Best Thanksgiving ever.

(1). LAX. I was stupid and not assertive enough to get on the bus WHILE IT WAS STALLING FOR FIVE MINUTES, but the Van Nuys bus driver had me run across the entire airport (actually, two crosswalks) to chase it down before it looped over. More importantly, I felt bad about not explainin' the situation to the poor lady with her pet Puggle (a Pug/Beagle cross breed) that I carried the baby dog along with my extra heavy bags while she wheeled her suitcase across.

(2). I like Union Station. It's pretty.

(3). Kyochon is a fried chicken place on the outskirts of LA's Koreatown. I, with my friend, her roommate, and his (current) date had dinner: 121 pieces of fried chicken, thankfully tiny. And chocolate soft-serve ice cream.

(4). Attended my first proper thanksgiving dinner at my friend's co-worker's house (they have big big big houses in Huntington Beach). Turkey. Mac and Cheese. Sweet Potato casserole. Adorable Malteses (OMIGOD THEY SNUGGLED). I sucked at the karaoke game. (And there was only one song that I was even vaguely familiar with.)

(5). Gardena. As stupid as it sounds, I checked in bags and flew all the way to Los Angeles for the sake of getting rid of 11 manga. 50 cents each isn't great, but it's better than having them take up space. Now what to do with the other 15 that I don't want to sell...

(6). Konbu Tsuyu. Nijiya Market in SF didn't stock any konbu tsuyu that was sufficiently small (they were all 1-litre large bottles), so I was ecstatic to find a 355ml bottle. ♥

...And the cheaper soba tsuyu tastes better. So I didn't waste money after all.

(7). The Grove. It was entirely on a whim (because we were both bored after getting back from Gardena), and so we headed out to people-watch, go window shopping (it's like Emeryville, so I've seen it all, thank you), and watched New Moon.

... Yes, that. I should have watched Myself and Orson Welles instead, but my friend wasn't up to watching cartoons in the theatre and I stubbornly refuse to give up on reading vampire literature (this means that yes, I have skimmed through Darren Shan, and yes, I read Dead Until Dark - in my first year, now that I think about it). It was stupid, and thankfully, the audience that night were cynical familygoers too (although I would have been amused by fangirls).

(8). Christmas shopping. I bought socks for Turtle Girl and Ai-chan (wasn't expecting to, BUT THE MONKEY WAS SO DAMN CUTE).

(9). Daikokuya. The wait was stupendously long, but I met bastardized for the first time in 4 years so we had all the time in the world to catch up on anything and everything in between.

(10). Central Hollywood was boring and rather unsettling.

(11). Bolt was classic Disney fare, but TV-obsessed, psychotic hamsters were worth it.

And that's it. Now for miraculous studying to happen.

screwed, screwed, screwed, screwed.

I take back all of the nice things I've been saying about my physics professor.

The material may be hard - who says e/m is easy is clearly fit to be a physics major - but (vaguely) fair. Even if it were hard but fair, I could accept it with a huge stretch. I've seen weirder problems.

But I'm stumbling through the class, I get my near failing quizzes back, and other than the score, I still have no idea how to do the problem, much less go over the problem. Which is going to hit me again for the final. I'm sure his marking is methodical and systematic, but actually knowing where I went wrong, knowing how to go through a solutions manual methodically, is frankly, something important.

this is a twitter/facebook-status-like post.

Mizuki Nana is going to Kouhaku.

Remember back in 2005 when people were freaking out over FictionJunction YUUKA showing up for Pop Jam and Honoo no Tobira making it to the #1 spot on Oricon (the daily chart, that is)?

Well, this one is another score for the anime otaku.

Well.

UC Regents decided to raise undergraduate student fees by a whopping 32 percent, starting in Fall 2010.

Unless financial aid increases, I expect a fair number of people leaving school after this year.


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AKB interest died this week. But that's mainly because I've been watching the KinKi You concerts. :P

Hiroi Ohji scripted, and directed AKB48's first musical, which is as campy and cheezy and stupid as the story can get. (They even called it "AKB Kagekidan"!)

...I forsee a repeat of 2007.

don't drag me into this no no no ---

... Hi there! That's what I'm doing!

Only, (1) I suck immensely at my math and science skills and (2) I am totally incompetent when it comes to creative design. And by my loner nature, I don't work well with many teams. At least, not the ideal, anyway.

And actually, some of the questions were hard. They apply to me half the time, and that's pretty much what I got: 85% introvert, and the other three within 50% to 57%.





Personally, I think my withdrawn and passiveness actually allows me to be a lot more compliant. In that way I work a lot better in a team, than trying to be a slavedriver :P

Now to increase the chance of a miracle happening. It's not turning out so well.

Who said that community classes are a joke? I'm swimming in Linear Algebra *and* Differential Equations here, and covering more material and HARDER material (secondary eigenvalues, Laplace Transforms, Power Series)... and there ain't a curve, either.

my procrastination habit has been getting silly. other than the major deadlines and assignments, I haven't been able to jump onto things and start working. it takes me weeks to work up the courage to call people. it takes me months to write essays. it takes me days to ask for requests. it takes ages to do stuff. I haven't been able to turn in a single birthday card to anybody (other than on LJ and FB).

time to hit Y!J auctions.

first of, the linear algebra midterm is going to slaughter my backside.

My landlady's three-year old starts crying at the drop of a hat. 97% of the time is because he's a brat. The other 3% is because he hurt himself. The frequency is a bit akin to the dog's tendency to mark his territory when I'm walking him.

(There is something very amusing about this analogy, and what kind of little twitter-like details I pick up.)

when do you draw the line between 'let's do this crazy integral by hand' and 'let's punch it in the calculator'?

In class, I did things (and I still do things) by hand, even if they take ages. Even if they're matrix operations and take up pages after pages. One of my classmates finished up his homework with Mathematica.

There lies the difference in our grades.

Although, that said, I'm very defensive and don't challenge my brain in creative ways, so that's where I'll suffer down the road. And I don't play enough games - or any game, really. I think that makes me quite a human misfit, where my element of play is, well, reading possibly anything and everything (now who reads travel guides for fun?).

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still trying to comb google for caches. One of my favorite sites was taken down today, and I've been trying to ransack Google for caches. (The score: 1 out of 13.)

Maybe I have to go back to that old routine of saving every page I come across.

behold the number of books consulted for one class (technically two)



only THREE are the actual books needed for class. The rest are all ones that I've had to buy/borrow from friends BECAUSE NOTHING MAKES SENSE WITH LINEAR ALGEBRA WTF.

(and I turned off the flash on the camera.)

Writing 'JC' is so much easier than using 'community college' or 'CC', even though there are differences. (This is Yoss's strategy against wise-cracking or particularly picky people: be as literal and as legal as possible so they can't ever, every get a point in.)

Differential Equations & Linear Algebra - yes, we combine those two - is the one class where I haven't found truly incompetent people or ones who are just annoying rude-mouthed jerks.

The introductory seminar is harder than I thought, because we have more thought-provoking papers, or simply, just more papers to write than other iterations of the class. But keep in mind that it's a one-unit seminar with no prereqs, so provided that it's easy to BS on papers... well yeah, there are students who are just taking the class for units (there was one such person at the first class... then she dropped, of all things), and there are some who have yet to know how hard the academic program will be, because they're still catching up on their pre-calculus and their Englishes, and well, they just don't know the brutal stuff I went through. (Maybe I'm starting to get arrogant with the college pedigree.)

But at least it's been nice to hear these seminars again. I skipped almost all of my chemistry seminars in second year, only staying to hear the professors whose research touched into topics I liked. It's something new now, and even though the transfers processes don't apply to me, and the local schools mean nothing to me, at least there's something to be learned from each presenter. Even if I'm going to disagree with their practices or approaches or dissing the theoretical engineers. (But theoretical engineers do not exist. Theoretical engineering professors, of course, do.)

The design class is still a joke. I sweated blood for my first two homework assignments, and then did the minimal for the third, and... they were all the same. And the midterm grade - now dang, that's my highest score ever, and there's no way anybody can top that. But I doubt anyone can learn anything from this class, and in my opinion, if you get a low B, there is something wrong with your competency or work ethic. And there are two people whom I dislike on sight, but I'm hoping that I'm disliking them on sight for the sake of it. Now I don't want another post-project meltdown, because my math exam is the first thing coming up after that...

The physics class is uh. It's a hard class, and it's taught by a harsh professor, and I'm still trying to make it over the halfway mark. But I have to stick to it, because there's no turning back, and I really like the top students in my class, anyway.

The physics lab is... hm. It's hard. It's hard as in I'm still not sure what my professor wants (he also teaches the lecture, too), and now I can understand why people dislike lab classes: the writeup and the conclusion and the damned uncertainty calculations will drive me nuts.

More importantly though, I'm stuck with competent but foul-mouthed windbags. And this is sad, very sad - because one of them is like me: a post-grad switching fields (from Kansas, though: and they're... not that great), and the other is on break(?) from Cal Poly. Cal Poly. THE other engineering school. I'm not sure whether my professor takes pity on me for having to deal with their... pretty durned dirty comments, or thinks I'm an idiot for not reacting, or wonders if I have anything intelligent to say. So I've been trying to butter up (slightly), because I definitely need to improve my grades for his lecture class.

Yeah, it kinda sucks when you're working with lazy people (who futilely argue for not doing homework, who don't show up to class), or people stuck in their ways (I still think the engineers and engineers-to-be think too little of social justice theory, or think little of theory), but there are little sparks of hope to be found. And some are just people whom I really wish I could be. ::yep::

I thought multivariable calculus was going to kill me, but differential systems is systematically shredding through my brain like the combined slaughterhouse that is Green's and Stokes. (The Divergence Theorem was something Nice and Easy after those two.)

At this point I have no idea how to play with secondary eigenvectors, how anyone comes up with them in the first place, whether it's a shoehorn of Really Really Weird Things, how Jordan Canonical Forms come into play, and... actually, it wouldn't be so bad if my homework wasn't so hard. (They're harder than the midterm problems. But everything's hard anyway.)

And oh god, power series. Power Series to describe cosines and sines.

After solving defective matrices (AND WEIRD FUNKY STUFF), heterogeneous equations are like a big phew. They're just long.

in times like this, amazingly the community colleges have not had their meeting days hacked.

State has hacked their Fridays and Mondays.
Cal shoved it all down into December, so there's now a full week to study.

I don't know how that works out. More time to study? I recall doing physics and chemistry finals back to back (and I forgot my calculator to both of them). We had two days of study leave, and exams occurred on Saturdays.

And there aren't any changes over here. Less than two months of school to go! I am still on the record for twenty-seven consecutive weeks of instruction.

Actually, back in 2006 I went for 30 weeks (+1 for Spring Break), so I'm in no position to complain now.

The bookstack now looks smaller, only because I separated the manga out. Given that southwest lets me check in two bags, of course I'm going to fill one with books and take 'em to book-off.

Yes, if I can do it I'd do silly things like this, only because I can't think of a single secondhand Chinese bookstore around here. Actually, scrap that. Think Japanese.

rumichan & mura_arkaine: So, any (rough) ideas on how much Book-Off offers you? (It's not as if it even matters, since I'd be donating them away up here. (You'd think that with the huge Chinese population here, surely I can offload my stuff somewhere!) What other stuff do they take that secondhand bookstores usually don't take?

The number of book-boxes is still at... seven, plus a bookcase of this year's textbooks.

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Useful information learnt today:
(1)general physics sequence could substitute for dynamics
(2)CEs don't stress too much on the chemistry - unless they're environmental, which I could still do if I successfully transfer
(3)with physics and statics I've run out of classes to directly transfer, and anything else is now strengthening the application. even e/m would be a third year course.
(4)I pretty much know who'll be reading my application
(5)C++ isn't emphasized at Madtown (but it is in UCLA!)
(6)State engineers think of Cal engineers as elitist pricks who don't know how to get their hands dirty and you know, actually build stuff. Which is sadly true, according to some people I know.
(7)I still think my engineering design professor is a prick and consider myself lucky that he's not teaching the introductory seminar.

I got very tired of the engineers who thought all other majors were useless and I got tired of the social science people who found everything else boring and I became worried about the humanities people who fall too deeply into the belief that their viewsystem is true (more importantly, all others false). when people engage in this 1/0 talk I wonder how polarized we are becoming and where do I stand, and where others like me stand. I'd like to think they actually exist, but we like to keep to ourselves too much.

Incompetent Moron dropped the class, after I called him just as the midterm was about to start and told him (in more or less) to get his ass over to class.

Turns out he dropped it.

Again.

You had an NP for this class last semester, and this semester you're getting a W. Clearly, he's not going to MIT. And doubtfully Cornell (although he says he's been accepted, wtf). And I raise eyebrows at Davis. Or just any engineering program. And if you've been here for three years, then I think you're just a total failure at being academic.

winter plans:

freeze backside in Milwaukee and Madison. If I can't stand the cold and the windchill for several days, there's no way I'll hold my ground for months. (Provided that they take me in the first place, anyway.)

Mom's thinking of accompanying me, but on the condition we go to New York, too.

my housemate is from yokosuka and is studying english. No, she's not an English major.

And she's moving to San Diego tomorrow.

I can't even get out of the Bay Area.

my intro to engineering midterm is today and the professor has not handed back a single thing - no homework and no labs. even the project was due last week.

so even though I'd like to think that I'm doing well in that class -- well, this is but incompetency to the highest level.

it's an open book and open notes exam, so I'm just wasted a shitload of paper reprinting my assignments.

this is why I get annoyed with easy classes more than hard classes. with hard classes I get upset at my inability. with dumb-easy classes where no one learns a thing I truly despise.
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I've been reading the Tsubasa Chronicle summaries on the wiki and they make absolutely zero sense. I think this was why I gave up on CLAMP some time ago - the characters have too many similar names, or different identities, and it was sufficiently hard in X.

now understand that I love lagomorphs. I have a (very dirty and ugly and old) stuffed bunny my mom bought the week before I was born, and despite the fur peeling and the crushed bobtail (which I stepped on when I was three - oh, the trauma my little self had to go through), I still love him very, very much.

so I am not fond of bunny cruelty.

that said, while it pains me that killing bunnies has to be employed as a method of reducing the bunny population, I am not opposed (on humane grounds) to using their cadavers for fuel.

I am, however, opposed to spewing more CO2 (and other byproducts of bunny-burning - does anyone know of any analysis done on particles emitted by incinerators?) into the atmosphere.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091014/od_nm/us_sweden_burning;_ylt=At8nd5l..m.IClbMN0Ih8Cms0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTFmMDhobGQ0BHBvcwMyMDMEc2VjA2FjY29yZGlvbl9vZGRfbmV3cwRzbGsDYnVybmluZ2J1bm5p

Hopefully I don't get shitty teammates for the second design project.

Because I did just about the entire work for the first one.

Actually, I was more like Human Resources, between calling up everyone and sending mass e-mails and updates and making sure they got their work done, because we didn't even start building the stupid golf ball launcher until the week before it was due, and only built it because I adopted my slavedriver attitude and got them to work.

And then I had to stop the main builder from staying in the Thinking Stage and told him to give me a SOMETHING idea, not a SOMETHING LIKE idea.

And I wrote most of the 25-page report in a night, sacrificing a lab midterm, a physics quiz, and all but 2 hours of sleep. And about five whole days of thinking nothing but the project.

And then dickwads of classmates at class accused us of building illegally two launchers not a launcher for the competition, I did most of the speaking, our launcher was still not the best nor the efficient (I'm bad at the design stage, to be very honest), and the class is a complete waste of my time because it's just EXCEL and MATLAB, not to mention the longest and most pointless labs of all time (seriously, you want us to write a 2-page proposal for solar power implementation when we have just about no idea what the different terms even mean?).

And I got stuck with the most useless of teammates - no, I look at his reports for the force body diagrams and there is NO FRICKIN' WAY he is going to survive the engineering program, and I don't even want to know how he's managing multivariable calculus, the first semester of engineering physics, the whole year of non-calculus physics, AND english, or what prompted him in the first place, when his work is nothing but turd.
There is no way you are going to survive in Cornell, much less get in - it may be a private school, but it's still a damn fine school.

So, Thursday night was a complete mess, I broke down, and my friend told me to go visit her.

And then right then and there I bought plane tickets to LAX.

Hence, I had dinner on Friday night at Little Tokyo, had brunch in Hollywood, went on a drive to Long Beach (and got us lost getting back on the 710), and spent time at Century City (the selection of books at Borders was insufficiently academic). None of the truly touristy things, and frankly, a rather normal weekend (complete with actual studying!), only about 400 miles away from "home".

But Monday was a holiday, so it worked out.

I should do more of these get away trips. Although they'll probably be just limited to LA. Or maybe I can go further north on the Amtrak. Hmm.