’n’ Things

Customer Service

2006-12-14T21:21:00.000-08:00

So today I went to the barber – the same one I’ve been going to for the past four years or so. As I’m getting my hair cut, this really old man walks in, and heads to the one lady barber (who didn’t have a customer at the time), and says something to the effect of “I came in here last week to cut my hair cut – it was one of the worst haircuts I’ve ever had in my entire life. Now, I want you to prove that you people can do it right by fixing my hair.” Very condescending to her, even though she probably wasn’t the one who had “ruined” his hair.

And I started thinking: Wow, I’d never do that! If I ever got a bad haircut, I’d do one of two things: 1) Tell the barber what’s wrong, and have it fixed on the spot, or 2) If it’s unfixable, I wouldn’t give a tip, and wouldn’t come back again. Regardless, I’d never do what that old guy did.

While I was working as a cashier at Sears, one thing I noticed was that old fogeys were generally more demanding than younger people. Not always – some of them were the nicest people you could ever meet – but more often they were grumpy and if we didn’t have exactly what they wanted they’d be upset.

Does that mean customer service was different back then? Or are they just like that because they’re jaded? Maybe it’s a combination of the two?

Anyway, I just wanted to write this down, because I was genuinely shocked that he demanded something be done after the fact. Going back to a barbershop to demand that they fix my hair is just a concept that I’d never even think of, much less carry out, yet he had no problem doing so.

Innocence

2006-12-12T22:32:00.000-08:00

Microsoft steals one of Apple’s icons – how effing lazy can you get?
Best Buy goes to a more flexible work model – I truly believe this kind of stuff works, for obvious reasons
Black vs. White – a thoughtful analysis regarding console design
Iranian typography – I love the kinds of neat stuff you can do with more script-like languages (too bad it’s, you know, Iran)
Firebug screenshot – if you’re a web designer, and haven’t heard about Firebug, where you have you been the past four days?!
Woodpixel – make your own pixel art out of wood
Wikipedia founder will give away web hosting – interesting
Sony sets up fake YouTube campaign – Sony has quite the knack for making enemies
Four-year-old accused of sexual harassment – roll and eyes
LA Auto Show – take a look at my little walkthrough of this year’s show (it took me forever to do!)

GUI Tires

2006-12-04T11:58:00.000-08:00

Veyron is wicked fast – oh jeez!
Minilogue – this is really cool; if you ignore my other links, at least look at this one
del.icio.us will eat itself
Pictures of the $100 laptop
Water in zero gravity
GUIdebook – amazing archives

Don’t expect another post for the next few days – finals week.

Illness’s Ways

2006-12-01T16:28:00.000-08:00

Next week is finals week. Half of my suite has a cold. I want to get a flu shot.

They will, presumably, get better by next week – if I catch it next week, I’m screwed for finals.

If I get a flu shot, that might temporarily weaken my immune system just enough to get a cold.

If I don’t get a flu shot, I could catch the flu.

…

I better stick to vitamin C pills and washing my hands constantly.

Physically Possible?

2006-11-25T21:08:00.000-08:00

Something’s not quite right… (aside from the freaky body-less legs).

Forty Six Years

2006-11-22T03:16:00.000-08:00

A Wonderful New World of Fords
India driving – think your drive ’round town is bad?
IF – MetLife’s new typography-aware commercial
Pillow Pal – noted without comment
Museum of Online Museums
Psychology of the Wii and PS3
Speaking of those two: (very!) tiny springs in the Wii and PS3
And speaking of tiny: Tiny Icon Factory

News ’n’ Things

2006-11-15T14:57:00.000-08:00

Well, I’ve neglected this poor site long enough. I’ve given it a refreshening (okay, a whole makeover), and I’m also going to introduce a change in how I approach posts. Instead of limiting my posts to long-winded babbling, I’m going to split my posts 50-50 between long-winded babbling and linked lists – which, if you’re not familiar with, are just posts with links to interesting sites or articles. I really like reading other people’s linked lists, so I hope I can contribute a little myself, plus hopefully it will make the site a bit less stagnant (or at least create that illusion). Without further ado:

Yoga center straw
Jajah – like Skype, but browser-based (too bad about the silly name)
Chinese version of Wikipedia explodes in popularity after ban lifted (update: the ban’s been reinstated)
Open behind bars
The Vitamen – interesting band I’ve discovered through the They Might Be Giants podcast
Microsoft chooses an odd picture for its install screen
Blame Room Service – why do all the interesting things happen to him?
Sneezing panda

Well, that’s about it for now. Enjoy!

Recent Animal Pictures

2006-07-10T13:14:00.000-07:00

Just a few pics taken within the last few months.

In mid-March, the biggest snowstorm we’ve ever seen moved through (remember, this is southern California, where snow is about as rare as finding a virus on a Mac). The raccoons didn’t seem to mind though, and ate their dinner as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

Here are Mommy fox and her mate (well, at least we think he’s her mate – he’s the only fox I’ve ever seen who hasn’t tried to steal food from her). He seemed to be more interested in the chaparral though.

Here we have a visitor who decided to drop by in the early afternoon. The raccoons seem to just suddenly appear from the cliff (behind the black fence), and we’ve yet to figure out where any of them live.

Well, Meanie (given that name because she’s about the most anti-social thing ever) gave birth a couple weeks ago. She was in labor at our house, but finally went off in the woods to give birth. Two nights ago she finally brought the little ones for us to see. I was in the dining room, and heard something rustling outside – when I opened the door, I heard a high-pitched brrrr noise, and knew instantly that she’d brought her babies. It’s a very distinctive noise that’s very difficult to describe, but if you close your mouth, then force air out to make your lips flap while at the same time making a high-pitched noise in the back of your throat, you get the general idea. Anyway, she finally brought the little boogers, although they didn’t stay around very long (mainly because there was a large male raccoon eating at the food dish, which of course will make a mother raccoon very nervous, even though this particular male is a harmless bumbler).

Gauge Clusters pt. II

2006-05-05T17:04:00.000-07:00

In this second installment of Gauge Clusters, I’ll, uh, cover more gauge clusters (duh?).

First off, I’d like to point out the Volkswagon GTI’s cluster:

I know, bad angle, but it’s what I could find. Anyway, that doesn’t matter, because the main reason I wanted to talk about this one is the tach – I’ve noticed that German automakers are very fond of using two digits in the tach, with the multiplier being 100 (versus most other tachs, which are single-digit and multiplied by 1000). Why do they like this? Beats me – the only thing I can think of is that it’s more “balanced” in relation to the speedo, since the speedo is primarily made up of two-digit numbers. I don’t like it though, because the single digits are easy for the brain to map (three-thousand, four-thousand), while the double digits are more difficult (thirty-hundred?).

Here is the gauge cluster from the 2005 BMW 5-series. Notice that BMW is so obsessed with the double-binnacle design that they’ve snuck the gas and oil clusters at the bottom of the speedo and tach, respectively. It’s probably not as confusing as it initially looks though, since those secondary dials will stay practically still while driving.

Here in the Porsche Cayman S, we see several interesting things. For one, the speedo is divided into increments of 10, but only labeled every 50 km/h. Maybe that’s more in line with common speed limits in countries that use the metric system, but somehow I doubt it – can you imagine what a pain in the ass it would be to try and figure out if you were going 70 km/h or 80 km/h?

Also, notice how all the numbers are italicized, a common method automakers use to portray speed, since italics evoke forward motion (imagine someone’s face being pulled back when they slam on the accelerator).

In addition, what’s up with the secondary clusters? Look at the temperature gauge – marked off at 40°C, 80°C, and 120°C. What’s wrong with “H” and “C”? The gas gauge is particularly bad – 0, 2/4, and 4/4? What the hell is up with that – did somebody at Porsche forget how to reduce fractions? That gauge is just silly.

By the way, didja notice that the tach is centered? That’s another “go-fast” deal with automakers, since they want the emphasis to be on engine speed rather than staying under the speed limit. (Who needs a speedo when you’re going all-out on a mountain road?)

Speaking of that, here we have the Mazda RX-8:

The design is strikingly similar to the Cayman’s, with a triple-binnacle design, middle speedo, and temperature and gas gauges to the right. However, the RX-8’s left binnacle is occupied by an oil gauge (oddly missing in the Porsche), while the speedo has been made digital and set to the side of the tach. As I mentioned in the Honda S2000 description in the first installment, there’s a reason the speedo is digital and the tach is analog: digital is much more difficult in terms of figuring out relative speed changes, and in a sports car, you want to put the emphasis on the tach, so in this case, the tach wins out. Try matching shift points with a digital tach – yeah, right. Look at that beautiful 9000 rpm cutoff – must be fun watching the needle sweep that entire dial each time.

Here we have a car that’s not so concentrated on spirited driving (2006 Toyota RAV4), so the speedo takes center stage (for urban driving), and the tach cowers behind it over to the left. The large metallic rings are rather interesting, as are the orange halos. Notice the temperature gauge, which lacks any intermediate markings whatsoever - the needle looks kinda lost, don’t you think?

Ford Mustang. Wholly hell that speedo is impossible to read – quick, somebody find 65 mph! Oh, right, it’s that little dot smooched between the large 60 and the unmarked 70. And what happened to the metal bevels – they’re only three-fourths complete, as if they got tired at the bottom and stopped.

Hey, nobody claimed they’d all be good gauge clusters. This is the epitome of what’s wrong with GM – cluttered, ugly, cheap-looking, and clever details that aren’t very clever. Yank those four secondary dials out before someone’s brain gets overloaded. That black plastic might’ve been special in the 80s, but it’s just tacky today. Who thought the unfilled-bars (look at the markings next to every 10 mph on the speedo) would be a good idea? It looks like somebody made the outlines, then forgot to color them in, or maybe his crayon was taken away to go make a Saturn. Stupid. By the way, it’s from a Trailblazer.

Here’s a better job done by GM (2006 Cadillac DTS). The blue-purple is really nice, the numbers legible, and everything fairly simple, which is good for the kind of clientele the DTS attracts. Somebody should’ve checked the gas gauge though, because the filled and unfilled bubbles are too cute for their own good – E/F is more universal, and that bottom bubble seriously looks like a magnifying glass, since it’s almost touching the line marking. I really like what they’ve done with the tach though – see how they’ve just faded away the markings at the redline, instead of making the markings red? That accomplishes two things at once – it says “don’t go here” instead of “warm engine here”, and the red would’ve clashed very badly with the blueish stuff.

Lastly, I leave you with the previous-generation Honda Civic Hybrid. Talk about electroluminescence! The numerals are kinda big, but the big problem is in that right-hand dial. First off, four thingies in one dial isn’t such a good idea, even if they all “fit in” quite nicely. Second, notice how difficult it is to figure out exactly what each thing is reading – it took me a while to realize that blue is “empty” and white is “filled in” – why not just use black and white? Come on Honda, seriously…

Interest Check

2006-05-02T20:43:00.000-07:00

I was going to continue my post about Gauge Clusters, but I’m not sure if anybody cares (or is even reading this), so I’m just posting up an interest check before I spend three hours doing a writeup.

Decision 2006

2006-04-28T21:31:00.000-07:00

Starting September 2006, I will be attending the University of California – San Diego to study Bioengineering: Biotechnology.

In the end, academics won out. Out of the three colleges I had to choose from, SD has, by far, the best biotech program, and even though it’s the costliest school for me, I think it might actually give me the greatest value education-wise. And hey, I’ll have nearly beach-front property.

Anyway, exciting chapter in my life, as you can figure out. San Diego, here I come!

University Impressions: Davis

2006-04-25T21:04:00.000-07:00

On the 22^nd, I visited UC Davis. This entry’s a little late, but I needed a few days to recover (can you say long-ass drive?).

First, the city of Davis: it’s in the middle of nowhere, but that doesn’t bother me (guess where I live? – right, middle of nowhere). It’s an interesting city in that about half of its residents are from the campus, and it’s psycho-liberal-enviro-whatever. They are so big on keeping out large retail chains and what not that they even voted down a Trader Joe’s, which is the darling child of enviro people. Weird. Oh, and, bikes – this is the bike capital of the U.S., having an average of two bicycles per person (hrm), being the place where bike lanes were invented, and now being the place where bicycle signals are in use. If you’re a cyclophobe, don’t come here.

The 22^nd was Picnic Day, which is a sort of city-wide celebration of all things quirky about Davis and the campus. Too many things happened that day for me to put into one post, but it was a very fun and interesting day, filled with such oddities as really really old tractors, a marching band from UCSD, a chemistry magic show, and a wiener dog race.

The campus is beautiful – the best-looking UC campus I’ve seen. Ironically, the city is rather dismal-looking, because of small, old, crowded houses, uncontrolled shrubbery, and too much moisture in the air which makes all the wooden stuff have that nasty soaked look. The campus, on the other hand, is mostly gorgeous modern design, and is laid out with wide-open spaces and lots of nice trees, and there’s a beautiful arboretum that rivals the best parks one can find.

I was rather disappointed when I say the biological systems engineering exhibit though – they had things like various packaging for tomatoes and demonstrations of agriculture equipment. I talked to two professors there, noting that I wanted to work in biotech, and the way they described things didn’t sit too well with me. They talked about packaging things and making greenhouses and that kind of stuff – I want to work with E. coli and restriction enzymes and mitochondrial DNA and all that good stuff, not mess with cardboard packaging. I’ve looked on their website, and their course list closely matches San Diego’s, but somehow it seems like they still have a very different emphasis, which is not surprising, since Davis is an agricultural area.

I have less than a week to choose which school to go to, and while Davis is a great school, it doesn’t seem to have quite what I want academically, and the city has a kind of fascist attitude to it that I don’t think I’ll be able to handle. It’s too bad I can’t take the campus of UC Davis and pick it up and move it over to UC San Diego.

San Diego, here I come?

University Impressions: Irvine

2006-04-14T17:53:00.000-07:00

On the 13^th I visited UC Irvine.

I have to preface this by noting that UCI is kind of an odd-man-out for me, because it doesn’t actually have the major that I want (Biotechnology engineering). The closest it has Chemical engineering with a focus on Biochemical engineering, which is what I signed up for on my application.

With that in mind, I still wanted to consider going there, because they’ve offered me their Regents Scholarship, worth $9000/yr. Part of me says that I might not stay with biotech (after all, how many people change their major at least once in college?), so I should keep an open mind with Irvine.

I have to say that the architecture was really nice, with many modern and futurist buildings. And all of the staff there uses Macs.

That’s about where the good ends though.

For one, it’s too much like my high school in one respect – they have no damn shade! More importantly though, the academic aspect doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as high as San Diego’s. They took us into one lab – one lab – that had several SEMs, then proceeded to tell us that only grad students use that lab. Hello-o? This is an undergrad tour – you don’t go showing us what we can’t have! And they made it known that that was their one really nice lab.

And during the presentations, they talked more about getting a job and stuff, and said almost nothing about the school. No national rankings, no state of the art this or that, no super-duper professors, nothing. I came here to learn about the school and what advantages it’ll give me over other schools – I heard nothing of the sort.

I should also note that just getting to the presentation was a hassle. When I made a reservation online, there was no information about where to park, where to register, or where the presentation was to be held – and to make things worse, on one part of the webpage they showed the presentation starting at 11 a.m., and on another part of the same webpage they showed the presentation starting at 12:30 p.m. Stupid. So, anyway, we went there at 11 a.m., found a random parking garage ($7; San Diego was free), then went to Information to figure out where the hell to go. The nice lady couldn’t find anything on the computer’s schedule, so she called the engineering department, since they were, after all, putting on this presentation. Nobody knew – the lady who was supposed to be the head organizer said that there was a “misunderstanding”. So the Info lady told us to go to the Bren Events theatre, where an Explore UCI tour was being held. We went there, and asked someone there what to do about an engineering presentation. He told us that it was being held on the opposite side of campus. We went there, and found it, but it was already about a third through. At the end, one of the parents asked the presenter “Where is the Experience UCI engineering presentation going to be held?” – the presenter said “This is it!” At least we weren’t the only ones having issues.

As you can tell, I wasn’t impressed by Irvine at all – academically, and the lack of organization and cohesion. Very pretty architecture though, and possibly the best stretch of freeway in the world.

Coming soon after the 22^nd: impressions about UC Davis.

Gauge Clusters

2006-04-11T13:46:00.000-07:00

Anyone who knows me knows that I pay a lot of attention to car interiors. However, most of you probably don’t know that I’m particularly obsessed with gauge clusters (the tach, speedo, oil, and whatever else). You can instantly tell whether a car is good or a piece of crap just by looking at its gauge cluster, and you can tell what the designers want from the car: sportiness, truckiness, old-people appeal, etc. Let’s take a look at a few gauge clusters (thanks in advance to Edmunds.com, where I swiped all the images from).

Let’s start off with one of the most interesting designs in recent years, the Honda S2000. If you’ve ever seen the instrument panel of an F1 car, this is obviously patterned after that, but let’s ignore that fact for a minute and dissect the individual details. Notice first that while the tach looks somewhat similar to an analog tach, the speedo is a numerical display. Numerical displays are inherently difficult to use – you don’t get any sense of speed with a bunch of switching numbers, while you definitely get a good feeling of relative speed when you see a needle sweeping across a curve. But that’s why the S2000’s cluster is set up this way: you’re supposed to be concentrating on the tach and keeping the engine in its sweet range, rather than making sure you’re obeying speed limits. Measure of speed is unimportant, because you’re supposed to be going as fast as you can (just as auto racers probably don’t care too much about how fast they’re going, but more so about whether or not they’re going as fast as possible).

Also, notice one other intriguing detail: the tach is evenly spaced until about 6000 rpm, at which point the spacing becomes increasingly wider. Why is that? I’m not sure, but my guess is this: variable valve timing kicks in in the S2000’s engine at exactly 6000 rpm, which on a normal tach would make the needle move at a fairly consistent speed across 0–6000, then suddenly surge forward at 6000–9000. Because of this, the increased spacing might cause the needle to move at a consistent speed throughout the entire 0–9000 range, giving the illusion of smooth power delivery. Maybe – I dunno.

Now let’s look at the previous-gen Lexus IS300. The obvious thing that sticks out is the chronograph-style speedo, which I have to say looks like a pain in the ass to read – it’s hard enough to find 70 mph, let alone 75 (uh, officer, I couldn’t read my own speedometer). I must say that the use of dots to mark off the odd-numbered 20 mph increments is interesting and rather aesthetically pleasing. Oh, and, did you notice the Miles Per Gallon dial set near the top? I’ll eat my computer if anybody reaches that 80.

One more note about this particular gauge cluster – notice how the numbers are set facing in the circle, instead of standing upright like most dials. Makes you want to tilt your head sideways to read some of the numbers.

Now let’s look at the Scion xB. This thing is about the size of a big fist, and set in the middle of the dash, so it must be damn near impossible to read. Anyway, look at the tach – reminds one of a VW Beetle’s tach, no? (Which is ironic, since the xB’s boxy shape is the antithesis of the Beetle’s happy round shape.) Good luck trying to correctly match your shifting points with a tach that puny. By the way, this would be a good time to point out how ubiquitous the 20 mph markings are on speedos these days – you almost never see 10 mph labels anymore, just little unlabeled marks. It makes for less clutter on the dials, but I know from first-hand experience that it’s a bit of a pain on occasion.

Here’s the gauge cluster from the Chrysler 300C. Notice how elegant it is, with the thin, black numbers on white faces, the black pointers, and the two thin lines sweeping parallel to the chrome bezels. However, look at how cheap the black plastic surround looks – a good indicator of the rest of the interior, which also tries to look elegant but suffers from some really cheap plastics.

This garish gauge cluster is from the Ford Escape Sport. Can you say “stupid”? The green outlined in black looks positively childish, and the super-long odd-numbered marks (10 mph, 30 mph, etc.) look like out of control weeds. This might be a bit cute on the hybrid version, but the Sport? Puh-leeze.

Let’s end this first installment with the Lotus Elise. It seems like a fairly unremarkable double-binnacle design, but look carefully at the tach. What’s up with 0–3000? Maybe it’s similar to what I said about the Honda S2000, but this is way farther down in the rev range – this’ll make the needle race through that first section, then seem to crawl through the rest of the range. Very interesting. And is that red light at 6000 supposed to indicate the redline? Or is it just an annoying red light?

Well, that’s all for now. I’ll post more about gauge clusters sometime later – I have plenty more I want to talk about!

University Impressions: San Diego

2006-04-09T17:16:00.000-07:00

So, on the 8^th I visited UC San Diego.

The campus is much nicer-looking than I thought it’d be, although it might take Brutalist a bit too far. After having to ask for directions twice, we finally found the ballroom where the bioengineering presentation was held. It was a rather boring presentation and a model of what not to do when making a PowerPoint slideshow. The interesting part was when they let us loose to explore the campus and specifically the bioengineering labs.

The Jacobs School of Engineering is a gigantic building set up for engineering classes, and while it’s a little bizarre on the outside (although it matches the also bizarre Geisel Library quite nicely), the inside was absolutely gorgeous, with a very clean and modern feel to it (lots of glass, light-colored wood, aluminum accents, etc.). There were a ton of labs, some with very specific functions, like one for cardiovascular tissue analysis, and some broader ones, such as a nanotechnology lab and a molecular bioengineering lab. They were about what you’d expect in a lab: lots of flasks and labeled tubes and expensive-looking equipment. There was one room where I saw the largest centrifuge I’ve ever seen – it literally looked like a washing machine.

I was surprised by a few facts the school laid out for us. For one, bioengineering and biotechnology are the only impacted majors at UCSD – that obviously shows a huge demand for this program. This leads to the next thing that surprised me, which is that they only graduate about 40 biotech engineers from the program each year – I figured that since this is a world-class biotech program (ranked second in the nation), they would let more kids through, but I guess not. I was also a bit taken back by how high the GPAs were – the average CSU GPA of those admitted into biotech was 4.41 – I’m barely ahead at 4.46.

Speaking with some of the grad students, I was very impressed with how enthusiastic they were about UCSD’s biotech program, and with how many amazing faculty members they have, including Yuan-Cheng Fung, who is considered the father of bioengineering.

So, San Diego gets a very favorable review from me. In fact, the only drawback of going there is that they’re the only college that didn’t offer me any financial aid – but hell, if it costs me extra to go to a place that’s on top of its field, it might be worth it.

Coming up later this week: UC Irvine.

Schools

2006-04-02T11:11:00.000-07:00

So, as some of you may know already, here’s the tally:

Accepted:

UC Davis
UC Irvine
UC San Diego

Rejected:

UC Berkeley

This is pretty much what I expected, and I’m somewhat relieved that I got rejected from Berkeley, because I think it would’ve been too intense for me. Anyway, the question I’ve been getting is “So, what school are you going to?” Well, here’s the deal:

It costs roughly $20,000/yr. to attend any UC. My parents can afford about $10,000/yr. As I’ve mentioned before, I won’t be getting any government aid.

Davis has offered me a one-time $2,000 scholarship. Irvine has offered me their Regents Scholarship, worth $9,000/yr. (provided I keep a 3.25 GPA). San Diego has offered me nil.

So, Irvine seems like the obvious choice, right? $9,000 + $10,000 = just about enough to fully pay for college. But – Irvine doesn’t have the major I want. I want to major in bioengineering, and Irvine has no bioengineering program whatsoever (in fact, Irvine has only about five or six engineering majors). Davis has a good bioengineering program, but San Diego has the second-best bioengineering program in the nation, not to mention all of the biotech firms located in the San Diego area.

Just my luck that the amount of aid offered to me is inversely proportional to how good the school is in the major I want.

So, now San Diego seems like the obvious choice, right? Take out $10,000/yr. in student loans and just suck it up. But – what if I don’t hold on to bioengineering? What if sophomore year I decide that bioengineering really isn’t my kind of thing? Let’s say I decide mechanical engineering is what I want to do – then I’ll be damning myself for not just going to Irvine and saving the cash. And if I want to change my major, then Davis is the best place to do it – Davis has the largest engineering program amongst the UCs. And I think I’d like the environment at Davis more than at the other two.

In other words, I have no clue whatsoever where I’m going. And I have less than a month to choose.

I Found a Bug

2006-03-11T16:28:00.000-08:00

No, not software, but an insect (actually, “bugs” are technically insects under the Order Hemiptera, but you probably could care less). See:

I’m pretty sure it’s a Ceanothus Silkmoth (Hyalophora Euryalus), which I was surprised to find here (I thought they lived farther north). Silly thing was banging on the windows screens – I had to wait about half an hour to get this picture, when it was cold enough that the moth started to calm down. By the way, it doesn’t look very big in the pic, but its wingspan is about as big as my hand.

Mazda 3

2006-02-25T12:58:00.000-08:00

Well, we finally got it. Here’s the GTP thread I made. So happy!

Javascript Links

2006-02-19T12:21:00.000-08:00

Why, in 2006, are there still websites using Javascript for links‽ I can understand them for AJAX overrides, but for chrissakes, web designers are using them for basic navigation. Look at this:

Effin’ stupid, no?

It might not affect most people, but it’s a big problem for me, because it means that I have to wait for a webpage to fully load before I can click on anything, which can take ages on my dial-up connection. Nothing makes me madder than stopping a page, trying to click on a link, then realizing that it’s a Javascript link.

Living in the Sticks

2006-02-12T12:06:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it’s nice, sometimes it’s not.

On Friday night, our well sprung a leak in the bottom, and released 5000 gallons of water overnight. We went without water for most of Saturday, and this (Sunday) morning I had to dig several trenches so that we could set up a temporary water line from the pump to two trashcans (they’re our new wells) to the house. I just finished digging a while ago, and now my dad’s hacking everything together.

Major suckage.

A Few Things

2006-02-04T17:47:00.000-08:00

I just noticed that ABC News uses Google Earth whenever they need maps. Neat!
How to look like an ass in the name of Allah. I can’t believe some of the crap going on (in the 21^st century!) in the name of religion. Yeah, we atheists are the menaces of society, while them ideological folks can go destroy all the shit they want. (If you haven’t picked it up from all my cursing, I’m really pissed about this nonsense.)
Today I test-drove a Mazda 3, and loved it so much that it’s going to be my next car. My dad has put down a deposit on one that will be delivered here in a couple weeks – a titanium gray 5-speed manual Mazda 3 i with the Touring and ABS/SAB/SAC packages. Hurray!

The Secret to Life

2006-01-27T18:12:00.000-08:00

Is to constantly redesign your blog!

Heh, just kidding. Sort of.

Anyway, after requests from millions of daily readers for a change to the site (or maybe from three people who visit once a month), and after realizing that my molecular genetics class really kicks ass, here’s what I’ve got. Cookie points if you can name each molecule on this page (two in the logo, one at the bottom) without looking them up.

The Devil…

2006-01-13T15:47:00.000-08:00

…according to Scott Adams.

A Challenge

2006-01-09T17:48:00.000-08:00

For those of you wondering what the hell has happened to the styling of this site, I’ve decided to give myself a challenge.

I have stripped the site of all extraneous code (except for the nasty stuff that Blogger automatically inserts), and not just made the code semantic, but purely semantic: there is not a single unnecessary <div>, no <span>s, not even a single id or class.

My goal is to, using just this code, design a website. That would be tricky in itself, because the lack of, for example, ids means that I can’t differentiate between the ordered lists used in my posts and the ordered lists used for site navigation. However, I’ve added another layer:

I must use only one font
I must only use the colors traditionally given to print typographers, which means black (and the grays you’d get when screening black) and red (and the lighter shades of red made from screening)
I can’t use background images to make a pretty rendering of the font – I want all of the text to be rendered by the operating system
And it must scale

So, there you go. I have no clue why I’m doing this, but I am. By the way, there’s a good chance it’ll eventually start looking way neater in Firefox (and other such browsers) than Internet Explorer, because with the standards-compliant browsers I’ll be able to use child and sibling selectors, which will allow me to, for example, style the navigation list differently than the rest of the unordered lists on the site.

This’ll take a number of weeks – I’m doing it piece by piece.

Edit: I’ve had to make one concession. Blogger totally hijacks the <body> tag, and I can’t fine a way to override it, so I’ve made a container <div> with an id equal to “body”, so that it’s a pseudo-body-tag of sorts – and I’ve even left the body selector unstyled in my CSS to show that it’s there strictly because of Blogger. So this is still “clean” as far as I’m concerned, because if I had my own server, I would just replace that one selector with the real body selector and it would all work the same.

Oh, just our luck…

2006-01-06T22:44:00.000-08:00

For those of you not familiar with higher education in the U.S., when you apply to a college or university here, you also have to apply to FAFSA, which is sort of the centralized “let’s-see-how-much-financial-aid-you’ll-get” deal. You give this government thingy information about how much your parents make, taxes they’ve paid, etc., and then they figure out how much financial aid you’ll need to attend the college you’re going to.

Anyway, what they mainly do is calculate your Expected Family Contribution – that is, based on your financial stuff, how much is a reasonable amount for your family and you to contribute to a college education. This number is fixed. The theory is that no matter how much tuition costs, you should be able to afford it, since the government will help make up what your EFC won’t cover. For instance, let’s say that your EFC turns out to be $5,000, and the college you’re going to costs $20,000 to attend – in theory, the government will help make up the remaining $15,000 through grants and low-interest or subsidized loans.

Anyway, I’ve just filled out my FAFSA, and here’s the kicker: According to CollegeBoard, it costs roughly $21,000 to attend UC Davis (which holds true for just about every UC). Guess what our EFC is? $20,961.

So, I’ll be getting, what, a $40 grant? Whoo-hoo – I can buy a third of a book!

Boo.

Edit: I apologize if my babbling is more incoherent than usual. I just got my wisdom teeth pulled yesterday, so I’m medicated up the whazoo right now.

VW GX3

2006-01-04T15:49:00.000-08:00

Oh my! Now that is one sweety of a car (err, bike—no, err, tricycle). Volkswagon, if you build it, we will come!

Car Manufacturers and Flash

2005-12-29T17:04:00.000-08:00

Why oh why does almost every car manufacturer insist on using Flash on their websites? And not only using Flash, but using it heavily, and without a low-bandwidth version of the site. Do they just assume that if we can’t afford broadband, we can’t afford a new car?

Chevrolet.com gets my nod as probably the best car manufacturer website – it’s clean, it loads relatively quickly (even the Flash files), and the HTML is pretty good (they even use definition lists!). This is a website that I actually enjoy using. Ford can go die with its 566 KB homepage, which does nothing that can’t be done in under 100 KB with a few nice images and some clever Javascripting. Seriously, half a megabyte, just for the homepage. Unbelievable. And it’s far from being the worst offender.

While the rest of the world discovers the joys of standards-based web design and lean file sizes, the car manufacturers continue on their trek to annoy the piss out of every person with dial-up, which in America happens to be about half of the population. I think I’ll shop through my credit union website, since the cars are usually cheaper and the site isn’t bloated.

So remember, if you want to make a Flash-heavy website, please make a low-bandwidth version, or better yet don’t even use Flash for any part of the site except for small areas that absolutely need it (e.g., a 360° view of a car’s interior). Save your customers the aggravation, and save your company the bandwidth expenses.

(Boy, am I preaching to the choir or what?)

Rediscovering GT4

2005-12-20T14:14:00.000-08:00

I haven’t touched my PS2 in, gawd, maybe four or five months. Just haven’t had the time.

But now that I’m on winter break, I decided to turn my PS2 on yesterday (after using a can of compressed air to get all the dust out of it), stick my GT4 disc in, and try to remember How do I play this thing?

I apparently left off in the middle of the Professional Hall GT World Championship series (the one that used to get a new thread at GTP every week or so), which was a really bad place to leave off on. I started the next race (Hong Kong), decided that even in the wonderful Audi R8 I was lacking skill to pull off anything near first place, and abandoned the series. Then I wandered off to find a place where I could regain some of my virtual racing skills, and found that I still hadn’t started the American Championship in the American Hall, so I decided Why not?

Strapped myself in a Chaparral 2J (the Sucker), found another 2J at the starting grid, took off, and I actually won – I won every race except for El Capitan Reverse, which has dramatic elevation changes that aren’t conducive to the 2J’s need to have its underside sealed to the ground. Anyway, the nice thing was knowing that I didn’t make it an unfair challenge – all of the other cars had similar horsepower figures to mine (and most were much newer, with twice as many gears), and the other 2J was always in second place (keep in mind that mine was completely stock). The 2J was awesome though; the great thing about it is that if you started to understeer in a turn, you can often just give it more gas, and the extra downforce created will give you more traction. It’s a bit counterintuitive at first, but works wonderfully.

So I’ve rediscovered the joy of GT4, that world where we all can drive cars that only insane maniacs (good insane maniacs) would otherwise drive, that world where an Oopsie! doesn’t cost you thousands of dollars and where you don’t have to talk to annoying salespeople to get a test drive.

GT4’s fun!

Hateful People

2005-12-07T19:44:00.000-08:00

My generation is a fairly tolerant one – polls have shown that we’re accepting of gays and wouldn’t mind gay marriage, that race is not an issue, and that religion doesn’t decide friendships.

But what of the few bad grapes in the bunch? There’s a guy who sits next to me in my Literature class who is homophobic and a racist. I overheard him tell somebody that he got fired for calling a gay customer a “damn fag” to his face; this made more sense when he told me that he spent his first ten years of education at a Baptist school, so obviously he has religious reasons for hating homosexuals. I’ve also overheard him say that every Mexican in the U.S. should be deported back to Mexico, and he refers to blacks by the n-word (not to a black person’s face, of course, but whenever he’s talking to someone else).

Problem is, he’s been trying to befriend me, which makes me terribly uncomfortable. Whenever I’m talking to him, all I can think of is all the hate under that fairly unassuming exterior. It’s so difficult to pretend that I don’t know or that I don’t care, because I do – because I know that it’s people like him who find ways to press their views on the world and make a shithole of it all.

On the Internet, you can lay these kind of people out, expose them for who they are, and at least try to knock some sense into them. You can’t do that in real life. It’s so frustrating. And the worst part – he’s not the only one.

College Apps – Check!

2005-11-28T20:49:00.000-08:00

Well, there’s some weight off my shoulders – I’ve just submitted my college apps. All of them were for University of California schools; tuition fees are about $6k–$8k there (versus $25k–$40k for private colleges or out-of-state fees on public colleges), which is about what my parents can comfortably afford (there’s no sense in me getting chest-high in debt before I even graduate).

I applied to Irvine, San Diego, Davis, and Berkeley. The first reaction I get from most people when I rattle off the names in that list is “Ooh, Berkeley!”, but I actually have very little… incentive to go to Berkeley – I mostly applied just because I can, and because of family pressure (I have four family members with Engineering degrees from Berkeley). But, Berkeley just comes off as too, too precious for me (and don’t get me started on the ugly muddle of architecture there).

Actually, the most ironic thing (to most people) is that my first pick is Davis, even though it’s the lowest-ranked amongst those four. Why Davis? It’s the bike capital of America (hurray!), it has a massive Engineering program, it’s a small college town (I am so not the party type) with friendly locals and supposedly some of the friendliest and most humble students out of the UC system, and I’ve love to minor in Entomology, Davis being the only UC campus to offer that degree. Davis just rocks on so many levels, and I think I’ll fit in perfectly.

I’ve thrown in the application to San Diego because their science programs have really catapulted in the last decade or so, and I’m applying to Irvine only because I’ve already been guaranteed a spot there. If you’re in the top 4% of high school students in California, you acquire Eligibility in the Local Context status, which means that you’re guaranteed into at least one UC school; every year that one school is always Irvine, because nobody wants to apply there. So, I’ve only applied to it as the ultimate “safety”, since, well, I’m basically already in. I really don’t want to have to resort to going there though – it’s a rather unspectacular suburban school that isn’t known for anything in particular except for lousy parking and being 50% Asian (yes yes, I am Asian too, but who said I’d be comfortable in that kind of unbalanced environment?).

So, anyway, Davis is my target, and seeing how it’s the easiest one on my list to get into (and it has a 97.8% acceptance rate for ELC students), I am hopefully on my way there. Oh, and, I have a half-sister who lives there, so I’ll be able to see her for the first time in a long while.

Now it’s just a waiting game – March is when the acceptance (or rejection!) letters come out.

Mystery Cat

2005-11-17T20:04:00.000-08:00

There’s a cat that’s been coming to our house for the past two nights. We leave a lot of dog food and scraps from dinner outside for the raccoons and foxes, and it’s been coming to eat the dinner scraps. Cute little thing – it has a motley, lynx-like fur pattern, except for snow white feet.

Problem, nobody knows whose cat it is. Remember, this isn’t a huge neighborhood, where something like this wouldn’t be too uncommon – this is a small neighborhood composed of exactly three families, and we’re plop right in the middle of the forest, ten miles from the nearest city. There is only one family that has cats, and they’ve confirmed it’s not their cat (the cat actually visited their house first, sometime last week); the other neighbor only has dogs, and we have no pets. So, either it was abandoned, or (more likely) it wandered from the trailer park that’s a couple miles from here (that’s one hell of a journey though, because the trailer park’s in a deep valley, with huge mountains with a bajillion tons of brush separating us from them).

However, the little thing doesn’t have a collar. The real problem though is that it seems afraid of humans – it runs away as soon as it notices us, even if we’re still inside the house. I’ve never seen it for more than a few seconds at a time (and again, remember that we’re in the middle of nowhere, so once it runs, it can easily get out of sight).

I’d like to at least catch the little booger so that I can bring it down to the trailer park and ask if anybody’s lost a cat recently, but if the silly thing keeps running away, it’s going to find itself in an unfriendly encounter with a bobcat or mountain lion. At least I know the raccoons won’t attack it – the other night when it noticed us, it froze for a little bit, and out of nowhere one of the raccoons walked up and patted its tail a little bit, tried to smell its butt, then lost interest and went to eating the dog food.

I want the kitty.

Artistic Styles

2005-11-11T11:38:00.000-08:00

Art is so complicated. You have many time periods: Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical, Romantic, Realist, Expressionist, Modern, Postmodern. Within these, you have individual techniques, ranging from making large, uncluttered open spaces to such oddities as deconstructionism. There are buildings with ridiculous detail to ornamental design, aluminum trash cans that are the essence of simplicity, and “Bangle-ized” cars.

I’ve noticed lately that I’ve taken a great liking to two opposite styles – Modernism, and, for lack of any known words (lack of education on my part, maybe?), what I’ve deemed “Homeliness”. I love the organic architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings and the geometric style of Bauhaus (including one of my favorite fonts of all time, Futura). Those are Modern. But I also love down-to-earth styles – brick houses, paintings that don’t go all abstract-crazy, and fonts with a humanist axis. Homeliness.

They’re basically on opposite ends of the spectrum, except that both are the “essence” of something (brick is re-formed clay, making it the essence of natural building material; Bauhaus and Futura are the essence of the circle and the line; a humanist font is the essence of the human hand), and I’ve noticed that I tend to dislike artistic styles that don’t strive for that essence (for example, Neoclassical is a strange cross between what’s natural and what’s rigid – bleah).

So, what do you like and appreciate? What styles really stir your emotions in a wonderful way, and what styles simply make your eyes bleed?

I Ran

2005-11-06T15:19:00.000-08:00

A half marathon today. I’m not even exactly sure why – one of my friends from the Cross Country team said he’d do it, so I decided to too. I took it very easy – 9-minute pace for the first five miles or so, 8-minute pace for the next five miles, and a rather fast pace leading into an all-out sprint for the last three miles. Turned out a 1:46, which isn’t particularly good, but I wasn’t really racing at all. For the first ten miles, I just hung with my friend, talking to him and such. A nice jog, you might say.

It’s going to take a while for my feet to recover though. And at around the 11 mile mark, my entire right leg fell asleep – at least I couldn’t feel any pain!

I think I’m going to do light running during Track season (I’m not officially registered for Track this year, but I’ll probably just run with the team), and then pick up cycling over the summer (or re-pick it up – anybody remember youth_cycler?). Running’s great and all, and I finally got my Varsity letter this year, but it’s not something I can continue indefinitely, lest I don’t mind the cartilage in my knees being completely destroyed by the time I’m forty. So, I think I’ll do cross-training – some cycling, some running, some walking – through college, and I probably won’t join a team (maybe a club, if I can find one).

So, my serious running days are probably over. Now I’ll just be a “casual” runner, which is fine by me. After all, shouldn’t sports be fun?

Career Plans

2005-11-02T20:42:00.000-08:00

My apologies in advance: I’m about to delve into a me-me topic. Such is the nature of blogging.

Anyway, I’m stumped on career plans. Thing is, I kind of enjoy doing just about everything, so I can’t pinpoint something as being the thing I want to do for the rest of my life. Adding to that problem though is that my primary interests reside in engineering, the physical sciences, and life sciences – all of which are very difficult fields to move away from once one has degree. If one studies the liberal arts or business or something like that, there’s a great deal more flexibility in what fields a person can work in. With engineering and physical and life sciences though, you’re essentially locked in (and you take a huge, huge risk if you try to get out). That’s nice and all for the person who knows he definitely wants to be an electrical engineer or she knows she wants to be an astrophysicist, but what of those of us who don’t have a damn clue?

So, my concern is that I really have to choose now-ish what I want to be doing for the rest of my life – scary. I realize that most people change their major at least once during college, but I’d hate to spend two years studying chemistry and then suddenly decide I want to do architecture.

Here are my top picks (at the moment, anyway) of things I’d like to study:

Biochemistry and Bioengineering
Architecture and Architectural Engineering
Entomology

Thing is, in a month, that list will probably change. Two months ago it would’ve been Architecture, Mathematics, and Computer Science; but, I’ve decided Mathematics would be too boring, and I’m taking Computer Science right now in high school, and I honestly don’t have the faintest clue what I’m doing, so I figured I’d better drop that from my list. Hell, I didn’t think of Biochemistry until I actually started filling out my UC application.

Scary times. Why can’t I just learn a bunch of stuff about everything?

Classical Music

2005-10-30T10:10:00.000-08:00

I asked Duke for some recommendations on classical music, because, let’s face it, They Might Be Giants isn’t the greatest stuff to listen to while studying. He returned a huge list, and I ended up buying Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Rachmaninoff’s Greatest Hits, including his famous Symphony No. 2.

Whoever thought classical music could be so awesome? I’ve listened to each album, all the way through, four times since Friday (two days ago) – that’s how awesome this stuff is. Now I feel like I’ve missed out on a lot by not listening to classical music earlier.

IE (not That Is)

2005-10-23T21:56:00.000-07:00

I have no clue how this site’s design fares in IE6/Windows (and I can’t check from school, because their damn proxy server has everything under the sun blocked) – if somebody could send me a screenshot, I’d appreciate it. Thanks!

I love how it’s 10 o’clock on a Sunday night, and I still haven’t started my homework. Forget weight-loss pills: what we (we as in we people in general) need are anti-procrastination pills!

Resigning

2005-10-18T20:54:00.000-07:00

Which is a nice way of saying Quitting. I’m quitting my gawd-awful job at the Tutoring Center. At the Tutoring Center, I did very little tutoring (eh?), and a lot more, uh, behavioral management. Lots of little kids who don’t get proper discipline – their parents are rich enough to just throw money at the problem. And I get paid $7.00/hour – that’s the starting salary at Wendy’s for cryin’ out loud! Plus, they make a killing off of us: the Center charges in excess of $35/hour for its services, and each tutor has to work with two kids at a time, so it only costs them $3.50/hour to actually teach the kids. Oh, and, the manager and head instructor are total assholes. So I have kids who are insolent little brats, administrators who are jerks, and the salary of an unskilled laborer.

Manager, meet resignation letter! Too bad there’s a two-week notification policy.

And then I’ll do lots of private tutoring, which I actually enjoy, and make $15.00/hour doing it. Hurray for options.

So…

2005-09-02T20:49:00.000-07:00

… this is what it’s like to have my own blog. I’ve made blogs for other sites before (the WRL and GTPlanet Insider), but never my own.

Um, I think that’s all for now. G’night! I’m all worn out from this week.