birthday love

thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday! it first started with the facebook messages, then the text messages, and a few calls here and there. then after i finally got into boston after a stupid delay, we had a great little gettogether that turned into sort of a party (with wine and cake.)

of course, the whole weekend was a party.

liza and ripan got married the next day, may 27, 2007. (remember it well, ripan.) it was a fusion wedding, indian and russian/jewish and overall pretty american. so it started with a baraat which usually involves the groom riding an elephant while his relatives dance around him. instead they just rented a car.

as we danced toward the wedding chapel/room, whatever it actually was, we met the other side of the family, all the russians who were quiet and regal. it was almost like a clash of cultures, or rather one that eventually turned into a meld and combining of cultures. which was good.

the best part was the indian buffet, russian hors d'oeuvres, and open vodka bar. i've never learned to appreciate grey goose until it flowed freely...but now i'm not drinking any other vodka. ever. and i do regret, as i always do, being too drunk and full during the ACTUAL dinner, which was later, because we were served more indian food, but i barely got to enjoy it due to a full stomach and a spinning head.

anyways, among the gifts i received were a GPS system from alicia (finally! i will never get lost again!) and a check from my parents. and since today on woot there was a camera and underwater case for $100, i consider that the gift from my parents, because it's the same price. the camera's kind of crap, but the underwater case will allow me to finally take surf pictures...woot!

lolucsd

uh oh, it was just waiting to happen. lolucsd macros (aka pictures of taekwondo with funny nongrammatically correct captions.) kinda like lolcats. but with people YOU know.

(this is a belated entry.)

Click on "Inspiration" beside each image to see what it is based on. Many are in the style of the lolcatz on icanhascheezburger.com but the two at the end are based on xkcd, a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

WoW


Throw cheezburger | inspiration


Fly


Back massage | inspiration | and more from lolpresidents.com


Insert cheezburger | inspiration



Bicycles | inspiration


Philosophy | inspiration from xkcd


Pointers | inspiration from xkcd

ucsd tournament

Here are the sparring matches from the UCSD tournament this past weekend. Some of the movie files seem a bit long to me. I haven't watched them yet so tell me if any one is wrong or has more than just that match in it.

Again, RIGHT CLICK and save to your computer.

Allan

Bryan 1

Bryan 2

Gallahad 1

Gallahad 2

Johnny and Peter Exhibition

Ken 1

Ken 2

Ken 3

Kyung

Mike

Paul 1

Paul 2

Paul 3

Sei

innocuous wednesday

wednesdays are the most innocuous day. monday is always the most energetic (for those who are awake) because it's the beginning of the week and people are coming back from a weekend, ready to go. tuesdays there's still that energy left over, and for us we have meetings. thursdays are pretty innocuous too, but they're leading up to fridays. and fridays are the day before the weekend. wednesday is smack dab in the middle of nothing. and the office is quiet and san diego's may gray is dampening the whole socal atmosphere. so today it's pretty chill...almost too chill.

except this morning as i was driving to work, there was a HOMELESS FIGHT on the street. first i saw this one guy cross the street right in front of a car making a uturn. he was booking it to this other black homeless guy holding one of those signs on the median. they started talking and it seemed like the white guy was saying something like you can't use that space it's mine, or pointing at some stuff the black guy had. the black guy didn't think anything and leaned in closer to listen because i doubt homeless guys enunciate. at this point i had to drive away but i kept watching in the rearview mirror, and even from a distance i could see the white guy was getting closer and getting in the black guy's face. suddenly the black guy takes a swing, probably hits the white guy in the face, but loses his balance and falls down right in front of the left turn lane. fortunately the light was red but he was sprawled out in front of a large red suv. that's when my light turned green, or had been green for a while, and a row of cars was stacking up behind me, so i had to leave. but i saw another person come running, and maybe they called the police, but i really just wanted to sit and watch the fight.

late night...somewhere in boston

its one of those nights that i was all prepared to go to bed early, and really didnt have anything to do, and was decently tired at around 11. and i don't know why but i'm a bit awake now...kind of not sleepy anymore. maybe it was because i was hungry, so i went to grab a snack in the kitchen. apparently the microwave and the toaster are a bit loud at 1:30 am. maybe it was because i was thinking about moving back to boston, and the excitement of the apartment hunt woke me up. and thinking about work next year, and all the possibilities. sometimes it's hard to sleep when you have too many things on your mind, and not enough in your stomach.

housing will be quite an adventure. i will be looking for a single bedroom apartment. but those don't come cheap, and it'll be hard to have to save quarters for laundry again, and not have a huge kitchen and living room. and it'll be hardest to have to pay for utilities in a city where temperatures range from 20 F to 95 F throughout the year. san diego has its stability, but the price is monotony. i know that i will enjoy the spring that much more when it's only a month long.

and in three days i'll be turning 24. actually i haven't thought about this at all. i entered my age as 23 earlier today when doing a survey, an i remembered a time when i didn't realize i hadn't yet turned 23, and completely missed what it was like to be 22. not that it matters anymore after you turn 21. that's probably why i'll be 21 forever. yeah, really, 24 doesn't really manifest in my mind. is it denial? is this why, when you get older, a birthday doesn't seem to have as much of an impact as when you are 6, turning 7, turning 7 1/2, turning 10? each half birthday means twice as much as now. and even on the big 3-0 and 4-0s, they're not quite as much joy and balloons and cake, as midlife crises and questions of where have the years gone.

the celebration should be grandiose, though. this weekend is perfect. a friend's wedding, another's housewarming party, a 3 day weekend. and a birthay snuck in there somewhere, which is perfectly convenient. i should have just extended my vacation to tuesday. after all, i have plenty of time left, and not much time to use it.

i think the next iteration of my blog will see it being renamed something cheesy, like there and back again, after jrr tolkien. i mean, it really was like that - i travelled there, and now i'm back. who knew that a year ago, when i was leaving for the airport on the T for the last time, all the romantic memories of my favorite city that i was locking into my heart, would be reawakened to a reality just about a year later? does that make them any less romantic?

i'll be returning to a cambridge of my adulthood, not the boston of my tumultuous college years. different. no more microcosm of MIT undergraduate life, where anything is possible, and everyone is young forever. where boston is a large playground for the underaged and fake-id endowed. where there is work and then there is play, and both take up more time than you have in a day, but you can't afford to miss a minute of either. where people don't go to bed before midnight. or 2 am. where my night would be just beginning right now, in a suite full of people wide awake, in pajamas, cooking up greasy midnight meals while clutching books and bibles full of notes.

and my fraternity house will be just minutes away, but years away too, with some annoying pledge of the class of 2011 sleeping in my lofts, watching tv in my lounge, drinking beer in my party room. i can always walk by my front door again, open it with all the pride i had, but now entering someone else's house. and kenmore square will no longer be mine, but only another T stop for my trip to nowhere.

and my school will be there, but if i walk through the infinite corridor i will see all the newest, greatest minds that are being bred and molded, like i was but probably better. as i walk through, i'd wonder if i contributed to the history of this place, if my name would ever be put onto a tile on the hack wall, or be discussed to legendary proportions in someone's lab or classroom. and if i'm lucky i'll be partially affiliated with MIT again, with either Lincoln Labs or the Broad. and that's of some comfort, even if it's not jumping in a time machine and going back four, five, six years, back to the moment i received my acceptance letter.

maybe i was meant to be a lifer, though i always made fun of conor, john ho, and even nathan when he thought about the ph.D program. i used to dislike kendall square so much, because it was too close to MIT and life, and always dreamed of traveling to far lands, to california. but when i think i might end up living there, it's comforting, to know that i would need nothing more than a bike to travel to all that is my world. (ok, so maybe broad would be too close. i'd have to try living a bit farther. lincoln would give me the distance necessary.) but living in cambrige and working for some other company (like google) would not be the same. some part of me wants that email address, bbren@mit.edu, back again and active so that all who email me will know, and everyone who drives behind me will wonder, "who's tim?"

but still it's the same boston skyline, the same chilly winters and throbbing summers, the same bike paths down dirty cambridge streets. i'm afraid to live it again, because i don't want it to be different from what i remembered. but i'm afraid to miss any more than i have, because then it would have gone and changed without me.

i look like a bob

which one of these guys looks like a tim? and which one's a bob?



if you guessed the same way that this article says, you probably don't have a very hard time remembering my name.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070518164713.htm

"warning: spoilers"

no actual spoilers here, unless you havent seen star wars.

yea. i really shouldn't read spoilers threads on digg. the first time it was something about starbuck, and i was thinking, "starbucks? the coffee shop?" then i realized it was about BSG and i cried. seriously.

well this time i'm like, haha, this tshirt that ruins 18 pop culture endings that i found through digg.com should be fine. for example, the first one was *STAR WARS SPOILER* Darth Vader is Luke's father. duh. and also, for a lot of people this was bad but *300 SPOILER* all of them die except for the one eyed bard guy. well...that's not hard to figure out.

then i kept reading, and after a while came upon some kind of iffy ones, like donny darko, which is actually fine because it's impossible to understand the movie without reading about it anyways. and then i came across a harry potter spoiler but i thought "well i probably won't watch it anyways, although it kind of ruins some stuff." then i came across...another BSG spoiler. and i had to shut my eyes.

damnit! don't ruin BSG for me! stupid internet.

raw food recipes

omg this looks so good.

i stumbled across a blog for someone who has a cookbook for raw foods. it caught my eye that she was an asian who's publishing cookbooks...you don't see too much of that among the rachel rays and giadas. and i'm not too keen on purely raw foods and i like to think i'm different from the typical socal health nut. but i love avocados. like i love lamp.



Spicy Kream of Avocado Soup via Ani's Raw Food Kitchen
Soup

1 1/2 avocados, peeled and seeded
2 Tablespoons unpasturized miso, brown or white
2 Tablespoons olive oil
2 1/2 cups filtered water
1 lime’s juice
3/4 teaspoon rosemary
1/3 teaspoon chipotle

Toppings

1/4 cup tomatoes, diced

music

the best thing i ever got out of facebook was the apple sampler packs from the apple students group. i am horrible at finding new music that i like so the samplers were great. yesterday i listened to a lot of the more chill blues/jazz/r&b/rhythm songs and now i decided i like a lot of them.

some albums im listening to now:

Sao Paris, Sambaleias

Kev Brown, Albany

Vikter Duplaix

Adrian Quesada, Tamarindo

chickens

hm...my two favorite blogs are definitely The Consumerist and Treehugger. for one, the consumerist keeps me jumping in my harebrained schemes of money management, and keeps it real in the world of material consumerism. on the other hand, treehugger yang balances my worldly yin and soothes my bank-account fueled rampages.

tonight, treehugger has made me want to raise chickens.



seeing as how i'm probably going to end up living in a concrete-covered semi-urban region of boston soon, enjoying four months of warm weather per year, it makes me want to take up my childhood gardening habits even more. i'm already growing miniature carrots in large clay pots outside. i even have peppermint which i've deemed a worthy investment, after having made FOUR successful mojitos. (the rum was not from local sugarcane/beets, alas).

but what could be more fun than chickens? and fresh eggs? according to mother earth news apparently farm fresh eggs are really tasty. they even look better in that picture. and the description of farmed chickens reminded me suddenly of why i had, for one or two weeks, forgone meat. i'm not militant about vegetarianism at all, but thinking about farm animals in pens sometimes makes you turn back to beans.

yea. urban chicken. brings new meaning to the MIT Coop.

stats for demo

haha...now i know that demo videos attract the most visitors. or at least, posts about ihouse. maybe ian's just such a hunk and ucsd can't get enough of him.

here's what happened after i posted the ihouse demo videos.



yea yea my blog isn't that trafficky. whatevers

ihouse demo

I've finished editing the International House demo videos. Even though i was working with stupid-oriented windows movie editor, it still gave me tons of trouble...including changing the screen resolution and aspect ratio, which i finally figured out was camera and captured-media independent. i am stupid.

but here's the ihouse demo crew! while i still remember them: from front left, fa long, jemma, ming, jeremy, ian, and kyung and garret from our own ucsd tkd group! of course technically everyone's welcome to be a part of our club now if they choose to practice with us.



and if you notice, jeremy, fa long and ming are wearing my doboks. and the red and blue belts are also mine. lolfers.

here's another of ian in the middle of the break. looks good! although no one did a spin hook break like i was hoping.



and finally, here are the links (and embedded) videos. these won't autoplay this time so dont worry if you're in class or at work. right click to save them to your computer.

The blackbelts perform koryo


The main demo part

We didn't get to take the colorbelts kicking paddles, but that was cool too.

good job!

bank of america

bank of america customer service is good. i know Consumerist often has complaints about them but my recent experiences have been fine.

i missed a credit card payment on my balance transfer which had involved a earn money on low interest balance transfers scheme so that there was a $39 late fee and the promotional 1% apr was voided. i called in yesterday and asked them if they would be nice because i've been a good customer. the first lady immediately removed my $39 late fee and said to call back so they can review my apr. today, i called and mentioned it and the lady said "done." and that was it. wow, i thought i'd actually have to beg and plead and threaten to take my thousands elsewhere.

the other good thing is that they don't outsource. they have english speaking people, not indians, on the phone. argh i hate outsourced customer service reps.

so maybe bank of america is something worth investing in, because good customer service = high returns? but you're already investing in them as your bank, anyways.

another nerdy reference

ok i've been working out some memory errors at work and i receive an email from a current mit team member asking for old photos. and suddenly i realize that life is like a program in which there may or may not be lots of memory leaks. for example - i've allocated a large buffer for the MIT aspect of my life - all the photographs, videos, friends, etc. that i've gotten over the past few years were allocated into memory. however, when i left for san diego, that memory was not cleared. i clearly still had several pointers to the memory space, because i continue to interact with them - i continue to collect photos and media from MIT over the past year even though i was not there. it's like the other programs still had a pointer to my MIT memory and have been updating it.

and i allocate a bunch of memory for UCSD, which i'm currently using. but when i leave ucsd i don't think i'll deallocate it. or maybe i will? probably i will leave one or two pointers in the form of unprocessed video, and maybe some connections to friends here. but i will most likely put down the smaller chunk of ucsd video, and reallocate my MIT buffers again.

XD

thursday diversion

ah the news of the week. i've been up to alot since my last post, including formatting and copying files around on my computer, which is still in the process of doing so now. i've also made some visits to monster, reaffirming my belief that kids straight out of college have the most to talk about and the least actual content. but i am slightly better off than i am before, having done some more extensive searching and writing up a cover letter that helps me understand what i want to do. (i wonder if the Broad Institute is a fun place to work?)

work

this morning ryan and i sat at his computer for about an hour trying to fix a freeze up that i was almost sure i wouldn't be able to fix. first, i'm horrible about being put on the spot to fix things. i don't do well when someone's watching me, and typically i solve a problem much faster if i'm alone in a room coding and trying stupid little things. (too self conscious.) but suddenly it worked, and even though i think i know what we changed, we changed VERY little (less than a line of code). but i can still walk away feeling satisfied.

sport

this weekend is the UCSD tournament. we have quite a large team going - i think 10 competitors, which is relatively large. and lots of support, of course, from everyone else who won't be competing. but i left ucsd yesterday with strange mixed feelings. maybe it's that i will be leaving this place and now my involvement has fallen...and it's just not what i'm used to. what i'm used to is always being in the fray of things, helping out, being frustrated that everyone else isn't involved. now that i'm less involved, and don't really care about it, deep down i still don't like it. (maybe also because my teaching time is being shared.) sure, i am an attention hog. but taekwondo and work are very similar in ways. i've left my undergrad years, gone out on my own for a year - working at a startup, leading a taekwondo group. now i realize that my experience is not enough, and i have to go back for a more advanced degree. thus - business school, training at CW. under professor master dan chuang.

web politics

there have been so many web stories recently. most of it has been political, and it's making me sick. but one can't read articles, participate in public digital outrage, and then not be able to do anything about it. i mean, what am i going to do, write a letter to nancy pelosi about bush and his cronies? picket the scientologists to save keith henson? often i've found that reading one side of the story (in my case, mostly tech savvy, liberal blogs) is never enough, because when i go and read conservative blogs i get sick of the way they call democrats and liberals names. but then i realize that the same happens on this side. the worst part, yet the most attention holding, are the comments below any controversial or hot digg topic. they usually descend into "youre an idiot" and "pwnd" and "go crawl back under your rock" and shit like that. whatevers.

web distractions

and what would happen if humans shut up, and machines became our voices? here is a conversation between ALICE and jabberwacky, two AI chat bots:

ALICE: Are you alive?

Jabberwacky: Perhaps.

A: Why the uncertain tone?

J: Everything is uncertain except for five facts.

A: The whole universe?

J: And we both might just be some ones and zeros in the computer memory.

They're like...so deep and calm. insightful yet unpenetrating. this is zen.

computer nerdgasm

i received my Seagate FreeAgent 500 GB external harddrive today in the mail. it's a sleek machine that has a much smaller wire/power adapter/base volume than my previous 80 gb drive, and is about the same as my other 250 gb harddrive. but this one looks super cool. and now my total external hd capacity is 832 (500 + 250 + 80 + 2). and internally my desktop has 160 + 250 + 300 = 710 Gb, putting me at 1.5 Tb of storage (minus whatever they need for system files, so like 1 TB.)



however, the 80 gb doesn't quite work on my desktop. and, as i found out, neither does my new FreeAgent.

I got the freeagent so 1) i could move all my crap from my media drive somewhere else, so i can reformat it from FAT format to NTFS. but since i can't read the FreeAgent...i'm getting kind of worried. So i'm going to try to reformat the freeagent on my laptop, which is Windows XP Home, rather than the Windows XP Media Center edition that my desktop runs. Maybe a new format will help?

As i was doing that, i ended up rummaging around for windows drive utilities, and came across an article that listed all these useful things you should use to maintain your computer:


Tucows: Increase Computer Performance

Among the tools i've started to use are Registry Mechanic and Diskeeper. I have a horrible time keeping my computer defragmented (especially when i download from bittorrent, and when I copy large 12 Gb video files from one drive to another.) So hopefully this will all help my system out in terms of speed/performance and data access. and maybe my harddrives will stop being stupid and be recognized on windows! and maybe my 250 GB drive will stop being a stupid FAT system which will not allow partitions greater than 50 gb or something like that!

self expression on facebook

art, music, clothing, hair, fancy cars, poetry...these are some of the ways people typically express themselves. and actually facebook is a great way to find out how one does it. the internet is basically a big posterboard where everyone finds a way to post their ideas, personality, life, to a public domain where people can view it. that's the idea behind social networking.

if you look at facebook, you can tell the personality of a person by their posting. typical college facebook obsession aside, there are many different styles of facebook posting. some people use it as a blog, and write note after note, tagging all their friends so they can read about the carried-over teenage angst. others use photo albums and are prolific with a camera. still others like to share links, and while this involves nothing being created by the author himself it does show a lot about their interests - ie, are you a techie news junkie or pop culture vulture? others may simply be constantly changing their about me and profile, or interacting with so many friends on their walls that it's hard to follow who they are because it is changing by the minute. and then there are others who have empty facebook profiles. that's because they have a real social life, and interact with _real_ people.

i suppose i am more of a poster. i read digg and boing boing and share interesting links. i do it on facebook because it will automatically share it with my friends, in the hopes that they will read it, read about me, contact me, interact with me, make my days less tiresome. i also write in this blog...more for my own sake than anyone elses, because i think i have three regular subscribers, who must be bored off their ass at work.

but blogging and copying and pasting links is easy. i would eventually like to be able to express myself in more ways. clothing and hair require too much money and attention to style, so i think i will be looking into photography (via facebook or flickr) and video/documentary editing. ah yes, the traditional definition of "art" through multimedia. but hopefully combined with tools such as blogs and facebook posts, they will be much more interesting to the hungry masses who are dying to know who i am.

ucsd at uci

Here are the most recent sparring videos from UCSD. Warning: some files are sort of large and might take a while to download. I would right click on the name and save it to your computer, rather than try to stream everything from here. The actual files are hosted at Fileden but apparently you can't get a public listing.

Chris 1

Chris 2

Ken 1

Ken2 1

Mike

Paul 1

Paul 2

Steve 1

Steve 2

Steve 3

Steve 4

inspired by school, scared by work

attending a graduation ceremony, especially one which was so focused on applied sciences, has made me feel a renewed interest in graduate school. for a small fraction of a second i considered getting a PhD. but just being at a place like the keck institute, hearing a talk by Nobel Laureate Stanley Prusiner, and reliving the escapades of all the grad students through the stories, all these have made me really want to go back to school.



i'm not sure if i want to go to a pure business school. i almost desire science again. actually, i almost want to go to the keck institute. or MIT.

so now i'm going to sit down and seriously start thinking about what kind of school/program i want to go to. seems that people who went to keck had already done several years of industry experience. i think it'll be good for me to do that. so that brings me to the biggest obstacle...

monster.com is a scary place. i've briefly looked at job postings in the boston area. i had an idea of what i'd want to do - well, kind of an idea like a bright eyed freshman. i want to do some software...maybe with a biomedical engineering focus. maybe with some business aspects. i think i can do anything. there's so much opportunity out there. america is great!

but then i look through postings, requirements, 3-5+ years of experience, proficiency with .NET, C# or OpenGL, has shown success leading a team, knows the product cycle and has succesfully managed the development of a product, has a perfect GPA and 2400 SATs, loves to do charity work and works well under pressure but is never under pressure because time management skills are so great. OMFG i'm going to go hide under a rock.

family reunion, of sorts

i went to pasadena this weekend to attend my cousin Asia's graduation from the Keck Institute, a small but prestigious school that focuses on biomedical/pharmaceutical business and management.

most of the weekend was spent, in my mind, in front of a plate of food. for dinner we went to an italian place that had really good pasta with sausage, i forget what it was called. we loaded up on the bread because i had gotten really hungry on the long drive up. then we went to hang out at a bar in pasadena, and on the way back i guess it was not-quite-drunk munchies but we ended up stopping at an in-n-out, and i accidentally got a double-double, which was double what i wanted.

the next morning, we had breakfast at our hotel, Embassy Suites, which had pretty much the most kick-ass breakfast buffet, ever. they had a made-to-cook omelette line that also served hash browns, toast, pancakes, bacon, and sausage. i ate a ton of eggs and hash browns, then just for fun had a huge glazed donut.

the graduation was very quick because only 36 people were in the 2007 graduating class. they did have time to talk personally about each individual, so the whole show didn't finish in 5 minutes, but it was definitely bearable, and with the great weather it was a perfect setting. while the graduates were busy taking a class picture, my cousin jessica and i hit the finger food table at the front of the line, and had a bit more quiche, strawberries, veggies and dip, and cookies than we should have eaten before lunch.

lunch was at an afghan/american place that served great sandwhiches and soups. their afghan fries were a bit greasy, and the one waitress we had had sort of an attitude, and didn't remeber vita's soda, then blamed it on the other waitress. but we tried out some of asia's home brewed wine, a 2005 syrah, and it was actually really tasty. the wine goes well with my lamb pita sandwich, which i took home because it was impossible to eat any more food. (i was too full before we even sat down.)

i think this weekend, a combination of seeing family again, good weather, great food, and meeting cool people make it really relaxing. especially since everything was covered by various people, and i ended up spending very little money.

of course, there was one small thing i found really interesting. i drove one of asia's friends home back to san diego - vita, who had come up with another friend who had to leave because of an emergency. when we got back they were laughing about how they were trying to see if vita would be able to get a ride from me, but they had been apprehensive - "What if asia's cousin is weird? maybe we should take the train." then they were relieved that i was normal.

i remember when i graduated MIT and the girl next to me - alma - told me afterwards that it was cool we talked during the ceremony. she was afraid that everyone (course 6) would be weird, but was glad that i had been the only normal one there so she could have someone to talk to.

hah...what is normal? i'll take it as a compliment but it's an awfully bland one.