Zhanga: November 2008
Entries have their own pages now. Click the date to see the entry by itself with its comments.
Sunday, November 23, 2008 (5 comments)
Why is it so cold? It's been freezing for about a week straight, and the wind chill makes it worse. I think the South is broken (well, I guess we already knew that).
So anyways, I was defeated yesterday. For the first time at Duke, I had to turn on the heater because my feet were freezing. Between this failure of a computer I have now (the old one worked equally well as a heater or as a computer; this one only computes), the crack in my window that lets in a constant stream of cold air, and the laws of thermodynamics which we follow in this house, I was doomed for failure. I don't know if my thermostat was broken or just buggy, but the temperature was below the scale (which begins at 60 F) and the "auto" setting didn't work. I had to turn it to "on" for a while before the thermostat would work.
Ok, back to this essay which will consume the next 34 hours of my life.
Oh, right, writing this essay reminds me. The following happened before religion class began one day, due to some math scribbles on the board left by the class who used the room before us:
Girl 1: What does f mean?
Girl 2: f is just a function, I think.
Girl 1: What's a function?
Nobody in the class seemed able to answer that. Somebody tried but got the x's and y's backwards. Certainly math isn't a religion major's specialty nor should it be, but they should remember elementary math concepts, right? It was taught in like 6th grade and has been used in every math class since then.
10:46PM
Monday, November 17, 2008 (8 comments)
One day, I was browsing Youtube for ping pong videos. Actually, I was looking for videos of people who think they're really good but actually suck, which is always kind of funny. For example, watch 10 seconds of this clip, whose caption begins, "This is one of the greatest Ping Pong matches ever" and whose intro screen reads, "Masters of Ping Pong."
Anyways, I ended up watching people who are actually good. Here's one of the funniest ping pong clips out there. I laugh every time I watch it, though I think it gets half its funniness from the fact that Cantonese sounds funny (and is that Jackie Chan?). Then there's the legitimate competitions where really ridiculously good players hit faster than the Youtube framerate can show.
I stopped when I got to this video of a six-year-old girl (watch this one if it's the only one you click). I cried for seven days straight, thus the lack of posts here, and then decided I cannot allow myself to be ownable by somebody who can barely see over the table. How is she even doing that? And we're not just talking about hitting balls being fed to one spot. They're going left and right and all over the place! It's completely ridiculous. So I Googled some ping pong machines, but the cheapest decent one is $695. Looks like my mastery of ping pong will be forever limited to just barely above the level of those guys in the first video. By the time I find that much spare change for a ping pong machine, my bones are going to creak.
4:30AM
Tuesday, November 11, 2008 (4 comments)
I forgot to write about this three weeks ago when I fell off my bike, so I guess I will now. The day after my little accident, my hands were pretty gross-looking because the scabs hadn't had time to form, and there was still a bunch of dead skin just basically hanging there. I was coming out of an interview and ran into Michael, Yujing's roommate. For some reason (probably because I was wearing a suit) he wanted to shake my hand, so after I did that I put on a very serious face and told him, "Oh, uh... maybe we shouldn't have done that. I have this flesh-eating bacterial infection..." Then I stuck out my palms for him to see.
Michael turned his hands palms-up, stared at them, and made an absolutely priceless face of shock and despair.
A few days later, I was telling this story to Michelle and found out that Yujing had fallen off his bike, scraped his palm, and played the exact same trick on her about two weeks prior. Good to see we still think alike, and more importantly, are equally useless on wheels.
Totally unrelated, but I just realized that, at least from my personal experience, Mr. Gesick completely failed at being a computer science teacher. I don't remember much about the class since I had him in 9th grade, but I do recall really disliking his class, and programming in general, by the end of the semester. I remember once when he asked me what I wanted to study, and whatever it was that I replied with (it was something quantitative), he told me I'd have to take a few computer science courses in college to get a degree in that. And I remember thinking, no... must... find way around this...
Anyways, I guess I'm just glad I took another CS course after Walton, taught by somebody who isn't Gesick.
Haha, that reminds me of Astrachan's joke that "when I was your age, integers were 16 bits." Well, they were 16 bits in Gesick's class too which makes me feel really old. Stupid DOS. Alright sorry, no more nerdy stuff for the next few posts.
10:30PM
Saturday, November 8, 2008 (0 comments)
I had a paragraph in my last post ranting about airlines, their fees these days for checked luggage, and the lack of free meals, but I deleted it before posting because I figured I had done enough complaining for one post. Ugh.
I'm at the airport right now (it's 1:12 PM) and was supposed to be on a 1:23 to 9:14 PM flight from Seattle to DC. With no meals. What do they expect me to do, pay $10 for delicious airline food? Well, I guess United got around that by getting rid of the flight.
The Seattle-Tacoma airport's check-in area is shaped like a U, with Delta and United at opposite ends. It takes about five minutes to powerwalk to one from the other. So I arrived at around 12:20, went to the United check-in kiosks, and swiped my card. It asked if I'm flying to RDU, so I said yes, and then it dumped me at a screen telling me Delta customers can't check in here and to go check in at the Delta area. Ok, so I walked all the way over to Delta, and then Delta told me the first leg of my flight is with "another airline." Wtf? (Somebody turned her head to look when I said this.) I pulled out my laptop and saw that both legs of my flight were in fact on United Airlines, so I walked back yet again to United, and asked to speak to a person. She passed me to some other guy, who told me my flight was delayed and they had put me on a Delta flight. Gee, thanks for making that clear on the kiosk machine. It was already 12:40 now, and I had to walk all the way back to Delta check-in, get boarding passes there, and make it through security and the gates to a plane that was already boarding. Yeah right.
I already returned my rental car, checked out of the hotel, and only have one taxi voucher. So I'm stuck at the airport until my 10:25 PM flight... over nine hours from now. I land in DC at 6 AM (just like my failed interview redeye, and if there's a crying baby at 4 AM I will seriously flip out and let out all of my stored baby rage) and land in RDU at 9:47 AM.
At least I can get online here. I'll probably make a game out of seeing how many people I can Goatse in the next nine hours. Or try to find an audio input for the airport speakers so I can rickroll the entire airport.
4:25PM
Friday, November 7, 2008 (1 comment)
I hate flying. Why are there always babies on flights? What do you people do with your 6-month-olds that require them to travel all the time? I swear, there are no less than five families with babies on this 767, and some of those families have more than one.
The little brat sitting across the aisle from me tried to take apart the seat in front of him for about half an hour. I guess he's bored now so he's entertaining himself by crying and kicking the seat in front of him. It's like he's trying to be the next Stewie Griffin or something, minus any hint of intelligence. Meanwhile, the one a few rows back seems to have cried himself to sleep.
I spent $50 a while back on these noise-reducing earphones that look like earplugs (they are great for taking walks and getting run over by cars because you can't hear them coming, no this didn't actually happen), but even they are helpless in the face of this stupid annoying noise-making slimeball. Worse, he keeps flailing as if his arms and legs were each weed whackers with no off switch. Agh!
I'm glad this flight is an evening flight (6:45 - 8:45). If this was a redeye like last time, I'm pretty sure I'd be facing multiple counts of aggravated baby punting. You probably don't realize how tempting it is until you are on a 9 PM to 6 AM flight, and you wake up halfway through because some stupid 2-year-old cyborg is crying in the aisle. Why is he a cyborg? Because it's not physically possible for humans to cry that loudly, mechanically, and for such a long time. I had an aisle seat, and I was almost overcome by the temptation to get up, sprint back towards the kid, and try to make a field goal into those food carts at the end of the aisle near the bathrooms.
Needless to say, I failed my 8 AM interview that morning. 9 PM to 6 AM is only six hours since it was San Francisco to DC, and I was only asleep for about four hours. If you haven't flown with me before, that's saying a lot. I knock out on flights faster than in Ms. Pepple's chem lectures. Last time I arrived in Atlanta from Raleigh-Durham after a 90-minute flight, I wasn't aware we ever took off (or landed).
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I've landed and arrived at my hotel now, so while I'm rainting, what's up with hotels? The "nice" ones are ripoff central. Came in on a late flight and all the restaurants are closed? Well, for only $43 you can get room service to deliver you 3 ounces of noodles! Yes, I am eating it right now (luckily I'm not the one paying, or else I would just starve myself on principle). Want breakfast? That'll be another $25. Want to go online? That'll be $12.95 per night (or the incredible value deal of $25.90 for two nights — it went linearly up all the way to 5 nights I think). Seriously, I'm at the Westin, and for $12.95/night they can't even give me an Internet connection faster than dialup. My keystrokes are lagging about half a second as I type them into the terminal!
Why do expensive hotels have to gouge you so badly when the cheap ones give all this stuff away for free (plus Internet that actually works)?
2:13AM
Monday, November 3, 2008 (4 comments)
I admit I know nothing about either Elizabeth Dole (D) or Kay Hagan (R), other than the fact that they're facing off for a Senate seat in North Carolina. Elizabeth Dole recently ran this ad saying that Kay Hagan attended a fundraiser hosted by the Godless Americans PAC. Kay Hagan has filed a defamation suit due to this. The "there is no God" clip at the very end of that ad, apparently, was altered to sound like Kay Hagan if we are to believe Hagan's response ad. Then Dole came out with a second ad saying essentially the same thing as the first one.
So my question is: am I un-American because I'm not Christian? Why do Dole's ads make atheists look like some sort of villain? She almost makes the mere association with an atheist group sound criminal!
This is just like the right-wing bullshit about Obama being Muslim, therefore he's evil/un-American/a terrorist/etc. So what if he is Muslim? By the way, for anyone counting, here's the Christian vs Muslim score...
(I kid, I kid! Also, the picture is from here.)
By the way, from that one Kay Hagan ad that I linked to above, I can only conclude that she is a complete tool. Job creation and the economy? What is she, Sarah Palin's parrot? At least pick somebody with half a brain to mimic. It's really sad that I favor Hagan solely because she is less disgusting than Dole, but I guess that's what it comes down to.
Oh, how I love the South.
Edit: Sigh.
1:31AM
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