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It's finally over. The crazy semester where I took all two classes for Rescomp and two fillers. At times, it seemed like it would never end, and at others, I just wish I could freeze that moment and make it last forever. But such is life, and the passage of this entity called time. It happened; what's in the past is over.
In a nutshell, it started off with rescomp. It owned most of my time, and until the first weekend of September (for reasons some of you know by now), I actually cared. Then a disillusionment set in, I stopped caring, and spent all my time on school and academics because i knew I'd be able to get away with it. And all was well too as CS162 had no major assignments for the first five weeks or so. I was on track, on task, ready to own all my classes. Yeeeah! I was without a TV, without the woman issues of the previous year, and most of all, I was in a room by myself.
Yes, such was the house on Scenic and Rose - the closest thing to a bay view is the thing out ted's room window (which looks out over Rose St. toward the bay), and even then, most of the interesting things come from varying sky colors:
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In terms of the people I lived with, there were four. Sometimes more. There was Pat the landlord dude who's a hardcore hardware EECS type, Larry the Physucks major (also known as a Physician), Ted the guy I share my dsl line and phone with, and Steve. Larry, Pat, Ted, and I graduated high school together, so this was cool. Pat and Larry were there last year too...oooh...anyway, here's Ted:
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Oh yeah, and there was Pat's sister's cat, She-Ra. She's the one who is afraid of people or something, as if you feed her then try to pet her, she ducks and runs away from the hand. No kidding. The 'coons also came to eat her food occasionally, which provided some interesting episodes involving the throwing of broomsticks, water bottles, and coke cans, but nothing else too strange.
The biggest adjustment probably came from living off-campus. Really off campus. I almost qualified for that parking permit; if I lived two more blocks up the hill, I'd've been the required 2 miles away from Sproul Hall. But here's a cool snipping from the Daily Cal: apparently, the end of the rainbow in the picture is on the way between my house and campus...cool, eh?
Then there was the whole cooking thing. Or rather, the chemistry experiments that just happened to be edible. Not only did we learn how to make food, more importantly, we learned how to read. kinda...
In all other aspects of life, fall 1999 proved to be yet another learning experience. Learning how to sleep in a library, learning how to walk uphill the right way (without getting tired), and most of all, learning just how moronic and idiotic many people out there in "the world" can be. And in stark contrast to that, learning just how cool and awesome the other people can be.
Random shout-outs:tchen!, also known as tree-saw or theresa or mother_theresa or even boss_lady, she has been an inspiration to lots of us. through her own personal hell and all that, she manages to persevere and live through this crazy berkeley life, when her own is at times falling apart. she also decided she wan't a vegetarian anymore...that one time ted tracy theresa and i went to get mcflurries, she just inhaled those chicken mcnuggets...(gasp!). so she also threatens us with britney spears music and even threatens to come back from washington dc as britney spears....
ted! & tracy!, partners is food preparation and crack dealing and gasoline with the gimpefied car. they sure know how to make life in our quaint little house interesting; poor tracy still commutes everyday from livermore...that is, when she's not living in our house up the hill...
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calvin!, my switched-at-birth-twin. so i finally actually talked to this guy. hehehe. so he suffered cs162 along with me, and also fluffed his way through cogsci100 just like I did, and admitted that the buffer-overflow of the password prompts in the Evans computer lab is a known bug/feature. ooh....
rick!, kurtm!, mdelp!, the cs162 group of mine - rick, kurt, and mike. ok, so our OS was impractical with all the overhead involved in our implementation, but it was modular! once those terahertz processors are out, watch out! actually, i'm probably eternally grateful to these guys for teaching me C and C++, and for helping me get an A in cs for the first time in my life.
cynthia!, my quasi-sig-o®? someone who understands my freakishness and randomness and all that, despite being a bsb fan and closet radioAlice lover. such a shame that i didn't spend nearly enough time with her this fall, though perhaps that was a good thing. she proved that it's ok to be a violent pyromaniac when it comes to ladybugs, and maybe even marshmallows...yeah. and as the camera-shy one that she is, i'll just be mean and leave a pic here:
rayleen! & anne!, and the ieorness of it all. rayleen is an eecs major at heart...she's just in denial. and ieor too. that's why she managed to pull off doing most the project herself without freaking out. anne was cs150's gimp. and an ee20 ta. poor poor anne...
eddie! & stella!, ee122 gimps 'r us. if stella were to teach a college-level class, it would be on "how to freak out and worry." if eddie could teach a college class, it would be "how to properly use malloc in C." And they'd do a much much better job than Stavros and Costello did in EE122 this semester.
pat!, larry!, steve!, the people who shared a house with ted and me. and the people who put up with my incessant cd burning and christmas lights. yay christmas lights!
jay!, the Wang; jay the mack. he manages to keep my mind active with his amusing tales of life in a search for meaning and understanding and a point to it all. though i wonder about him sometimes...
james!, the Yeh, who drove a bunch of us to the Farm to watch Cal lose the Big Game. You gotta laugh at someone who loses his attention of the road and the curb when a $2 piece of paper is about to fly out the window. And to think, that window wouldn't've been rolled down if he didn't have a cold tolerance like mine.
| bsii!, the rcc, and owner of another.reshall.berkeley.edu. sound familiar? it should - if you've seen the stats page, he is by far the clear winner in the web-stalker category. congrats, ben! |  |
Finally: what to do with a dead cat5 cable? Here's idea #27: a gift decoration. That's right - just snip, strip, and stick, and it's the perfect addition to any gift.
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