What A Wave Must Be

Wow.  It’s been a while since I last made an entry here.  I had meant to make one after Thanksgiving and recap all that we did there, but I didn’t get around to that.  Oh well.  I guess I can do it now.

Thanksgiving wasn’t all that interesting really.  We actually went out to a restaurant for dinner, rather than staying in, which I thought was sort of weird.  The restaurant we went to was alright, on the whole.  They served us a sort of crabcake thing for the appetizer and then some dryish turkey breast for the main course.  It wasn’t that bad, but I think I’d have liked it a lot more if we’d stayed home.

The next day, it was off to Jon’s house for a reunion of the gang.  That was much fun.  I brought my Wii and showed everyone Wii Sports and how the remote works and all that.  Then they played Smash on it.  We went and saw Casino Royale later that night when Adam managed to show up.  That movie, I didn’t like so much.

I suppose that I went in with a little prejudice as I didn’t know that the movie was supposed to be a prequel to the entire Bond series.  So I was wondering why the new Bond was so bad at everything he did.  I also didn’t like how they concentrated so much on the poker game, and how little actual action there was.  When I see a Bond movie, I see it for the fancy car chases, high-tech gadgets, shootouts, and explosions.  I don’t see it to watch a poker game.  If I want to watch a poker game, I can watch WSOP, just fine and for no money.

One other thing I found interesting was how aggressively Sony placed its products in the film.  Every laptop was a Vaio.  What’s more, every cell phone was a Sony Ericsson.  I thought that that point was really funny.  What was even funnier to me was that the cell phones actually played a relatively big part in the tech department, as they were used for a lot of things such as surveying a building, or detonating a bomb.  All of which required close-ups of the phone.  Very smooth.

So after the movie, we came back and played more games.  Jon got out the PS2 Naruto, so I played that.  I must say that I am now very bad at it, having gotten used to the Gamecube version.  Regardless, it was still fun.

I hadn’t planned on staying the night, but it wound up that just about everyone did.  I was intending to go to sleep, but I ended up staying up the entire night watching Kevin and Adam play DotA and teach Jeff how to do the Rubik’s cube.  I slept for a little bit in the wee morning and woke up around seven, I believe.  We spent the next six hours wandering around and doing various unproductive things (namely, stacking things on Adam and Kevin who were still asleep) until Jon’s mom suggested we go for lunch.

We went to Ming’s, which was nice as I haven’t had dim sum in a long time and was aching for some.  Very fulfilling.  After that, I went home.

And that, for the most part, was the extent of my activities over Thanksgiving break.  I have naught much else to report for this week.  I bought a new zippered sweater from the UCLA store, partly for Blue and Gold week, but mainly because I wanted a zip-up and a properly colored UCLA sweater.

I can’t believe that it’s basically the end of the quarter.  In about three more weeks I’ll be going back home for Christmas.  That’s exciting.  I’m going to have to start thinking of what I want for presents this year.  I don’t have much idea, aside from a new cell phone.  Maybe a Pearl or a Q.  I don’t really need the smartphone functions, but those phones are so slick looking, I can’t resist.

Woooooo!

Finally home for Thanksgiving.  I’ll recount the afternoon before my flight (Wednesday), and then what little I’ve done today.  It’s actually still pretty early in the day, although it doesn’t feel like it at all.  If I had to say what time I think it is, I’d say that it’s either 7:00 or 8:00.  It’s actually more like 4:00.  That makes sense seeing as my day started somewhere around four hours early.

Anyway, wrap.

Wednesday was a typical day of classes.  The one interesting thing that I did was starting to learn how to develop in CakePHP.  What is CakePHP, you ask?  In short, CakePHP is a PHP implementation of the philosophy behind Ruby on Rails.  That is, it’s a framework that makes interacting with relational databases very easy, and also simplifies the presentation of data from those databases.  Cake follows the Model-View-Controller philosophy and is all around quite easy to use.

I came across Cake because I had been poking around at various ways to teach myself how to use Rails and found that there were actually Rails-clones built for most of the major web programming languages.  I’m sort of planning on learning how to use Djoomba or TurboGears or Pylons to teach myself Python sometime too, but that’s on the backburner.

So I found Cake and thought that it was really cool and that I’d have to try it out.  So, what I decided to do was to make my own CMS.  The goals of this project are:

• Support for both periodic content (blogs) and static content (articles)
• Support for images with albums and sub-albums.
• Support for tagging on all content.
• Support for comments on all content.
• Implementation of OpenID.

As of current, I’ve been able to very easily set up a database to store all of this information and, using Cake’s very very handy scaffolding, build a very simple interface for the database in just the space of that afternoon.  I haven’t figured out the OpenID implementation yet, and I want to figure out how to expand tag-management capabilities, and then of course I need to make my own logic for most of the stuff, but it’s all actually very easy.  Surprisingly easy.  And very cool.

This all really makes me want to learn how to use Rails.  But it seems that Rails is designed for a much more experienced developer as there is a lot I have to do in the command line to generate stuff that’s all a pain and that I’m not entirely sure about.  In Cake, I just write the files and make directories according to specifications.  It’s all stuff I’m comfortable with.

However, I’m still really interested in learning Ruby.  The language is so cool.  Especially the way iterators work.  I love it.

Other stuff from Wednesday: I had to wake up at 4 AM this morning, so Wednesday night was spent mostly trying to decide if I should stay up the whole night and just not sleep, or if I should go to bed early and get some sleep.  Neither I really wanted to do.  So, instead, I opened the extension on my desk.  My desk is now at least a third larger than it was.  And the change is very significant.  It was quite a chore to make the extension, though.

My desk is under my bed.  By some weird quirk, the bookshelf that’s stacked on top of my desk is exactly the height from my desktop to the bottom of the bed.  This means that it’s impossible to remove the bookcase from the desk without dismantling the bed.  I suppose you could move it if you could move the desk out enough.  But the bookcase actually adds quite a significant weight to the desk and makes it very hard to move single-handedly.

I did it, though.

It took a lot of very creative sliding and tilting of the bookcase to get it to a point where I could nudge the desk around and sort of pivot it forward.  But it all paid off.  And now my desk is so much bigger.  I can actually put my printer on the desktop and it doesn’t eat half of the space.

Other news: We’re pushing the SCA site live on Monday!  It’s very exciting.  Hopefully I’ll get the rest of the components I need from the rest of the committee before then…  And I don’t know if that’ll work out.

Here’s something fun.

1) Open your library.  2) Put it on shuffle.  3) Press play.  4) For every item, enter the song that’s playing.  5) When you go to a new item, press next.

• Opening Credits: Moaning Myrtle – Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban Soundtrack
• Waking up: Rhythm of Red – Yasunori Mitsuda
• Falling in Love: Fly High [Pop 'e.a.' Mix] – Ayumi Hamasaki
• Fight Song: Trauma [Yukihiro Fukutomi Remix] – Ayumi Hamasaki
• Breaking Up: Peace Love And Understanding – Perfect Circle
• Formal/Prom: Traveling – Utada Hikaru
• Life: Who… [Blue Obsession Mix] – Ayumi Hamasaki
• Mental Breakdown: Making Love – Utada Hikaru
• Driving: Fat Bottomed Girls – Queen
• Flash Back: I am… – Ayumi Hamasaki
• Getting Back Together: CAROLS – Ayumi Hamasaki
• Wedding: Battlefield – Kà
• Birth of a Child: Depend on you – Ayumi Hamasaki
• Final Battle: You Make Me Want to Be a Man – Utada Hikaru
• End Credits: Boys & Girls – Ayumi Hamasaki

So… I have an interesting soundtrack.  Most of it is Jpop.  I can’t really say that I think any of it matches the mood of the events.  Fat Bottomed Girls is a nice driving song.  CAROLS sort of fits its spot.  Other than that though, I don’t know…

Next quarter is shaping up to be a monster.  My original plan was to take Chem 20B next quarter and then take Chem 20L the quarter after that.  After talking with my little group of chemistry friends, I found that there was considerable talk going around saying that the professor teaching Chem 20B in winter was perhaps the most horrible professor ever to walk the face of the Earth.  We even asked Scerri after lecture on Friday what he thought of the professor, and Scerri told us flat out that we should avoid him at all costs.

So that threw my whole schedule out of whack.  I’ve made a plan with Shilpa and Stephanie, however, that if we can get into Chem 20BH, we’ll do that.  Kat and Naomi are holding off with chemistry until spring quarter and are going to take Chem 20B with the professor that’s teaching then.

And so I thought I had my plan worked out.  But nope.  It turns out that priority enrollment only allows me to enroll in a class until half the seats are filled.  When I went to look into Chem 20BH, half the seats were filled.  Fantastic.  So, I went about making a new schedule.

My current plan is as follows: I’ve enrolled in Life Science 2 and Art History 54.  If, come second pass, I can enroll in Chem 20BH, I will.  If I can’t, but can enroll in Statistics 10, I will do that.  If I can’t do either, then I’ll enroll in Linguistics 1.  And then, of course, there’s my cluster.  So that makes four classes next quarter.  That’ll very likely be 20 units; if I get Chem 20BH, then it’ll only be 19, but I’ll be getting 4 honors units.

Gah.  This whole enrollment thing is really stressful.  I was also looking over a more generalized list of prerequisites for various pharmacy schools out there, and it looks like I’m pretty good just by completing my major.  There are a bunch of random courses that I need to take, though, like Communications 10, or Psychology.  So we’ll have to see where those fit in.

Also, it seems like I won’t be going through with my plan to get the Computing Specialization on my degree.  In order to that, I’d have to take Math 33B as a prerequisite for the upper-division computational chemistry courses.  And I do not want to take any more math than I have to.  So that’s out the window.

It also seems, however, that I may need to take a year of college math.  That’s sort of depressing.  What’s not really depressing is that I could take some Comp. Sci. courses to satisfy that.  And I’m going to have to be taking Stats. 10 anyway.  So just put in one more CS course, and I’ll be good.

Other news: I got into contact with the sys admin for the SCA site, and he hooked me up with the MySQL data.  The website is almost up and running.  I am very excited.  The last thing he needs to do is allow me to put a .htaccess file into our directory.  Once that’s done, I’ll be able to have permalinks going and push the site live.  Quite a bit ahead of schedule, if I do say so myself.  Of course, the gallery won’t be done, but then there wasn’t much to put in there in the first place.

Speaking of the gallery, I’m thinking of implementing it using this cool new development framework I heard about called CakePHP.  Cake is, basically, a simple framework for building sites that need to access a database.  I wasn’t planning on using a database for the gallery, but I’d like to learn how to use this thing, so I’m thinking I’ll teach myself about it while writing a gallery script for us.  Galleries are relatively simple, so it should be a no-brainer and a good learning exercise.  I want to add more skills to my repertoire as a web-developer.

I’m thinking of e-mailing Bluehost and asking them if we have Ruby and/or Python installed, or if there’s any way that I could get them installed.  I’d like to learn how to use Rails and one of the Python frameworks as well.  This is all in my attempt to get myself more familiar with current web-development trends so that I can grow my abilities.  I have something like a plan to do freelance web-development while I’m going through Pharm. school.  And if I can build full sites from the ground up without using other applications, I’ll be really really happy.  Granted, there’s not much reason to, as there are already a lot of good CMS applications floating around the nets already.  But, it’s another thing to put on my resume.

Other other news: I went and Mac-ified my computer again.  I found a nice OSX Tiger skin and even a good iChat skin for Trillian.  I got my dock back, and I’m planning on downloading a cracked ObjectDock when I go home so I can do away with the taskbar entirely and make it really Mac-like.  Also got a really nice Exposé clone that also clones the Flip 3D functionality from Vista.  It’s very nice and I like it a lot.  Also switched back to using iTunes, mainly because there was some music I wanted to transfer to my iPod and I figured I’d might as well upgrade iTunes while I was at it.  The cover art stream is very cool looking.  What’s more is that iTunes now responds to my Dell’s media buttons!  That was one of the main reasons I left iTunes for Winamp.  But, now I’m back.

Last piece of news: I have plans to camp out in front of Best Buy tonight with Adam and Keegan for the Wii.  I personally don’t really plan on getting one, so I’m not sure if I’m actually going to go through with camping out and all that.  But it does sound fun.  I may redownload and install Xampp or some other Apache imitator on my laptop so I can bring it along and work on the gallery.  Granted, I should probably also work on math, but let’s not think about that.

R.I.P., my motivation to do anything.

It seems that whenever there is a great amount of responsibility weighing down on me, I lose all ability to motivate myself to do anything.  At first, it’s just my ability to motivate myself to productive things, like studying or reading or something like that.  I tend to just divert myself to doing other non-productive things like reading manga, building new designs for my sites, forum surfing, etc.  But then after a few days, as the responsibility builds, I lose all will to do anything at all.  I look at my work and think “Bleh…”  I look at distractions and thing “Man, I should really do some work…”  And then I look back at my work and think “Bleh…”

It’s a vicious cycle.  And one that I can find no easy way to break out of.

Just about the only thing that I can ever get myself to do when I’m at such an advanced stage of apathy is blog.  That, and psychoanalyze people.  I find the second one is very therapeutic, no pun intended.  I suppose that the reasoning behind these two activities is that they both encourage a constant stream of thought, which is what I want when I’m stagnating.  And it’s a constant stream of thought that doesn’t really require any thought in and of itself.  I just keep my brain moving and that’s all that matters.  If I actually have to stop and think about something, then that’s just “Bleh…” all over again.

Other news is… largely uneventful.  In the looming shadow of midterms I haven’t been doing much but trying to cram all this math and all this chemistry into my head.

I am moving forward on the SCA redesign, which I’ve codenamed Sarabande.  I’m going to have to think up an alternative to the built-in WordPress calendar, as I want it to only display posts from a certain category, but that functionality isn’t built-in.  Plus, all the calendar plugins that are floating around are designed for WP 1.5 instead of WP 2, which means that I’d have to hack WP 2 to get it to work and that’d mean that upgrading would be a major pain.

Other than that, though, the redesign is going well and I plan to have a well-enough working model up for business by the time the Monday meeting rolls around.  I may consider bringing my laptop to the meeting so I can show everyone during my report.  That would be nifty.

I feel like I have a lot of coiled energy these days.  Not energy to really do anything extremely active like a marathon or anything.  I don’t think I’ve been laughing enough these days.  I used to be able to have a guaranteed, good laugh every week on Thursdays.  No more.  And never more, what with Core Team disbanding.  And I’ve been playing my “cool and reserved” card a little too often for introductions, lately.  That all amounts to the new people I meet here get my reserved face, while only the people I’ve known from high school (read: Adam) get my laughing face.  Two aspects of my personality that I have found most difficult to merge.

I may also just be sitting too much.  That could be it too.

In other news, I went and finished learning how to do the Rubik’s Cube myself.  And now I can do it in somewhere around four to six minutes, depending on the configuration.  I’m trying to learn a second method that involves building an expanding cube of solved blocks from one corner, but it’s exceedingly complicated and I don’t like the thinking.  The layers method is a lot more intuitive and easy to understand.

In other news, I’ve been poking around at Linux distros lately.  They’re most interesting.  And I’m sort of getting tired of Windows and all it’s weirdness.  I’m sort of apprehensive about installing one on my Dell, though.  I don’t know much about Linux and all that and don’t want to mess anything up.  I looked around for tutorials on installing the two distros that I’m most interested in (Ubuntu and SUSE) on my Dell and found that there were a good number of tutorials for both.  They seem somewhat iffy, however.  There’s a lot of talk of going into configuration files and using terminal windows.  I’m pretty sure I’d be able to do it, but I really don’t know at all.

And then there’s the whole thing that I wouldn’t be able to play games anymore.  I wonder if I can still partition my harddrive more.  I also wonder if running an OS from an external harddrive is doable.  I highly doubt it is.

So I may just wait until I buy a new laptop.  I conceive of that being… maybe next year around this time?  Maybe the year after that.  I would really really consider buying a Macbook and setting up a triple-boot situation with OS X, XP, and Ubuntu or SUSE.  However, it seems that there are a lot of little buggies with putting Linux on a Macbook, which is depressing.  These are mostly little annoyances like screen brightness being unadjustable, the Fn and eject keys not working, or two-finger scrolling not working.  However, it also seems that sleep and hibernate don’t work either.  That’s very disappointing.

Well, we’ll just have to see.  I like Linux a lot and think it’s cool and all that.  Plus, SUSE looks really slick.

It’s already almost the end of sixth week.  That means it’s already almost the beginning of seventh week.  That means I already almost have midterms.

So not cool.

What’s more is that my midterms are all on the same day this time around.  What a day that’ll be.  South campus majors should get extra accolades for surviving their time here.  It’s ridiculous how much we have to do.

Saw the sneak of the Tenacious D movie.  All in all, I thought it was unremarkable.  I like Jack Black sometimes, but most of the time I don’t like him at all.  He leans a little too much on the crude humor, which is off-putting for me.  I did think the movie was somewhat funny though.  I wouldn’t see it again.

Other more interesting news: Adam’s starting to teach me the Rubik’s Cube.  It’s actually pretty fun.  I’ve been practicing with a Java version of it and can reliably solve the first two levels, most of the time.  Sometimes I run up against a weird configuration that I have no idea on.  That irks me.  The last level is still weird.  In principle I understand what to do.  I just have to learn all the moves.  The moves get so complicated on the bottom level that it’s not even funny anymore.  What I find somewhat annoying about learning the Cube is that you can’t practice on the end game directly.  To practice on the end game you have to get to the end game first, which means doing the rest of the Cube first.  It’s sort of annoying, although I guess that’s how you get really good at it.

So now I sort of want to go into Westwood and see if I can find a toy store or something to buy a Cube.  I want one to fiddle with for myself.  However, I fear that it will be rather hard to find one.  Especially on foot.

And that’s just about all the news I have to mention.  I’m trying to get my class list worked out for next semester.  The prospects aren’t bright.  I’m looking at four classes: Chem 20B, Math 32B, Physics 1A, and my cluster.  And the possible schedules are, shall we say, horrendous.