Zhanga: January 2006

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Monday, January 30, 2006 (7 comments)

I've noticed that Linux commands have some pretty interesting names. For example:

Seriously, who came up with these names? I mean, you can probably figure out what unzip does. It gets stuff out of .zip files, of course (there is a nice bash quote on this). But what on earth does gawk do? Stare at... files? And... haha, Linux is based on Unix, pronounced eunuchs. I love never growing up.

Anyways, on Saturday I went to a random Chinese party with Baishi. I'm used to going to RCPs where I know maybe 5 families out of 20, and usually there's 5-10 other kids + Charles. Usually, I know 2-3 of them + Charles. So I was expecting a fairly large party, especially because it was for Chinese New Year. I wouldn't know anybody there, but that's ok because I usually only know a few anyways.

Well, so Baishi and I got there and walked in, and there were four people in the tiny family room. There were two sisters, one looking maybe 25 and the other maybe 21 or 22, with their dad sitting there next to them. Interestingly, the older sister's white boyfriend (who by the way was huge) was also there (at an RCP??). They were all getting drunk. There was also the lady who gave us a ride to the place, who apparently was the father's girlfriend but otherwise unrelated to anybody else.

So that was it. Some guy and his son (who barely spoke English and would randomly laugh hysterically at the most inane things) showed up later, but they only ever spoke to each other and only very quietly, so they might as well have not been there. You can imagine the awkwardness... sitting around with a friend for an hour or so with four drunk people who neither of you have ever met before, plus some random guy and his kid who was probably retarded. I really wanted to get drunk so I could get my mind off of how completely weird it was.

It turns out that the younger girl was actually 15. What kind of Chinese father gets drunk with his 15 year old daughter? When my little sister is 15 and there are two completely random, strange 18 year old college guys at my house... she is not going to get drunk.

So after about an hour of complete awkwardness and really worthless smalltalk, we went to eat. We had hot pot and dumplings, which were better than any Chinese food I've had at Duke, but that doesn't say much. Alice's dumplings at her New Year's party were way better. (I know, the fact that I had dumplings on New Year's makes me a gigantic fob, but give me a break, I hadn't seen her in forever. Besides, they have this nice side effect of soaking up liquor very effectively.)

After dinner, Baishi and I sat around with the two sisters and the boyfriend for another half hour or so. We ended up leaving around 9:30, maybe 10, which is so early that most RCP dinners aren't even finished (or are barely finished) by then. Possibly the weirdest 2-3 hours of my life.

Since I have nothing else to write about, I'll just write about Ronjon since that's what I seem to do when I run out of topics.

So I was walking out of Compsci 100 today after a particularly depressing series of events occurred near the end of class (I can't write about them here). As I approached the bus stop, my pants started vibrating and my phone made a funny noise. Imagine R2D2 after too many carbonated drinks. Apparently the SIM card's text message storage thing was full again. My phone is supposed to be able to hold 100 messages in addition to the 30 on the card, but there is no button to get things off the SIM and onto the phone, making that area of memory completely useless. Great work, LG.

I think I went off topic. This was about Ronjon. So anyways, this guy never ceases to be funny. This is what I got from him... I thought I'd share. I think it made my day:

Whats an indians favorite method of transport?

brownian motion

I'm going to be really sad the day he tells me a bad science joke that I don't understand. I don't want to have to ask him to explain =(

Oh yeah, this reminds me. At the RCP, the younger drunk girl asked, "What kind of bear dissolves in water?"

As you might expect, I enthusiastically shouted out the answer. I had already heard this one from Dutter (who else?) and the answer is polar bear. I think I posted this joke here at some time in the past already. Baishi was very depressed that I actually knew the answer to this, and I can't blame him. It made me a little depressed myself.

5:26PM

Sunday, January 22, 2006 (5 comments)

Last week, the CS professor asked each TA to send in a photo of him/herself. I hate being asked for a photo of myself because I never have any good pictures of myself. Anything that's decent is always me with someone else, usually caught in a less-than-admirable act. For example, consider Ronjon and me in front of the White Castle sign. That was a good picture just because it's the two of us and because he looks like a flaming homosexual with a multicolored jester hat on, but it just has the minor issue of a lot of raised middle fingers.

So I look through all my pictures that only have me, and it turns out I only have a handful of these. Excluding the ones where I'm yawning, blinking, sleeping, and/or looking really gay, there are maybe three pictures. Yes, people take pictures of me sleeping. Apparently this is fascinating, as if people have never seen me asleep or something. I have at least ten of these pictures, including several that were taken during class. Actually, there's one from AP Bio (I was way out in some nth level of dreams) that's not really a bad picture, but I don't think the professor would have liked it very much despite the fact that there is no visible drool.

Of the very few remaining pictures in the pile, none of them are good, but at least they qualify for being sent. So which crappy one do I send? After a long debate with myself (hah), I picked the one that shows me standing in Tiananmen Square under Chairman Mao's large portrait. I sent it to the professor and apologized for my unpatriotic act.

Well, she didn't ever mention anything about it, but when I went to check on the course web site, I saw that my picture had been posted with Mao cropped off! She cut off Mao!! What!!? You can imagine how hard I flipped out. Well, maybe she was afraid people might see the picture and think that Mao is one of the TAs, since his head was about eight times the size of mine in that picture. I don't know. Whatever the explanation... I will pretend it's a good one, because it better be.

Actually, now that I think about it, I should have just sent in a picture of a generic Chinese guy. Obviously she'd never know the difference since all Asians look alike (Davita couldn't even tell Gene and me apart, and she's really Asian...), and most of the people in that class probably wouldn't know the difference, either.

Wait, why didn't I just send in a picture of Mao? I'm so slow. I wish I could think of these ridiculously stupid ideas faster.

Yup, that's two posts in two days. I'm taking a break for the next two weeks.

3:50PM

Saturday, January 21, 2006 (2 comments)

If I told you that on every weeknight this semester, I've slept before 1 AM, would you believe me? Actually, on Wednesday and Thursday nights I was asleep by 11:20 (that's PM, not AM), but still I kept falling asleep through my afternoon class. Why can't I just stay awake sometimes?

This post was inspired by one of my favorite high school seniors. I'll give you half a guess at who this guy is. Get this: he actually told me to go watch porn, and then when I said I'd quote him, he said "ship." (Yes, this is my favorite big-eared, rosy-cheeked boy who has a Facebook group named "I Love Yujing and Want To Marry Him" or something like that dedicated to him.)

That thought led me to the realization that I haven't made fun of Ronjon for what, two months at least? I think? I don't know, maybe it's only been a week and it just feels like forever so I think its been two months, but in any case, it's been far longer than it should have been. So let me tell you a story about Ronjon.

One day, Ronjon went onto a cliff with his friends. Ronjon fell off the cliff. End of story.

3:35AM

Wednesday, January 18, 2006 (9 comments)

A somewhat funny thought came to my mind, and these days when I have nothing to post about, any random thought is eligible for placement on this now-defunct Zhanga.

Over the break, my mom was intruding into my privacy by sitting down in front of my laptop and looking through my email program (Thunderbird). I have a bunch of folders named really boring things like "CS 6 Rodger" and "Econ 1D Kelley" and "Ping Pong" and "Useless" (yes, this is where all of your emails go). There's enough of them to fill up the left side of my screen. Anyways, my mom saw one particularly juicy-looking one named "Helen Zhang."

I was upstairs for some reason, perhaps to get orange juice or sunflower seeds or something. When I got back downstairs, I noticed that my mom was on my computer. She thought she was all clever and had found something interesting that I wasn't telling her about, so she pointed at this and asked me who Helen Zhang was. At this point my mom was already reading the text of some emails.

Obviously I wouldn't be telling this story to you if my mom was anywhere close to being right. So here's what happened.

In August, I went with my mom to meet one of her old friends from college, who happens to live near Duke. She told me to keep in touch with them, blah blah, so I sent emails to them every once in a while, and they'd send one to me every once in a while. When my mom realized that Mrs. Zhang is the guy's wife, she just stopped talking for the next hour. (If an hour doesn't sound like much to you, then obviously you've either never known any Asian women or you have ears that don't work.)

Wow. I read this crappy story over again and thought it was retarded. I can't believe I thought this was funny. If you didn't like it, I suggest reading it again at 4 AM... it will probably be funnier.

I'm taking a environmental course in rivers, and one of the intro assignments was to get into a group of three and draw a river system. The girl in my group who was drawing drew an "estatuary" and kept saying that word over and over. Estatuary, as in estuary gone horribly wrong... ok so that was not funny either, but at least Ronjon may have enjoyed it.

Being a TA for CS 6 is so boring at the beginning. I got asked three questions during class on Tuesday, and two of those were "Does this class get any harder?" Basically I get to get up at 7, sit around, and do nothing. I can't wait until next week, though. I'll have consulting hours (office hours without the office) and I'll get to make really awesome jokes. Can you tell that I'm excited?

7:06PM

Saturday, January 14, 2006 (5 comments)

Darnit, I figured that since I don't post enough, I'd surprise you with two posts in two days. Well, that failed. I procrastinated too much, and now it's the next day already. I guess two posts in three days is still a lot better than usual, though, so be happy.

But then again, this is just one of those posts where I think someone else said something really funny and so I thought I'd share it with the rest of the world. Vincent has never IMd me before (according to my memory and my logs), but decided to today for some reason. I think he had a question about his computer, but I was asleep and didn't reply until it was already moot.

So without further ado, some quotes...

He asked me where I am right now, so I replied with a boring response:

Me: duke
VTuralyon: cool
VTuralyon: That's one of them good colleges right?

A couple lines down, he elaborates:

VTuralyon: I've heard conflicting things about that college lol.
VTuralyon: So I'm not sure...
Me: like what?
VTuralyon: That it was a really crappy school but also it was a really good school with an awsome football team or something.

Most of you know this, but I know a few of you don't. Duke's football team is known for how bad they are. Betting on the Duke football team would be kind of like betting on me staying awake during AP Bio last year. (It's the basketball team that's good. Shoot yourself if you didn't know that.)

In other news, I woke up on Friday morning to discover that I had read my schedule wrong, and that class actually starts at 8:30, not 8:45. So I have 8:30 AM classes every day except Monday, when I can sleep for another hour and a half.

12:14AM

Thursday, January 12, 2006 (0 comments)

My classes start at 10 AM on Mon, 8:45 AM on Wed/Fri, and 2:50 PM on Tue/Thu. So I figured Tuesday and Thursday would be my recovery days because I'll be pretty dead after getting up so early the other days.

Well, I just found out that the class I'm TAing for meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 8:30 AM. Goodbye, sleep.

The info thing for computer science UTAs was today. There were about 25 people in the room (4 girls), and almost all of them had been TAs before, so I felt really dumb being the clueless one. I asked so many stupid questions that I felt kind of like Leaky Faucet.

Every time I think about me as a UTA, I feel more and more sorry for the students in that class. As a UTA, I'll have a more-or-less legitimate excuse to make really nerdy jokes, which means I'm going to make a lot (read: thousands) of them. If you thought I make too many bad computer jokes already... you will certainly feel pity for these people.

I'll get to write comments on program code that people turn in for assignments and labs, and I have a feeling that I'm going to be repetitive with the comments. I'll probably scribble notes all over the code, but I don't think there will be many distinct comments. They will probably all be TLAs (three-letter acronyms):

omg!
If I write "omg!" on someone's paper, it'll probably mean that they did something brilliant and that I'd never have thought of it myself. I guess it could also mean "omg you are a dumbass," though.
wtf?
This probably indicates that the student wrote a piece of code that makes absolutely no sense and that I can't figure out what it does. Or it could mean that I can't figure it out because I'm dumb, and whoever wrote it is brilliant and flew it over my head.
lol
This almost certainly indicates that some part of the assignment was done in a retarded fashion and that I somehow found humor in its idiocy.

If I'm in a really good mood, I might use an ETLA (extended three-letter acronym, aka four letter acronym):

lmao
Indicates code so bad that no combination of "omg," "wtf," and "lol" can express my feelings.
rofl
In case lmao gets too repetitive.
redo
That's not an acronym.

I can already see some poor soul getting his paper back with "omg wtf lol" in red everywhere, while I sit in my room laughing.

In other, non-geeky news, I went to get myself a hamburger today. The lady making them repeated my order ("hamburger?") and a few minutes later gave me a cheeseburger. I said I wanted a hamburger again, and she made me a cheeseburger again. I think this is the first time I've gotten cheese twice in a row when I didn't want it. It took about twenty minutes just to get a hamburger. And then she gave me eight onion rings ($1.79). Eight. Baishi and Tai stole a quarter of those, leaving me six.

10:01PM

Friday, January 6, 2006 (4 comments)

Last night (this morning) I got bored and went with Gene to Tech as he dropped off stuff. On the way back, we went to Waffle House. In the car, I told him that they were going to give me cheese on my hash browns even though I wasn't going to ask for it.

Well, we ordered, and I asked for a triple hash brown chunked, peppered, and topped (ham, peppers, chili). She repeated my order:

Waitress: Covered, peppered, and topped? (cheese, peppers, chili)
Me: No, chunked, not covered.

Just to make sure, she repeated the exact same thing, and I replied with the same response:

Waitress: Covered, peppered, and topped?
Me: No, chunked, not covered.

Ten minutes or so later, two plates of food came. Mine was a triple hash brown with... nothing but a slice of melted cheese. I didn't even care where the peppers and chili went. I just don't like cheese. Well, I looked at her and before I could say much, she took it and put chili on it.

I told her I don't like cheese and I don't want cheese, and she got really, really angry. She told me that she asked me if I wanted cheese, and that I said yes. I guess she follows Drew's philosophy of "no means yes."

She took the plate back and they started making another one for me. It came with peppers and ham. She took out a random bowl with chili and poured it on top of everything else. I don't know where that chili came from, but I'm guessing it was scooped off of the last hash brown, the one with cheese on it.

They were the worst hash browns I've ever had at a Waffle House. They had the worst ham, the worst chili, and by far the worst potatoes. I don't recall eating any peppers, so I don't know if they even tasted like anything.

Not surprisingly, my stomach doesn't feel so well (read: very bad) today. I already had a pretty annoying cold, and this combination is really sucking.

In other news... well, this isn't exactly news, but I thought I'd share it anyways. Ronjon did a thorough analysis of Bill's Xanga the other day (it took all of 3 seconds), and determined that Bill only ever talks about these four things:

  1. Racist shit
  2. Tiffany
  3. Chinese things
  4. School grades

It's true, too. Read Bill's Xanga sometime, and you'll realize that it's funny how he really does only talk about those four things.

Furthermore, we can probably collapse some of these categories. For example, "Tiffany" falls under "Chinese things," and "School grades" probably can go there too. Come to think of it, "Racist shit" can also probably be a "Chinese thing," which essentially means that the list of things that Bill writes about is down to:

  1. Chinese things

6:35PM

Monday, January 2, 2006 (4 comments)

Gene's second party was pretty awesome. Everyone got drunk, people made out with people, people got walked in on, and Erica threw up a lot.

Before Gene's party, I was at Alice's party eating loads of dumplings (they seem to absorb stuff pretty well). When I left, we had a neat little conversation:

Alice: "Don't do anything I wouldn't do!"
Me: "What wouldn't you do?"
Alice: "Drink."

On the way back from her party, which was in the middle of nowhere aka north Georgia, I passed cops with flashing lights at least ten times. Cops were going crazy that night. After I got back to EC, I was about to charge a yellow light, then stopped for no good reason. I looked up to see a cop right there... whew.

Have you ever tried driving at the speed limit on Woodlawn? After seeing that cop, I was so nervous that I decided I'd obey traffic laws for the next two minutes to Genes' house. But it seemed like I was on Woodlawn for an hour. I set the cruise control to 35 mph (try going 35 the old-fashioned way and you'll see why), and at least three times I had to look at the speedometer to make sure the cruise control was working. I kept thinking it had turned off and I was just coasting, but it was always a steady 35. The speed limit on that road needs to be like 70.

I learned a lot of things from the party. Here's some of them, in no particular order:

For this party, I had basically the same objectives as at his first party:

  1. Get Yujing drunk.
  2. Get [Bill's] Melissa drunk.
  3. Get Tiffany & Lilly drunk.
  4. Get Bill drunk.

I had already met Daphne and Anh-huh-nwiggywiggy-wikipedia-workit, so they're off the list. The results were the same as last time, though. Yujing was lame (some excuse about being out of town), Melissa didn't go for lame reasons, Tiffany and Lilly... I'll skip that..., and Bill was dumb. And Daphne was quiet and Anh-huh[...] didn't show up.

But even so, this was a lot better than last time, which was already good. Pat was horny and tried to do a lot of girls. Drew humped Tiffany a lot. Ai's Roger made out with some girls. James and Eva were doing it again. Gene was oddly quiet except when he obnoxiously blew on that annoying horn thing. Ronjon... was he having sex for the last sixteen hours of the party? He disappeared and didn't come back until morning. Lilly said "FUCK YOU, BITCH!!!" a lot with a mean, I'm-going-to-eat-your-face look. Then her expression would completely change into a sad, sorry look and she'd apologize a lot.

I think I can count at least four make-out pairs that shouldn't have happened. Anyone have more?

Yesterday was a day of recovery. Then today was supposed to be frisbee, but no one showed up because everybody is lame. After a short sequence of more dumb events, I went with Ronjon and Arthur (Oysgelt) to... Dutter's house. We weren't sure which one was her house, so we were looking around... Ronjon got out of the car to ask, and some girl (maybe 10 years old) saw him and ran for her life. That was pretty funny. A lot of nothing happened at Dutter's house, but I did managed to get a couple of quotes =)

I came home to find my mom demanding access to my photos. She said either that, or I have to let her roam around on this website. Both look like certain death for me. Actually, she probably reads this site secretly anyways, and can't ever mention it to me because then I'd stop writing things. Like this paragraph right here.

I will end this post with my favorite picture of all time. Well, no, not my favorite picture of all time. It's my favorite picture of Drew, though, and that's saying a lot. If you have Facebook, I posted it, but if you don't have it then here's your chance to see Drew in action. This is, by the way, proof that Drew is in fact not gay. (That was a reference to something Drew always used to say, in case you didn't catch it.)

Drew is jacking off!

Take a close look at this. Drew is wacking it, James is saying "check out how drunk Drew is," and Lilly is waving her finger and telling him how that's gross and he shouldn't do that in her face. and According to Ronjon and CiCi, it looks like Courtney was giving Drew a hand and just got shot in the stomach by Drew-juice. I couldn't agree more with this interpretation.

11:20PM

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