Having watched quite a lot of Korean dramas and getting tired of their ever-present rectangle love relationships, I turned my eyes to Japanese dramas. After all, I did learn Japanese, so watching them should at least improve my Japanese. I started with the 1999 Classic Majo no Jouken and was immediately hooked. Then, a serial dose of Long Vacation, Gokusen, Densha Otoko and Co. later made me a fan of Japanese dramas. I liked that most Japanese dramas carried an educational message, so you could become a better person while being entertained by the show. (Oh, meanwhile, I also watched the great Hong Kong drama called War and Beauty. It got the highest rating in the year it aired. It really is a great drama with intriguing plot and lavish sets!)
Due to my recently heightened interest on TV Dramas, I am curious to know what makes a great actor. Therefore, I took an Intro Drama class at De Anza College. It was interesting to know that most of the class consists of group games that seemingly only marginally related to acting. Anyway, at the end of the class, I was able to present two monologues. It turned out that acting was harder than I thought. I now have a greater respect for acting professionals.
Having been living in San Francisco Bay Area for almost six years, it was a shame that I still hadn't visited the Yosemite National Park immortalized by the great photographer Ansel Adams. Finally, I decided to give it a go with some friends. Yosemite turned out to be as gorgeous as advertised. I was quite happy with the pics I took. :)
After working for ACSSS the last two years, I thought it was time to step down to pursue other interests. But due to the persuasion of the new President Jiang Li, I decided to stay on as Senior VP of Consulting. My main duty was to advise the new ACSSS board. I would help out their events but I wouldn't take the lead to organize any events. Hopefully, we could all make this new board works!
I had been hearing my Mom raving about the Korean dramas for a while. I looked at the news and found that there was a Korean drama craze throughout Asia for the last few years. I am not a TV-type. I haven't watched a TV drama for almost ten years! Due to curiosity, I decided to give it a try. I started with What Happened in Bali and then Damo. Both were excellent dramas. Gradually I developed a habit of watching dramas while eating at home... Out of curiosity, I also learned the Korean alphabet Hangul. Pretty neat alphabet set in my opinion. Now I should be able to read some signs in Korea using my Chinese and English languages. hehe! ;)
I contributed a Hidden Markov Model module to Bioperl. It can be used for recognizing patterns in strings. I heard that it can also be used to do speech recognition.
Good News! My brother was found to be "free" of cancer. Technically, this is termed as cancer in remission. That means no cancer cells can be detected by current technology. However, it is possible that some undetected cancer cells can grow and bring back the disease later. Typically, cancer is defined to be "cured" if it is in remission for five years. Anyway, that's a huge step in the right direction! Woohoo! :)
For this Year's Thanksgiving, I organized an internal ski trip for ACSSS. I rented a house in north Lake Tahoe for three nights for 14 of us. We only skiied one day at Northstar. The rest of the time, we just played games and cooked together. There really wasn't a better way to bond than living together for a while in a small group.
For the Christmas break, I went to Florida with a friend. This time we rented a car to do a road trip. The plan was to get around the whole of Florida in a cricle. We first arrived at Tampa Bay. We didn't do much there. Then we headed south to Sanibel Island for its famed beach. I was very impressed by the beach: white sands, lots of sea shells on the beach, exotic birds flying around and very few people! I highly recommend this beach if you are going to Florida. Next, we drove a long way to stay in a hostel in Florida City. We then visited Everglades National Park for their famed Tram Tour. Not really impressed by it but we did see many alligators. What impressed me though was the Hostel in Florida City. The beds were clean. There was a huge backyard that had an interesting set-up. Free Movie every night. And the added bonus of a communal spirit!
We then headed to Key West. White beaches there but no sea shells and many people. On our way back we kayaked in Key Largo. Next, we stopped at Miami and visited Vizcaya Museum. We were both striked by the beauty of this mansion by the sea. Again, a highly recommended place. Then, we went to Disney World in Orlando. Magic Kingdom was a dream-like place that is worthy of a visit. In contrast, MGM Studio however is small and not interesting. Animal Kingdom is an innovative marriage of a zoo and an amusement park. We were pleasantly surprised by EPCOT's futuristic rides (especially Test Drive) and the great food in the World Showcase (you will appreciate the various authentic ethnic food there after several days of burgers and hotdogs...). Our last stop was the Kennedy Space Center nearby. This was my second time there, it didn't seem to change much. We concluded the trip with a long drive back to Tampa Bay airport to return our car. All in all, I enjoyed this trip, Florida really lived up to its name as a place to have fun! :)
As a final event for my ACSSS tenure, I organized an one-day Ski Trip to Heavenly ski resort. After learning from the trip I organized last year, this time I contacted a ski trip organizer to arrange the trip for me and I worked as the bus guide. This really saved me a lot of headache compared to the ski trip I organized the year before.
Chromosome 16 paper was finally out. I was surprised that my name was ranked much earlier than the previous papers. Anyway, this concluded our part of Human Genome Project. I am sure our work will benefit mankind for years to come.
Near the end of August, the most sorrowful news in my life so far arrived by a phone call from my mother. Her tearful voice told me my younger brother was diagnosed with Stomach (Gastric) Cancer. We later learned that this is a stage IV (ie final stage) gastric cancer. There is only about 5% 5-year survival rate for this stage of gastric cancer and the average lifespan since diagnostics is two years.
My brother was only 25 years old. According to the statistics at National Cancer Institute, only six in one million American males in the age group of 25-29 diagnosed with gastric cancer. So this is a very unfortunate and tragic situation. Whenever I thought about my brother's misfortune, my eyes would be filled with tears... It is natural that I had to visit my family in this kind of emergency. My parents told me my cousin (my father's younger sister's oldest daughter) was going to wed in October. Therefore I bought a plane ticket to Hong Kong in October.
While waiting for my trip to Hong Kong, I did a lot of research on gastric cancer. My participation in the Human Genome Project really helped here as I learned quite a lot of medical terms in the process. What I learned from my research in gastric cancer helped my parents to pick the best treatment option for my brother. I even managed to hook up with one of the best gastric cancer experts in Hong Kong. His assistance allowed my brother to have surgery done two weeks earlier than it normally would. I hoped all these ultimately will help my brother to recover. This also showed that there are compassionate people out there who are willing to help, as long as you show them you need help.
Prior to learning my brother's grave news, I was scheduled to attend the annual Genome Informatics conference in Hinxton, England in the middle of September as part of my job. This time I went there two days ahead to make my second tour of London and Cambridge. I spent these two days using the photography skills I acquired to take many beautiful pictures. While many great pictures were taken, I found that it was extremely draining to lug around my 7kg equipment for the whole day! At the conference in the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, I presented a poster about a research I did for the past year. It is about aligning mRNA sequences of one species to the genome of the other species.
Mid-Autumn Festival Celebration was another event I planned before I learned about my brother's situation. I pre-ordered 100 lanterns and seven boxes of mooncakes. In the evening of September 28th, 2004, ACSSS organized a Celebration for the Mid-Autumn Festival in the Oval area on the Stanford campus. To my surprise, there were over 150 people showed up. While there weren't enough lanterns and mooncakes, people did have a good time and made friends thru this first event of the school year.
Finally it was time for me to visit my grief-stricken family in Hong Kong. It was tough just hearing stories from my parents about my brother's dreadful situation but it was another thing to witness it with my bare eyes. He looked so thin and distressing compared to the brother I knew. He was very lethargic as a result of the surgery and chemotherapy. He basically lost his will to live. He only wanted to eat, sleep and maybe watch TV. It was very heart-wrenching to see a close family member suffered like this. The only things I could do was to hug him and chat with him with my caring heart.
The other thing I did while I was in Hong Kong was to take pictures! It was quite interesting that for a place that I call home, there were many places that I still hadn't set my feet on. I decided to explored the uncharted area with my photography equipment. I took many pictures in the process. Two of the interesting ones are: Miss Asia 2004 and Kelly Chen Ribbon-cutting.
I had been to many social dance parties as a result of social dance being my main hobby. I always wonder what it is like to host a dance party myself. Therefore I decided to organize one in the name of ACSSS. It was set on the evening of May 8th (Sat) in the Tresidder Union Oak Lounge on the Stanford campus. I was responsible for all the coordination and also teaching people how to dance salsa. Fortunately I found a friend to help me out as my instruction partner. The party turned out pretty well. There were more than 100 people showed up. One lesson I learned in organizing this event was that it is easier not to work as Disc Jockey but just prepare several CDs to play in succession.
Under the influence of my friend Chi Yung Ng, I started to learn photography. My interest is landscape, urban life and portraits. As a result, I bought a digital SLR (ie the type of digital camera that allows you to change lens), lenses, a flash and a tripod. I read several books about the technicalities of photography as well as the composition rules. Now I understand how people took nightscape, firework, night portraits and so on. Plus, some techniques to take more aesthetically pleasing photos.
Another paper got published at the May 27th, 2004 issue of Nature Journal. This time it is about the Quality Assessment of the human genome.
As an officer of ACSSS, I organized several events in these four months. The notable ones are: 1) 2.5-day ski trip at Heavenly Ski Resort; 2) Horseback Riding in Half Moon Bay; and 3) Hearst Castle. Among them, the ski trip was the most complicated event I ever organized so far. I put 50 people in a tour bus and then do all the motel and ski lift tickets booking. I even acted like a tour guide when I was making announcements on the tour bus.... ~~; Oh... Heavenly Ski Resort has the best view I've ever seen at a ski place. There really isn't much you can beat a gigantic lake with a snow-covered mountain range as the backdrop!
Since January 2004, I had become a Certified Bioperl Developer. The module I contributed is called Bio::Tools:dpAlign. It is used to align pairwise DNA or protein sequences using the dynamic programming approach. This was my second contribution to the open source community. I was lucky that I could be a small part of it.
I attended the NSDI Conference with the other two co-authors at the end of March. It was a nice respite from work. I was like an odd man there as I am not in the computer networking field any more. However, I was proud that I did my part to contribute to the continuing development of the internet - the technology that shaped many aspects of my life and other people's lives including this very page you are reading.
As a continuation of working under Department of Energy's genome sequencing effort, I am now also one of the annotators of chromosome 16 after I completed the annotation of chromosome 5.
The April 1st, 2004 edition of the famed Nature Journal featured the chromosome 19 paper. I was fortunate enough to be one of the 100+ co-authors of this paper. :)
I hooked up with Sarah Wheelan who previously worked for National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) to do a research that will improve her program spidey. I am crossing my fingers that something good will come out of this research...
I was selected to be part of the 10-person chromosome 5 annotation team. The job is to verify the gene sequence structure with mRNA evidence.
I hooked up with a Stanford Physics PhD student called Stephen Ng to work on my Car Physics Page. Now it has more content. Let's hope we can keep this up and finish as much as we can.
I was elected to be the VP of Social Activities within the Association of Chinese Students and Scholars at Stanford (ACSSS). My responsibility is to organize social events for ACSSS in year 2004.
We were notified that the paper I worked with two computer scientists at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories since April 2002 is accepted to the USENIX NSDI 2004 Conference. The conference is going to be at San Francisco in March 2004. I think I am going there.
It has been two years since I went back to Hong Kong to visit my family there. I thought it was the right time to go, so I used 60,000 miles in my Mileage program to get the ticket for free.
It was great to see my parents and my relatives. I also managed to meet some of my high school and elementary school classmates. My mom thought I might be bored, so she signed up an Eastern China tour in the first week of August (Plus, because Hong Kong just came out from the SARS epidemic, the travel agencies are selling tours in great discount!). We visited Shanghai and the surrounding cities in Zhejiang and Jiangsu Province (for those of you who are familiar with the Chinese cities, they are Hangzhou, Tongli, Suzhou, Wuxi, Zhenjiang and Nanjing) for seven days.
It was great to visit the places that were mentioned in my Chinese History textbooks. Some scenaries were more beautiful than I imagine. Most notables are the Leifung Pagoda, Yunqi Zhujing (literal translation: Bamboo Lane in the Clouds) and West Lake in Hangzhou, Hanshan Temple in Suzhou and Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum and Nanjing Massacre Museum in Nanjing. I also learned about the local specialties in each city: Dragon Well Tea in Hangzhou, Silk and Purple Sand Teapot in Suzhou, Pearl in Wuxi and Crystal in Nanjing. Last but not least, it was fascinating to see China is now booming and Chinese people's eyes are beaming.
Back in the States, I finally concluded my web caching research project at the HP Lab. We should know whether the paper is accepted by the end of the year. I am crossing my fingers right now.
Oh. I moved again. This time it is because my current roommate moved out to live with his girlfriend. I also wanted to move closer to work. My new place is only five minutes from work. I now live in the master bedroom in a house with my own bathroom.
One of the less well known benefits of working at Stanford is that you are free to join their Student Organizations. Since I joined the Hong Kong Student Association (HKSA) while I was in Michigan, I started out by joining the HKSA at Stanford. However, probably due to the lack of people (around 80 total), they don't really have that many events. I later found out there is an organization called Association of Chinese Students and Scholars at Stanford (ACSSS) that serves Chinese students. They have more and better events. At one point, they had a recruiting event. I responded and now is an associate for their PR team.
After nine months of working at Stanford Human Genome Center, I finally got my first taste of going to a conference. Together with my boss and a colleague, we went to the Genome Infomratics Conference at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, NY during May 7-11. Cold Spring Harbor Lab is a major research lab in Genomics head by the famed Biologist Dr. James Watson aka the co-discoverer of the DNA structure. I have been reading about Cold Spring Harbor Lab when I was interviewing for my job. It was a mini "dream comes true" that I could become part of the action.
To my surprise, the Lab doesn't really look like a lab. It looks more like a resort with a bunch of vacation homes surrounding a horseshoe shaped harbor. No wonder the world's finest scientists love to work here! I think I had a great time there, even though, like many other academic conferences, most of the stuff talked there were out of my mind. Nevertheless, it is great to get to know some people in your field on a face-to-face basis.
While I was there, I took an afternoon off to go to Manhattan which is about one hour from Long Island by train. I was in Manhattan almost exactly four years ago when I embarked on that 30-days trip. New York changed a lot since then because of what happened to the World Trade Center. I remember four years ago I was running aroundat the shopping mall at the ground floor of the World Trade Center, walking down the granite stairs to chill at the giant fountain. Now everything is gone. I would like to see it for my eyes.
I started from the Penn Station walking towards the World Trade Center. People hustling on the sidewalk, taxicabs competing for every narrow openings - Manhattan was like its old self. There was no way you can feel that September 11th happened. That was until I hit the corner of 7th Ave and Greenwich Ave. There is a barb wire barbed wire wall with many colorful procelain tiles hanging on it. The tiles are full of messages that condoles the dead as well as people's longing for peace. It was quite a touching place. I kept going until I hit the World Trade Center. Now it is just like a giant construction site. The surrounding area seemed to be fixed already, so you couldn't really notice anything until you get close to it. It was a quite a hollow feeling when you saw a big hole in the mist of sky-scrappers. Let's all pray that similar things won't happen again...
Due to the slumping economy, even Stanford needs to shut down for the Christmas week. Fortunately, I already accumulated enough vacation days to handle this.
I didn't really go anywhere special for the break. I continued the web searching research I mentioned earlier. I rewrote the code to make it more stable. It seems to me now it should be ready for the next phase.
Like many big companies, Stanford has this Flexible Spending Account benefit that I can use to make my medical expense tax-free. Based on my research on the subject, the best way to use it is to do a LASIK surgery. I am also 25 already, so my prescription should be stable. I am also tired of missing contact lenses. Therefore I decided to do it. It turns out pretty good. While it is only 20/30, I don't need contacting lenses to drive any more!
After six and a half months of unemployment (More accurately four because I did make two and a half months worth of good money through my temp jobs), I finally landed a job!!! Starting from August 20th, 2002, I am a Software Developer Research at the Stanford Human Genome Center. My job duty is to write bioinformatic programs that helps the research being done there.
It had been quite a ride to get this job. I was initially contacted by Professor Will Talbot in the Biology Department for a job in late June. I had interviews with him and other people. One of them is my current boss Jeremy Schmutz who is the Senior Scientist leading the Informatics Group at the Genome Center. At the end, I didn't get to work for Dr Talbot but I impressed Jeremy enough that he offered a job at the genome center. While I was preparing for the interviews, I learned a lot about genetics and related materials. It is quite amazing that the human genome has some resemblance to a computer program.
To sort of 'celebrate' my return to normal life, I organized a San Francisco Group Cruise for the Bay Area S2000 Club. On the Saturday morning of October 5th, twelves S2000s convened at the Stonetown Galleria. We then stormed past the Twin Peaks, Crooked Street, Boardway Tunnel, Pier 39 and finally Marina Green. Although there were breaking-ups, getting-lost, we managed to keep together most of the time. What a wonderful drive! Pictures of the cruise taken by one of the fellow S2000 drivers are hosted at this site.
After three months of unemployment, I finally get a two-month contract job through Craig's List. It is a Perl programmer job at Nokia. Initially, my job is to write Perl scripts to convert hardware part numbers. But since I finished the job in the first week, I was assigned to do something more interesting.
Nokia has a DCOM-based client that allows people there to access hardware parts database in Finland. However, the client is not designed to query multiple parts at once and do something with it. So my boss at Nokia asked me to reverse-engineer the software in Perl and create some new functionalities. I used tcpdump to looks at the packets and figured out the protocol it uses is DCOM. Then I looked up the web and find DCOM and its underlying DCE RPC protocol specifications. I read them and created Perl Modules for them. It turns out CPAN doesn't really have these modules, so I submitted mine there. This turns out to be my first open-source contribution. Hopefully, someone will find it useful at all. ;-)
In late May, I got another gig as a part-time Perl programmer working for a PhD candidate in the Stanford Economics Department. My job is to write programs to get data from the leading auction sites. The guy I worked for is a Japanese. His mom was with him because he was injured in a car accident. I got to taste some authentic Japanese food from his mom and also learned how to make sushi rice. ^_^
My company ran out of money on January 31st, 2002. So while it still continues to exist in a certain form. No employees will continue to get paid. That means I am now one of the statistics. Fortunately, my green card process is at the I-485 stage, so I don't need to pack home in 10 days like other H1-B workers. I also have the Employment Authorization Document (EAD), so I can work for anyone without restrictions. If you want to hire me, feel free to check out my resume.
In April, after I handed out my resume to 200+ companies, I think I pretty much laid a good foundation for my job search. So I decided to re-join the Squid development community. Maybe it is a stroke of fate, I re-acquainted with Terence Kelly there, a PhD student at University of Michigan who I worked with before. He is now an expert in Web Caching, sitting on some web caching conference program committee and all. After a casual exchange in email, I was curious enough to read one of his latest research paper. I liked the idea in his paper. Upon learning he needed a squid hacker to implement his work for some real world simulations, I volunteered my service. Hopefully something great will come out from this research.
The economy is getting worse. The 9/11 terrorists attack definitely didn't help. My company laid off 10 out of the remaing 15 people and moved to a smaller office in Santa Clara. I was lucky to be among the survivors. However, I got a 26% pay cut. Hopefully, the company can last until I get my green card (around April 2002).
In November, I joined the Stanford Ballroom Dance Team as a team member. I also finally competed in their Beginner's Challenge. Fortunately, the result was not that shabby. I got second place out of seven couples in Newcomer (for people who are first time competitors) Cha-cha.
Maybe it is my destiny to own a S2000. Couple days after I got my S2000 home, someone put a piece of paper on the car's windshield wiper. I picked it up and found that it was from my neighbor Josh Goldberg. He told me to register at S2000 International and participate in local S2000 events. It turned out he is the moderator of the Bay Area S2000 Forum. Since the club is still in its infancy, effectively he is the spiritual leader of the Bay Area S2000 Club.
My research in Car Physics made me understand that driving a car well requires a lot of skills. I figure driving is quite an important part of my everyday life in the States, so it will be great if I can make it as enjoyable as I can. A good way to improve my driving skill is to surround myself with good drivers. So I started to participate in the S2000 Club events. In addition to the get-togethers, I also went to autocross and track events with them. I think I gradually become a better driver now.
Finally, one more twist with my car club involvement. There were S2000 group drives once in a while hosted by club members. Unfortunately, they are more geared towards experienced drivers. I always thought group drive in twisty mountain roads is one of the best ways to enjoy the handling of S2000. Besides, I am an explorer in heart, so charting new terrains is definitely my cup of tea. I figured that since the majority are not that good as a driver, it might be a good idea to start something called "Novice Group Drive" for us beginners to drive in a more relaxed pace. So I organized several drives. They were all as enjoyable as I was expected. After several successful events, Josh even designated me as "Drive Organizer Supreme" of Club. I guess I need to work harder to organize more drives. ;)
While I continued to learning piano, my landlord told me he was transforming the garage in front of my room to another room to accomodate one more people. He moved the washing machine out of the garage and put it in front of my room. Given the fact that I rented this place at the peak of the tech bubble, I just couldn't stand it anymore. So my roommate Patrick and I began looking for a new place to live. Fortunately, we found a nice place with an unbeatable location. ^^ We moved in on May 18, 2001. So far, we are pretty satisfied.
Now my new apartment got a covered parking place, I can start thinking about getting a new car. The car I finally got is 2001 Red/Black Honda S2000 #7056. It was born in April 2001 at Tochigi, Japan. Okay let me tell you how I got to buy this car in the next paragraph.
Honda S2000 has been Car & Driver Magazine's 10 Best Cars for two years in a row. It is a high performance car, so it is naturally on the short list of car I want. I first saw S2000 pictures at Autozine web site. I was stunned by the pictures posted there. Later I went to a Honda dealership to see the real thing. I was basically speechless when I saw it; it was like love at first sight. But when I asked for the price, it was $39,000. (after "Market Adjustment" of $7,000) It was December, 2000 when the Silicon Valley people were still thinking the market would rebound. I was shocked at the price but still it was fine for me because my plan is to get the new car between June 2001 and Sept 2001.
Around late May, there was a Subaru dealer offered me $450 over inovice for the Impreza WRX. This is a 10% discount. I thought it was a good deal. I was almost set to buy this WRX. But my heart told me I should give S2000 one more chance. So I called some Honda dealerships and I found two of them offering S2000 at MSRP. I decided to spend the Memorial Day weekend to take a look and test drive these cars. On May 27th, I test drove both cars. The interior of WRX looks pretty similar to my old Protege. I was asked to drive in really steep residential area. Hardly an enjoyable experience. Next, I drove the S2000. It fits like a glove. The rush to 6000RPM is enough to convince me. Then the rest is history. Even now I still remember the big grin I had when I hit 9000RPM for the first time! ^_~
I have long fingers. People constantly remind me that I have the fingers for piano. I don't know whether this is true or not. But I do like to move fingers around when I listen to my favorite music. So I put piano as one of the things I want to learn in my life.
I finally decided to take a piano class in De Anza College and see whether I like it or not. I also bought the Yamaha P-80 Digital Piano. I picked it because it is the best based on the consensus of the Newsgroup given a US$1000 budget. (By the way, I found that Newsgroup is an excellent place to conduct consumer research. You got real people judging real products.) It happens that one of my colleages, Wesley Cheng, is a pianist. So I got some additional training from her also! ;) Let's hope after six months or so, I can put some sample here for your enjoyment (or torture, heehee)! ^_~
Besides piano, I started taking International Style Dance classes with Stanford Ballroom Dance Team. International Style Dance is more technical than American Style Dance. It takes care of those little details to make you look good in dancing. After couple classes, I am converted to an International Style Dancer! ^^
I had another two weeks trip to Hong Kong at the end of March. I tried to find some social dance places in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, I had a hard time finding them. Even when I found some, there were not many people there...~~ (ie less than 10 people)
Other than dance, I also re-unioned with my childhood friend, Chan Hoi Wah. (Well, technically he is the grandson of my grandpa's brother.) Geez.... He is only 25 and he is married! I think I need to work harder to find my first girl friend....~~ It has been almost five years since the last time I saw him. He looked the same though. ^^ I added him to my ICQ. We should have more plenty of chances to talk about the good old days...
After a month or so in my home, one of my housemates moved out. My landlord immediately found another one. Suprisingly, my new housemate Patrick Law is a Canadian whose origin is also Hong Kong. But more surprisingly, he is an experienced social dancer! So maybe I am destined to get involved in social dancing. (Interestingly, Connie Wong also became the president of the Stanford Ballroom Dance Club) ;) He used to dance in Canada. He also introduced me to the world of international-style ballroom dancing.
After getting out of school for almost one and a half year, I finally decided to go back to school. I found out that De Anza College offers $7 per credit classes, so taking classes there is just a matter of whether I have the desire. Swimming is one of the many things I want to learn in life, so I decided to take novice swimming and beginning swimming. It turned out to be a good experience. I made some friends and also know the basics that allow me to practice on my own.
More old friends are coming to the Bay Area. My UM classmate Dapeng Zhu came to Stanford for Computer Science PhD. Later, under my recommendation, he also became my part-time colleague. ;) I also reunion with Peter Hwang. He is the son of my father's friend. I lodged at his apartment when I was in LA back in May 1999. Now he is an MBA student at Stanford.
Another noticeable thing I did was car research. I planned to get a new car as late as September 2001. Initially, when I read all these car specifications, I didn't know what they are talking about. After I did some research in the web and also some helpful discussions with friends, I found that cars are more interesting than I think. That's why I came up with a whole series of pages devoted to car physics.
Based on my extensive research, I finally narrowed down the cars I want to buy. As of this writing. If I don't have a girl friend by June, my new car of choice is 2002 Subaru Impreza WRX. Otherwise, my girl friend can pick among 2002 Subaru Impreza WRX, 2001 BMW 330i, 2001 Honda S2000 and 1995 Mazda RX-7 for me.
There is not much happened during the summer. After I returned from Hong Kong, I continued dancing. This time I decided to learn more nightclub dances, in particular Salsa and Hustle.
Still, there is one surprise in this summer. Tiffany Chan, one of the summer interns in my company turns out to be a long time friend of one of my ICQ friends, Susan Hu. Her sister, Michelle Chan also worked as an intern. Since we all speaks Cantonese, we become friends.
My University of Michigan classmates also have an reunion in early August. It is good to know where each other is heading to. (n_n) I also added a lot of them to my ICQ contact list. ^^;
Ah.. I forget to say that I moved. My ex-roommate bought a house at Tracy, so he moved out. Since my company moved and I want to move closer to my company, so I also tried to move. It turns out to be pretty tough to find a place to live. The rental market was very hot back then. It took me more than a month to find my new home in Sunnyvale.... ~~;
I have been planning to learn many things once I am working and have plenty of free time after work. Social dancing is one of the things I want to learn. In an ICQ conversation with Connie Wong back in late January, I learned that she was learning social dancing as well. This inspired me to sign up at Starlite Ballroom for some group classes.
Once I started learning it, I quickly learned that I like it. First of all, I like walking. Social dancing is a more disciplined way of walking, so it is a natural fit for me. Second, it allows me to interact with other people. Then it comes naturally many opportunities to hone my social skills. And mostly importantly, I firmly believe it can bring me a girl friend in the near future! ^_~
After several months of learning, I believe right now I get past the beginner stage for cha-cha, salsa, two-step and hustle. Since I deem at this point of life I probably won't go to any formal balls, so I will concentrate my learning effort in night club dances.
Another interesting thing happened during this time is the reunion with my primary/elementary school classmates. It all started when Connie Wong told me my primary/elementary school classmate Wah Tung Lau also went to Stanford for a Master in Electrical Engineering. So I met Wah Tung at Stanford and from him I get the contact info of some other old classmates in Hong Kong. Coincidentally, I bought a ticket to Hong Kong in May earlier because I need to change my U.S. student visa to work visa. So I used this Hong Kong trip also to reunion with my primary/elementary school classmates. Eventually, I was able to meet ten of them. And it also let me know how ten years can change a person. Hopefully, next time I can meet more and see what they are up to right now. ;)
For those who don't know, I spent fifteen years of my life in Hong Kong before I went to the US. My family is still living in Hong Kong. It has been about two years since the last time I returned to Hong Kong, so I think it is about time to visit them again. Also, I made several friends through ICQ, so I would like to meet them in Hong Kong, too.
Other than re-connecting with my high school friends and seeing the relatives, I met a person that might change my life. I will see how things turn out and let you know when it is appropriate.
Another trip was a vacation to London. I picked the days such that I would experience the turn of millennium there. Honestly speaking, it was not a good time to visit London because the weather was really bad (I only saw several hours of sunlight, mostly it was cloudy and rainy) and some places like Buckingham Palace was not open during that time. The celebration on the new year day was in my opinion fairly over-hyped. It seemed like a fairly standard fare. Fortunately, I made a friend in a London hostel. That somehow made up for the bad weather.
Hmm... Other than these trips, I also finally became a driver! I bought a used entry-level 4-door sedan. It is a manual transmission car. I don't know how to drive at the beginning. Fortunately, I made an friend through ICQ and he taught me how to drive. Well, he didn't really teach me too much. After one hour moving around in the parking lot, he took me to the street. After another hour of going up Highway 101, driving through expressway and all, I finally got 'it'. What I got was the confidence on my own driving skills. From now on, I am free at last! (For those who used to live in Big City, I should let you know that it is like being trapped at home if you don't have a car in California because the public transport is very bad here.)
I finally get a job!!! I am now a Member of Technical Staff in an Internet start-up called EnjoyWeb, Inc. The process of getting this job is pretty interesting, too. In a normal Sunday morning of August 1st, I received an email from my current boss. I have nothing to do that day, so I replied immediately that I can see him that day afternoon or later. Within 30 minutes, my boss called and we agreed to have dinner and then an interview at night. We immediately became friend. Later, I also did reasonably well in the interview. Next day, he gave me an job offer and then he told me his business idea. I liked the idea, so I signed the contract and started working the next day. While it was pretty weird in retrospect, but I think if everything click, why should I hesitate to make a decision?
Interestingly, on the day I signed the contract, I received an email from the ICTEC '99 committee that my last paper was accepted to the Conference Proceedings. I talked to my boss and he allowed me to go to Nashville, Tennessee to present my paper. The conference in fact underwhelmed me. It seems to me it is more like a social event than anything else. I would like to spend my last day in Nashville to travel but unfortunately, that day was rainy, so I can only visit a limited number of places. I did go to the Country Music Hall of Fame of course. ;-)
I finally fulfilled my promise to myself. I traveled from Ann Arbor, MI to San Jose, CA by train! I visited Boston, New York City, Washington DC, Kennedy Space Center, Miami, New Orleans, San Antonio, Austin and Los Angeles. It is definitely a fantastic journey. I saw interesting things, ate exotic foods and met fellow travelers all over the world. I highly recommend that if you have time and money, try having a long trip. It would be the unforgettable segment of your life. Chinese had an old saying, "Read ten thousand books is not as good as walking a ten thousand miles." Now I really understand why. I would post some pictures of my journey once I have a scanner with me.
Currently, I am staying at San Jose State University Moulder Hall. I am here to look for programmer jobs. If you are a recruiter, please check out my resume and see if you want to hire me! Meanwhile, I also started playing ICQ. It seems to me I found a wonderful tool to help me communicate with other people. It makes me more comfortable to open my heart to other people.
This is the last semester of my college life. And it probably would be the end of my academic career. Lots of things happened: some bad, some good but nonetheless overall is interesting.
Bad things first, I was rejected by all the Ph.D. programs I applied. I think I am just not good enough in certain sense. =) Anyway, this gives me a legitimate reason to pursue something other than academia. I hope I would have more fun trying out the world outside of academia.
Then comes good things. I co-authored three papers regarding my Market-based Web Cache Project. The first one is about weighted LFU and is published in the Proceedings of Web Caching Workshop '99. The second one is about Market-based Push Caching but it is written by economists in our team for the Second Internet Economics Workshop. It is also accepted and to be published in the Conference Proceedings. Finally, the paper that I was the principal writer is submitted to ICTEC '99. The content is mostly the same but is written oriented to the computer scientists. Hopefully, it can get in.
Another good thing is that I find my old primary school classmate Connie Wong. We haven't seen each other for exactly ten years. At first glance, I really can't figure her out because she is much thinner and does make-up. Anyway, she is still her brainy self. She is going to do a Ph.D. Biology in Stanford University.
First, let me continue what I left out in last update. After all, I got my driver's license. It is tougher to get it in Michigan than before because now you need to do parallel parking and go to the freeway. Anyway, I am proud of myself for this. As to my graduate studies, I applied to the Computer Science Ph.D. program in Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Princeton and Caltech for financial reasons. For your information, admittance to Ph.D. guarantees either a research assistantship or a teaching assistantship. Finally, as usual, I continue my research in Market-based Web Cache.
I am a part-time research assistant at the EECS department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I am continuing my research on Market-Based Adaptive Web Caching. I am also doing research on the removal policies of Web Cache. At the mean time, I decide to get a driver license and prepare for the GRE exam. I am planning to apply to the Master of Computer Science Program in Stanford, MIT, Harvard and Princeton. If possible, I would like to travel around the US by train.
I am a full-time student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In addition, a part-time programmer in the Real Time Computing Lab under the Engineering Research Center Reconfigurable Machining System Project 2.1 and a homework grader of Professor John Lott's and Professor Peter Duren 's Math 285.
Since I only finished my first year in college and my first year in the US, it was virtually impossible for me to find a summer job here. I reckoned that the best bet would be to work in the research lab. So at the end of my Logic Design class, I talked to my instructor - Professor Shin. He referred me to Professor Ravishankar. I understood that I didn't have the tools to do the job. So I offered to finish all the programming projects in a C++ class in a month. I finished them in 18 days, so I was offered a job. It is not well paid but it did pave a way to my future career as I realized later.
