Eric’s Blog

Well, I take it back, Los Angeles IS colder than Berkeley.

20081228berkeley-temperature

20081228la-temperature

So…in the past couple days I watched 8 movies. This is the list of movies I watched:

2008/12/20 Saturday
The Fifth Element
The Professional
The Thing

2008/12/21 Sunday
Requiem for a Dream
Gattaca

2008/12/22 Monday
21 Grams
28 Days Later

2008/12/23~27 Tuesday to Friday
The Longest Day (3 hours!)

Why did I watch all these movies? Well, it’s because they’re free! I just discovered that I could watch movies on hulu.com for free. Hopefully, it’ll stay that way, because it seems like a good model from the consumers’ side, but you never know when this type of stuff would get shut down. Also, the last movie took me a long time because I kept on getting interrupted with Christmas stuff.

I went back to Berkeley last week, specifically from Sunday the 14th to Wednesday the 17th. Why did I go back? It was because my old research had a problem that they couldn’t figure out, so they wanted me to go and fix it for them. My co-worker already tried a couple of weeks to fix it and he couldn’t.

Anyways, the morning of 14th, I was like, screw it, I’m not going to sleep, because my bus was at 6AM and it was 2AM already. But I still neglected to prepare until the last moment. It was 5:30 when I thought to myself, “maybe I should get ready.” So I went and took a shower, and then it was 5:47. So I had to pack all my stuff, my toothbrush, clothes, charger, laptop, and everything else in 10 minutes. That was pretty fun, and I made the bus :-).

But actually, I was not out of danger, yet. Since LAX was not the last stop for Culver City Line 6, I almost missed the drop-off at Parking Lot C, but I didn’t. So it was all good. I checked in, got on the plane, and went to SFO. I flew Virgin America, by the way, which is like the best airline since Southwest. I mean, $50 for LAX-SFO and leather seats and personal entertainment system? Best deal ever. I slept the whole way, though, almost didn’t get my drink.

When I got out from SFO, I was like, yeah, I recognize that feeling. It’s the feeling of December in Bay Area. It all feels so…familiar somehow. It’s like I never left. That’s the way I felt when I arrived at Berkeley, too. Rain greeted my there, which I love. Rain is the best weather in my opinion, but other people would disagree. Then I checked into Bancroft hotel, located on the corner of Bancroft and College. They had this really old TV, which was the exact same model we had when I was back in Taiwan. This brings back memories. I still remember watching the old broadcast TV and playhing the NES through this set.

old Sony TV

From my room, I could see the Campanile and Barrows.

Barrows Hall

Campanile

I could also see Kroeber fountain, and I happened to catch the old 51 bus stopping.

line 51

The hotel I’m staying in is pretty comfortable, it has that nice homely feel, but the restroom was really small. Overall, I really liked it, though. Some people like things that are grand and pretty, but I like stuff that are comfortable, so probably that’s why I like Bancroft Hotel. Plus, free continental breakfast that’s actually good. They had yogurt, pastries, OJ, coffee, anyways, it was good.

bed

SMALL bathtub

Anyways, moving on to the job. So I spent two days trying to figure out the problem. On the morning of the third day, I finally figured it out. It was only one line, and it wasn’t even in the code. The error was in a configuration file. Basically, the ICE message size wasn’t large enough, and that was causing all our video messages to be dropped. I told them when I landed that something that takes this long to fix has to be a very simple one-line problem, and it was. I’m so glad I figured that out, though, because I don’t know what I would have done if I couldn’t figure it out. I also pointed Josh to logstringutils.cpp and logstringutils.h because he was using the ascii log files for his project.

Besides working, of course I met up with some people at Berkeley. I met with Michelle, and we had a nice meal at Akasaka Sushi on 2650 Telegraph Ave. Then that night I gamed with Edison on Metal Slug 3 until the ungodly hour of 4. The next day, I had dinner with Aaron at Taiwan Restaurant. I had beef noodle soup, which was good except they had some old beef mixed in with the fresh ones; the tea also wasn’t as strong as I remembered. The old waitress still recognizes me, though, and we spoke in Taiwanese for a while.

When I was coming back from Berkeley, I COMPLETELY missed my flight. I woke up at 11 and my flight leaves at 11:05. Of course I didn’t make it. But I hurried down to SFO, and since I got there at 12:45, they let me do standby on the next flight free of charge or anything, how nice. When I got back to LA, though, it was raining. Looks like I brought back the rain with me. I wish it could rain like that all the time. Just before I got into my apartment, though, I let up my guard, and I dropped my laptop on the hard, concrete floor, because I thought that hand was holding the clothes bag. Initially I thought it was okay, but it turns out I broke the DVD burner :-(. Fortunately, I have an external one. Well, except for that, I’d say the trip went well. I fixed the problem that they wanted me to fix, had dinner with old friends, it was good.

Hai jiao qi hao 2008

Went to watch Cape No. 7 today at UCLA’s James Bridges Theater in Melnitz Hall, which, by the way, was on the very north side of the campus, meaning it was far! I thought the movie was great. I didn’t like the sound mixing so much, because some of the music was too loud, but that may be because I was sitting too close to the front. I guess the movie had to be cut short, though, because there were certain parts where I thought the movie was unclear. Even though it was 133 minutes, I wanted it to go on for longer. There was just so many interesting characters in the movie, which meant that the movie was always interesting, never a dull moment. Also, I love the main song in the movie, 國境之南 (South of Border). I’m definitely going to sing that in the ktv if they have it. I definitely recommend this movie to everyone.

Toshiba Qosmio X305 Laptop Computers

Toshiba Qosimo X305

Finally got hot water on Wednesday. Two days of taking cold showers is more than enough :-(.

ESPN – NCAA College Football Recap

Went to the UCLA-USC game today. But I couldn’t find a parking space so was late to the game :'( missed our only score and touchdown. After that, it was pretty much all USC. I guess upsets only happen every so often (see 2006 UCLA-USC game, when unranked UCLA beat #2 USC). Then after the game, we had to stand in the longest line EVER, for the shuttle to take to the Parson’s parking lot. It took like an hour of standing in line for us to get to the shuttle. All in all, it was a fun experience, even though people here don’t care about football as much as Cal fans, probably because we’re not a good team. I hope we can do better next year.

Hi, writing about Thanksgiving a week later because of all the work that’s been pushed back :-P. Anyways, Thanksgiving was loads of fun. I think it was a good choice to not go to Vegas, ’cause everyone would have been too tired to do anything. So on Thursday, we obviously had the turkey, then we played poker and had alcohol until lates. Ahmet’s sister, Deniz, had this thing where we would only drink after a toast, and while one of us was giving the toast, everyone else would stop eating and pay their full attention. Needless to say, it was an excercise in public speaking. She picked it up in Georgia (Eastern European, not the US State), I think.

Then on Friday we decided to go to the LA Auto Show. It was alright. I enjoyed myself, but definitely Ferrari was lacking something. I think they’ve become too mainstream. We probably should have went on Saturday, because Ritesh got a ticket for no good reason. We should have paid more attention to the sign, I guess. Also, I saw some of my CS classmates at the show, which was random.

I don’t think I did much on Saturday, except for working out a bit and finishing my homework. Then on Sunday Ritesh, Ellen, and I played mini-golf at Sherman Oaks Castle Park, which was fun. In retrospect, I probably should have stayed home to finish my CS251A Computer Architecture homework. I didn’t get any sleep Tuesday night because of that.

Then on Wednesday, UCLA Taekwondo had our In-House Tournament after I had almost no sleep, because of the CS251A homework and the super-early CS118 Computer Networking final, which was given on the week before the scheduled finals. My fight was good, I gave it my best, but there’s obviously still a lot to work on. At least now I know what I need to work on. I think this is the longest dead time between two finals. I have a final on December 3rd, before the actual finals week, and then one on December 12th, the last day of finals. Well, at least that gives me plenty of time to prepare, since I have to finish CSM186A Computational and Systems Biology (C&SB) summaries on Monday and the CS251A simulation #2 on Wednesday.