Thursday, March 23, 2006

UCLA game was awesome!!!

Got a new phone today, yay. It's a Samsung t309, a low-end phone to replace my old low-end phone, but this new one at least is a flip phone. Seems pretty good so far, finally get a decent signal both at home and at work... now I'm waiting for them to transfer my old phone number over to the new phone.

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Every year around this time, just when spring is starting, it gets cold... it's the end of March and there is still snow in the forecast! Sigh. At least there was less snow this winter than in previous years. It's been pretty mild, actually.

This semester I've been taking a class for fun. It's an engine teardown class; you get into groups of 3-5 people, and each group gets a car engine, and over the course of the semester you take it apart and put it back together. It's a neat experience because really, when else do you get the opportunity to take apart an engine for free and with no real consequences if you mess up?

Our engine is a 2-liter, 4-cylinder, 16-valve DOHC Ford/Mazda engine. One of the other groups got a V-8 Cobra engine which looks way cooler, but hey, I'm still taking apart an engine, so I can't complain too much. Right now we're a little bit behind the other groups since there were some snafus with obtaining a manual and getting certain bolts off. But now we've almost got the whole thing apart, so we'll soon be getting to the hard part -- putting it all back together.

Friday, March 10, 2006

Here's an old entry I wrote a couple of weeks ago but never posted for some reason.

I was looking at the change in my pocket the other day and it occurred to me, some of these coins have been around for a long time. For example I have a 1969 dime. Sounds like nothing special, but think about it... this little piece of metal was minted the year that Apollo landed on the moon, the year of Woodstock, and it's been spending the last 37 years circulating around in people's pockets... 37 years is a long time for an everyday object. Really, what else do you own that is that old? It probably spent a decade in a jar on someone's desk. I think it'd be interesting to follow a single coin around and see all the places that it goes during its lifetime.

Apparently there's a site that tracks dollar bills... coins would be more interesting though since they last so much longer. Of course it's pretty much impossible, since unlike bills, coins don't have serial numbers.

Wednesday, March 8, 2006

Came back from San Diego on Monday. SD was great. This time Jenny and I hung out at Mission Beach, Coronado, La Jolla, and Balboa Park. We watched the hang gliders and paragliders at Torrey Pines. It looked really cool.. I will definitely go hang gliding next time I have money and the opportunity presents itself. I looked into hang gliding in Michigan, but there are no cliffs here, so you have to get towed up in the air by another plane. Which makes hang gliding a more expensive proposition here. So probably I'll wait until next time I go to SD or somewhere like that.

Jenny and I also wound up going to the Nikkei Student Union culture show at UCSD. It's been a long time since I went to a culture show... went to a few put on by the Chinese Students Association at UCLA back when I was there. Jenny and I both remarked how unusual it felt to be surrounded by 99% Asians again. Felt exactly like undergrad, except all the people were like 6 years younger than us. It was funny because I felt taller than normal, since I was surrounded by this population of shorter-than-average people.

Anyway, like I said, came back on Monday, and today I helped out some labmates on a research paper that we submitted for review about 1.5 hours ago.

No one probably noticed, but recently my photo albums stopped working again for some reason. I am going to rewrite them using some Javascript, and get rid of those iframes that I have been using. This is mostly a backend change though -- when I'm done, they shouldn't look too different from how they look now. (Or, I should say, from how they looked when they actually worked.)

Currently reading: Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman.