let it all hang out. It's the moment when I'm not so
distracted by schoolwork that I can actually see my life for what it is.
And I really don't like it. This bottle of beer I'm drinking is the
same bottle I drank a few years ago. This cigarette I'm smoking is the
same one I smoked a few years ago. I've always told myself I'm changing, I'm
growing, things are going to be better next year, but but more I try to
change, the more things stay the same.
I know I shouldn't be complaining because I'm the one living my life,
but seriously
... I'm not in the real world yet but I'm already on the treadmill. Work
hard during the week looking forward to the weekend. Weekend comes and
nothing happens. Work hard during the week again. etc. etc. year after year.
I sincerely don't believe in the "life sucks, and then you die" philosphy
but somehow, I seem to be living it out damn well.
Is this really supposed to be the best time of my life? If so, then
please spare me the agony. I can't help but be reminded of that dream I
mentioned so long ago.

There has to be something more purposeful and fulfilling about life
than living the treadmill. I don't know what it is. In The
Theories of the Good Life, we've read a number of philosophers that
advocate the simple pleasure. Well, those simple pleasures get old.

Today's fortune: "The trouble with being punctual is that people think
you have nothing more important to do."

---

Thursday, February 21, 2002

Tough break for Michelle Kwan today, huh? For these past four years,
she's favored to win the gold at the Olympics but because of two mistakes
ends up with a bronze. Still, you gotta respect her.

Wasn't the judging kinda weird though? Michelle Kwan is in first with
one skater to go, so naturally you'd assume that she'd be assured a
silver at worst. The last skater, Irena Slutskova makes a single mistake
and ends up doing better than Michelle. However, the surprise is that
neither Michelle nor Irena get the gold but another American skater,
Sara Hughes, who was actually ranked right behind Michelle before Irena's
skate. So Irena ends up with silver and Michelle with bronze.

The odd thing is that Sara was ranked behind Michelle before Irena's
skate, and ahead of her afterwards. They explained the scoring in the news
afterwards and it does make sense, though, you'd think that the relative
rankings of two skaters wouldn't be affected by a third. But that's
the way it worked out. Had Irena done worse than Michelle in that last
skate, then Michelle would have ended up with the gold, and Sara with the
silver. Well, that's the way the cookie crumbles.

Today's fortune: "A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into
superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education."

    -- G. B. Shaw

---

Wednesday, February 20, 2002

Lucky for you, I found two pieces of poetry I wrote in high school.
I wrote the first one, "I Felt a Fishbone in my Mouth", in twelfth
grade for a class assignment
and I formatted it to look like a fish on a plate. Unfortunately,
you don't get the formatted version since it depends too much on font
size and I can't really rely on that in the web. It was supposed to parody
another poem we read that year (I think it was called "I Felt a Funeral
in My Head" or something to that effect). I wrote the second,
"Misbehavin'" in tenth grade for extra credit. As you should be able to
guess, it parodies "The Raven." These poems, like
everything else on this site, is copyrighted to Samuel Ahn. If you want to
publish it, send an email to sahn@hmc.edu and make checks payable to
(you guessed it!) Samuel Ahn.

---

Samuel Ahn

A.P. English, Period 2

November 24, 1997

I Felt a Fishbone in My Mouth

I felt a Fishbone, in my Mouth

It's stingings wild about

Kept moving-moving- 'til it seemed

I could not spit it out.

My Mother said the supper meal

Would be some rice and fish.

I could not know and dared not dream

That Fish, an evil dish.

If trout or bass, I can not say,

But Fish it was for sure.

And sure enough it had inside

A row of prickly spurs.

So from that Fish I had that night

I took a piece of meat.

I searched that meat for needles sharp

And found it was deplete

So on my rice I placed that Fish

While thinking it was clean.

I scooped my spoon into my bowl

And popped it in my mouth.

I chewed and chewed and felt a sting

Along my bright pink tongue

I knew that moment my search had failed

But did not care too much.

I moved my tongue to push that Bone

So I could spit it out.

But when I pushed I found ti gone,

So went to search again.

I chewed and chewed and found again

That Bone which had dis'peared.

Again I tried to push that bone,

Again I lost that rib

I chewed some more and felt a prick

But could not find the source.

I stuck my finger in that mush

And still that Bone was gone.

I grew frustrated and decided

The Bone could not be large.

I swallowed then that sickly mush

And felt that sting again.

The food went down; the Bone did not

And, yes, the sting had stayed

In my throat, that Bone was caught,

And, Damn, it made my day.

---

Misbehavin'

by Samuel Ahn (1996)

Once upon a Friday dreary, sauntered I to school so weary

For that night I slumbered merely several minutes ere the morn.

Out o' bed I got up weeping for last night I'd done no sleeping

Since that night I'd been preparing for the test I did deplore.

I could now do nothing to delay the test I did deplore,

    Nothing now, nothing more.



To school that day I slowly wandered as my mind, it quietly wondered

As my psyche often shuddered 'bout the test that dismal morn.

The eyes of mine were sadly downcast as I watched the dewdrops hold fast

To every single blade of green grass laid about on the earth's floor.

Wished did I to sleep on this grass laid about on the earth's floor,

    But I knew I could sleep no more.



Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December.

There that day I saw each member of my class like me had bore

The selfsame countenance of the sleepless crying to the teacher heedless

That this test was truly needless since 'twould surely drop their score.

But there was a student fearless for the test would raise his score.

    This kid sat right to my north.



This kid who sat solely fearless was a kid who was rather friendless

Since this kid was really senseless and was truly a fat bore.

It was true, I must admit, that his smarts was to his credit.

Though the chapter we all read it, only he the knowledge stored.

How he did it I couldn't know it nor why this info we could not store,

    Or why for us it was a chore.



As the teacher passed the heavy test book I grew faintly dizzy

And to sleep I fell so nearly that I gave a single snore.

While I nodded nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping 

As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my posterior.

"'Tis some student seeing me sleeping thought to tap my posterior,"

    Thought I, "this and nothing more."



I sat up and tried to answer the questions but nothing could I remember

And slow but surely each wrong answer carved itself upon my score.

Eagerly I wished the morrow.  For a moment I dozed although

My Forehead fell on my pencil, then waking startled, to my horror

The Pencil cut my Forehead and Blood dripped onto the Floor.

    All this I did ignore.



Seemingly the period had passed but not many answers had I amassed

And though I tried to work real fast, I remained on number four.

Keep in mind this was of ten so I felt my paper I would rend

But self-control I kept and stomped my foot onto the floor.

This shook the shabby trailer classroom since it had a hollow floor.

    I worked some more on number four.



The slow and certain ticking of the clocks and my heart beating 

Filled me with the horrid feeling that I had time no more,

So that now to still the beating of my heart, I kept repeating

"I can skip this question, this problem number four - 

I can skip this question and it won't do much to my score.

    Only a point, and nothing more."



Then again I felt a tapping and turned to see who was rapping,

"Hey, said I, "I'm sorry.  Truly your forgiveness I implore,

But the fact is I was testing and so rudely you came rapping

That I must say you were bothering so I'll beat you after school."

Luckily the teacher was out the door.  Here I looked and this I saw:

    A desk there, and nothing more.



Deep onto that table peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,

Doubting, dreaming evil thoughts about the tap I felt before.

But the silence was unbroken and the stillness gave no token

And this was the phrase there spoken: "Whoever did that will need a morgue."

This I whispered, and the teacher looked at me and asked, "A morgue?"

    Merely this and nothing more.



Back onto my test book turning, all my soul within me burning,

Soon again I felt the tapping somewhat harder than before.

"Surely," said I, "surely that is someone at the desk to my side.

Let me see then who thereat is, and this mystery explore - 

Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore."

   'Twas merely my friend and nothing more.



I turned my head to this other when I heard him quietly mutter,

"I look and I look and I look some more, but no one has answered number four."

His search apparent made he, on his paper never stayed he;

Swiftly flying from paper to paper, quickly searching for number four.

How the teacher did not notice this frantic searching I did not know

    She perched and sat and did nothing more.



Seeing this wrongful act of cheating right before my eyes happening,

I couldn't help but have the feeling of deep, miserable woe.

This was because in this class I saw integrity no more.

Yet, more than that this was angering for in points, he would score more.

About to raise my hand in telling, I had this feeling in my core:

    Quoth my conscience: "Nevermore."



I stopped and pondered at the meaning of the word that I was hearing,

This cryptic word that I was seeing emblazoned on the air before.

Then the light began burning, completely filling my whole being.

It was the light of understanding of the word I heard before.

After this understanding I saw the word carrying my score

    Higher and higher forevermore.



This is what I understood at my every rising outlook:

Often I saw Ed turn and look - and this I did much abhor -

But the teacher didn't stare, she didn't even seem to care.

In the same way I can dare to look elsewhere for number four.

And the teacher will not care or notice as she did before,

    All thanks to the word "Nevermore."



Once upon a Friday dreary, while I pondered weak and weary

Over a question on a test, the problem number four.

While I nodded nearly napping, suddenly I began the tapping 

On a student who was dying just as I had been before,

Before I saw this wondrous word reach out and touch my score,

    Long ago, long before.



This student before me that I was tapping turned and looked and saw me smiling

Right to business I went to asking, "Have you answered number four?"

This to him I was quietly whispering, but I don't think he was listening

Since at me he was looking, as a foreign owner of a liquor store.

"Do you think you'll ever solve number four?"  I asked once more.

    This boy replied, "Nevermore."



Then I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing

To the boy whose innocent eyes now burned into my bosom's core.

This and more I sat divining, about the strange, ominous meaning

Of the constant reappearing of the word, "Nevermore"

Whose first appearing made me not fearing of this andfuture scores.

    Scores forever, forevermore!



Then methought the air grew denser, perfumed by an unseen censor

Whose job it was to wipe out evils that would not be done this a class called Honors.

But this feeling I didn't consider and continued my searching for the answer

To the question that was tearing at my mind, the problem number four.

"Help me," said I to that guy, somewhat louder than before.

    Again he repeated, "Nevermore."



Here I felt something bearing down on my soul and strongly tearing 

My mind apart, stronger than did the question number four.

Now I sat there fearing, feeling the most painful bearing 

Of rested eyes intently staring much more strongly than did before.

Then this voice from above came questioning, "Did you cheat to boost your score?"

    Then I heard the cries of my ancestors.



'Idiot!" they cried, "stupid fool, allowing yourself to get caught by the wolf.

Just calm down and stay cool.  Play it off and ride out the storm."

Keeping this in mind, I said, "I didn't do it, you can't prove it."

Then the teacher grabbed my collar and picked me up off the floor.

She stared me down and asked me once more, "Did you cheat to boost your score?"

    Sweating profusely I muttered, "No?"



Here I began my panicking as the strength of the teacher was overpowering.

My stomach inside me left me as the teacher threw me to the floor.

"Ed did it first!" were the words I had spoken as I felt my arms become broken.

Imagining my life here ending, I dashed quickly towards the door.

For my bed I was yearning for my entire body was sore.

    Quoth my teacher, "Do you want more?"



I was expelled on charges of cheating.  Finally beaten I began crying

As now I began understanding the true meaning of the word "Nevermore,"

The meaning first I had mistaken cause my integrity to be taken.

"What word was famed by 'The Raven?'" was the question number four.

On the sand I was walking listening to the waves crashing upon the shore

    When I cried out, "NEVERMORE!"

---

Why I used Ed's name in that last piece, I can't remember. Maybe I somehow
had the impression that Ed was my accomplice in cheating... not that I did,
or he did. Reading these over again, I have to wonder why I put so
much work into these poems. Then again, I guess you can also ask
why I spend so much time posting to this page.

Today's fortune: "'Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct
a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.' --
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr."

---

Tuesday, February 19, 2002

Sigh... I have a take home midterm due on Thursday and two exams on
Thursday. I think I'm starting to burn out. I need a break.

Gotta psych myself up.
This is supposed to be my best semester ever.
I only have a month until spring break, and then
about two month after that until graduation. I also have to find a job.
I wonder what I'm supposed to do with my life.
Groan.

Today's fortune: "'Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when
he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.' --
Oscar Wilde"

---

Monday, February 18, 2002

Remember that Valentine Midterm I got? I started working on it today, and
there was a dead fly squashed between the pages. Yes, what a wonderful
valentine card.

---

Sunday, February 17, 2002

Restraining Someone

During dinner with the CS prof and the other graders last night at the
japanese restaurant, one of the students told an interesting true story.

During the past few weeks, there have been a lot of thefts here at mudd.
As far as I know, the theives are generally not students here. We got an
email from the school describing the thefts and the suspects. In one of the
thefts, it described a male, age 23, going into a crowded dorm lounge,
grabbing a laptop that was in there, and running off with it. He was
apprehended and banned from scripps and mudd campus.

Last night, I heard the real story. There was a party going on at
West dorm in the Lounge. During the party, the boyfriend of a scripps
student walks in and sits at the laptop that's playing all the music.
So he's sitting there for a few minutes and the other people don't really
care too much since they assume that he's just adding a song to the playlist.
Suddenly, he grabs the computer and runs out of the dorm. Of course the music
stopped when he grabbed the computer and ran, so two guys at the party started chasing him.

First of all, I gotta say that you have to be incredibly stupid to think
you can steal the computer that's playing the music in the middle of a party.

So these two guys finally caught up with the guy and I'm not exactly clear
on what happened then. But a little later, other people caught up and saw
the computer sitting on the ground, one of the guys (who happens to be a
Karate enthusiast) holding the theif in a headlock, and the other guy looking
for campus security. So after the campus security came and dealt with him,
he was banned from harvey mudd and scripps, which means that if anyone sees
him on campus, they can call security who'll then politely "escort" him off
campus (and hopefully to the police station).

Anyway, I've taken tae kwon do for a number of years when I was younger so
I wondered how I would've dealt with the situation, that is assuming that I
chased the guy and caught up with him.
How do I restrain him until security gets
there? The thing is, in tae kwon do, you don't learn how to hold the opponent.
You learn how to hit him. Furthermore, you learn how to get out of holds
which means you'd be less likely to hold the person since you know that it's
easy to get out of any hold you know how to do. So what would I do? I don't
know how to hold the theif, but I know how to hit the theif. The only
good thing I could think of was to hit him until he's incapacitated. For
example, if I could get the guy into a headlock position, instead of doing
a headlock like this karate guy did, I might grab his hair and bash his
face into the ground, cause I don't really understand a headlock, but I
do understand bashing a guy's face into the ground. Or perhaps I'll try to
break one of his bones, like a rib or a limb. Of course, that is assuming
I have the ability to do so, which I don't know cause I've never tried it.
Maybe I'd throw him to the ground and kick his head until he passes out.

In any case, whichever of these approaches I took, I don't think I'd get
a pat on the back from security when they finally arrive. So what should I
do? I can just let him run off, I guess it doesn't really matter. I don't
think I'd have any problem with breaking a couple ribs (get the guy on the
ground, and instead of jumping on top of him like a wrestler, punch his
chest as hard as you can. Did you know lifegaurds occasionally break ribs when
administering CPR?) but I think I'd stop before kicking his head when he's
down, or bashing his face into the ground... unless it was my laptop.

What might be a more interesting questions is what Chester would do.
He's taken too much kung fu than is healthy for him (I'd say), and he knows
how to hit and how to hold. And he's merciless, just brutal. So I can't
really imagine him getting the theif in some hold, which might be the smartest
thing to do. I can imagine him hitting the theif just for the joy of hitting
him bareknuckle, or putting some joint lock on him to keep the theif in
constant pain... even to the point of breaking the joint. I don't
really think he'd be one to bash the theif's face into the ground because
there's not that much tactile sensation in doing that. He'd rather bash the
theif's face with his fist (I on the other hand wouldn't want to risk breaking
my knuckles. A person's skull is incredibly hard).
Anyway, I'd like to hear Chester's take on this.

---

Saturday, February 16, 2002

Assembly Assembly Hooray!

Ah ha. My brother
thinks I should pray for a wife. Is he that
worried that I might not get married? But seriously, my brother surprises
me. It seems that he's a bit more mature than I gave him credit for.

My tire is still flat. It's been flat for about 2 weeks now and I still
haven't gotten around to putting the spare on. That's largely because my
car didn't come with a tire wrench and a jack for the spare. I tried
using Ken's today, but the tire wrench was the wrong size. Apparently
Honda and Nissan uses different size nuts for the tire. I wonder when I'll
be able to get it fixed. I did get a chance to get off campus today,
the first time since my tire went flat. A professor treated me and a
couple other students out to dinner at a Japanese restuarant as thanks
for grading for his class last semester.

Have you ever tried programming in assembly language? Have you ever
seen assembly language? Let me tell you, programming in assembly is not
fun. I had to write a piece of assembly for clinic, so I spent about
2 hours last night figuring out how to do what the program was supposed to do,
and I spent about 3 hours today actually writing the code and writing
a design document about how the code works. Naturally, the document
explaining the code is longer than the code itself. After writing that
dang code, I couldn't think for shit. But I did get an amazing sense
of accomplishment.

When you log into the computer science mainframe, you get a little message
called a fortune, like a fortune cookies. Yesterday, my fortune was,
"If someone nods while you explain your code, wake him up." With that in
mind, I figure I'll post the code I wrote because I'm so dang proud of it.
While my clinic project is for Qualcomm, there shouldn't be any harm in
posting this piece of code since it's intended to become open-source anyway.
I'll let you take a stab at deciphering it. Perhaps it would've been more
interesting if I posted the design document because it's written in
English, and you still wouldn't understand it. Oh yeah, this code is
probably going to change later down the line as my teammates pick through it.
I just thought I'd let you know in case you try to implement it.

---

@ February 16, 2002

@ I (Sam) decided to rewrite the stub so that all the information in the

@ design doc would not be repeated here. I also took out all the lines

@ marked "paranoid" and changed the registers since I found that I could write

@ the program using 4 registers and no stack space. Also, you might not

@ have to push anything onto the stack if you don't change any of the

@ registers you would've had to push, I decided to use r3-r6, as r0-r2 are

@ arguments to the program and r7 is some unknown thumb "work register."

@ (Of course, it never hurts to be paranoid and push the things on anyway.)

@

@ The registers used are as follows:

@   r3: scratch space

@   r4: PC -> ASOP -> OFFSET

@   r5: AGOT -> LC

@   r6: AEGOT



stub:

    @ Prep

    @ If we're paranoid, we'd add the stmdb instruction to push registers

    @ onto the stack here.

    mov         r4, pc

    sub         r4, r4, #8      @ r4 = ASOS

    ldr         r3, stub        @ I'm not sure this will work. But the idea

    ldr         r5, stubend     @ is to subtract the beg from the end of stub.

    sub         r3, r3, r5      @ r3 = LOS

    add         r5, r4, r3      @ r5 = ASOP = ASOS + LOS



    @ This next section copies the 8 special bytes to the end of the stub

    @    (ASOP - #8).... I'm not quite sure this works. ldr copies 4 bytes,

    @    right? I stuck this section here since we've just found ASOS and

    @    ASOP, which we need for this.

    ldr         r3, [r4, #-8]   @ first 4 bytes

    str         r3, [r5, #-8]

    ldr         r3, [r4, #-4]   @ next 4 bytes

    str         r3, [r5, #-4]



    @ Prep (cont.)

    mov         r4, r5          @ r4 = ASOP

    sub         r4, r4, #0      @ r4 = OFFSET = ASOP - PSOP,

                                @      #0 is a placeholder for PSOP

    add         r5, r4, #0      @ r5 = AGOT (LC) = OFFSET + PGOT,

                                @      #0 is a placeholder for PGOT

    add         r6, r4, #0      @ r6 = AEGOT = OFFSET + PEGOT

                                @      #0 is a placeholder for PEGOT

loopcond:

    cmp         r5, r6

    ble         loopbody

    b           end



loopbody:

    ldr         r3, [r5]        @ r3 = [LC]

    add         r3, r3, r4      @ r3 = [LC] + OFFSET

    str         r3, [r5]        @ [LC] = r3 ( = [LC] + OFFSET)

    add         r5, r5, #4      @ LC = LC + 4 (increment LC to next item)

    b           loopcond



end:

    @ If we're paranoid, we'd add the ldmdb to pop the stack here.

    b           stubend         @ 'b' seems to be the ARM jump instruction

    nop                         @ The 8 special bytes are copied to this

    nop                         @      location



stubend:

---

Ain't she a beaut? Now this darling here is supposed to solve all our
problems. I think I should mention that almost nobody programs in assembly
because it's so confusing. The only times you'd program in assembly are when
it's really, really important to get the computer to do something exactly
the way you want it to do it, or when you want the computer to do something
it's not supposed to do. In our case, it's the latter. We need the
computer to change the program as it's running it, which it's not normally
supposed to do. Funky huh? It's like, I give you a list of things to do,
and the first two items on the list is to change the last three items on
the list. Why I would want to do that is because I didn't write the list,
I only added the first two items to the list because I didn't like the last
three items.
As you can imagine, virus programmers used to program in assembly,
but thanks to Windows and the internet, they've found much easier ways to
hurt your computer.

---

Friday, February 15, 2002

Surprise Class of the Semester

tech class - A class taught at Mudd in the subjects of Computer Science,
Math, Chemistry, Biology, Physics, or Engineering.

hum class (or hum for short) - A class not in the above subjects. These classes
may further be categorized as "mudd hum" (hum class taught at mudd), or
"off-campus hum" (hum class taught in the five colleges, not including Mudd).
The term is derived from "humanities class" though the subject need not
technically be in the humanities (e.g. economics). Note that the plural is
not "hum classes" but "hums."

This catorization leaves off-campus classes in Computer Science, Math,
Chemistry, Biology, Physics, and Engineeering in the grey area between
tech class and hum class as these classes are somewhat despised since they
are not infrequently taken my Mudd students to avoid taking a harder
tech class at Mudd.

A class I enjoy is "Theories of the Good Life" which isn't surprising since
it involves discussions about what it takes to be happy with one's life.
I expected the class to be enjoyable so there wasn't a big surprise when I
found that it was.

The real surprise of this semester is one of the econ classes I'm taking,
"Political Economy of the Environment." Doesn't really have a catchy name,
does it. The reason I decided to take it was that I needed a hum class, a mudd
hum in fact, I needed a seminar, and I needed an econ class. This class
fulfilled all three of those requirements. In fact, I talked with the
professer when I was filling out my schedule and it she talked about how
we were going to read books about environmentalism and write papers about
environmentalism and all that stuff. It sounded terribly unappealing.

Last semester, I would never have considered myself an environmentalist
by any stretch of the imagination. I thought that all those crazy
environmentalists were crazy misguided fools with a good cause.

This class, though, turned out to be really interesting. The topics we
cover and the environmental issues we discuss are remarkably complex
and fascinating from an intellectual standpoint. There's lots of interesting
economics that comes into play when valuing the environmental resources,
a lot of interesting politics when trying to figure out why politicions
would vote the way they do on these issues, and a lot of interesting things
to say about the public who is so uninformed and misinformed about these
(largely because it's in the favor of the politicians if the public didn't
know).

I'm going to force myself not to get into a discussion about sustainable
economy, the tragedy of the commons, pullution credits or any of the
other stuff we argue about in class. I'm just going to say that
environmentalism is important because if it's neglected, Malthus's
prediction about the human race outgrowing the planet is ultimately going
to be true, with bad effects for us humans.

Anyway, I'm sure you don't want to hear about all that stuff. Actually,
I'm curious about what you do want me to write about. I'll take requests.
Interestingly, I find that writing papers is not as painful as it used to be.
I actually don't dislike writing papers anymore, and given the right topic,
I may even enjoy it. Anyway, I've done quite a bit of work tonight for a
Friday night, so I think I'm going to get ready for bed. Good night
everybody.

---

Thursdsay, February 14, 2002

Valentine's Day

blog - abbreviation for web log, as in
www.blogspot.com.

Wow, all of a sudden all these blogs started popping up. At first, it was
just Jeannie. Then, feeling inspired,
I created one (which is what you're presumably reading now). Now, mind you,
mine isn't technically a blog as mine isn't on blogspot.com. Mine is an
actual personal webpage where I type up all the html and all that, but you
get the point. Then my brother David
creates one to "rival" my own. For a long time that was it. I kept up with
these three (including mine). Then Steve
and Joon get their own going in the past week. Now I find that
Tom Chen and
Gene Lee have made one, too. I wonder if my own writing inspired these
other people to create blogs. I wonder if they're going to update them
regularly. I hope so. Let me know if I missed anyone.

Anyway, it's Valentine's Day and there's nothing notable going on in my
life today. No special someone to spend time with. No candies to give or
love notes to write. No roses. Am I bitter? Sad? Disappointed? Lonely?

Nah. This is how I've spent all of the other ... oh ...
one ... two ... twenty one Valentine's Days of my
life. So heck, today might actually be the best Valentine's Day I've ever
had! There's no way of knowing for sure since nothing notable ever happened
on Valentine's Day so recalling them for comparison is an impossibility.
I did, however, get a valentine card today. It's on heavyweight pink paper,
folded and stapled closed.
On the front of it is a drawing of a heart with an arrow through it. On the
back it says, "Do not open this exam until you are ready to begin working on
it. You have 24 hours to take the exam (these 24 hours are to be consecutive,
and do not allow time-outs). I don't think you'll need 24 hours... I think this is, like, a 2 hours exam, tops. But what do I know? Anyway, it's due in class on Thursday, February 21. This test is closed book, closed notes, closed nerd... no reference material of any sort may be consulted while the exam is in progress. No calculators or slide rules are allowed ... ... ... Happy Valentine's Day, Prof. Greg"

Ah ha ha. Funny huh? My computational geometry prof handed out our take
home midterms to us as a Valentine's Card. I'm sure there's some sort of deep
personal commentary I can make about this, but I don't know what it is.

Incidentally, there's going to be an Anti-Valentine's Day party
tonight at West Dorm here at Mudd for all those bitter, lonely, dumped, single
people here at Mudd. I'm not planning to go and I'm not sure
exactly how it's going to be, but from the flyers, I get the impression
they're going to break and burn all things related to Valentine's Day...
like cards and heart-shaped candy, etc. There's going to be a microphone for
people to rant and complain about how much they hate Valentine's Day or how
some "special" person dumped them or screwed them over.
There will probably be alcohol, and
who knows, there might even be some music and dancing, too! Ahh, Mudd.

Enough about Valentine's Day. I looked at Mt. Baldy today like I often do,
and I noticed that the smog seems to be coming back. While the sky is still
pretty blue, the mountains are little more than shadows beyond the haze.
The birds are also coming back. Little pocket-size birds all chirping
and twittering. Yessiree. Spring is just around the corner.

---

Wednesday, February 13, 2002

Wow, it's been a while since I updated this. I've been pretty dang busy.
Now I'm pretty dang exhausted. Still a few more days to go before the end
of the week. And then it's next week and I got more work to do ...

You know, By Sunday night, I usually know what I'm going to be doing
until wednesday night. And by about Monday night, I've got my entire
week until Friday night figured out. It's not that I actually sit down and
write my entire schedule down on paper, it's just that I recall all the
homework assignment I have to do for the week, and everything just falls into
my free time slots. So ... by Sunday night, it sorta feels like it's
already Wednesday since I know what I'm going to do until then, and the
actual living out the days until wednesday is just a formality. It's a little
odd and I think it just feels like this because I'm not exactly looking
forward to the week. I looking forward to free time which doesn't come until
the end of the week.

Anyway, I had two interviews today. I can't say that either one of them
went great. I just hope I can find myself a nice, well-paying job by the time
I graduate. Time to get some sleep. I should work on my clinic project
tomorrow morning before my clinic meeting.

---

Saturday, February 2, 2002

Well, today a friend of mine randomly asked me to take this personality quiz
online at www.colorgenics.com.
You should take it. I find it very interesting since the only thing it asks
you to do is to rank a series of 8 colors. Then based on that, it gives you
a description of your personality. I took it twice and apparently ranked the
colors slightly different both times I took it so the descriptions came
out slightly different. Both seemed to be rather accurate, though. Oddly
enough, this personality description seems to be a bit more negative than the
Myers-Briggs one I wrote about last time. This one seems to point out more
possible personality quirks than does the Myers-Briggs. Anyway, here's
how my assessment came out the first time I took it:

You are the sort of person that needs a peaceful environment. You seek release from stress and freedom from conflicts and disagreements, of which you seem to have had more than your fair share .But you are taking pains to control the situation by proceeding cautiously..and you so are right in so doing so... You are a very sensitive person -



You are feeling very disillusioned at this time and you feel that you are being left out of things. You know - or you think you know what you want but you seem unable to exert the effort to achieve your objectives. As a consequence, you are feeling left out and neglected. You would like to be afforded greater security, and fewer problems.



Every thing seems to have gone wrong and the situation at this time is such that you are not quite sure which way to turn. So it would appear that you are "holding back" re-consolidating your position relinquishing all fun and games for the time being.




For some time now your hopes and expectations have been denied...and because of this you are becoming withdrawn and introverted.Continual disappointment has manifested itself in you becoming both suspicious and restrained...you have become withdrawn from others and have receded more and more into yourself. You seem to have lost your innate enthusiasm and imaginative nature, for fear that you may be carried away by it only to find that you are wasting your time. You are loath to trust people as in the past your trust has been misplaced. You seem to be keeping yourself cautiously aloof from others. At this moment in time your attitude is to trust no-body...until they can prove themselves to you.



Since in the recent past all of your hopes and aspirations gave been denied you, you are now convinced that the future will hold nothing but anxiety... so therefore... "why bother?" You would love to get away from it all, to escape from the trials and tribulations of this mundane existence and fall into a peaceful and harmonious relationship, which will protect you from the lack of appreciation and give you the chance to start afresh..

Here's how it came out the second time I took it:

You are the sort of person that needs a peaceful environment. You seek release from stress and freedom from conflicts and disagreements, of which you seem to have had more than your fair share .But you are taking pains to control the situation by proceeding cautiously..and you so are right in so doing so... You are a very sensitive person -



You are feeling very disillusioned at this time and you feel that you are being left out of things. You know - or you think you know what you want but you seem unable to exert the effort to achieve your objectives. As a consequence, you are feeling left out and neglected. You would like to be afforded greater security, and fewer problems.



It is hard for you to accept that your needs and desires are misunderstood by almost everyone within your sphere of influence ... and there is no one to rely on. Your pent-up emotions and inherent egocentricity make you quick to take offence, but as matters stand you realise that you'll have to make the best of things as they are.



Matters have not gone well for you. You are experiencing severe stress trying to guard yourself from further disappointments.It would seem that all of your hopes and dreams have not been realised .. and you are now beginning to doubt yourself. You no longer wish to be further advised by anyone and you insist on going it alone... to control your own destiny. Even though deep down you doubt whether things will get better in the future... you have one consolation - and that is that they couldn't possibly get worse. Unwilling to give up anything that you possess, you are looking for some sort of security as a protection against any further setback or loss of position and prestige. You are so negative that you tend to exaggerate your problems and refuse to accept any advice from so called well-meaning friends.



Since in the recent past all of your hopes and aspirations gave been denied you, you are now convinced that the future will hold nothing but anxiety... so therefore... "why bother?" You would love to get away from it all, to escape from the trials and tribulations of this mundane existence and fall into a peaceful and harmonious relationship, which will protect you from the lack of appreciation and give you the chance to start afresh..

A little depressing, isn't it? Do you think this describes me well?

In any case, this page says that the color personality system was created
by a psychologist studying the relationship between colors and emotions and
personalities. Sounds reasonable enough.
My guess is that this area of study is probably called
Colorgenics, hence the name for the site. My general attitude for these
kinds of personality tests is that I tend to believe them. That is, if they
can give me a reasonable psychological explanation on what the question I
answered have to do with my personality, then I'll believe it. For example,
in the introduction to Please Understand Me II (the book with the
Myers-Briggs personality test), it mentioned that the personality types in the
book was the result of the studies of a number of psychologists. That's
reasonable. But on the other hand, if you say that you can tell me about
myself by looking at my palm, or by my birthdate, or something that has
no relation to me, then I'd say you're full of balogna.

---

Saturday, February 2, 2002

This past Tuesday, for ten minutes it snowed in Claremont. Unfortunately, I
was in class so I didn't get to see it. I wasn't all that disappointed since
I'd seen snow fall before, so I went about my day as usual. The next day,
after class, I looked up toward Mt. Baldy. The sky was clear so the
mountain stood out in stark contrast to the mundane scenery of the school.
The peaks were capped and it was friggin beautiful. The sun behind me
shining off the white peaks... the mountain was calling my name. I had some
books to buy but I decided to push that aside as I couldn't resist the
call. I had to see the mountain up close. So I hopped into my car and started
driving.

I went up the mountain but instead of taking the lonely road I usually
travel, I went up the main road toward the ski resort since that road
went up higher and all I could think about was going up. As I started up
the bottom of the hill, several cars passed me going in the other direction.
Their hoods and roofs were covered in snow, presumeably from the previous
day. Some ways up the mountian, small patches of snow lay beside the road.
The road itself was covered in gravel from all those people who waited too
long to remove their snow chains. On top of that, the gravel was wet from the
melting snow and half frozen to create a sort of rocky slush. The mixture
was slippery indeed.

At first, though, it caught me off gaurd. I was at an intersection making
a left and my rear lost traction. I countersteered and caught myself, though
not soon enough to prevent myself from fishtailing a little. I grinned and
knew that this would be an incredible ride despite the painfully slow
Camry I was following. With this wet gravel on the road and the tread depth
of my tires at barely a fraction of a millimeter, I decided I'd practice my
drifting.

I kept a hefty distance between me and the Camry in front of me. As the
first turn came up, I speed up, turned the wheel and held the throttle.
As I expected, the rear slipped out and I countersteered just enough to
hold the drift through the turn. As I came out of the corner, I straightend
up and slowed to allow my following distance to increase again.

I slid through each of the tight hairpins going up the road, each time
getting a better and better feel for the movements of my car. I wasn't the
driver, I was the car. The feeling was exhilirating. Sliding through
tight hairpins at about 15 miles an hour at most. Slow enough so that nothing
could really go wrong even if I had lost control. Slow enough so that I
pull off sweet drifts despite my inexperience.

At the top of the mountain was a clearing with a number of cars parked
along the side of the road and a small crowd playing in the snow. It was
very nice, and it would be nicer if I could come back to play in the snow with
some friends.

I made a U-turn and headed back down the mountain. Drifting going down
was a little bit trickier since the road was rather steep and I wasn't
prepared to throttle through a downhill turn. If the car understeered, then
I'd basically be screwed. At one corner though, I did manage to drift using
some trail-braking to cause the rear to slide. At the end of the turn, I was
amazed that I had managed to drift through the turn without touching the gas.
I wasn't able to do it again, but it was interesting to learn that it's
possible.

After I go back to school, I dropped by the bookstore to pick the books
I needed to buy. At the bookstore I ran into Joshua and suggested to him that
he organize a Pathfinder trip up to Mt. Baldy for some snowplay for the
coming Saturday.

Afterwards, just after the sun went down behind the horizon but before the
sky went dark, I stepped out of my dorm and looked to Mt. Baldy again.
The sun from under the horizon shone on it like a bright red spotlight.
Each crevice was clearly visibly in the waning light and the snow caps
glowed pink against the dark blue sky. I stood staring at it for a few
moments with my mouth agape. The entire scene reminded me of a movie set.
A lonely, mundane town in the foreground with a ridiculously majestic
mountain range painted on a backdrop set behind the town. The mountains
looked out of place as though the town weren't worthy of such a grand view.
Back in my room, I reflected on the day.

Saturday (today) came. Five people including me and Joshua showed up for
the snowplay at Mt. Baldy. This time the trip up to Mt. Baldy was a different
story. The gravel had been cleared and most of the water had dried. But
even if the road were as slick as before, it still wouldn't have afforded me
the sliding fun since the road was a solid line up car leading up the
mountain. After we had reached the top, it took a while to find parking.
We hurled snowballs at each other for a few hours and headed back down.
It was good fun, though I wish more people could have joined us.

On the way back, I took Joshua onto that lonely road I like to drive.
With the crowds, it wasn't so lonely today. After a few miles out, though,
the traffic was light enough to get my heart pumping. Since I wasn't all
that eager to take Joshua's life, I prevented myself from driving there for
too long and came back down to school shortly.

It's the simple pleasures in life that make life worth living. Grand
mountain views, snowball fights, twisty roads. It amazes me how many people
would rather stay in their dorms on a beautiful day such as this.

---

Friday, February 1, 2002

After a bit of soul searching, I came to the conclusion that I'm not as
dependable as I'd like to think I am. However, I need to qualify that.
What's required here, I think, is a definition of dependable. As far as
personality assessments go, I think a good definition of dependable is the
probability that one is going to do something one is obligated to do scaled
(i.e. multiplied by) how much one doesn't want to do it. That means that
you would consider a person very dependable if you count on him to do something
the person really doesn't want to do but is obligated to do. For example,
if you tell someone to take out the trash every Tuesday, you could count
on a dependable person to do it despite the fact that he doesn't want to
take out the trash. Another example would be that you could count on a
dependable person to pick you up if you were stranded somewhere far away
by virtue of the obligation that arises from being a friend. The distinction
with this definition of dependable is the scaling factor of how much a person
doesn't want to fulfill their obligation. The reason I decided to include
this factor is because you can almost always count on a person to do something
they want to do. For example, if a person is obligated to watch at least
three hours of TV a week, you can usually count on any person to do it
regardless of his dependability since watching TV is enjoyable. Or more
reasonably, you can usually count on a person to go to work every day if
his work were well-paying and enjoyable. Therefore, the scaling factor
makes the definition of dependability more reasonable. However, it isn't
altogether practical since oftentimes when you're counting on someone to
do something, you don't know how much they want to or don't want to do it,
nor does it matter. As such, the usual definition of dependability doesn't
take that into consideration. Why this distinction might be important for a
person like me is because of my apathy. Because of my apathy, I tend not
to want to do anything and that fact coupled with the fact that I fulfill
any obligations at all results in my being considered dependable by the
modified definition. However, the fact of the matter remains that I don't
end up fulfilling many of my obligations due to extreme lack of desire,
and this fact renders me oftentimes undependable in the traditional sense.

Besides that, I didn't exactly intend for the "A Look at Myself"
essay to be taken all too seriously or nitpicked because its intended
audience was my professor who knows very little about me and isn't in a
position to disagree with my assessment of myself. Also, Steve mentioned
an interesting point about these personality tests. His point was that
people tend not to argue with their personality assessments since the
assessments are usually somewhat flattering. While I believe that for the
most part, assessments like the Myers-Briggs that are based on solid
psychology are fairly accurate, Steve's point shows that people tend to bias
peoples' belief in the accuracy of these assessments to the more-accurate
range. This is why people can believe that horoscopes are accurate when they
are essentially random. Simply because they tell good news. On the other hand,
if the personality assessments were more unflattering, people would contend
more with the assessment which would cause a bias towards inaccuracy. In any
case, that's all I have to say about my assessment of peoples' assessment
of the personality assessment and I believe it's time for a change of topic.

I did a very remarkable thing tonight. I did math homework. It's not
remarkable that I did it, but it's remarkable that I did it tonight, since
it's Friday night. In the past I've (almost) never done homework on Friday
night. I'm amazed and proud of myself. Though, taken from a different
perspective, it might be a little sad to see that I have nothing better
to do on a Friday night than homework. No movie, no alcohol, no date,
nothing. And I probably won't do anything for Valentine's Day either.
hint, hint, to all you single girls out there.
But that's nothing new. Oh well. More time to do homework. Hooray!

Anyway, tomorrow I'm planning to head up to Mount Baldy to play in the
snow with some Pathfinder people. Because it was a little last minute, I
don't really expect the turnout to be that great. However I'm eager to write
about it tomorrow... mostly because I already know what I want to say and
it doesn't really have anything to do with the snowplay trip to Mt. Baldy.
It has mostly to do with how friggin gorgeous Baldy is
this time of year, but I'll save that for tomorrow.

By the way, if you haven't signed my guestbook yet, please please please
sign it! And if you've already signed it, sign it again! It would be nice to
know who's reading this. It'll probably motivate me to write more often or
more interestingly.