Htam::Diary

This Sunday, after being in my house for two days straight without leaving, I went to my father's offices today.  In the morning, I went to his big office, the one for his position as Provost (?).  Then we went and ran some errands including buying drinks.  In the afternoon, I drove to my dad's normal small office and worked there.

The photo is of my messy room.  I have been dealing with a lot of electronic accessories for my computers.

This Saturday, I woke up pretty early, before 6 AM.  There is typhoon hitting us right now.  I spent the morning researching grad school fellowships.  Of the 30 fellowships listed by the Fellowship and Study Abroad office at Caltech, 12 are for study abroad (which I plan not to do), 7 of the remaining are for specific fields (which does not match my field of interest), 4 are for minorities (which I am not part of), 2 are weird (which does not interest me).  Finally, one of them (Josephine de Karman) is for the last year of grad school, and should be applied to later (if ever).  Therefore, there are four remaining: NDSEG, Cooke, NSF, and Soros.  Soros is for "New Americans" who were either not born citizen or are children of naturalized parents.  I am not in the explicit cases, but I might want to inquire whether it is sufficient that my parents are not US citizens while I am.  Furthermore, NDSEG seems to not really apply to my case, but I am leaving it in there just in case the stretch is not too far, since Po-Ru Loh applied to it.  I will most likely apply to NSF and Cooke.

(I also read a graph theory book written by L.H. Hsu today.  He is a professor at NCTU, where my father used to be.  His book has similar topics as that I have explored last summer.  Apparently my research my have applications to street cleaning... which obviously have something to do with national defense, which is the ND in the NDSEG.)

In the afternoon, I slept for about two hours from 4 PM to 6 PM.  This is better than the three hours of nap from 3 PM to 6 PM yesterday.  Perhaps tomorrow I will only need to sleep for one hour?

This Friday is my first full day at home.  I dealt with some computer problems, involving my internal communications now that my laptops are split between two localities.  I also spent some time reading.  I slept for about three hours in the afternoon, due to adjusting to the time zone difference.  I am still tired now, hopefully I can get a good night's rest, and tomorrow I will no longer need to sleep too much in the afternoon.

This Thursday, I woke up at 9 AM at the hotel.  After having some breakfast and trying out the complimentary (and slow) Internet connection at the hotel, I packed up everything and checked out.  I had lunch at a very expensive (about $30) and fancy restaurant and had lunch with my dad and two people I did not know.  We had a two-hour lunch.  The food was pretty good, and the service was superb.  Then my dad and I went to the train station and took the Taroko train from Taipei to Hualien.  It only took about 2 hours since this is a new train that tilts and therefore does not slow down when turning.  However, it was more dizzy-inducing and I did not like it as much.  At night, I am trying to stay up as long as I can and not fall asleep too early.  But I am going to sleep now.

This Wednesday, I have arrived safely in Taiwan.

Tuesday in PDT, I left home at about 13:45, June Han picked me up and brought me to the airport.  I got there at about 14:30.  By 14:45, I have checked in, received my boarding pass, and brought my luggage to be scanned.  By 15:00, I went pass the security checkpoint and was sitting at the gate.  June got me some pastries but I did not have water to go with it (since the security checkpoint does not allow water to pass).  By 15:30, I finally tracked down a working water fountain.  Then I went to a bookstore and read Popular Science and some other magazines.  I got back to the gate at 16:30.  Our boarding time was 17:30, but there was a delay until 18:00.  During the time, I started playing with my Rubik's cube, and some kid (4th grade) also had a cube and came over and wanted me to teach him.  He had a few friends with him, a girl (5th grade) and a boy (6th grade).  Eventually, I got the two boys to solve the first layer.  That's about as far as I planned to go anyways.

The plane's liftoff was at 18:37:22.  After 12:36:16, we touched down in Taiwan at 22:13:38 local time.  This time I flew in the B777-300ER, with interactive in-flight entertainment including on-demand movies.  I watched Spider-Man 3, Next, Fracture, and Becoming Jane.

My dad came to the airport to pick me up.  We took a Taxi to Taipei and slept at a hotel.  We went to sleep around midnight.

This Tuesday, I fly back to Taiwan.  I flew 8/14 last year as well.

Due to server error, this entry has been temporarily lost.  I can restore from backup once I return to the US.

The photo is of my five pairs of pants that are the same.  The left most two were bought right before Sophomore year, and were worn during that year.  The latter three were bought before Junior year.  The first of those was worn during the year until it broke.  The one with the belt is my current wear.  The last one has yet to be touched.  I plan on buying two more of the same when I go back to Taiwan.

This Sunday, at church, I said farewell to some people that I might not see upon my return: Michelle Hui, Sam Ho, and Dan Tse.  After church, Po-Ru Loh came over to my apartment and we talked for quite some time.  Our talk is focused on grad schools.  Po-Ru has agreed to impart knowledge and wisdom regarding applying to math grad schools to me.  I have actually learned things that I have not yet heard before, even after talking to many different sources.  It was quite an informative meeting.  After that, Po-Ling Loh came over and the three of us sang some KR.  At night, Scott Hsieh dropped by for a visit.  I might not see Po-Ru for a very long time, and I might not see Scott before I leave either.

This Saturday, CCF had the last dig-in of the Summer to finish up 1 Corinthians.  We had a potprobability (instead of a potluck, since we do not believe in luck).  After many, many hours of studying (including three hours today), we finally finished.  Afterwards, I was pretty tired, but I still went to Bible study at church.  We started the study of Isaiah today.  It was actually quite good, much better than I expected.  (Though I should not trust expectation.)  At night, I met with Abraham Buditama, my Syzygy partner this year, for possibly the last time.  I am meeting with people to talk partly because I am leaving for Taiwan in three days.  I just want to catch up before I lose the opportunity to talk face to face for a while.

This Friday, I went to present my final progress of my research to Wilson.  He is quite pleased.  I will not see him until after I return from Taiwan a few days before school start.  My research has come to some sort of a conclusion.  Of course I might still work on it in Taiwan.

I also ran a few errands today, taking care of things that needs to be done during business hours, since I might be quite busy on Monday.  I also started packing.  I use to pack very early, but then I have to take most of the things out, and re-pack the day before leaving.  Now I have packed more, I am more confident in my packing capabilities, so I only started today.  (Some might think packing four days early is still "early," which serves to illustrate how "cautious" I used to be when it comes to packing.)

At night, Andrew Kositsky came and we talked for more than three hours, late into Saturday morning.  It was nice catching up with him, and talking about certain philosophical issues.

This Thursday, I did not go to SFL to work during the normal hours; yesterday was most likely the last time.  It has been a good experience working in the SFL uninterrupted regularly every day for the past few weeks.  Today, instead, I stayed in my room since I need to use my computer.  I typed up the proof of my exciting result mentioned yesterday.  While typing it up, I actually found a simplification to a part and now the proof is a lot cleaner.  Also, the possible hole I thought of last night turns out all right.  I will present the paper to Wilson tomorrow.

On the other hand, I have been spending a lot of time in preparation of my departure.  Today I tested out a new SATA laptop hard drive I got.  I finally got my ConvertX TV capture card to work in Fedora 7.  I have not been able to get it to work in Fedora Core 5 or 6.  This might mean I can finally update my server, which has also been serving as my TV capture machine.  I have discovered that udev rules rules!  I might want to learn more about udev, hotplug, and hal this Summer?

At night, I attended what could possibly be my last TenSing ever, since I will be leaving Tuesday, and who knows whether I will be around next Summer.  I was a bit sad, thinking about all the good memories I have had at Tech.  (Yeah, I know, I have one more year, but still, the end of my Caltech career is drawing close.)  I am going to miss this place, and all the wonderful people I have come to know here.

This Wednesday, I worked on more details of my proof for the major result: "The chromatic number is bounded above by a polynomial of degree k-1 in the clique number for a k-claw-free graph."  I have the general outline down, and some of the details.  I am basically telling people I made some big progress now.

In the evening, I went to CCF Summer Study.  This will be the last one I attend, since I will be leaving a day before the next one, which will also be the last Summer Study this Summer.  We continued studying 1 Corinthians.  I mainly talked to Scott Hsieh and Abraham Buditama, since we were sitting together and we decided to split off into small groups from location.

At night, I realized I might have some holes in my proof.  I should check those and confirm them tomorrow.  Also, I should type up my proof tomorrow and present it to Wilson on Friday, which will be my last meeting with him before I leave.

This Tuesday, after sleeping 10 hours, I made some more progress on my research.  I found some errors in my proof from yesterday, but I was able to supply even cleaner proofs to my conjecture.  I went to meet with Wilson today, and after talking some more about grad schools, we talked about my research.  He told me that one of my sub-conjectures is actually true, and that I knew it, since it is just Ramsey's Theorem.  Then we looked in his book and found a sufficient bound for the Ramsey number given our current situation.  I am quite happy about what has turned out for my research.  I will check the details some more.

At night, Jian Yu Fung, Scott Hsieh, Po-Ling Loh, and Caleb Ng went to Old Town Pasadena to have dinner with Lydia Ng at Yujean Kang's.  She is leaving tomorrow, and I probably will not see her for quite some time.  It was really nice to get to say goodbye to her.  We ended up only eating dinner after 20:35.  Good thing I ate a light dinner first at 17:00, so I would not get hungry.

This Monday, I made a major progress on my research in the SFL during my normal working hours.  I think I was so excited and cannot contain myslef that Po-Ling Loh noticed my odd behaviour.  However, my proof is very high-level and all the details have not been worked out.  I just "think" it "should" work.  So I am not supposed to get too excited right now, since it might very well not work out.  However, I cannot help but be quite excited.  If this result hold, then it will make my one-major-result-to-date from 7/18 look like child's play.  I will work on the details some more in the consequent days.  I probably will not have time to finish all the details before meeting Wilson tomorrow, but I will probably present the major idea to him, and see what he thinks.  If this works, it will be quite a good ending for the not-so-good research of this summer.  If not, I will simply fall back to my "minor" result that I included in my abstract that was due a few days ago.

On a side note, I got 33571 on Endless Love on Expert Difficulty with music staff turned off.  I think that is quite an accomplishment; I got one "okay" though, but I am not sure which bar that was from.

This Sunday, the Dengs of five from church invited everyone to their home for BBQ.  We had about 150 people at our church regularly.  About fifty of us went.  That is, almost all the English-speaking people were there.  We were there for about four hours.  We played games, we talked, and we ate.  It was quite enjoyable.  However, I was really tired afterwards.  I was falling asleep at 21:00.  I relied on a friend to talk online to keep me awake so I don't sleep too early.  I ended up sleeping at about 22:30.  I woke up tomorrow at 09:30, after sleeping eleven hours!

This Saturday, I read three chapters from 2 Kings.  ACF Saturday night Bible study is starting to study the book of Isaiah.  To ease into it, we have decided to study 2 Kings 18-20, which references Isaiah.  The sharing was fuller than expected (though I should learn to not trust expectation).  Next week, we will start studying Isaiah proper.  I know not what to expect. ;-P

This Friday, I met with Wilson again and we mainly talked about grad schools.  Wilson is quite pleased with my homework and how much information I brought him regarding selected grad schools.  We talked about things, and we narrowed down the list.  Afterwards, I talked to my parents about grad school and then did more searching online.  Four more hours?  Now I have a list of 8+6 schools.  8 of which I probably will apply to.  6 of which I am not sure whether I should apply to or not, partly due to the high number of schools in mind already.  I am actually quite excited about Georgia Tech, for they seem to have a strong combinatorics ensemble, ranging from alebraic to probabilistic professors.

This Thursday, Kevin Dick came by my apartment to talk about GRE and other academic related items.  I met Kevin back on our Washington ARML team before coming to Caltech.  He was the first person I met and I think also turned out to be my roommate for the duration of ARML.  We were both pleased that we now know someone going to Caltech.  We ended up traveling together to Caltech, and also took the same flight for the first Thanksgiving.  Since then, I have not traveled with him since I rarely go back to Seattle now.  Anyways, we were surprised by how much we talked, it was about 1.5 hours.  A simple talk about GRE turned into massive catching up with life talk.  It was nice to talk to him again.

Then I was almost late to TenSing, so I went, and no one was there yet.  As usual, the females are late coming from their Women's Bible Study.  Po-Ling Loh came back from her trip.  Afterwards, everyone went back to the Seven Houses, so I walked with her back to Avery, and then I went home.

This Wednesday, shortly after dinner, Scott Hsieh dropped by and used my kitchen to cook dinner.  We talked while he was cooking dinner, while he was eating dinner, and afterwards, too.  We ended up spending about four hours talking.  It was quite some good time spent.

This Tuesday, I met with Wilson to discuss my second progress report and abstract for my Summer research.  We also talked a bit about grad schools.  He gave me some homework to do regarding background checks on schools.  So I spent several hours today browsing the web hunting for schools.  I will then compile the information and bring it to him and he will supposedly help me narrow down the list.

I spent much more time in the library today than usual, I think I spent 4 to 5 hours, while usually I only spend 2.  At night, we had our last Council meeting of the Summer.  Now I am going to sleep.  I have been sleeping a bit later now.