Zhanga: June 2005

Entries have their own pages now. Click the date to see the entry by itself with its comments.

Tuesday, June 14, 2005 (4 comments)

From CiCi:

Place the first picture from Google that shows up for each of the following...

(You can mouse over the images to see what I entered into Google.)

First name

David

Middle name

As a side note, this came out of a Harvard computer science class site:

Ruidong

Last name

Zhang

Favorite color

This is a false-color image of sunspots:

Blue

Age you'll turn next

Nineteen

Somewhere you'd like to be kissed but haven't been

Luna

A bad habit

Procrastination

Favorite fruit

(Duh.)

Watermelon

Favorite animal

=)

Fox

What you are listening to/watching

Cascada - Miracle

Someone you love

Belinda

The street you live on

wtf.

Old Timber Ridge Road

Google's SafeSearch thing doesn't seem to work too well. Search pink with moderate or strict filtering on, and then search it with SafeSearch disabled. Like the results? Don't worry, it's nothing disturbing or nasty. It's pretty funny if you ask me.

Oh, one more thing. I haven't actually seen this screen (I stole it from AV), as I'm sure it only existed in the early days of the Microsoft AntiSpyware product, but this is so funny:

Firefox is spyware

I guess Microsoft was trying to kill Firefox by saying it's spyware. "This is a very high risk threat and should be removed immediately..."?? Haha, and the description is just as funny.

9:59PM

Sunday, June 12, 2005 (6 comments)

I was going to post this a few days ago but I kept forgetting. My webcam is a little weird, and it turns things green sometimes. But that doesn't really matter. Take a look at my right cheek area:

I'm translucent!

I'm translucent!

This is a shot from my webcam on my bed. The white rectangle in the lower right is the door to exit my room, and the door showing through my head is my closet door.

This wasn't a one-time thing. Any time I put my head between the camera and the door, the door would show through my head. How odd. It wasn't a moving effect, either; holding my head in one place for a long time doesn't get rid of the door showing through my head.

Has anyone else noticed this happen with my head? I mean, has anyone else maybe seen a light shine through my head, or a lighter-than-usual shadow in the summer, or anything like that?

Weird.

Today was a non-random Chinese party, with Roger's, Jin's, Mary's, and my families. That was somewhat uneventful. And now I'm bored. I don't even have anything to write about.

This is one of the last posts I'll make before I leave for China, and I have nothing good to say. And now that everyone's going or gone, no one's going to read this anyways.

East Cobb is so boring.

8:14PM

Saturday, June 11, 2005 (2 comments)

On Thursday morning at 2:15 AM, I was driving to Eva's house to pick her up to play 麻将 (Mahjong). This could possibly have been the most Asian thing I have ever done. Sneak someone out at night to play 麻将?

Grovehurst

(c) 2005 Google; Imagery (c) 2005 DigitalGlobe, EarthSat

So I turned into Providence, and signaled that I was about to turn right into Grovehurst when I was still about 200 feet (point 1 on the map) from the entrance. As soon as I did that, a car in a driveway (2) on the other side of the Grovehurst entrance (~150 feet from it) across from me turned on its headlights and turned onto Providence in my direction. As soon as it turned on its lights, I was alarmed, and that's actually the first time I've been alarmed by something like this. Seemed like that car had been waiting there for a while.

It followed me into the subdivision, and that was more than a little weird. So I drove cautiously with an eye constantly on the rear-view mirror. The car following me drove even more cautiously and slowly (maybe the driver saw me look back a lot), and I lost sight of the car and even its lights by the time I got to point 3. I thought maybe it had turned left (4) after entering the neighborhood since the road is a circle, and it would try to meet me at the end of the circle. Or maybe it was just going home... in a rather odd manner. I turned off my lights, turned into Eva's cul-de-sac (5), and got out of the car quickly.

Eva took fifteen minutes to come out so I was stuck in lightning in her backyard >:O because she created a ruckus as she was trying to get her shoes. Being as paranoid as I am, I kept turning in circles during these fifteen minutes to make sure nothing was approaching. An angry fox sneaking up on me would be just as bad as a human, you know. I mean a fox fox, like Vulpes vulpes, not Tiffany. Though I guess an angry Tiffany sneaking up on me could be disastrous as well. Anyways, about five or ten minutes into the wait, headlights appeared in the cul-de-sac and shined into the side of her yard. I wasn't quite curious enough to look out there, so I stayed put. I didn't hear any talking or doors opening/closing, and after a minute or so the car drove off.

I don't know what that was about. Maybe he/she/they thought I was someone else and were supposed to meet up at around that time. Who knows. After Eva finally popped out of her house, she said something about that car and looked a little disturbed, too, so it wasn't just me.

In other news... nothing else interesting has happened.

Well, actually, I read that in some areas legislation requires a certain amount of tread on tires. I'm not sure if we have it here, but I'm certainly not in compliance. Whoops.

Ummm, what else. Well, I learned today that "Houston, we have a problem" was urban legend and it's actually "Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here."

Ok, that's all.

12:56AM

Tuesday, June 7, 2005 (7 comments)

I bought a watermelon yesterday because I've been having these cravings ever since my mom ate all my birthday gifts. After I finished, I took a look at my desk and realized that my desk is an utter disaster just waiting to happen. Actually, this is not as bad as it gets. My workspace here goes through a cycle about every four weeks, because that's about the amount of time between cleaning sessions. It's only been a week or two since the last time I cleaned... it gets a lot worse than this by the fourth week:

What a mess!

I don't think the watermelon there was a particularly good idea, but whatever.

I never gave this a thought before, but this area has the most random and useless collection of items ever (they're all visible except the last two):

I forgot to mention the other thing worth mentioning (at least for me) in Chicago. We beat Dorman on a protest. I guess it's a good ending after the fiasco at Parkview a couple years ago. On top of that, it was me getting a lit question (I think that may be the first, and certainly the last, time for me). Take that, Dorman!

The contested question was one about 孙悟空 (you know, the awesome transforming monkey) from 《西游记》. Well, I answered "Monkey King" and got it wrong, and Dorman got it right on "monkey." Apparently the reader didn't think that I was Chinese enough or something, and he didn't agree with our protest. At least the tournament center wasn't dumb.

I was searching for 孙悟空 on Google because I didn't know which characters to pick for song and wu, and I found a Chinese/English side-by-side translation of what appears to be 《西游记》. This caught my eye:

悟空：少罗嗦！你追了我三天三夜，因为你是女人我才不杀你，不要以为我怕了你了！
Bitch! Youve followed me for 3 days. I didnt beat you up because youre a woman. Dont think that Im afraid of you.

How does 少罗嗦 mean "Bitch!"? It's an imperative telling the listener to be quiet or stop blabbering. I scanned through some of the other lines and they're pretty funny, too. Here's one:

唐僧：又干什么？(俩人正要动手，突然)
Whats up?

I'm not too sure how they got "What's up?" out of that. [It means "What are you doing now? (The two are just about to fight, when suddenly...)"]

3:18PM

Monday, June 6, 2005 (3 comments)

I'm back from Chicago for the second time. Our flight got delayed by an hour and a half, which was rather annoying. They didn't even announce it at the gate. They just changed it on the screen and expected us to see the change.

We finished tied for ninth in the rigged double elimination playoffs out of 96 teams that started. Pretty good, I would say, without our team captain Jason (surgery). Notable victories we had include Dorman and DuPont Manual.

That wasn't the highlight, though. I, along with Pat and Bobby, am proud to say that we have made Academic Bowl history. I'm pretty sure our last game was a record-setting game. The score was 885-95. Thomas Jefferson A is pretty good... lol

That was embarrassing, to say the least. The only tossups we got were from catching TJ's wrong interrupts. Sad...

A couple of other things happened during the tournament. There was a Britney Spears tossup that I didn't get because Bobby buzzed before me and said Madonna. There was an Avril Lavigne bonus, for which we were supposed to identify the song given a few pairs of "rhyming" words. This is something I can't do very well. Even Pat did better than I on that one. That bonus sucked. I was sooooo disappointed. I've been waiting FOUR YEARS for a gay music question, and finally I get one. And guess what, it sucks balls! Argghh.

Oh, and my car got fixed. I paid $80 for them to replace one damn belt, which is probably a five-minute operation. I didn't realize this at the time, but I think the belt was still under warranty from Goodyear the day I went to get it replaced (at Goodyear). So after I get my shots tomorrow, I'm going to do a lot of complaining.

12:18AM

Thursday, June 2, 2005 (2 comments)

I have a lot to say today but I'm actually quite tired (it's only 11! weird...) and I'm too lazy to type much. There's some pictures in this post, but you'll probably have to push refresh at least sixteen times to get them to work.

As some of you have heard already, my car died on I-285 today. I was driving along, and all of a sudden I heard this noise that made me think I ran over a large poster board. My music was pretty loud, though, so I just thought some papers in my car moved around a bit and I didn't hear clearly. Well, five seconds later, a red dashboard light came on telling me that my battery needed charging. Odd. My battery is one of the two parts of the car that actually works (the other is the A/C).

I kept driving since I knew my battery was good. But not even five seconds after that, my temperature needle shot up as if Ms. Bryan had sat on the other end. Bad. Then an awful odor went into my nose, giving me a huge headache for the next two hours. I pulled over immediately and found that the asphalt had turned green from my antifreeze. I opened my hood, and at the time, I only noticed that my antifreeze was leaking because a hose had popped off.

Far worse than that had happened, as Charles and I found later:

Shredded Belt

That connects something to something under my hood. Belts are not supposed to shred like that. (In case you're wondering, the belt is resting on my hood, and the pattern on my hood is the reflection of trees above.)

I'd like to thank Gene and Charles for giving me a ride today back and forth between places. I would have had lots of fun waiting for the tow truck without you guys.

My car is worth maybe $500. If fixing it is going to cost a significant amount of money, it's not going to get fixed. This makes me really sad because I love my car =( Can you believe this is the first serious problem I've ever known it to have, besides the chronic temperature issue? When I get a new car, it better be as ownage as this one.

Moving on...

I was at the Field Museum or something like that in Chicago. There was an exhibit about animals that said dogs have large penis bones and cats have a small one or none at all.

This is a T. Rex:

One manly T. Rex

Check out the size of that thing! And I didn't take the picture at 90 degrees to the bone, so it looks shorter in the photo than it actually is. What a man!

Unfortunately, I don't think that's actually a penis bone.

I went to the school a few days ago to get my immunization records. You know, one of the things I love most about being short is that I never have to duck or bend over to avoid hitting my head.

Smoke detector hanging way too low

Well, as I was leaving the Records Room (in the photo, the guidance area is past the doors to the right, and the Commons is past the doors to the left), I started flipping through my papers. As I was peacefully reading things (I found that my two lowest ITBS scores for one year were labeled "Math" and "Science"), I was suddenly greeted on the top of the head by a heavy object. Grrr. Who leaves smoke detectors and their 10 lb mounts hanging at 5' 3" above the ground?

While I was there, I got a picture of the new wing:

Death Hall

This reminds me of MIT. How boring. Hopefully it won't be completely gray when it's done, though. But look how uninteresting it is! Compare this to the former B-hall (which wasn't exactly a hall). That area was so much more exciting. You could find something new every day for four years and still leave plenty of things undiscovered. In this hall, there's not much to do. You can't even trick the freshmen into going into wrong places because it's arranged so lamely.

11:44PM

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