Htam::Diary

High Schoolers

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 21:01:36 -0800

This Friday, Steph and Chris came to pick me up and we drove to Alhambra. Beryl invited high school group kids and the teachers to come for lunch and spend some time together. We played some games, including my Bible Scattergories, Bible Guesstures, and Rummikub! I was very "unlucky" and was unable to start playing after many many rounds. Finally I got enough pieces to start, and I went all out, putting down all but one piece. Man, I was so close to winning... and the next round, I helped Rachel win, so I lost. But I was able to play my last piece immediately when it was my turn, so it was a pretty close game.

Then we drove back and sang some KR at my place, then Steph and Chris went to Friday Fest. I decided to pass, for I have had too much social interactions for a while now. One other thing to note: Joshua lent me his guitar today. I doubt I would have time to practice, though.

[Photo: My pathetic hand; I just got that red 4 on the 11th draw, and finally I can "form" something, yet still without a high enough value to enter.]

Math

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 20:59:39 -0800

This Thursday, I decided to let math be the major activity of the day. During this break, I have worked on and off in bits and pieces each day for math. Today, no. I will work much longer on mathematics. Tomorrow I will not have much time for it; and in some sense, break ends tomorrow. Indeed, school starts Monday, and since I always have church-filled weekends, there is no real reason why I should consider break to end Sunday instead of Friday. So today is the last day I can work hard for break.

Volleyball!

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 20:21:33 -0800

This Wednesday, when I was trying to decide what to eat for lunch, Tammy called me and said I could come over for lunch. A bit later, Doris called to ask for a ride to Tammy's, so that's settled. Afterwards, ~20 people from my fellowship played volleyball between Tammy and my place. Jennifer and Steve needed to work for a bit. Steve suggested that I should stay for a bit and then drive him to the volleyball place. So I read Atiyah's Commutative Algebra for an hour or two, while Steve and Jennifer worked. Then I drove them to the park next to my place. I decided to come out for a bit too. Later when they were lacking one person for the third team, I decided to join in and play. I have never really played volleyball before, so I am not sure what to do. Of course, I know the general idea and such, so I fit right in. I played 4 games, and we actually won twice (due to my teammates, of course). I actually hit a few balls :-) It was quite enjoyable, maybe I will join with them sometimes on Sundays (they play every Sunday after church).

Curry

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 20:59:22 -0800

This Tuesday, I cooked curry! Tammy showed me some ingredients and sauce packs at 99 Ranch. Since I am afraid of the potatoes budding, I decided to cook curry quick and not wait. It tasted really good, except now I have way too much food. I know it looks like what I often eat, but I used to just buy prepackaged curry, instead of cutting my own potatoes and carrots.

I was a bit bored so I counted the windows I have opened on my 12 virtual desktops. I have 1 of each of the following: Firefox, Thunderbird, xpdf, xdvi, 2 rxvt (console) running a text clock I wrote and pork, my AIM client that I hacked. Then I have 31 konsole (console), with them running 2 top, 1 latex.sh (my homemade latex compilation script), 21 vim, and 21 sitting in the shells in various directories, often with meaning. One may say that 2+1+21+21 is bigger than 31. That is true. A konsole can have many tabs.

I posted photos to 13 past diary entries, dating back to 2008-12-08. I suggest looking at them by clicking on the "PHOTO" category at the top navigation bar.

[Photo: Food; curry for the first time!]

Wing and Cameron

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 21:23:31 -0800

This Monday, I drove to Arcadia to Wing Ning Yung's house. Wing and Cameron Taketa came back from Hawaii for Christmas, and they invited some of us to come. In the morning, Theodore Yu drove Stephanie Chan up from San Diego and picked up Scott Hsieh on the way. We met at around 11 and talked for a bit. Then we went out to eat lunch. We were originally going to go to the seafood dim sum place next to 99 Ranch, but when we drove by, it was quite crowded, so we drove to Hop Li instead. I have actually never been to Hop Li for dim sum--when we went with ABSK/LCF, it was usually at night, and for Ray's graduation, it was three tables banquet style. It was really delicious, I have a different view of Hop Li now. Oh, and I have a new perspective on Stephanie too, wow, she can order and eat! After lunch, we went back to Wing's place, and we played a round of Bang!, and then played many rounds of Rummikub. We teamed up three teams, and I was with Stephanie. After a fierce battle, Stephanie and I won the first round. Subsequently, Wing and Cameron won two rounds and then Teddy and Scott one the last round. It was really fun.

[Photo: Group photo standing with the teams. Each team was triumphant at least once.]

Phone Done

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 21:21:47 -0800

This Sunday, I went after church to Old Town Pasadena. The closest Sprint store from UCLA and Caltech happens to be there. So despite a normal "home zip code search" would not reveal this, I know that I go to Pasadena enough to search for stores there as well. I asked Sprint to transfer my contacts from the old phone to the new phone. It took a while for them to get my old phone to work with their equipment since it is so old. But eventually they got it all transferred. Yay, now I have contact information of so-many-people again. Some of them I would probably never call again, why do I keep it? Well, does not hurt too much, right? The most frequent callers I have on speed dial anyways. Now my phone is finally done. Good that it got done before school started again. I would not have time to deal with this.

99 Ranch

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 20:41:37 -0800

This Saturday, we had Bible study as usual. I drove myself today, no Alex still. Afterwards, we went to lunch. I ate a lot. Then I went to 99 Ranch in Arcadia with Tammy. She showed me certain things, including how to properly buy meat. She also showed me some ingredients for making my own curry. It was quite enjoyable shopping with her. (Steve was napping in the car.) I bought quite a bit of food today. Of course, the one that makes me the happiest is the bakery buns.

[Photo: The same dish I make every other day, but this time with lean pork grounded on the spot. I did not add enough oil to compensate.]

Movies

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 21:17:11 -0800

This Friday, I spent some time compiling a list of movies I want to watch. I went to Steve and Tammy's for dinner, and Steve gave me more suggestions, too. I am also asking Bing Huo for recommendations based on my preferences. In addition, Alex may want to watch some movies with me, and possibly David Barmore too. Furthermore, Barmore has a lot of (possibly eccentric) opinions about what kind of movies are good, too, so I have many sources of information to compile together to form a master list of the movies I want to watch. This is quite a non-trivial task. :-D Why do I have to approach everything so academically? Well, I do things mathematically, and often combinatorially. This is who I am. Even my mathematical tendencies shine through in leisure activities that have seemingly nothing to do with math. Finally, I came up with a rating scheme for movies. It is quite mathematical in its description, I am afraid some people may not get even the statement of some of the categories (one of them involved open neighborhoods, which could be translated into sequences in some suitable movie-topology). Yay math!

[Photo: I think sunsets are beautiful.]

Phone Navigation

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 21:00:40 -0800

This Thursday, I tried out the GPS navigation feature on my new phone. I was originally going to call Sprint like the past two days, but then they are on holiday break so I decided to try to figure it out myself. After a lot of effort, I finally figured out how it may work. But I do not get GPS signal in my room, so I decided to go out and take a walk. Still no signal in the immediate vicinity. I could not take no for an answer, nor was I able to wait longer, so I drove to UCLA. Okay, I also had some errands that take me there, but it was mostly just to test out my navigation system. Dan and Jennifer invited a few of us over for dinner, so I was able to actually use my GPS navigation on the road. It worked out quite well. I am beginning to like my new phone, finally.

rsync

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 20:42:21 -0800

This Wednesday, I talked to Sprint for an hour in the morning again. Now I have web access. Apparently the rates are so high without a plan that basically even using Internet for a day or two would pay off the data plan. So I bought the data pack. It was suggested that I should switch to a plan with data included, but switching has an overhead in cost, so Sprint will call me back next month right before the billing period to set-up a no-fee switch.

For the rest of the day, I wrote a utility called hsync that mimics rsync -vprt --size-only. Well, I did not know that option existed on rsync (so dumb), so I wrote my own. I did all this because when syncing a ext3 filesystem with a vfat filesystem, due to the imprecise modification time on vfat, some of the files will always be re-transmitted. This is really bad, so I am ignoring the modification time (incidentally, to ignore time we use --size-only, and not --ignore-times). After coding all this, I then realized the proper way to sync ext3 with vfat is to use --modify-window=1, and it is actually documented on man rsync. Way to go... not reading the man page carefully. Not all is lost, however, since now I have a working code for basically traversing a directory recursively on a file system and performing (arbitrary) action to each file, dealing with links the way I want, and ignoring special files such as sockets, fifo, character and block devices.