Zhanga: December 2005

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Thursday, December 29, 2005 (3 comments)

I have to admit that the last post sucked. I mean, if Ronjon is telling me that it sucked, then it must really suck.

Anyways, for the past week it's been sleep-eat-party-sleep-eat... endlessly, with a random 11 AM meeting stuck in the middle of all that and some extra volunteer work wherever I could fit it.

I'm just making excuses for not making a real Zhanga post.

You know, I've noticed something. Drunk people like to say "drinken" or "dranken" a lot. But then again, I caught myself saying that once or twice last night.

Am I a failure if I tried without success for 15 minutes to convince a kid (whose name doesn't rhyme with Bean Pee) to not drive home after he had ten shots? I guess that's a pretty dumb question. But the funny part is that he probably drove better than I drive sober.

I'm going to an RCP later today, which should as usual be very fun. Then the New Year's party is in two days, and that's going to be fun. Especially the part where Gene's parents get home... on New Year's Day.

I like writing random, unrelated thoughts without any transitions so that you get lost. I think I'll keep doing it.

I went to Gene's first party with clearly defined objectives in mind. In order:

  1. Get Yujing drunk.
  2. Get [Bill's] Melissa drunk.
  3. Get Tiffany & Lilly drunk.
  4. Meet Gene's girlfriend.
  5. Meet Charles's. (An-huh-Na-wiggywiggy is only higher up because she sounds funnier, and with that name... I mean, come on.)
  6. Maybe get Bill drunk, but that could have unexpected consequences.

As always, things didn't go as I wanted them to. Here's what happened:

  1. Yujing showed up at like 10 and I think he was gone before 11. His excuse was a pretty brilliant one... "I have a Duke interview tomorrow morning." So of course I can't try to get him drunk, because I wouldn't want to hurt his chances, right?

    Well, I ran into this deceitful kid (he used to be so good, too!) the next day at Borders. His story was that he went to the interview spot, called the guy, and the guy said that he forgot about the interview, was at the doctor's, and that they'd reschedule. Uh huh! What a liar. He obviously used this "interview" as a lame excuse to not get drunk, and on top of that, he knew it'd cause me to help him avoid all the peer pressure because, of course, I want him to get into Duke.

    I guess I have to give him some credit because it was a well thought-out plan, but clearly Yujing is an evil, scheming kid who deserves to get run over by Kelly Bryan in the near future. Watch, he's going to try to deny it and claim innocence, too. Don't listen to him!

  2. I forgot why she didn't come. Out of town, maybe? I don't remember.

  3. "I'm not drunk!!"
    "I'm completely sober!"
    "Lilly is not drunk!"
    "I can't walk up the stairs..."
    "Daaaviiiiid, wiiillll you pour me another cuuuup?"

    I'm pretty satisfied with the results of this one.

  4. There was some lame reason why she didn't show up. I forgot this one, too.

  5. Technically, this was a success because I did meet her, but she's about as talkative as me =/

  6. Bill didn't go because, apparently, I wouldn't give him a ride. Except Charles told him the day of the party that I would give him a ride. This kid is useless.

So out of the six most important objectives of the night, only one and a half were accomplished. What a lame night.

I posted some really stupid pictures on Facebook. If you don't have Facebook, then you are worthless and need to get it because I'm too lazy to post here.

3:22 PM

Thursday, December 22, 2005 (11 comments)

For the past week, I actually forgot that I had a Zhanga. I was reminded yesterday of its existence.

Since I got back, I've been working pretty much full-time on the GA Coalition to End Homelessness (GCEH) website, doing a complete rewrite and adding some new features. They hired a guy at some ridiculously high price to write a set of pages for the site that'll allow users to query a database of homeless service providers. For example, if I'm a homeless man with one young child living in Cobb County, then what organizations can help me? You get the idea.

[A bunch of babble about PHP/MySQL goes here. Basically these are two languages used for this work. They're complete strangers to me, which is why they hired someone else to do it.]

However, he unfortunately doesn't know HTML. Look at the following three pieces of HTML and tell me which is syntactically correct:

  1. <a href="somepage.html">click here</a>
  2. <a href='somepage.html'>click here</a>
  3. <a href=somepage.html>click here</a>

You don't have to be a nerd to know that the first one is right (keep in mind that he's supposed to be a professional). Double quotes! I haven't found any double quotes used correctly in his HTML at all, yet the other two (single or no quotes) are all over the place. Another fun thing I keep finding looks like this:

<tr><td></td><td></td></tr>

What is he trying to do? (By the way, this is not the correct way to create blank space in a table, if that's what he's trying to do.)

It turns out that broken HTML will break some browsers. By some browsers, I mean Internet Explorer. His code actually managed to crash IE repeatedly. Upon inquiry from the GCEH office, he blamed this on me, because I wrote most of the rest of the site. The fix? Change his single quotes to double quotes.

His first email to me said that he wanted to meet to discuss his work so I will not make any "boo-boos" later, or in other words, so that I don't break what he's written. Funny, considering he's the one doing the breaking. Also funny, because I asked my sister about the term "boo-boo" and she said she hasn't heard it since preschool. And I graduated from preschool at the top of my class, too! (Not really. I was pretty dumb.)

So what does this story have to do with anything? Well... read on, I guess.

There's also a calendar on the site that lists some of the organization's major events. GCEH mentioned that it'd be nice to be able to add and delete stuff through the web, which requires a database in some form or other. PHP/MySQL is almost certainly the best choice for this.

This left me with three choices, all valid:

  1. Leave the calendar as is; just type everything into an HTML file and edit the file as needed.
  2. Tell the guy they hired to write a database application to dynamically generate the calendar.
  3. #2, except do it myself.

I picked the last choice because this calendar would involve the same languages as the other database thing that he wrote. I'd have to learn the language anyways, since after he's done, I'm the one that's going to be maintaining his code. I figured this would be a good time to learn.

So what now? I've spent the past week rewriting the GCEH site and making this calendar thing while learning a pair of foreign languages. So back to the original topic of forgetting the existence of my Zhanga... well, in order to test my code, I have to test it in Linux. But to update this Zhanga, I have to use Windows because I use FrontPage for this. (It's legacy... FrontPage really sucks, but I'm too lazy to change the system after so many years.) So I haven't had a chance to reboot, and consequently I forgot that Windows existed.

Working with PHP/MySQL taught me a few things. First of all, it's about ten times better than what I'm using on this site (ASP/Access), for at least thirty reasons that I won't go into. I think it would fix this site's problem of not loading half the time. It'd probably make that stupid Xanga Tracker work better, too. If I had learned this two years ago, I'd probably have put some work into rewriting this site so it works better. But who cares now, really? Pretty soon, daily hits to this site are going to drop into the single digits, and it's probably the same person pushing reload eight times because it wouldn't work the first seven times. (By the way, why do people say "refresh" instead of "reload"? Does "refresh" mean "to fresh again"? Come on, that's just stupid.)

I'm going to a meeting at the GCEH office on the morning of the 27th. This is conveniently in the middle of Gene's 9 PM - 3 PM party. Lame.

I guess I'm supposed to be entertaining my readers right now, and I haven't been doing a great job of it. Oh well.

I went to Walton on Monday and it wasn't completely boring. The B hall looks a lot nicer now. There are a lot more lockers, it seems. I think the most interesting part was when the multivariable teacher left the room for a couple of minutes, and everybody moved the desks out of the room before he got back. That would never have happened last year... even if McWilliams's room had a door in the back and had regular-sized desks, our class was so inefficient at everything we did that we had no chance of doing anything collaboratively. Well, that and we had people who actually wanted to learn...

I went to Greenberg's class later. I sat there talking with her for the whole period, and it was basically a whinefest about school policies (like those $@#% iBooks) and stuff. I FEEL SO OLD for thinking the same way as her. I also made sure to tell her that Firefox owns, but I guess that has nothing to do with the above.

A few days later, I dropped Charles off at Borders, where Bill and Melissa were. As soon as I walked in, some girl (Helen, maybe...? I forgot her name twice that day) apparently recognized me. It went something like this:

Helen(?): HEY! Bill's looking for you.
Me: Oh. Ok. Where is he?
Helen(?): You're David, right?
Me: Yeah. How do you know what I look like?
Helen(?): Oh, Bill described you. He said you're short and smart.

I swear, that last line is verbatim. One does not look "smart," at least not in that sense, and a lot of Asian guys are short. It reminds me of GHP, when someone tried to describe Jin as an Asian girl, short, black hair, wears glasses.

Then Bill showed up, but unfortunately Melissa wouldn't go near him and sat down practically on top of some other guy. By that time I had to go because I had a dentist's appointment, so I didn't get to say anything to her. Bill tells me she doesn't like me because she doesn't like nerdy, arrogant guys, but that's funny because I thought she and Bill were together.

Last thing: I read in the news that a student of UMass Dartmouth checked out Mao's Little Red Book from their library for research, and when he went home for a break, two NSA agents showed up at his house. This country is in a really sad state right now. We really don't need the government watching everybody's every move. If they're not going to send agents to the houses of people who read the Bible, then they shouldn't be doing shady stuff to people who read the Little Red Book, either. I don't really want to get into it, but if you look at it objectively, one can believe in Mao's book just as one might believe in the Bible.

2:23AM

Friday, December 16, 2005 (12 comments)

I just came back from my calculus final, where I was anally raped. Should have brought more lube.

I'll be back tomorrow afternoon, instead of morning. Not like it matters... I'm going to be asleep all day and all night that night anyways. Finals have exhausted me.

This is random, but here's a pretty good piece of spam:

SuperEva: View Photo's of Singles in YOUR Area

Here's an incoherent story. Have fun with it:

Yesterday was a depressing day for me. I found out that perhaps Duke students can do dumb things, too.

Scott (who lives upstairs) came down last night to tell us that a guy from Boston was coming to talk about a new business opportunity. He sounded pretty excited. It only took a few minutes to probe him enough to realize that it was just another scam and just another pyramid scheme, but that was pretty interesting in its own way.

If you don't know know what a pyramid scheme is, it's a scam, illegal in many countries and every united state, and has a simple fundamental idea. You recruit people, who pay some money that goes to you. They recruit more people, who pay money to them, who in turn pay you a portion. The more people that are recruited, the richer the people at the top get. That's why it's called a pyramid scheme. It's obviously not sustainable, because you have to keep finding new recruits, and if you're at the bottom you probably won't make any money. There's also no real product or service involved. It's just a bunch of cash trading.

I had never actually had anyone try to sell me into a pyramid scheme, and I thought it'd be fun to see what it's like. Nothing teaches you better than experience, right? I also thought it'd be fun to be an assface and mess up the guy's "business opportunity" presentation.

So I sat around in the Marketplace at 9:50 waiting for him to show up, and when he finally did, he turned out to be an Indian. The only thought that went through my mind at this point was, "Hanif is going to be disappointed." Anyways, he went upstairs into one of the rooms, pulled out a whiteboard, and started a few minutes later.

He talked of making millions, showed us a check for $33,700 that was dated three days after another one for $10,000, and promised that we'd be making six digits by graduation. He told of exponentially growing income, income that grows even if you don't work, and income even after you die. He posed the example of $5 million at the end of three years, or a penny that doubled every month, and then compared his "business opportunity" to the doubling penny. He talked about this "business" becoming a one trillion dollar "industry" just ten years from now.

So how does this work? How can I make all this money?

Well, simple. He claimed that when you buy something at a store, 30% of that money goes to the manufacturer and 70% goes to advertising, retailing, transportation, etc. He proposed to remove this 70% and replace it with the Internet. He claimed that this "business" had agreements with many major companies, and named a bunch of them (I can only remember IBM). By buying through the Internet, we'd pay only 30% of the normal market price because we wouldn't have to go through the normal routes and could therefore eliminate the middlemen.

If it had stopped here, it would have been pretty good. I'd probably have signed up. It'd be like buying stuff the Chinese way in America. Not bad. But obviously, in this scheme, there is no way for him to make money. Therefore it must be more elaborate

He told us that this idea is "spreading like wildfire" (he used this phrase no less than four times, in his thick Indian accent), and encouraged us to help spread it. He threw around some big words like "time-folding," basically trying to say that for every 5 hours we work, we'd be doing the work of 40 hours. How? Well, we'd have people working for us, people that we have recruited. For every dollar they make, we'd get a certain share of that, and in turn, the people above us (him) would get a certain share of what we make. Specifically, when we buy products, we'd pay 30% of the original price. From the 70% that gets saved, 40% will go to the person above you. He made very certain to emphasize that this 40% is not coming out of your pocket; you're still paying just 30%. So where is this 40% coming from? He didn't say. Somewhere in here, he said that it'll cost us only $300 each to join. That might sound like a lot, but with him throwing around numbers in the millions and billions and trillions, that seemed like a very small amount. Even to me (imagine that!).

Seems like an overly convoluted mechanism to get past some advertising and retailing, eh?

He continued, and for an example, asked me where my mom worked. I told him Holiday Inn (which is owned by ICH, but I was too lazy to say that), and he drew a pyramid (!) on the board. He asked me if my mom makes more than her boss. I said I don't know, but it's possible. In a normal corporate structure, just because you're on top doesn't necessarily mean you make more than the guy below you. It's just usually the case. He told me I was wrong and my mom makes less than the person above. Hey! Watch what you say about my mother, you stupid clown. Anyways, he continued talking about the "pyramid," and actually used this word several times in describing "traditional" corporate structure. I realized at this point that all along, he had drawn diagrams all over his whiteboard, but at all points of the presentation he made sure to never draw any semblance of a pyramid or branching-out pattern until now. He'd draw the branches in a convoluted way such that it would appear to be a network with bidirectional flow rather than a pyramid with unidirectional flow -- to the top.

Overall, his presentation was pretty good. It was Hitler-esque in that it was extremely convincing... but only to those who didn't know better. There are a lot of people who just don't know what a pyramid scheme is, and you can't blame them for it. It's very easy to see why one would fall for this trap. Anyways, he did have one point where he needed some work -- "Don't make the mistake I did! Don't go home and tell your parents, 'I am starting a business!' and then tell them about this business. Wait until later." I mean, isn't that a dead giveaway?

At the end, he asked if we had questions. Oh boy. Yes I did.

I forgot exactly how many I asked, but there are a few that I do remember. A few paragraphs up, I mentioned that he said we'd pay 30% for certain products by bypassing retailing, advertising, etc. and of the remaining 70%, 40% would go to the person above us. Well, 40% of what? Where is the money coming from? He answered me by giving an extremely roundabout answer, which made absolutely no sense and threw my train of thought into at least two loop-the-loops. He basically said that the manufacturer is paying that 40% from the 30% that you paid for the product. What? They're paying out 133% of their income?? After he was done, I summed it up by asking, "So the manufacturers will pay us to save money?" And he answered with a simple "yes."

Next, I asked him if he really believed that this "business" will be worth 50 times as much as Microsoft in ten years. I guess he was ready for this one, because he spewed a lot of precooked rhetoric at me. In any case, this is clearly impossible because there is no product or service provided -- in the worst case, it's theft, and in the best case, it's just bypassing existing industries. This is not a something that can achieve 10% of the GDP.

Somewhere in here, he went off on a tangent about how the Internet will revolutionize the world. How in the very near future, your refrigerator will sense when the milk is going bad and will order fresh milk for you transparently. This cracked me up, and I couldn't contain myself. Had he been using this same exact line for ten years? I heard this exact promise, the one about sour milk, ten years ago (though not from a scammer... I think it was a magazine)! Did it happen? Does my fridge order me food? No. Does yours? I'm guessing not. I'll tell you why.

My mother sometimes can't tell if milk is rotten a day or two past the expiration date. Now let's think for a second. If an Asian woman (and not just any! this is my mother!) can't tell if milk is bad, how can you expect a piece of silicon to? Until we get machines that pass the Turing test, I don't think we'll be seeing any auto-milk-orderers.

After a lot of questions went by, all from me, I had one final question: "Are you at the top of the pyramid, or is someone else..."

He wasn't too happy about this one and asked me why I had so many questions. He offered me two answers to his question: either I was ambitious, he said, or I was excited and wanted to make a lot of money. I obviously was neither ambitious nor excited about a textbook pyramid scheme, and I started laughing. What a dumbass.

Him: What's so funny?
Me: What do you think?
Him: I don't know. You tell me.
Me: This is clearly a scam! I mean, "Don't tell your parents..."? Are you kidding me?
Him: Well, tell your parents if you want to, but...
Me: It's obviously a pyramid scheme. You get people who pay you, and they get people who pay them, blah blah blah. Bye.
Him [talking to my back]: Well, if you don't want to make money......

Later, I found out that Scott (and Lawrence) had paid $300 without signing anything. Well, there goes that money...

11:08PM

Sunday, December 11, 2005 (4 comments)

We went to eat at Elmo's Diner today, where Tai's salad came mixed with a delicious looking bug between half an inch and three-quarters of an inch in diameter. The waiter came by and we pointed it out, and he said sorry and took Tai's half-finished salad.

He came back a few minutes later with another apology, and he reassured us that bugs wouldn't be in the rest of our food. Here's a quote:

This isn't a bug that we usually find in our lettuce.

(It was either "a bug" or "the kind of bug," but I don't remember which.)

Interesting, I suppose.

The waiter never came back with another salad for Tai.

Meanwhile, we were wondering why it was taking so long for our main courses to get to us. In reality, it was not that long of a wait, but I think we were just annoyed by the bug. Unsurprisingly, I took this chance to crack a lame joke about the delay being caused by restaurant workers debugging our food. I think this came pretty close to getting me kicked off the table.

Later, when Tai's main course (chicken stir-fry) came, there was no chicken. Tai asked where the chicken was, and the waiter went away for a minute and came back with another apology and a plate of chicken strips. He said they forgot to put those in the stir-fry. They still charged everyone for a meal.

Don't eat at Elmo's!

4:41AM

Thursday, December 8, 2005 (2 comments)

What a great day. My stupid alarm clock didn't go off again, so I found myself waking up at 12:30 with the alarm clock on but not ringing. I missed perhaps the most important day in comp sci. Apparently, we learned some theory, which hasn't happened any day that I've been to class.

I'm coming back Friday (not tomorrow) night, which I guess means I'll be home at like 3 AM Saturday. Just in time for a midnight snack at Waffle House.

I've noticed that I have less and less to write about here, because I can't complain over and over about AP Language or APES or anything like that, because guess what? Duke professors don't suck, in stark contrast to what I got from Walton. This makes for very empty Zhanga posts.

Next week is finals week, and studying is going to be interesting because Walton didn't exactly give me good study habits. I could count on tests being completely irrelevant to the material we were supposed to learn, making studying a great waste of time. Courses that come to mind include the two mentioned above.

I guess I have to write something here though, since I haven't for a week and a half. Alright, so I was reading The Chronicle (a print copy), and there was an article about international students from China. Reading it made me feel like a super fob. For example, the article quoted a second-year international student:

I prefer Chinese food, but I'm getting used to burgers.

Uhhh.

5:52PM

Sunday, December 4, 2005 (3 comments)

WHAT AN AMAZING GAME!

That's all for today. I might have something tomorrow because I seem to be slacking off here.

10:39PM

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