tonite... er... this morning, i find myself making a web page... well, i guess it is about time... i am about to enter the second semester of my fourth year at cal. i am not graduating at the end of this semester. but my days as a undergraduate college student are growing fewer each day...
when i first got here, uclink and ocf offered email accounts to students. back in those days, we made .plan files instead of web pages! and we walked across campus to class uphill! and when we returned, we also went uphill! and let me tell you about the great blizzard of 1993! of course, at the time we called it the mother of all blizzards! and we would each wear an onion on our belts, cos that was the style at the time!!! if we wanted to get into the r.s.f., we could just flash our cal i.d. cards with our validation sticker; only back then we called them "reg stickers!" anyway, back to the point... where was i? oh yah... in those days we could not get them nice big, yellow onions, we could only get the small, white ones. and we would tie one to our belt and hang it cos that was the style at the time!
today i start my eighth semester at cal... can you believe that? well, i am very sleepy. have you ever played simtower? i like.
i start work at east bay mud (municipal utilities district) tomorrow as an engineer's aide. i am very excited. i shall bart to work.
so i have finished my first week of work and got to enjoy a homeworkless weekend! hrm... i am hungry, but do you realize what time in the morning it is?!?!?! i should just go to sleep!
now i have made my web page look more like something real. :) well, i hope people look at it! the uc open taekwondo championships were this weekend. vivian and i had to do lots of work for that. now we are done. we would like to thank all our volunteers.
i am so glad that the tournament is over. now i might be able to have a social life again. though i love my job, i realise that it is sorta taking me away from my berkeley friends since i cannot see them during the day. the only students i see regularly are my taekwondo friends. well, i hope e-mail can keep us close. anyway, things will get better; more time! so let me stop whining and start planning. i am determined to have fun!
oh yah, visit the dole website's banana page to see the nutritional contents of a banana. i eat many. i hope that living in berkeley, and the consequential exposure to healthy foods, will help me avoid heart disease. i just heard on the news tonite about how heart attacks and disease kill the most americans every year. well, i vow to never do that... never to die of something that i could avoid by eating less red meat and less grease, et cetera.
ick! i just had lunch at the ebmud cafeteria... i had some fish thing: snapper bonne femme... it was sick... i cannot give this restaurant the best rating... oh my... it was bland yet fishy! and it was not even that warm! oh my...
so i talked on the phone with philip huang until the wee hours of the nite... it was butt hard waking up for work. well, i enjoyed talking to phil cos i do not get to talk to many of my old friends much these days. so if you are reading this, feel free to call! :)
berkeley is on spring break right now, but i still gotta work. but that is okay. i bought mini powerbars at costco yesterday. yum yum. all sorts of flavours. and these are mini! crazy!
walking on campus makes beno very happy. warm spring evenings spent walking on campus with vivian make beno happy.
taekwondo blurb : these next few months spent preparing for my black belt examinations look tuff, but i know i want to earn my belt; i want the honor to be worth it. if i do not deserve it, then i shall not test at the end of this summer. however all these basic techniques get me discouraged. sometimes i wish i could spend my young days fighting (sparring), not doing repetitive kicks... it makes me wish i had started taekwondo as a li'l wee kid; then i could spend all my time now sparring. but maybe all the effort i put in these next few months can come close to making up for my late start... but i dunno... i started playing piano when i was four. i think that is the proper way to learn piano. despite shine , i feel that adults cannot really become the best pianists. it takes all those young years spent practicing scales and chord progressions and studying music theory to become a real artist on the piano. if only i had stuck with piano... i took private lessons for 14 years! i spent so much time on it! and i practiced really hard... when i did not want to practice, my parents forced me to... and it really paid off by the time i was eighteen. but almost four years since then, i cannot play worth $#!+...
while in san jo for the weekend, i longed to write all sorts of junk on this page; but now it is late, and i must wake up for work tomorrow. the lecture must wait for another night. but i saw plenty of the comet. i also saw a big, orange moon.
today i battled depresssion. yes, i think i did... must be the clouds. some people think i am always happy, but no... no, i get sad. i dunno why. perhaps nothing is really going wrong in my life; it was just so cloudy today! and it is supposed to be spring!
i told phil today, "if cal engineering has taught me nothing else, i [at least] learned that an engineer must have integrity." (or the lemma to that theorem: 'if cal engineering has taught me nothing else, i at least learned that an engineer must have an integra. but seriously...) what i think i learned from berkeley overall, is that a person must believe in something, something big. i am not imposing any of my religious beliefs. your beliefs do not stop with theology. you can believe in giving a minority group a voice in this country, in helping some less fortunate group of people, in saving the planet, in giving society better technology, in making a decent future for the younger generation... the list goes on! but! i do not include believing in money! money is the default. almost everyone can believe in money / wealth. and all these people will default to believing in money if they do not give themselves an alternative.
i feel that, from my time spent at berkeley, this idea has imbedded itself in me, the idea that one should try to make a difference in somebody else's life, try to work for something positive and constructive, care about others and put them before him or herself. enjoy life, yes, but why resort to gluttony, greed, deceit, dishonesty, and self-degradation? dave miller, a uc taekwondo black belt, was teaching us to referee tournament matches, and warned us not to throw a match with our judicial power, "if you are wrong once, you're wrong once. if you cheat once, you are a cheater for life!" or something to that effect. i believe he accredited the quote to someone else, i forget... in the end, it will prove to be a folk proverb, i suppose.
anyway, why do you need to listen to such moralistic crap? you're young and energetic, or you're mature and wise! i never said you had to.
i am trying to make some links to asian- american sites, as in sites dealing with asian-american issues.
lately, i have been very reluctant to add to this page because i do not want to clutter it. if anyone actually checks this page regularly for recent additions, he / she would find it inconvenient to always scroll to the end... so let me hereby create a link to the next installment of the beno manifesto .