Old event, but I never got around to posting it:

Three weeks ago, at the beginning of our period of "dead days," a bunch of people from my floor decide to go ice skating in San Francisco. I wasn't intending to go, but for some reason I decided to be social at the last minute and tagged along.

Of course, I've never been ice skating before, so I wiped out...

And then I wiped out again...

... and again ...

... and again ...

Anyway, by this time, my ankles were in quite a bit of pain (not to mention the rest of my body), and it was starting to rain. No sense in breaking a few bones and catching pneumonia, so I sat the rest of the time out, waiting for everyone else to finish.

It wasn't until I got back to the dorms and took off my shoes that I saw why my ankles were hurting so much--I apparently had developed a huge blister by each of my ankles, both of which burst and bled into my socks. Needless to say, I had a fairly big blood stain on each of my socks...

I spent the following week limping a bit to my finals. What fun.

Wow, I now have senior standing at Berkeley.

I've heard from several people, though, that my AP credits won't count toward the University's unit cap, so hopefully I won't have to worry about being kicked out prematurely. Phew!

CS project due today, and we didn't finish in time. We couldn't figure out what was causing a major bug and thus had to turn it in incomplete. Dohhhh...

We're paying for cable television and sometime early this week, channels 33-52 suddenly became extremely fritzy. So I called TCI yesterday and complained.

So their representative says, "Is your television set to auto-program?"

"My television doesn't have an auto-program feature," I reply.

"It doesn't? How old is your television?"

"About three years old. But it's set to cable-tv mode and everything was working a few days ago."

"Well, there's solar interference from the third through the tenth of this month that may be causing your problem."

"But other people in my building have had similar problems, and their's have since been fixed. If solar interference is the problem, how could cable be working for some people and not for me?"

"Well, it depends."

("Depends on what?" I think to myself.)

Then the representative tells me that she could send down a repair crew, but if she did that, they'd have to charge me for repair service. Charge me to repair the problem when they're at fault?! Yeah, right. So I told her that I'd call back the next day, when the "solar interference" was gone.

So I called back today and thankfully talked to a representative who wasn't on crack. But they won't send a repair crew down for another week. Ugh...

Third day of classes and already I'm behind. Nuts.

Back in Berkeley, once again. It feels like I was just here yesterday... well, two days ago, actually, when I spent six hours on campus working out an extra credit problem for my Linear Algebra class. I finished it eventually, though my instructor helped me so much that he practically solved it for me.

Doh. My ethernet jack won't be activated until Tuesday. Nuts. Back in Berkeley and still on a modem! Sigh...

Weighed myself for the first time in months this morning. One-hundred-fifteen pounds. That means I gained twenty-five pounds in the past three months! That's almost a third of my pre-summer body mass! Joey Lawrence couldn't say it better: "Whoa!" Time for me to start dieting...

I've decided to stop being so self-absorbed and to start, well, griping.

People (fellow college students, in particular...) just don't update their web pages enough. (Yeah, I'm talking to you!) What's up with all these people posting some drivel on the web and just leaving it there? Seems a bit like littering, to me. If someone's going to take some garbage and call it a web page, they could at least update it every once in a while. I'm just kidding about the garbage remark, by the way. That's really more applicable to my pages in particular...

But maybe all those people just have lives. (Sigh.) Or schoolwork. Or both...

And yes, I'm aware that I don't update my pages very often either. So I'm a hypocrite.

A greatly condensed version of my past month-and-a-half...

Summer school started several weeks ago. Both classes are fairly boring. My math class is going rather slowly; it unfortunately focuses significantly more on linear algebra than on differential equations...

Monday was my birthday. A big =P to all who forgot (which consists of practically everyone; aside from my relatives, only one person remembered...). A pretty dreary day anyway. I didn't expect birthdays to be that depressing until I reached my forties...

Of course, having midterms on the two days following my birthday didn't make the day any more enjoyable, especially having been 200 pages behind in my economics reading...

Also found out my grades for the past spring semester. Ouch. I'm probably going to have a pretty difficult time transferring to the college of engineering now... doh!

I finally received my Painter 5.0 upgrade from Fractal Design/MetaCreations, but it apparently has a significant bug causing it to lose pressure sensitivity functionality from time to time. A bit annoying... How on earth could FD miss that one? (I e-mailed their tech support department, and they are aware already of the problem and are working on a fix.)

Among other things that I fail to understand: why do Photoshop books come in separate Mac and Windows flavors? Perhaps for versions of APS prior to 4.0, I might understand, but since almost all of Adobe's current products share interfaces and features across platforms (not to mention across other Adobe applications), what's the point? Aside from switching "Command" with "Control" and "Option" with "Alt" for the keyboard shortcuts, I don't know of any significant differences between Mac and PC versions. It hardly seems worth the money of printing two almost-identical versions of the same book. Why am I ranting about this? Well, usually the Mac versions of Photoshop books are published first with the Windows ones being released much later. Would it be too difficult to combine both versions into one?

Home again from Berkeley...

Failing to update this thing is getting to be a bad habit. So what have I been doing for the past month? You don't want to know. I don't want to know either. (I'm really just too lazy to try to remember.)

Actually, the past several weeks have been spent, with the help of ICQ, procrastinating from schoolwork. And last week I acquired a couple of console emulators and had a video game fest, playing old Nintendo and Turbografx-16 games. Rather ironically, this was the first time all semester that I had seriously played any video games (games of FreeCell or Minesweeper aside), and it was during finals week at Berkeley...

The past three uneventful weeks have passed surprisingly quickly. I suppose that happens when one doesn't sleep for more than two or three hours at time, seemlessly blending day and night into each other. The past two weeks, however, have had a few strange events:

On Tuesday, I received my second notice of failure since coming to Berkeley. Oh. Boy. (It was due to an administrative error... honest!)

Even more administrative strangeness: I received my registration information for the fall semester last week, and according to the Berkeley administration, this fall I won't be a sophomore; I'll be a continuing junior. Gee. Now I have to declare a major by the end of the coming semester and have to hurry up to transfer to the college of engineering if I'm going to be the EECS major everyone says I'm going to be. Wonderful. I think I'll stop by the administrative offices and void my AP credits and my community college units...

I've actually been going to sleep at normal hours... I can't remember the last time I've felt tired enough at midnight to sleep till morning. Wow. The slightly stranger part is that it happened so suddenly; even last week I was consistently awake each day until 4 or 5 in the morning. Then, Monday night, I went to sleep around midnight and awoke the next morning. Weird.

Whatever. Three midterms in two days is not fun. Especially when you bomb one of them. Really.

Well, I'm finally on my spring break, which so far has been spent recovering lost sleep. The past two weeks haven't been particularly pleasant, especially the last one. I spent the week of March 10th working on yet another CS group project, part of which was due on Monday the 17th. Being the snobbish jerk that I am, I decided to do the other members' work behind their backs for fun; somehow, when I was working on their problems at 3 AM Saturday morning, it didn't seem such a rude thing to do. I don't know what I was thinking.

Perhaps as some sort of bizarre punishment for my pomposity, when I awoke that afternoon of the Ides of March, I had a slight pain in my upper left thigh, as if I had twisted or pulled a muscle in it. Being the paradigm for physical inactivity, this occurence completely mystified me. After walking with it for several days, however, the pain became increasingly worse, and last Thursday it forced me to pay a visit to the University's health center. My problem completely mystified the doctors too, despite the numerous bodily fluids they examined and tests they performed. I borrowed a pair of crutches from them, and after reducing the stress on my leg, by the next day the pain felt completely bearable. Strange. I really didn't care why my leg was hurting; I assumed that once the pain went away, as it assumably would, it wouldn't return, especially given the random circumstances. I had really only gone to the health center for the crutches, but the doctors kept me there for many more hours than I wanted, trying to figure what the cause was. Me, I really could not have cared less. (Being the computer geek I am, I wanted to say, "Look, just let me reboot and hopefully the problem will go away, okay? If it comes back, I'll let you know....")

While my leg was physically aggravating me, I had to write the final draft to my already wretched English paper. The pitiful grade on my first draft had already doomed my English grade, and I needed to do well on my final draft to salvage even the hope for a passing grade. I thus spent the past week barely eating and sleeping--what little sleep I managed happened to coincide with the scheduled dormitory meal hours-- toiling into the night rewriting my paper.

And it still sucked.

...

Oh well. A few things last week did go fairly well. My CS group finished the second half of our project, due the Monday following spring break, with few difficulties and with minimal interference from my rudeness. Last Friday, I received my updated dormitory housing contract, and somehow I managed to obtain a double occupancy room in Unit 1--one of my choices! I obviously don't at all understand how Berkeley assigns residence hall contracts...

Boy. I haven't updated my web site in almost a month now. Yikes... Where do I begin? I don't even know if I can remember what's transpired within the past month...

Instead of studying for my Physics midterm the next day, I went to the Web Design and Development (Web 97) convention on February 23rd in San Francisco, since I had a free pass. I had been looking forward to it and was rather excited, but, as not can be unexpected, it turned out to be rather disappointing.

The convention started off badly. According to the organizers, Microsoft was to give an Intellimouse to each of the first five hundred people to visit their booth that night. I arrived at the convention half-an-hour before the exhibition opened (I would have been there earlier if I hadn't spent fifteen minutes getting lost walking there and another fifteen undoing that) and was easily one of the first five hundred people crowded around the doors to get in. When the doors were finally opened, everybody pushed and shoved to get through, rushing en masse to the Microsoft booth for their free mouse.

With oodles of people crowded around the Microsoft booth, all of whom pushed and shoved enough to shake the booth almost apart, the worker there started handing out boxed mice. After distributing no more than ten, he exclaimed, "Okay, no more! Everybody just back up!" With a wall behind us and people in the back not being able to hear, nobody flinched. Besides, everybody knew that it was physically impossible to give out five hundred mice within the first five minutes. So we all waited. Eventually, someone thought that exchanging business cards for mice would be a reasonable method for handing out mice in an orderly fashion. People then started passing forward their business cards--except those of us who didn't have business cards, and there were quite a few students there. Regardless, the idea was absurd since people in the back of the crowd had as much priority as those in the front. Not that it mattered, since eventually the employees decided not to do anything with the cards after all. After several more futile attempts to organize the crowd, the Microsoft representative started tossing out mice in a two-to-three foot radius. Five minutes later, he again stated, "Okay, they're all gone.". Once again, no one believed him, but after waiting another eventless ten or fifteen minutes, everyone decided that he wasn't lying and dispersed. I overheard that due to some organizing snafu, Microsoft only had approximately 130 mice to give away, though I never had that rumor confirmed. Needless to say, like four hundred other people, I didn't get a mouse and was pretty miffed.

The rest of the convention wasn't as exciting. Most of the products being showcased were utilities that automatically generated Java and HTML code or applications that voraciously consumed bandwidth--not items that particularly interested me.

I did manage to pick up some other free stuff, though none of it made me feel any better about the Intellimouse fiasco. In their JavaBeans promotion, Sun Microsystems gave away boxes of chocolate-covered coffee beans. I ate one and felt sick for at least half an hour. Some software was given away by a number of vendors, but most of the free CDs contained only trial versions of the showcased utilities. The only exception seemed to be from Micrografx, which gave away fully-functional copies of their Webtricity collection of graphics applications. I also acquired some free magazines that I'll probably never have the time to read.

At least I didn't pay for anything other than the BART fare to get there.

I had my first Physics midterm on Monday the 24th, which, even though it was easier than I thought it would be, I didn't do very well on. I missed nine points immediately for somehow stupidly thinking that as long as a string was taut its tension wouldn't change when one end was accelerating. (Duh...) My second project for CS 61A was also due that day, which, because I had misunderstood how the code we based everything on worked, took a lot longer to complete than it should have and wasted most of the previous week.

The following Monday, I had my second CS 61A midterm. I was up from midnight to 8:00 AM that morning working on CS--not studying for the exam, but finishing my two-point homework assignment. I have a somewhat strange sense for priorities. I spent hours trying to figure out why my code wasn't working even though it was right and more hours tracing through functions manually. It turned out that all I needed to do to run code was to load a particular library file first, which I had forgotten to do... (RTFM). Somehow staying awake on four hours of sleep, I managed to do fairly well on my CS exam...

The next day I had an 8-10 rough draft due for English and a midterm to take for Math. Oh. Boy. I intended to write the bulk of my English paper on Saturday, but Saturday happened to be the day that cable television was finally turned on in the dorms, and needless to say, Saturday turned out to be a very unproductive day. I stayed up all of Monday night and most of Tuesday morning laboring over my paper. It obviously didn't help that I had only three or four pages done and that because I had modified my thesis, I needed to rewrite most of it. I ended up stopping the paper two pages short, as a disjointed, weak, and embarrassingly flawed work. At least doing well on the Math exam later that day made me feel a bit better.

Last Thursday, however, was a horrible day. I finally received my dismal score on the Physics midterm, later found out that the shoddy rough draft that I had turned in was going to be graded--which will probably end up dooming my already pathetic English grade, and received my dormitory housing contract. It seems that next year I'm probably going to be living in Bowles Hall, the oldest residence hall at Berkeley, which is all-male, has one of the worst locations, and, most importantly, has no in-room network connections. It's obviously the last place where I would want to be. It doesn't make me feel any better that by next semester, several other dorms, including the one where I'm currently living and where I would like to continue living, are going to be connected to Berkeley's Internet backbone either via a single 100 megabit fiber-optic cable or via multiple 10 megabit lines. In comparison to the non-network at Bowles, even the 64 kilobit ISDN lines my dorm currently use look good...

Sigh...

Hrmmm. I've developed the typical dilemma experienced by many web designers (and by most normal people, for that matter): lack of organization. What originally started off as a small side project consisting of five pages has now grown into a small side project consisting of ten. Increasing the number of pages parallel to already existing ones poses no difficulty, but I haven't yet determined a convenient method for increasing linear depth. The horizontal navigation bars prevalent in my About... pages are already confusing enough... Sigh. That site map is looking more useful every day...

Not that I should have wasted much time pondering such relatively frivolous things. On Monday, I had homework and a project due and a midterm to take for my CS 61A class. The midterm, which theoretically was a one hour exam, almost took me the entire two hours given to complete. Ugh... (I thought I bombed it, but after I looked up my score today, apparently not. Phew. I'll be lucky if I can keep it up, though...) After the exam, I stayed up embarrassingly late writing a two page analysis paper for my English class, not unlike all those practice writing prompts in high school for the English AP exam. Sigh. I was hoping that I'd seen the last of those horrid things...

And I still haven't gotten around to seeing the Star Wars: Special Edition yet...

Sunday night, my monitor started behaving rather bizarrely. Several times, my screen dimmed quite a bit and suddenly restored itself to the usual brightness. At first I thought it was caused by a sag in the power, but none of the room lights were affected. I thought it was some fluke and hoped the problem would go away, but when I woke up Monday morning, rather than dimming, my display turned really bright, making the screen almost entirely white. After turning the monitor on and off several times, which at first seemed to temporarily restore it to its normal brightness, and switching video modes, my display became warped and magnified, even for the MS-DOS console, and portions of my display were off the sides of the screen. The monitor controls also seemed to have no effect on the display. Doh.

Prior to this, my monitor was already not working quite right. When I returned to Berkeley from winter break, 1024×768 resolution worked at 16-bit color but not at 8-bit. Uh... oh-kay... My display was also slightly warped at the edge of the screen, but perhaps I merely failed to notice it before. I suppose that the monitor may have been damaged during winter break by moisture in the air from our defrosting refrigerator, but I doubt that it ever got very damp. Well, next time I don't think I'll be leaving my monitor in my dorm room over winter break...

Luckily, my really nice parents brought me a replacement monitor last night. Wow. For a short while yesterday, I wondered if I would have to try to get a life. Phew. (Actually, I would have spent more time in the computer labs attempting to learn Unix instead. Phew.)

Sigh. It's only the end of my first week back at Berkeley, and it already feels like it's been so much longer. Ugh. I've already had an English essay due--only two pages, but the topic was nevertheless odd; I had to write about my name. It didn't turn out too badly, I suppose; I ended up filling up quite a bit of space discussing how generic my name is, listing statistics showing the number of "James Lin's" at other major universities. The current numbers:

              James   Jimmy   Jim   TOTAL
-----------------------------------------
UC Berkeley     5*      -      -      5
UCLA            5       1      -      6
UC Davis        1       2      -      3
Harvard         1       -      -      1
Yale            1       -      -      1
MIT             -       1      -      1
Stanford        -       -      1      1

* (based on active e-mail accounts; only 3 are enrolled)

It also turns out that the instructor for my English class was changed at the last minute, so almost all of the books I had bought for the class thus had to be returned. Doh...

I'm also taking CS 61A ("The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs") in which we learn all about... Scheme. Scheme so far seems to be sort of silly; when you load a file into the interpreter or toggle file logging, the interpreter responds with, "okay." Ohh-kay... The silly language also uses parentheses way too excessively...

I went to apply for a card-key for the computer labs today. I filled out the applications, and right when I was about to turn them in, one of the clerks literally closed the door in my face...! After standing in front of the door in confusion for a minute, someone came out and told me they were closed--fifteen minutes early! Greaaat.

The rest of my classes seem tolerable enough. I discovered that my Physics 7A class and my CS 61A class both have a midterm scheduled on the same day at the same time; luckily one of the three professors teaching Physics 7A has his corresponding midterm the day after the others'. Since all the Physics 7A classes are supposed to be more or less in sync, my lab TA said that I could probably take the other professor's exam instead. If that's the case, then my Physics midterm will be instead on the same day as my Math one... hoo boy...

Only one more week until the release of the Star Wars: Special Edition...!

Well, I'm currently back at Berkeley and again on the Dining Commons diet. How much weight will I lose this semester? Place your bets...