Um... Ok, cool!

The Vegetarian Spectrum

2011-12-01T20:31:00.001-08:00

Two of my coworkers are vegetarian, and the whole company has six people. I guess it's natural that I had to ask why they became vegetarians during today's lunch. Both of them had different reasons and to think about it, I realized that all vegetarians I know (although not that many) had different backgrounds.

Let me list them out. I'll use fake names here. Some people actually gave me explicit answers. For some people, I just inferred.

1) Anthony became a vegetarian because he once had a conversation with one of his friends about the goodness of being a herbivore vs a carnivore. He couldn't back up his thesis about why eating meat is good so he converted.
2) Brittany had an anatomy class in middle school and the teacher had her cut meat. She was disgusted since then.
3) Paul felt that people shouldn't hurt other livings, so he denied eating anything with a nerve system.
4) Sally had a good mind and didn't like the notion of killing animals.
5) Tom's religion prohibits eating meat.
6) Gale saw how cruel animals were "processed" and decided to stop eating meat.
7) Dave wanted to become healthy and eating meat isn't exactly a great way to be healthy.

I'm inclined to be like Dave, but I still can't live without burgers. Thank you In-N-Out, Burger King, and McDonald's. (I'm being sarcastic.)

MBA: The Good Parts

2011-11-15T19:14:00.001-08:00

Today I had a chance to talk with one of the co-founders of the company I work at and the CEO/CTO/CFO/[you name it] of another company with 80 people. He's a CS + MBA grad. I have always been curious what people learn in MBA as my dad always said you don't need an MBA to run a company. We ended up having a pretty interesting conversation and I thought it would be good to share.

First, he gave me a primer on the stereotypes of people who attend business school. He said 90% of people who go to business school need an MBA next to their name to bump their salary. And the other 10% are people who truly want to understand the art of business better. Clearly he fell into the 10%.

He told me that my dad was in fact right. You actually don't need an MBA to run a company.

I was curious. Then was it for networking or what?

He said no. The most awesome contacts he had weren't the people he met in business school, but were the ones he spent many years together in college and people he met through serendipity.

So what was special about MBA?

He said MBA gave him the "universal" vocabulary to conduct business. Without it, he wouldn't know what a cash flow statement was. Without it he would look at a product and say something like, "This is nice, let's make it better." without being able to objectively measure "nice" and "better".

Not only that, if he hadn't gone to business school, he said he wouldn't have had the confidence to take over and improve a 20-year-old business started by his family.

I guess business school doesn't solely consist of people in suits with spiky hair after all. Pretty cool indeed.

A (somewhat) concise explanation of HTTPS / SSL / PKI / Digital Certificates / Blah blah blah

2011-10-16T14:44:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: This is a technical blog. Sorry, regular readers :(

My work has recently forced me to understand HTTPS. It's been an area I've always shied from since 2004 -- I interned at an IT security department. I felt that the more detailed and accurate explanations on the web was a bit too much, so I thought this might be a bit more useful to a group of people. (In particular, I'm hoping this is useful to one of my friends who agreed that the video explanations on YouTube sucked.)

I'm no security expert, but I just know enough to get my job done. And here's what I have to share, a concise explanation of HTTPS. Topics includes SSL (secure socket layer), PKI (public key infrastructure), digital certificates, digital signatures, hashes, public/private keys, and stuff along those lines.

Let's start with this spreadsheet.


Term	Definition	Reason
HTTP	An application layer protocol for surfing the web.	So we have a standard for writing and showing webpages.
SSL	A protocol that wraps other application layer protocols so that it's secure.	So we can communicate across the network securely.
HTTPS	HTTP wrapped with SSL.	So we can browse the web securely.
Encryption	Ways to scramble data.	So Mr. Nosy doesn't know what you and me are talking about.
Decryption	Ways to unscramble data.	So you know what I'm talking about.
Keys	Something that can encrypt and decrypt data.	So we can encrypt and decrypt data. Duh?
Symmetric Key	A key that can decrypt data that was encrypted by itself.	So you and I can use this single key to encrypt and decrypt data.
Asymmetric Key	A key that can only decrypt data that was encrypted by its pair.	So it's only half the damage if one key was stolen.
Public/Private Key	An asymmetric key pair such that if one encrypts, the other can decrypt.	So I can use one key to encrypt data, knowing that you can use the other key to decrypt data.
Public Key	One key in the Public/Private Key pair that the owner decides to make public.	So people can write to me securely (because only I have the private key to decrypt the data).
Private Key	One key in the Public/Private Key pair that the owner decides to keep as a secret.	So I can assure people that I was the one who sent the data. (Only I have the private key to encrypt the data. You can verify it by decrypting it with my public key.)
Hash	A small computed number that represents a bigger chunk of data, such that even the smallest change to the big chunk of data can result in a different hash.	So if you knew this data is supposed to have hash X, but you computed the hash from the actual data and got Y, it means somebody changed the data.
Digital Signature	A hash encrypted by the private key.	So you know that the hash itself is not changed (only I can encrypt the hash with my private key).
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)	A group of technologies to help verify public keys.	So that you know that the public key is actually mine and not an impersonator.
Certificate Authority (CA)	Somebody who you trust.	So you can believe anything that the CA digitally signed.
Digital Certificate	A document containing my public key, digitally signed by a CA.	So I can give it to you and you can verify if it's really me or not.

Now that all the terms are hopefully understood. Here's basically how HTTPS works. I'll call this protocol Mini-HTTPS because a lot of detail is skipped and is not exactly HTTPS. However, understanding Mini-HTTPS will definitely help you understand HTTPS if you want to.

A user downloads Chrome. Chrome comes with a lot of digital certificates from CA's you trust. You trust them so much that you allow them to be shipped with Chrome. The digital certificates contain the CA's public key and is signed by the CA itself.
You open Chrome and go to https://plus.google.com.
Chrome detects that the URL starts with "https" so it needs some security checking.
Chrome sends, "verify yourself" to the server.
The server replies with, "here's my digital certificate, along with its hash encrypted by a well known CA (digitally signed)" It's like when you were a kid, if your Dad says you can trust somebody, you believe him.
Chrome verifies the certificate.

It tries to decrypt the digital signature (the hash encrypted by the CA) in the certificate. Chrome can do this because Chrome has the CA's public key from (1).
If it can decrypt it, it means that the CA really signed this (because only the CA has the private key to sign this.)
Since the CA really signed the certificate, it knows that the server can be trusted. Otherwise, the server wouldn't be able to get a signature from the CA.
The resulting decrypted hash is untampered for sure because otherwise it wouldn't be able to decrypt it successfully.
It computes the certificate's hash by itself and expects to get the same hash as the decrypted hash from (6.4). If they're different, it knows the certificate has been tampered with.
It now trusts the the server is really https://plus.google.com because its certificate is "CA approved" and untampered with.

Since Chrome trusts the server, it can confidently use the server's public key shipped with the certificate.
Chrome creates a symmetric key to be used for the entire session. It doesn't use asymmetric keys because it's more expensive. A one time symmetric key would be secure enough because if the key was stolen, only this session will be affected.
It encrypts the symmetric key with the server's public key and sends it to the server. (Only the server can see this symmetric key because only the server has the private key.)
This symmetric key is used to encrypt normal HTTP traffic through out this session (session is defined as "everything until the client says it's done").
When the client is done with this session, it sends "close session" to the server.
No more HTTP encryption between the client and server beyond this point.

Hmmm, maybe that wasn't too concise, but I think it was a good shot. Let me know if I can make anything clearer.

Experiment

2011-08-10T15:18:00.000-07:00

I came up with an idea.

I'm gonna post 5 consecutive "Get free ringt ones now!..." on my own Facebook and Google+ wall, then I will wait, and then I'm gonna see how my friends react. This is an experiment to see how many people are aware of internet scam and how people react to it when they see somebody that might be a victim. (Ok, to be honest, it's just for fun.)

I will make up for wasting people's time by visiting their Facebook/Google+ pages one by one and waste the same amount of time there.

Right now is about 5.30 pm CDT. Let's do it!

The Office

2011-05-08T19:52:00.000-07:00

I never thought I'd be writing about this but it's been a while since I found interesting stuff and wasn't too lazy to write about it.

Recently (say 3 weeks ago), I started watching the Office tv series. It's about a group of people working in a branch of a corporate paper company. The manager is the worst one can have. He's lazy, pretentious, and selfish. I really hated him in a lot of episodes. The team is basically a group of idiosyncratic people, with an exception of only a few that are considered normal to me.

I watch around 3-10 episodes a day depending on my energy -- yeah that's how I use my free time -- and now I've reached about its 105th episode.

So in one episode a guy named Jim is marrying Pam, the secretary, at Niagara Falls. The wedding, well, almost all weddings, didn't go exactly as planned. But eventually the wedding happened. At the church, Jim and Pam were surprised with a "JK Wedding Entrance Dance Style" (http://vimeo.com/6986692).

Now, as much as I hated a lot of the characters in this series, I was kind of moved by the way everybody had fun and was happy for Jim and Pam's wedding. I thought that that was actually enough to consider somebody a good friend. No matter how reproachable someone may be, if that person at least is happy for you when you're happy, then you've possibly found a good friend.

This series does teach a bunch of life lessons throughout the show, but I particularly like this one.

Anyway, I really have to praise the cast of the Office. I think they've done a fabulous job in making me think that they are in fact the fictional people in the series. I'm adding this to my favorite tv series list in facebook.

By the way, reviewing something is pretty fun. I'll have to do this more often.

Cool websites with 4 letters

2011-04-08T10:55:00.000-07:00

It's one of those Friday afternoons that sometimes your mind just drifts away from work and you look for something fun on the internet.

Today's activity was finding cool 4-letter domain names. For example blog.com is a 4-letter domain name, b-l-o-g. Out of innocence, believe me, I tried this name: p-l-o-p dot com. (Warning: don't try it yourself. I'll tell you why in a minute.)

I though it might be something related to programming languages (PL). In fact, there's a conference called "Pattern Languages of Programs (PLoP)".

So I entered that address into my browser to see what kind of website is gonna show up. Bam! My corporate homepage appeared with a message saying. "This website has been blocked. Reason: Pornography."

Oops... Maybe I should have googled it first. :P

How to surf Facebook safely at work

2011-01-10T22:18:00.000-08:00

Disclaimer: This is not about bypassing your company's/school firewall. It's about making Facebook not look like Facebook, hoping that people who just walk by won't notice.

The idea is really simple:
A) Disable pictures
B) Make everything black and white

I use Google Chrome for personal web surfing at work so this is how to do it with Google Chrome.

Step A
Here's how to disable pictures.

1) Open Google Chrome and go to the options menu.

2) Once the dialog pops up, go to the Under The Hood tab and press the button Content Settings...

3) Another dialog pops up. In the Features box choose Images, then choose Do not show any images

4) Close out of that dialog.
5) Close out of the other dialog.

Next, make everything black and white. You're gonna be editing one file. Different machines have different places you need to look at. Here's the default locations. For each location, change USERNAME to your user name on that computer (not your Facebook user name!)

Windows XP
C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\User StyleSheets\Custom.css

Windows Vista
C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\User StyleSheets\Custom.css

Mac OS
/Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/User StyleSheets/Custom.css

Step B
Going black and white.
1) Once you locate the file, open it in notepad or your favorite editor.
2) Paste the following into that file.

* { background-color: white !important; }
* { color: black !important; }
* a:link { color: black !important;}
* a:visited { color: black !important; }
* a:hover { background-color: white !important; }
* {font-family:monospace !important; 
font-style:normal !important;
font-weight:normal !important;
font-size:medium !important;}

3) Save the file.
4) Done! (You might have to reload the current webpage to see results.) The page now, doesn't quite look like Facebook unless you really look at it.

Oh, and to undo it.
1) Go back to Google Chrome's same menu and just chose Show All Images (Recommended).
2) For the file you've edited, just delete everything inside and save it.

I don't know if it's worth writing a small program to toggle this, but we'll see. And yeah, I've been through this just because I wanted to surf Facebook at work. :)

The Asian Sensation

2010-12-23T22:58:00.000-08:00

So Dear and I were having dinner at Sushi Thai and we had quite an interesting conversation with a couple sitting next to us.

Them: What's that you're having? Sushi samplers?
Us: No, we ordered 4 sushi rolls because we printed out this discount coupon.
Them: This is our first time here we don't know what to order.
Us: Where are you guys from? I mean, how long did it take you to drive here.
Them (well, just the guy): Probably not as long as coming from China!

Maybe I got it totally wrong, but did he just imply that he thinks we're from China? Yeah, right, all asians look the same. We didn't take it seriously though. :)

2010

2010-12-13T19:39:00.000-08:00

At the end of each year, I usually I summarize the stuff that happened during the year. Here's a list of the best moments I remember.

My best moments of 2010 was the moment that I
1) knew that mom was safe in the ICU.
2) got to be in Thailand and everybody in the family was there.
3) knew that Dear finally became a medical resident.
4) learned that my sister would be having a wedding in Thailand.
5) watched Korean drama with Dear every night.
6) got to visit my best friend in St Louis.
7) had a concert with my great friends in Seattle.
8) got to hang out with my beloved friends in LA for the last moments.
9) got to play soccer at UCLA.
10) adopted Jelly to our family.
11) got a job offer and Dear made me a special dinner.
12) saw the beer selection in Milwaukee's liquor stores.
13) saw snow.

Just looking at the list, I can't stress the following enough: "Great moments in life rarely happen when you're alone."

I don't usually post bad things, but this is a year to remember. My prayers have never involved such many people as this year. Here we go.

1) Many loved ones were lost, including loved ones of my best friends and people I know.

Losing somebody is the worst of the bad things, because, again, "great moments in life rarely happen when you're alone." It's the direct opposite, isn't it?

Take care everybody! Don't forget to keep in touch some time because I miss you.

Road to Milwaukee (part 1) - Napa: Donuts and Wine

2010-11-30T21:21:00.000-08:00

Continued from http://ok-cool.blogspot.com/2010/11/another-move-out.html

June 1, 2010
Los Angeles, CA to Napa, CA
~400 miles

We left LA around 5pm. Here's a little view inside the car.

It took us about 6 hours to reach our lodging place in Napa. We didn't really see anything at night. We were exhausted and hungry. Dear was provident enough to bring food from LA.

After we ate, we decided to rest.

The next day we made a stroll around the place. It was actually pretty nice.

First things first, we needed to reduce the car load. We headed to a Kinko to ship some stuff out.

Next was the favorite part. We planned to get some nice breakfast and do some wine tasting!

We headed to The Boon Fly Cafe for some breakfast. The donuts were just awesome. If you ever liked those baked donuts with sugar coating, these are THE donuts you must try.

Not only that, the food overall and atmosphere was nice.

The scrumptious breakfast was only part of the fun. We headed to the winery. We sighted some pleasant views along the way

And I had to do this.

And finally wine time :D

The day had to end there because it was about 2pm and we needed to drive north up to McCloud, CA.

pee pee

2010-11-05T21:37:00.000-07:00

Ladies might not know, but a typical sight in the men's room looks somewhat like this.

Yeah I know my drawing is crap, so let me explain. The white thing's a urinal and the yellow stuff is men's produce, and let's stop right there because you don't wanna go as far as the liquid's outlet, right?

It's a fact of life. There's ALWAYS pee on the floor.

Since we're human, we can only make but mistakes. There's no incentive for not creating a splatter right? Plus most of the time, we're not focusing on how well we're aiming.

So is it the urinal's design to be blamed? Is this problem even solvable?

Another Move Out

2010-11-03T21:13:00.000-07:00

The night before we moved out, we think we got everything planned. Since we had experience moving twice, we were better at ball parking what would fit in the car.

We weren't very good at ball parking what would fit in the closet though. On the night of May 31, almost everything was boxed and had their place in the car. We had some extra stuff but we found a 24/7 FedEx Kinko and sent out some packages around midnight. The only thing left was things in the bathroom and closet, which I thought was negligible. We went to sleep around 4am.

The next day I wanted to visit my advisor one last time, and Dear wrote farewell letters for her fellows at work. We were done around 2pm and that's when we really started moving stuff into the car.

The boxes we packed fitted nicely. There was some space left, after every box was moved in. So far so good.

Things got a little rough when we explored the closet. Clothes were piling up and at the end I couldn't see the rear mirror. (Forgot to take pictures because we were in a hurry).

Finally, we left the house around 5.30pm. Dear had brought a polaroid camera from Thailand, so we stopped by the camera shop to by some films. And off we went!

Our first destination was Napa, CA.

The 3rd Road Trip

2010-11-03T19:11:00.000-07:00

Back in March, I posted our road trip plan but never got to follow up. Now's a good time.

So the plan changed a little bit, but I think it became even more fun.

This time we ditched Las Vegas and chose nature by heading north through Oregon, to Seattle. And then there's Aspen which is one of the nicest cities we've been to.

The move out merits a separate post. Actually I think I'm gonna start writing now.

TOPU

2010-10-24T14:22:00.000-07:00

I discovered a few days ago that I had to take the TOEFL, a standardized test. I went online to register for the test. It seemed that the viable test dates in Milwaukee all fell on weekdays. There was this one testing center though, which was about 20 miles to the west, that had an available Saturday. Whatever.

It was a military school so I didn't expect it to be fancy or anything. Plus my sister in just had a bad experience with a particular test center in New York -- restrooms with vomits, cramped up testing rooms, to name a few -- so I was kind of ready to face anything.

Today was a Sunday and Dear was still working when I finished church, so I decided to drive to the test center to get a sense of how early I should wake up on the test day.

I entered this town called Delafield. It looked like a nice, seemingly-historic city. I drove a little deeper and the test center was on my left, St. John's Northwestern Military Academy.

I was speechless.

Man, this was the most beautiful TOEFL test center I've ever seen!

There were many buildings so I asked some people at the "front desk". One guy was an Asian. He seemed to have no idea where the TOEFL is usually taken. Good sign, because I might have a test room for myself. He called up a military student who was literally swinging a gun while marching. (I'm pretty confident there were no bullets.) Suddenly, they started speaking Korean.

"Blah, blah, blah, TOPU."

I watched a Korean drama and noticed they used the sound P whenever they use an English word with F. For example, "fan" is pronounced "pan". So in this case, TOEFL is pronounced TOPU.

Anyway, the student had no idea either and the front desk told me to probably come back and ask on a weekday when a lot of people who might know are around. I figured I'll just call to ask.

On the way back I took some pictures of the town. This seemed to be the whole city.

As if the pumpkins were forming a vocal ensemble to sing a Halloween carol. Well, happy halloween then!

The Ham

2010-10-13T21:27:00.000-07:00

We were grocery shopping.

What's been said: Can I have a pound of ham?
What's been heard: blah blah ... half a pound of ham.

Lesson learned: Half a pound of ham is not enough for a week. We'll have to come back to get some more.

Just a normal day

2010-09-18T14:55:00.000-07:00

I figured I have been writing a lot on ideas and stuff I find interesting, but I never really wrote a log of my normal day. Something like a conventional diary (although I argued in my Thai blog post that a diary is free-form). I believe one day it will help me bring back my memories in Milwaukee when I want to think about it. Here goes.

Today I woke up around 3am to pee-pee. Tired from last night watching Futarama, I came back to bed and slept more. Around 5.30am I woke up because there was this flash nearby. Turned out to be a thunderstorm just above our heads. There wasn't an issued warning though, so I guess it wasn't that severe. We tried to sleep again but the lightning was to bright and the storm was too loud. We finally got up.

Our day started as usual. As soon as I exited the bedroom, I saw Jelly waiting nearby the door. She was probably awoken by the storm as well.

We discussed what we would have for breakfast. There was this breakfast place called Trocadero which had great American food and donuts. It opened at 9, so we thought we had something to eat while waiting. (It was 6.30am.)

We heated that leftover ham & cheese bagel we got from Einstein the day before and had half each. Dear also had the chocolate Lucky Charm.

Dear skyped home while I took a shower. After the shower, I shaved. Usually I shave once a week and it's been a week. Dear finished calling home. I tried to call Mom but nobody answered. I think she's doing much better since her heart attack 18 days ago.

It was Dear's turn for a bath. Dear opened the water into the tub for a whirlpool bath and came back to the living room. She went on Youtube and not too long afterwards I heard the lyrics "เมื่อคิดให้ดีโลกนี้ประหลาด" that I've been hearing for the past couple of days. It was a Thai soap opera called วนิดา which I have no interest in (yet). I said "yet" because Dear always works her magic on me. Last time I didn't want to watch the Korean drama You're Beautiful at all, but later I got induced and finished the series twice.

Dear's bathtub was ready for the whirlpool. She disappeared in the bathroom for a while, and I started writing this log.

When Dear finished, it was time for brunch at Trocadero. It was raining and starting to get cold so I wore my UCLA sweater I almost never wore in LA. We were among the first customers so we got nice seats and the waitress was still happy. Dear ordered coffee and her croissant egg sandwich. I ordered eggs and sausage. We also got their famous donuts. They were really nice.

The meal was lovely. We decide to do some grocery shopping afterwards because we're almost out of tissue rolls -- everybody who poops knows it's something indispensable. Dear also bought cat treats for Jelly. When we returned home, Jelly liked the treats indeed.

It was high time we cleaned up our home. I took care of the living room and Dear cleaned the bathroom and kitchen. I was pretty tired so I took a break. Dear started to cook dinner. Today we're having Yum-Ma-Ma, which is kind of a spicy noodle salad, and steamed shrimp. The shrimps from Whole Foods are fresh and nice.

Dear hasn't finished cooking yet, so I came to the computer to blog.

The End.

Faith

2010-09-15T10:30:00.001-07:00

This will be one of the few blog entries that includes my religious views.

Many of my friends might already know that our family has recently been in a difficult time. In short, Mom had a heart attack and was admitted to the ICU.

Two years ago, through "luck", my Daddy figured that Mom had a heart disease. That night, Mom had a serious stomach ache and was taken to the hospital. For some reason, my Daddy took a listen to Mom's heart and knew something wasn't normal.

Daddy got the staff to run some tests and later on we found out that Mom had a blood vessel that wasn't suppose to be there since birth. This "special" blood vessel caused some amount of good blood to flow back to the lungs, when it's supposed to feed the body. She never had symptoms because she never played hard sports. If she did, I don't know what would have happened.

After we learned about the problematic blood vessel, she had surgery to remove it. She became healthier and healthier over the years, and she was even able to come to my graduation.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, Mom was sitting in the cafeteria of the hospital she worked at. She felt dizzy and suspected it had something to do with the heart. Her fellow doctors took her to the ICU immediately. It happened that she had what was called an "aneurism", which is essentially a very swollen blood vessel. This aneurism works similarly to a dam that sometimes keeps blood there for a little to long that blood starts to clot. The problem happens when this blood clot is set free from the dam and gets stuck in important blood vessels. In Mom's case, it was the blood vessel that fed the heart. So essentially, her heart wasn't fed for a couple of minutes and she had a heart attack.

She's now in a safe state where the clot is gone and her heart is regaining power, but the aneurism is still there. It's like a time bomb that can explode any time in the future, and if next time she's not in the hospital, it's going to be bad news. This might be even worse than cancer.

Come to think of it, Mom was very lucky.

If Mom was a sports person, she might have had a heart attack long time ago.
If Mom didn't have a stomach ache that night, we might have never knew about her heart disease.
If Mom wasn't in the hospital the time she had a heart attack, we might have lost her.

Mom was saved several times and I have faith that there's a reason. People believe in coincidences, sciences, karma, and so on. I believe Mom was a kind and loving person and God has been there to help her all the time.

We're looking for a cure. Doctors in Thailand say that Mom's aneurism was one of the biggest and in the hardest locations to do surgery on. Who knows? Maybe Dear got accepted to a medical program that has a strong heart department for a reason.

Amidst the sadness and fear, there is hope and positive light. This is the beauty of life and I appreciate every second I live.

You should too.

The move out from Ann Arbor (August 2009)

2010-08-25T15:22:00.000-07:00

Our road trip to Ann Arbor ended at the beginning of July, 2009. I started to look for part-time jobs immediately. Why part-time? Because Dear was applying for her medical residency and we would have to fly out together. Why fly out together? Because it was a family decision. Dear wanted to make sure we were moving to a city where we could both be living in.

I was pretty desperate because Ann Arbor was such a huge computer industry (if you can detect the sarcasm), especially for part-time jobs.

At some point, we received a letter from Immigrations (aka USCIS) saying that Dear was about to get her permanent green card -- back then she was holding a conditional green card -- and needed Dear's fingerprint. We had to go to Texas for a fingerprint.

After some pondering, we decided to move back to LA, visiting Texas along the way.

We had about 10 days to leave Ann Arbor because we had to reach Texas at the scheduled appointment. It was a little rush but I became a professional seller on Craigslist in no time.

My personal rule was, "If you want to sell quick, show the full price, say that it's in excellent condition, and sell it at 1/3 the original price." This rule worked pretty well, as we were able to sell almost all of our stuff (except clothes) in time. To get an idea, here's a bunch of our stuff.

Yeah, that's just about what we sold. Not only did we need to sell stuff, but we also needed to sublet our apartment as well because we're leaving before the end of the lease.

We found a couple of candidates. One that never called back, two nerdy dudes, and a small lady who liked the swimming pool in the complex. We, including our landlord, had interviews with them and ended up choosing the nerdy dudes.

After things seemed settled, it was time to move out. Bye, bye home.

As expected, the day we left Ann Arbor was a hectic one. And it had to rain. With a lot of help from Dear's friends in Ann Arbor, we managed to get our stuff in the car and leave Ann Arbor around 5pm.

Nothing was really exciting about this road trip back to Los Angeles and we didn't even bother to take pictures, so I think I should summarize it in this blog entry. Here's the map.

A) We left Ann Arbor around 5pm on August 8.
B) Stayed at my cousin's house in Bloomington, Illinois that night.
C) Stopped by Boy's house (St. Louis, Missouri) for two nights, August 9-11. Had Vietnamese seafood, beer, good Japanese food, desserts, Korean crepes, and those nice stuff. Thanks again Boy!
D) Stopped by my aunt's house in Plano, Texas on August 11-14.
E) Stopped by Amarillo, Texas on August 14. Boring.
F) Rested at Albuquerque, New Mexico on August 15. More boring.
G) Stayed at Las Vegas, Nevada on August 16-18. Celebrated our wedding anniversary there :)
H) Hurray, we're back in LA.

That's how non-interesting the trip was. But anyway, a lot of interesting stuff did happen afterwards, such as the match. I'll blog about it later.

Road Trip Summary

2010-08-01T14:58:00.000-07:00

Here's a summary of our road trip from Los Angeles to Ann Arbor (June 27 - July 5, 2009). Click on each link for more details.
Las Vegas (June 27-29)
Grand Canyon (June 29-30)
Utah (June 30 - July 1)
Denver (July 1-2)
Kansas City (July 2-3)
St Louis (July 3-4)
Chicago (July 4-5)

The road trip (final chapter): Chicago and Ann Arbor!

2010-07-31T22:34:00.000-07:00

Here's the previous post.

Our next stop was Chicago. We've been there once during my 2008 summer in Michigan, so we knew how tasty the Chicago deep dish pizza was like.

We left Boy's house maybe around noon because we woke up late. And we reached Chicago around 6pm. It was the 4th of July so the traffic was a bit crazy.

When we arrived at our hotel, we asked to no avail if they still had the fireworks. Boo!

However, we managed to order the Chicago pizza from Giordano's and it was soooooo nice. We had a good dinner then went to sleep.

The next morning we decided to take a boat ride. Turtle and I really enjoyed it.

We had lunch at the pier and were on our way to Ann Arbor!

And a couple hours later, we reached home sweet home.

By the way, despite me writing this in 2010, this road trip happened in 2009. I have another whole road trip to blog about soon, but this is the end of the road trip 2009 series!

Speaking one's mind

2010-07-27T15:59:00.000-07:00

I have a friend who speaks whatever he thinks and kind of got into trouble.

He argues that he doesn't really care because there are people who understand him. True, but it's not just about having friends. It's about possibly hurting other people's feelings. He also says that he's only being honest and sincere, but misses the point that honesty and sincerity does not equal bluntness.

I thought this was interesting so I'm blogging about it now.

So are you quiet or blunt?

The good thing about quiet is that your words won't hurt anybody's feeling because your not saying much. But if you just met somebody, that person may think you're unfriendly or worse if he's pessimistic, he may think you're wearing a "mask".

If you're blunt, you might hurt people's feelings because you can always say "this sucks" and "this" might be something the other person really likes. The good thing is that people know who you are. If you're nice, it shows. If you're not nice, you're being yourself and nobody can blame you for being pretentious.

Of course, best friends always accept who you are, but what about new friends who might become best friends later?

I personally think that if you just met somebody, be yourself but not too much. Don't be either too quiet or too blunt. Keep some things to yourself if you usually say everything you think, and speak a little more if you normally don't say anything.

This isn't being pretentious because you are still being yourself (with self-control added). This is just preventing potentially good friends from getting away.

Once you know who can accept who you are, you can be yourself little by little, and at the end if that person becomes your best friend, he will understand you no matter how rude you sound.

On the other hand, if you know who can't accept who you are, you can keep your distance and be just "a person I know" rather than "a sick person I know". It's always better to have less enemies, isn't it?

I've been living on this principle for a long time, and I only have a few best friends. Maybe this principle isn't totally right, or best friends are really hard to find. If it's the latter, you'd better be a little more careful with what you say.

Jelly's cute

2010-07-20T12:30:00.000-07:00

So I took Jelly to the vet to have her vaccinated.

The conversation went like this.

Veterinarian: Oh, look who we have here, a pretty little cat.
Assistant: Wow, you don't hear a veterinarian say a cat is cute everyday.
Veterinarian: I know, but this one's really unique. I can see some Siamese in her looks there.

Important key idea: Jelly's cute.
Even more important key idea: Anything related to Thai is good-looking.

The road trip (continued): St Louis

2010-05-11T12:18:00.000-07:00

Here's the previous post.

It was actually good that we didn't enjoy Kansas City because it made our next stop relatively a lot more fun.

I was really looking forward to meeting with Boy because we've been close friends since our days as an undergrad. It takes about 4 hours from Kansas City to St Louis, and when compared to other days, this is a short ride. It felt longer than 4 hours though because I was so excited to see him.

When we reached there, Boy was there to help us unload, then we went out to dinner. After dinner, we stopped at a store to buy some beer. We came back to Boy's place and played a lot of Wii and drank a lot of beer. It was SO fun!

The next day, we woke up at lunch time. Boy took us to a Thai noodle restaurant and afterwards we decided to go to the Arch. The Arch was spectacular, although I wasn't too thrilled because I'm not that much into phenomenal world creations. Seeing the line, we decided not to wait to go up the Arch. We had fun outside instead.

For some reason, Turtle was a little greasy.

And Boy also took a "shower".

That evening we went to Amerista to have the Alaskan King Crab Buffet. At first Turtle was the only one having problems cracking crabs open, but after a while he was the master of the table, being able to extract crab meat from its shell without tearing the meat.

Then we went home to play more Wii and have more beer.

We had to leave the next morning (boo), so Boy made us boiled rice (ข้าวต้ม).

For the whole road trip, I think this stop was the funnest :D

Don't use your feet!

2010-04-27T10:37:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if it's only at UCLA or not but many times I see people using there feet to do something that should be done with hands. I have different degrees of frustration when I see these events happen. I don't think I'll be able to make a change, so I decided to just blog about it.

1) Flushing
Many times in the men's room, I see people using their feet to flush the toilet. This is understandable because people flush after they do all sorts of dirty things, and the handle must be contaminated as well. However, people DO use their hands to flush. They just wash their hands afterwards. I don't see anything wrong with that.

2) Opening doors
After we finish our activities in the toilet, we have to exit the men's room at some point. Some restroom doors have handles and some do not. I see a lot of people using their feet to kick the door handles open. Give me a break! You just washed your hands didn't you? This is still tolerable as restroom doors tend to be contaminated from people who don't wash their hands, but what about people who do?

3) Opening handicap doors
Now this is way to much. What's so hard opening a handicap door with your hand or maybe your elbow? It always makes me angry when lazy people kick handicap switches to open the door, when the door is actually accessible without using the switch. If they were a little bit more considerate, they would realize that disabled people use their *HANDS* to press these switches.

Oh, well. There's nothing I can do about it.

Apartment Hunting

2010-04-23T00:32:00.000-07:00

Since Dear's resident training is going to start in June, we'd better find an apartment soon before the move.

For some reason I don't recall, last weekend (April 17-19) happened to be the best days for both of us to fly to Milwaukee.

On our way there, we chose Midwest Airlines because of its cheapest tickets ($99 one-way). The travel was smooth and the best part of this airline is they serve fresh baked cookies on the plane. You can see the flight attendants actually baking cookies on the plane. They were great. The flight was on time, smooth take off, smooth landing, and good service.

The moment we got there (Milwaukee), we were soooo hungry. We decided to stop by a Red Lobster to have some seafood, yeah! The place was crowded but we didn't mind waiting 40 minutes despite our growling stomachs.

It seemed that we were the only asian people in the whole restaurant and the grandma at the table across from ours watched my whole meal. I should have taken a picture.

Then we went to our hotel for some rest.

The next day we had about 10 appointments lining up. Dear had contacted a broker to take us to some places. Some were really, really cheap, but so depressing that we probably wouldn't be able to live happily for the next three years.

Finally, there was this one place that was just perfect. The rent wasn't over our budget. It included heated parking, air conditioning, heating, gas, cable TV, internet, and in-room laundry. It had a gorgeous lake view, plus no monthly pet fee! We liked the place really much. The only thing that was holding us back was we didn't see the rest yet, so we decided to keep looking.

Our next place, was almost as good as our favorite one except it didn't have a lake view, utilities weren't taken care of, and there was a monthly pet fee. The total rent was over our budget and that's when we decided we wouldn't get a better deal than our favorite apartment.

We headed back immediately to sign the lease, and we couldn't be happier!

After we signed the lease, the rest of the trip was play time!

We saw some cats at the humane society. At night we drank. The next day, we drove around to see my prospective workplaces. And we visited Dear's hospital.

We also went back to see the lovely apartment once again, and the management said all the units with that particular floor plan were sold out! We were very, very lucky to be there that week.

Everything was pleasant except for the United Airlines flight back to Los Angeles. They seem to boast their winning the #1 on-time arrival in 2008 if I remembered correctly. The thing is their punctuality in departing didn't commensurate with that of their arriving. I was sweating on a 30-minute-late, non-air-conditioned plane before we finally took off. What made matters worse was the fact that the captain wanted to make time and he was speeding -- I've never been on a plane taking off that fast. It was one of the scariest moments this year.

We were exhausted after the horrible flight experience, but we were too hungry to go to sleep after we reached home, so we went to a korean bbq and had some pork.

Overall, the whole trip was pretty exciting in different ways. I don't think I'll fly United any more unless there's a very good reason.

My Weakness

2010-04-20T01:21:00.000-07:00

I recently found one of my weaknesses. I get ticked off very easily by impudent brats. In other words, when someone younger than me is rude to me, I get angry so easily. On the other hand, if somebody older than me doesn't behave that well, I show respect and don't talk back.

It's all about expecting people to treat you the way you treat others. I show deference to elders, so I expect the same from minors. I was totally wrong to think that way!

I really can't expect anybody to show me respect because people have different backgrounds. Their lives don't get shaped up the way normal people should. And when I really examine these people's backgrounds, a lot of times they do have serious problems in the past. They already have their own problems, so I should let them go as long as they didn't do something that was blatantly wrong.

From now on I will learn to forgive more and just take it as a lesson that, if I have a child, I won't raise him/her to grow up that way.

I hereby declare this pledge!

It's raining ...

2010-04-16T15:15:00.000-07:00

"Cats and dogs", is what I would add to this blog entry's title, and it is actually what I'm going to talk about.

So after living to others' expectations for say 27 years, it's time we finally take control of our own lives. We're going to live with the money we earn, not our parents', and we decide what happens next in life.

And the imminent decision to make is, are we gonna have cats or dogs?

I've always been a dog person since I grew up with them. On the other hand, Dear is more of a cat person. After dating for a couple of years, I learned to like what Dear likes, and vice versa. So we ended up liking both cats and dogs, which complicates the problem!

Dogs are friendly. They are loyal, and they view us as their masters (according to the translating collar in the movie Up.) They're so cheerful, and we like happy people around us.

Cats are more like roommates. When you do something wrong, they tell you. They go wherever they want even on the dining table. They're not high maintenance. But they're cute and quiet, and we like quiet people around us.

So ideally, we would like
1) a dog that can live in the room all day and be quiet
OR
2) a cheerful, loyal cat

I know we can't find any of those, but what we know is that we might not have time to take our dog for a walk everyday.

Sound like cats is the way to go, eh?

Ranked on Youtube (as of April 3, 2010, 11:40pm PST)

2010-04-03T23:57:00.000-07:00

Well it's nothing to brag about, but this kind of made me happy :)

I searched the following in Youtube.

"เจ้าชายนิทรา อีทีซี"
I'm the first result!

"หวั่นไหว บอดีแสลม"
I'm the first result!

"larc pieces cover"
I'm the first result!

"zenith daita cover"
I'm the third result!

"triptych siam shade cover"
I'm the sixth result!

Naive or not, I take it that I'm pretty good at playing other people's songs. First step to becoming a rock star!

Match Day!

2010-03-24T22:04:00.000-07:00

I should have been writing this about 6 days ago, but a lot of things came in the way. Let's pretend to day is Thursday, March 18, 2010, all right? I'll try to recall what happened on that day.

About 6.30am, my cell phone rang, i.e. I set the alarm at 6.30am. We woke up so excited of the match results, but Dear had to go to work for an important meeting at 8-9am. It's okay because the match results would be posted at 10am.

I didn't take a shower because I was so sleepy. I slept in the car in the parking lot while waiting for Dear to finish. An hour later Dear woke me up and we rushed home. We reached home about 9.15am. The 45-minute wait was pretty darn long, but finally, the moment came.

Dear got the email, "Where did I match?"

We both say in front of the laptop full of apprehension. Dear opened up the mail...

We're going to ******* in Milwaukee! (Ask me privately if you don't know the program yet.)

I won't say exactly how high we ranked the program. Just know that we ranked it AMONG THE TOP CHOICES!!!

A while after the match results came out, the program director of that program called and said, "We finally got you!" Wow... He must have really liked Dear. What he didn't know was that we liked him and the program even more!

This is how the magic of the match works: both the applicant and the program get the best what they want. The program Dear got into was definitely the best program for us, not me, not Dear, but us.

Here's what's good about Milwaukee.

1) Dear's program has an in-house GI fellowship, which means she has a good shot doing GI after internal medicine. (She's passionate about guts, feces, and disgusting stuff.)

2) Milwaukee is inexpensive, safe, and beautiful.

3) Milwaukee is 6-7 hours away from one of my best friends in St. Louis (ไอ้บอยมึงนั่นแหละ).

4) Milwaukee is 5-6 hours away from Dear's friends in Michigan and Minnesota.

5) Milwaukee has a lot of beer.

6) Chicago (1.5-2 hours away) has a lot of great Thai food.

7) Chicago has Mitsuwa!

And also less important stuff.

8) Madison has a great PhD program. I don't know the odds but I definitely want to give a shot applying there.

9) Both Chicago and Madison have awesome jobs for me.

Having lived in Koreatown for 6 months, I won't miss LA that much. It's even good news I'll be leaving this scary part of LA.

However, I'll definitely miss Friday soccer, hanging out with awesome friends, and occasionally bumping into lab fellows and previous co-workers... Not to mention I'll not be able to have In N Out!

But whatever emotional roller coaster I'm riding, congratulations Dear! You made it! I'm so proud of you!

Our Third Road Trip

2010-03-24T11:00:00.000-07:00

So here's our tentative route.

A) Los Angeles, CA

6 hours and 33 minutes later...

B) Napa, CA

9 hours and 43 minutes later...

C) Portland, OR

2 hours and 48 minutes later...

D) Seattle, WA

9 hours and 8 minutes later...

E) Donnelly, ID

7 hours and 44 minutes later...

F) Salt Lake City, UT

7 hours and 56 minutes later...

G) Aspen, CO

9 hours and 58 minutes later...

H) Grand Island, NE

4 hours and 34 minutes later...

I) De Moines, IA

6 hours and 17 minutes later...

J) Milwaukee!!!

View this map in Google Maps

It's going to take at least 9 days (9 stops), but there are some places we might consider staying an additional night, such as Napa, Seattle, and Aspen.

Our tentative take off date is June 1, but we plan to visit Thailand as early as the second week of May before coming back for the road trip.

If anybody is up to eating out or having a quick farewell before we leave, let us know because we'll be missing you!

Well, at least for now we know Dear matched somewhere!

2010-03-15T16:07:00.000-07:00

Hey, heyyyyyy! Finally Dear's 3-year ordeal paid off.

Today (March 15), we woke up, with sore throats, around 8.45 am. The match results were supposed to be posted online at 9 am. We both took quick showers and sat before Dear's laptop awaiting the long-waited results.

Dear opened Firefox, logged into her email account, and there it was, an email with the subject "Did I Match?"

Dear opened up the email. She was so excited see didn't see the conspicuous message saying, "Congratulations! You have matched."

I saw it right away, but I figured it would be more exciting for Dear to log in to the online medical residency matching system to find out herself.

To no surprise, she screamed in joy. Don't expect as much screaming as when she learned she passed the USMLE CS. (http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=47360736988)

However, this definitely made our day. Hurray! Coming to USA was not just for me, it was for us! Oh, and here's the clip. (http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=369892716988)

Trying out Google Reader

2010-03-05T14:14:00.001-08:00

I'm trying to share this entry on Facebook through Google Reader.

The road trip (continued): Kansas City -- not a big fan at all

2010-02-28T23:14:00.000-08:00

Here's the previous road trip post.

Our next destination was Kansas City. I remember it to be the most tiring day during our journey. The route was pretty much as straight line like this. It was a 10-hour drive with fields all way long. The more I drive, the more fields I see. The most exciting thing we saw were horses and cows, but we didn't bother taking pictures of them.

After about 6 hours, I couldn't take it any more. I was so sleepy that even those energy shots couldn't keep me awake. We decided to stop at a gas station for an hour nap.

After regaining some energy (the right way), we moved on. And yet more fields were to come. We decided to have dinner before it got dark. We ended up at a sushi restaurant (again). The owner of the restaurant looked like a yakuza. We wanted to live that night so we didn't complain about the slow food. We hastily finished and left.

An hour later, we reached Kansas City. I made some wrong turns because of the stupid GPS -- yeah, always blame the gadget -- and got into some REALLY scary parts of the city, with people who looked like drug dealers walking around in the shadows. At that point our adrenaline were so highhhh, I tells ya!

Finally, we reached our hotel: Ameristar Casino. Yes, you read it right, casino. We didn't even bother stopping to look at the casino at all. There were so few people, plus we were still scared from the ride through downtown.

The receptionist welcomed us with a surprise: "I see that you booked a smoking room?"

Nope, that's not right. We were positive of booking a non-smoking room. Dear is allergic to smoke.

The manager came out to handle the situation. Either they'll have the smoking room sprayed and we get free breakfast, or we get to move to another hotel.

We chose to stay because we didn't want to experience Kansas City any more.

The next day, Dear's face was slightly swollen and she had nausea.

Turtle and I tried to have fun.

And we had our "free" breakfast.

We ordered so much, about $100 worth. When we checked out, the receptionist tried to charge us. Why wasn't I surprised? We explained the situation though and we finally got away with it!

Before we left the hotel, I decided to go to the toilet one last time, while having Dear and Turtle go ahead to the car.

While my body was getting rid of its waste, Dear called me with a very worried voice. There was a black woman who approached them. She warned Dear and Turtle that she has been mugged in that parking lot before so be careful. I didn't bother cleaning up well before I rushed to the car. We left and promised ourselves we won't come back to this city again!

Next stop, St. Louis.

The road trip (continued): Denverrrrrrrrr!

2010-02-21T17:59:00.000-08:00

Here's the previous post.

After we finished taking pictures with red cliffs, it was time to move on. We weren't too thrilled about Denver, compared to Las Vegas, Grand Canyon, and the Red Cliffs, but we had too rest somewhere, so why not Denver?

As usual, I normally take breaks in 1.5-2 hours intervals. I asked Dear to search for the nearest Starbucks, and the GPS took us to one in Copper Mountain.

It was a Starbucks inside a Target, but let me tell you that it was the Starbucks with the most beautiful view of all!

We hung out for a while to indulge in nature's beauty before we headed to the gas station. Again, this was the most beautiful gas station I've ever been to.

Our "kids" wanted a picture as well :)

We'd had enough pleasure, so we continued to our hotel. They had complimentary shuttle service so we asked them to take us to a sushi restaurant we found on Yelp. We tried to get Dear drunk by helping her order a Majito, or some cocktail of that kind.

Turtle and I had sake.

While we were still sober, we managed to take a group picture together.

We returned to the hotel to have some Wii fun with tipsy Dear.

Dear got sleepy really quickly, so she went to bed first, while Turtle and I continued playing Wii.

The next day we took a little stroll at a near by promenade. Looks a little bit like the 3rd Street Promenade in LA, but with trolleys. We had some fun.

Then it was time to move. Next destination was Kansas City.

We've submitted OUR rank order list!

2010-02-14T14:00:00.000-08:00

Valentine 2002: I gave a rose in a plastic bottle to Dear.

Valentine 2007: We registered our marriage with the District.

Valentine 2010: We submitted our rank ordered list.

Each of the Valentines I mentioned above marks a significant step in our lives, but since today is Valentine 2010, I would like to share our experience on the Match.

It's not easy at all for a foreign medical student to start medical residency in USA. In order to meet the requirements for many programs in USA, Thai medical grads need to complete at least 3 exams from the USMLE exam series. Seeing Dear prepare for them confirms to me that neither the GRE general nor subject test compares well to the USMLE. For each exam, Dear spent about 6 months preparing for them, and let me tell you each 6 months weren't easy ones.

Here's what we've been though.

USMLE Step 1 (September - December 2007)

In early 2007, I heard good news from UCLA that they want me to be a bruin. Dear had no plan at all coming to USA, until Dear's and my family suggested we got married and lived together. The wedding was in August 2007, so there's no way we can prepare both for the wedding and the exam and do well on both.

We moved to USA in September. Dear never had a good background in English, so it was a tough transition bringing her to the States. Studying for the USMLE exam during this transition was extremely hard. Plus my Mom had a heart surgery near the exam, so we decided to spend our time taking care of my Mom rather than preparing for the exam. At the end, Dear got a pretty decent score :)

USMLE Step 2 CK (January - June 2008)

In January 2008, Dear and I had to separate. She got a research position in Michigan (of course we didn't get divorced!) It was another hardship for both of us, but Dear was the one preparing for the exam. The stress from the separation and her new job and environment prevented her from effectively preparing for the test. In June, she flew to LA to see me before taking the test (the test was also held in LA). This time she owned the test!

USMLE Step 2 CS (July - December 2008)

The USMLE Step 2 CS is a very unique test in which the test takers have to interview, diagnose, and write up patient notes for 12 patients, each in 15 minutes. They looked at the test taker's professionalism, English, and the accuracy/likelihood of the diagnosis. I know one really smart doctor who failed because of his English, and this scared us.

Dear had nobody to practice with in Michigan. Even her English teacher wasn't that good a mock patient. I decided to have Dear come to LA early December and I would find a teacher for her.

The Thai doctor who failed (but passes gracefully after the retake) was willing to help. I even extended myself as far as posting notes on the elevators in the UCLA medical school. In the end, one super-generous UCLA resident offered help in exchange for good Thai food. (Thanks Bill!) And she passed!!! I recorded her screaming when she passed as well.

The California Letter (June 2008 - March 2009)

Californians are sometimes conceited and that's my guess why California residency programs require what is called the California Letter as part of the application. In order to get this letter, we have to fill up a bunch of paper work. Dear also needs to have her fingerprint scanned for an FBI background check.

We submitted the paperwork in June 2008. Around November, a lady at the Medical Board of California called and told Dear that she needed a certified copy of the diploma. Dear had sent both, but the problem is that our university in Thailand used the word "certified translation" instead of "certified copy". This is really confusing because the registrar only offers certified translations. We ended up sending the original diploma instead. Four months later, we finally got the California Letter.

The Dean's Letter (December 2008 - October 2009)

Back in December 2008 when we visited Thailand, Dear visited the Dean at her medical school to get "The Dean's Letter". The Dean's Letter includes a letter of recommendation from the Dean and Dear's performance compared to other students (given as a chart).

We have quite an obsolete computer system, plus Dear was probably the first student in her medical school to come to USA for residency, so both the registrar office and medical school had no idea how to make such a document.

Dear ended up asking for help from one nice medical faculty, who in turn called up the registrar office to arrange the documents. We got a big pile of everyone's grades with their names crossed out for privacy purposes.

My job was to input those grades into a Microsoft Excel file and create a chart. It took me about one full week, but we finally got the charts.

For the Dean's recommendation part, he told Dear to seek help from her advisor to write up a draft. We got pretty much everything ready to be signed by the Dean in September 2009. It was a long journey.

The Residency Application (June - September 2009)

Now that we got everything out of the way, it's time for the applications. First we need to see which programs we are eligible for applying. We spent days visiting each program's homepage to read the requirements and narrowed down from about 400 programs to 135 programs.

One day in September, it was time to apply. We woke up at 5am PST (which was 8am EST) and Dear logged in to the central system and applied to 130+ programs.

The Interviews (November 2009 - January 2010)

Starting in October, Dear started to get interview invitation letters from some programs we applied to. I decided to accompany her to the interviews, so that I could help her prepare and organize the transportation, plus I would have a chance to see the cities I might be living in for the next 3 years.

We ended up getting about 20 interviews. We managed to group some cities together to reduce flying, but traveling was still extremely exhausting and expensive. It's an investment though. If we're happy for the next 3 years, both Dear and I will make money to cover these expenses easily.

The Rank Order List (February 2010)

After we've finished interviewing at all the places, it's time to rank the programs. What happens is we rank which programs we like, and programs rank which applicants they like. The system ensures that applicants will get into the program they like most, given that the program has space for them -- whether or not the program has space for them is also determined how the program ranks them.

In our part, this includes a lot of prioritizing. It's a huge family decision, so we have to look at all the advantages and disadvantages of each program before we rank them. Some programs are extremely good for Dear, but I might end up unemployed. On the other hand, some programs are in cities I have so much to do, but Dear will have no future if she wants to do fellowship later.

Finally, we decided on our rank order list and just submitted it minutes ago. The only last thing to do is wait for the Match in March!

Anyway, Happy Valentine!

The road trip (continued) : Utah

2010-02-10T14:06:00.000-08:00

In case you have no idea what I'm talking about, read my previous post (http://ok-cool.blogspot.com/2009/12/grand-canyon.html).

After a couple of pictures at the beautiful Grand Canyon, it was time for us to move on. It was really hot at the time so we rushed to the car and headed to Utah.

We booked a room at Red Cliffs Lodge (http://www.redcliffslodge.com/). The woman who we talked to during the reservation phone call warned us about being off the map. Yep, the place isn't in our Garmin. Fortunately, we were given pretty clear directions, although we had no idea what the roads would be like.

The first couple of hours were just red deserts.

We drove for a while to see more red deserts plus traffic.

Ok, this is pretty boring, but we couldn't complain much when we're in the middle of nowhere.

After a long desert ride, we reached a city I think was called Moab. It was dark already (drats) but we kind of had a sense that we were on a narrow road between a river and a cliff. Since the lodge is not on our GPS, we really needed to pay attention to the signs. We drove on that road pretty long that we actually thought we were heading the wrong way.

And finally, we saw the Red Cliffs Lodge sign. We checked-in an got to our room. It was definitely impressive.

There was a separated dining area as well.

At this point, nothing was more suitable than to treat ourselves with instant noodles.

Then we went to bed...

The next day we woke up and was awed by the huge cliffs next to our room.

Not to mention the river we drove along the night before.

Too bad we didn't have time for the pool, but the whole experience was definitely breathtaking.

Our next stop was Denver, Colorado. See you again.

Ouch...

2010-01-28T22:16:00.001-08:00

Today Dear's feeling were really hurt. And since Dear's pain is contagious, I'm twice as hurt. Just wanted to make note of the record. This is my worst day of the year so far. Who knows? Maybe there's more to come...

Success VS Happiness

2010-01-08T15:35:00.000-08:00

What would you choose between success and happiness if they don't come together?

I know some people who do everything to get to where they want. If I were in their positions, I wouldn't be happy, because I'll be competing all the time, which in some way means making more enemies and being jealous of those who are better.

Some people, especially smart ones, love competition. An excuse I hear the most is that they were doing it for their family, and I don't understand.

It's funny how they know that I don't understand. They must know everything I've been through to say that.

I thought that a family could be happy regardless of how successful they are. Is it not true? Am I too naive?

Things I learned in 2009

2009-12-31T11:05:00.000-08:00

Disclaimer: These are my point of views. I'm not imposing them on you!

This year has been a tough year. I've moved twice. I've been traveling nonstop. Dear has been having a hard time consistently. I've been having conflicts with so many people, and I didn't call for that. But that also means I've learned a lot and will be able to cope with these kind of situations easier in 2010.

These are things I've learned both directly and from others in 2009. I have no intention of ranting or attacking anyone, and I'm sure my good friends know that!

1) You can lose somebody you love any time.
2) If everything seems bad, but you have at least one person you can always talk to, then you're life is already good.
3) Don't lose hope when you lose a friend. There are a lot of good people left out there.
4) Don't flirt when you're already in a relationship, and don't flirt with people who already have a relationship. Flirting equals cheating.
5) Don't act like a baby and listen to people who care about you.
6) When something good happens to you, beware of gossip.
7) Stress can change somebody nice to an insensitive person.
8) Don't get in the way of ego-centric people. They're always right.
9) Generous people sometimes aren't nice people.
10) Stay away from cynics. They never see the good in human.
11) Backstabbing is everywhere.
12) Balance carefully between somewhere safe and somewhere cheap.
13) For me, hanging out with a few close friends at a quiet dinner is much more fun than partying with 15 people I don't know.
14) An irresponsible person isn't always a bad person.
15) Don't assume people are talking about you on their Facebook status, IM status, or blog. You're not the only one in his/her world.

Great things about this Christmas

2009-12-26T19:02:00.000-08:00

I usually write Christmas things in my Thai blog (http://ashogay.spaces.live.com/), but I have a very good reason why to also update this US blog as well -- I've celebrated Christmas in USA this year.

Although it wasn't the same old Christmas, with the same vibe I get every year when I go to Siam Paragon or Central World or have that family and best friends reunion dinner at home, I still spent my time with my family and my best friend here: Dear.

Things have happened, great ones. I feel so good I had to write my feelings down.

1) The lost letter

First of all, in August, we moved from Michigan back to Los Angeles. Before moving, we filed a form to the US Immigrations, aka USCIS, to renew Dear's greencard. At that point, it was going to expire in September.

We didn't have an address in LA yet, so we used my cousin's. In October, my (other) cousin whose address I recently used, told me that USCIS had approved the greencard renewal application and told us that USCIS would send the new card to Dear in 30 days. The approval date was September 15, so we expected to get the card very soon.

From that point, we checked our mailbox industriously, sometimes even twice a day. The reason we needed that greencard so much was that we were planning to go back to Thailand to visit our parents in January. Not much time was left. We could have got Dear's passport stamped but still would need to go through a lot of hassle again.

We lost hope in December after visiting USPS just to receive an I-don't-care attitude from the staff.

However, about 2-3 days before Christmas, my cousin called me. It was good news! The card has arrived. Somebody had stolen the letter from my cousin's mailbox, probably because he thought it was a credit card, and returned it back. Thattaboy! Be good on Christmas!

To me it was kind of a miracle we got the lost card back, and that made me love Christmas even more.

2) My family and best friend

On Christmas eve, Dear and I made a lot of food together and enjoyed The Polar Express, You've Got Mail, and Ratatouille as a celebration. (They were on TV.) And on Christmas we played and sang a lot of songs together. Although we were here in USA, we felt home. Dear was here with me, and she was both a family and best friend to be with me on Christmas day. That's all I'm asking for.

3) The kid

Just today, we had a chance to visit one of our good friends. We had to meet at an Adventist church, which we've never been to before because I'm Catholic. We received a warm welcome and smile by everybody we met there, and throughout the congregation, a lot of Christmas songs were sung, ones I haven't heard in a while. Plus, there was a performance by a piano teacher and student that played together. All of this brought back my good memories during my childhood. I used to sing all those songs at school, and I used to play the piano with my teacher as well. I felt the child in me, and I love that feeling.

I don't expect these good things to stop, as we will be visiting Thailand in January, and Dear's interviews will pay off in March. So I'll be waiting with an optimistic mind. I hope it's fair to blame Christmas for all these good things happening to us.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

The road trip (continued): The Grand Canyon

2009-12-04T07:58:00.000-08:00

In case you don't remember, I blogged about our trip to Las Vegas several months ago. (http://ok-cool.blogspot.com/2009/09/road-trip-continued-las-vegas.html)

As I remember, we left Las Vegas around 2pm due to the problem of getting stuff into the car. (As a reminder, we're on a road trip.)

According to Google Maps, it's about 5-6 hours from Las Vegas, and of course it's even more when I drive because I like to stop and rest (and make a pee pee) every somewhat 100 miles.

Despite the summer climate, it was already dark when we reached there. It was around 8-9pm and thank God there's a McDonald's around entrance of the Grand Canyon National Park. We (I) bought some nuggets, filet-o-fish, and fries to survive the night.

The deeper we went into the park, the darker it got, and because it's a park, there's not much artificial light. In fact, I remember seeing a moose or the like.

We reached our lodging place about an hour later. It wasn't far, but we were kind of lost and couldn't find the exact place we were staying. After several phone calls and driving around the same one-way paths, we finally checked in.

Now remember that we were moving. Each destination we go, we need to get our essential stuff out of the car. By essential, I meant instant noodles, the water boiler, precious items, and clothes. Thanks to Dear, we bought a couple of flash lights back in Vegas. Otherwise, we would never be able to find all our stuff.

Once we got everything ready, we walked to our room. We noticed we were walking along some sort of canyon but it was dark and we couldn't see anything. Once we got to the room, we were starving. Turtle and Dear made instant noodles using the coffee maker while I had my McDonald's. That concluded our day.

The next day we woke up and was impressed by the amazing view outside our windows. It was the canyon!

After checking out and spending about another half hour to pack our stuff back into the car, we figured maybe we should ship more of our stuff to Michigan. We visited the post office and did some "weight lifting", i.e. shipping a guitar amplifier, a DVD player, and a lamp to Ann Arbor.

We rested a little bit when we were done.

Then we headed to the hot spots.

The view was just amazing!

Even the dogs liked the Grand Canyon.

Our next stop was Utah, so we decided to leave before it's late. I don't like driving when it's dark.

More excuses

2009-11-22T21:31:00.001-08:00

I haven't updated my blog for two months, and I have an excuse. This is my third time this year traveling across the country. For what? For Dear's medical residency interviews. What a transitive experience. Now I have too much to write when I have free time.

The road trip (continued) : Las Vegas

2009-09-15T11:57:00.000-07:00

I've heard from many people that Vegas was a fun place to go. A lot of movies also take place in Vegas. We decided to see for our own eyes and, to no wonder, our first destination after leaving LA was Las Vegas.

Keep in mind that the car was really, really, really packed. Think of a salad dish in a Mongolian buffet restaurant where customers try to fit as much as possible in one dish. That was the situation of our car. Plus we had a friend, Turtle, who accompanied us. He got his personal "suite" at the back seat. You can call it a cubicle if you wanted, although it was a cubicle that imposed his sitting posture for the next 6 hours.

The use of space was very efficient. There absolutely no bubbles. Every single small space had to be filled up with shoes or household items. I was lucky to be the driver because I had to have leg space to drive. Nevertheless, I could not see anything through my rear mirrors except personal stuff.

It was 7pm when we left LA and we were sleep-deprived from the day before, yet we still had to make it to Las Vegas because of the hotel reservation at the Venetian was too late to be cancelled.

I kept my speed around 60-65mph despite the 70mph speed limit on the highways because I was afraid a bump on the road could cause the car tires to burst. I kept my lane changing to minimum because I could only see through the side mirrors. Everybody was tired, but we had to keep talking in order to be awake for another 5-6 hours.

After seeing a couple of "fake Vegases" (cities that seemingly had bright lights and casinos) we finally reached Las Vegas. Our GPS was acting wacky, causing us to be in the wrong lane several times, but we managed to get to Venetian at 1pm.

The weather was absolutely hot, as hot as Thailand's summer I could say. It took us half an hour to get our luggage out of the car and EACH OF US ended up having 4 bags to carry.

We wandered listlessly to find the lobby which was sooooo far away. After we successfully checked in and got the swipe cards, we headed to our room, assuming it would be a little bit closer than the parking lot.

We were wrong.

We got a room pretty much almost the furthest from the elevator. We wanted to cut down the expenses as much as possible so we didn't use the bellboy service. It was the longest walk from the lobby to our room I've ever made. We reached the room at 2pm-ish and went straight to bed without a bath :)

The first thing that came to our mind in the morning was we needed to ship as much as possible. We went to the business center and shipped two huge boxes of clothes and household items that weren't needed during the trip. After all the shipping was done, we wanted to have fun. We skimmed through the shows they had. To bad there were not many magic shows on Sunday except one whose name I already forgot. We went to that show at the Flamingo and on the way back we bought some Thai food, In-N-Out, and a new GPS (the old GPS was becoming a brick).

We came back to the hotel to have the dinner we bought from outside. We also bought some huge margaritas from a store downstairs.

After our lovely meals, we had fun with the casinos, and I made $30 from the slot machines.

Before we slept we figured we were still missing the "boat ride" and the pool. The next morning we decided to book the boat ride tickets, go to the pool, then come back to the boat. We went downstairs in our pajamas (but with underwear of course). I brought my credit card but they didn't accept it without my ID, which I left in the room. Damn! It took me another 10-15 minutes to run back to my room and get my ID.

We booked the boat ride near check-out time and we had little time for the pool. After we changed to our bathing suits, we rushed down to the pool for a 5 minute submerge and came back to have a bath. After that, we had the boat ride and it was pretty cool, although I didn't really want to tip the helmsman who kept chatting with another helmsman, plus she was even on her cell phone during the ride.

When we were done with everything, it was 11.30am. I tried to call the reception for checkout, but after half an our of no answer, I discovered I'd be better of checking out in person. Dear and Turtle headed to the car to re-pack stuff; the car was still full of stuff although we shipped a lot. I went to check out. The lobby was so crowded, and it took me about 30 minutes at least to check out. By the time I came back to the car, Dear and Turtle were sweating because it was still really hot.

Eventually we were ready to go! We stopped by an outlet to have lunch. And Turtle had a running-stomach which delayed our take off time by about half an hour.

Next destination, Grand Canyon!

Words: How hard is it to say congratulations?

2009-09-14T15:27:00.000-07:00

I've been writing about words in my Thai blog. I was essentially talking about what is good and bad, if said to other people. I thought it would be a good idea to expand on each of those tips, as well as adding new ones, in this blog.

Recently, Dear got her first interview invitation from one of the medical residency programs in the US. I've seen what she's been through: all those exams that took her 18 months to finish, her perseverance with her not-so-nice coworker (also for 18 months), and finally all her research on which residency programs are good and accept foreign graduates.

Been through applying to a master's program, I can say that the GRE is tiny, when compared to the USMLE. Three full months is enough for the GRE, but you probably need six full months for EACH step of the USMLE and she needed at least 3 steps as a requirement. Computer science programs in US tend to like foreign people, while medical residency programs tend to like US students. I applied to about 10 programs and got accepted by 4. My wife had to apply to about 130, and so far, only one program has invited her to the interview.

Hope you see my point.

After going through the trial, it's something to celebrate, for sure, when her first interview invitation came out. We were both happy, telling the good news to our friends. We received two kinds of responses though.
1) Yayyyyyyy! Congrats!
2) Well, a lot of people helped you. Actually you should thank Mr.X or Mr.Y, too.

Yes, there exists people who answered 2.

Another example was when Dear passed the USMLE, and told it to her friends. Again, there were two responses.
1) Yayyyyyyy! Congrats!
2) Really? If you managed to get that score, I'm sure I could do a lot better. Is the exam THAT easy? I should take the test right away.

Apparently, respond number 1 is shorter than number 2, but I wonder why some people choose to be too "natural" instead of being a little biased for the sake of happiness. To me, those people are ego-centric, thinking that they are better than others. Their responses to others' achievements are, "So what? I can also do that if I wanted." Those people just don't know themselves, and they should get a mirror for Christmas.

I'm done with my rant. Here's what I wanted to say. Whenever somebody is happy about something, don't forget to say that little "Congratulations!" To you, it might be something trivial, but to the other person, it's a big thing.

Where did the roadtrip stories go?

2009-09-03T00:04:00.000-07:00

I gotta tell you, I've been really busy recently just until yesterday.

Here's basically what happened: I moved twice within 2 months.

Moving from Los Angeles to Ann Arbor was pretty fun, but when you learn the news that you gotta move back to Los Angeles the following month, it's not that fun.

Our apartment in Ann Arbor had two bedrooms, one bathroom, and one huge living room. It was inherited from my cousin. I mean, we continued our cousin's lease with the landlord. What follows is left-overs we've never seen before. Where the heck did those 20 pair of shoes in the closet come from, if you know what I'm talking about?

The fact that it was much larger than the apartment in LA made it worse. Instead of a studio to take care of, we get an apartment about 5-6 times larger.

We didn't have to hurry, had it not been because the US Immigration scheduled Dear's fingerprint in Dallas so soon. Yes, we had to drive down to Dallas for a 15 minutes finger scan. Why Dallas? Because it's the address we used when I filed Dear's petition for permanent residence. We considered that our permanent address because it was my cousin's home, and we were virtually welcome to stay whenever we needed a place to sleep.

Let's not forget Dear's medical residency application as well. It was due on September 1 -- well, you can submit it later than that but it decreases the chance of getting into a medical center you want.

As a result, things were so hectic: the green card, the driver's license, the health insurance, my sister's wedding, the visa, Dear's new job, and Dear's application.

Everything is pretty much settled now, so I hope I have time to write more about the road trip to Ann Arbor.

And the road trip back to LA indeed.

The Moving Out (Part 2)

2009-07-27T07:35:00.000-07:00

Continued from part 1.

So I thought it was pretty much over, unaware of the fact that it wasn't even half way through.

Our scheduled rehearsal for the move was one night before the actual move. We took all our empty luggage downstairs, leaving the boxes and stuff in our apartment.

They seemed to fit well in the car, so we slept peacefully that day.

Boy, how wrong I was!

I did had a feeling that the boxes had no space in the car, so we decided to ship some stuff to Ann Arbor the day we were planning to leave. On the big day, I slept at 6am. I spent all night putting little stuff around the room into boxes for shipping.

I woke up at 9am, didn't take a shower, and headed to one USPS that opened on Saturday. After shipping about 7 boxes (improperly packaged due to the lack of shipping tape and suitable-sized boxes), we headed to Ralphs (a grocery store) to get myself a Rockstar (an energy drink).

After I got my energy, we headed to EZ Lube (an auto repair shop) to do a full car check up before the road trip. It was lunch time when we hit EZ Lube but we weren't lucky enough to have dim sum at Monterey Park as we planned the night before.

The EZ Lube guy said it would take about an hour. The problem was we had one more computer desk and a huge printer/fax/scanner, which wasn't sold on Craigslist, sitting around in our room. Dear suggested we needed help.

I picked up my phone and called one of the most reliable friends I know in LA (who had a car), Pink. I asked Pink to drive Dear to my cousin's home in Hollywood, along with the unsold desk and printer. My cousin said she would hold on to them for me; she still had hope we would come back to LA one day. So Pink got a free date with Dear.

My car was ready to hit the road, although my apartment wasn't ready to be inspected, by the time Dear got back to our apartment. Lunch time! (1.30pm)

During lunch, I made a rough estimate that we would be ready for Las Vegas around 4pm. I was wrong again.

Around 4pm, we were still cleaning up the room. The small stuff sitting around amounted up to a couple of huge boxes. Pink to the rescue again! She took approximately half of what we had left and even volunteered to send the other half to us in Ann Arbor.

We took everything to the car downstairs, and I headed to the manager's office to return the keys. It was 5pm already.

Now the fun part, literally fitting everything into the car. It took us about 2 hours. We had luggage, we had boxes, we had guitars, we had lamps, we had shoes, we had socks, we had instant noodles, blah blah blah...

The more stuff we couldn't fit in the car, the more stuff Pink got to ship. She was nice enough not to complain a word.

Finally, 7pm we were out of our apartment, Yay!!! What a day, and I only slept for 3 hours.

This whole mess made me more experienced in moving. Next time you're gonna move, seek consultation from me :)

Acknoledgement: Thank you so much Pink! If it hadn't been because of you, we would have had to dump a lot of our stuff or postpone the road trip.

Next chapter: What happened in Las Vegas.

The Moving Out (Part 1)

2009-07-23T13:37:00.000-07:00

I've always been an expert in making my room messy, and my mom knows that well. Before my mom came to LA for my graduation, Dear and I helped cleaning up our apartment. When mom arrived, it looked good, but she still had doubts about fitting all the stuff into our car for the road trip. I told her everything's planned and not to be worried about.

So after my parents went back to Thailand, the moving started.

I had so much furniture and I posted a lot of them on Craigslist. I also emailed a couple of friends if they were interested in buying the furniture. Many household items were sold quite easily because of their small sizes.

The problem? The queen size bed and sofa bed.

It took me a couple of weeks to sell the bed. This person emailed me and asked if she could come at look. She stopped by after school to decide, and she liked the bed. It took us about an hour to go get her car, come back, and move the bed into the car. We were sweating when we were done, but we had to pick up our friend at the airport that night. By the time we got home, we were so exhausted.

Now the sofa bed situation was a bit more complicated. The first person who contacted me asked if I could hold on to it for her. After a lot of frustration from losing many buyers because of holding this sofa bed for her, she finally showed up with her boyfriend and a truck. The sofa bed was huge. I don't remember exactly how the IKEA people even got it through the door, but magically after half an hour, we managed to get it through the door.

Our next stop was the elevator. It took us another half an hour to get the sofa bed downstairs and I guess a lot of tenants weren't happy about that. Our last obstacle was the getting it through the two-door apartment entrance. It doesn't sound like a problem if there weren't the fact that only one door was open. The manager and maintenance guy refused to open the other door for us, shoot... Fortunately, some where in the middle of my argument with the manager, the sofa bed got its way out. This proves that USC people are not only strong but clever. (Yes, the buyer was a USC alumni.) So the whole thing took almost two hours and four people.

I thought everything was over but it wasn't. We never had the "dress rehearsal". Simply put, it's trying to fit everything left into the car before we really leave LA. And that merits another entry so see you next time!

The Reunion

2009-07-09T23:27:00.000-07:00

Since Dear and I both came to USA, we got to stay together for only one quarter. It was a do-it-for-the-best-of-your-future thing. I had to stay in LA, obviously because I got accepted to UCLA. But Dear got a research position in Ann Arbor which was hard to turn down because it would help so much in her medical residency application the following year.

So January 2008 marked our first month of separation. Oh, boy it was hard. I had to start making myself as busy as I could. I started to hang out with a lot of friends instead of staying home with Dear. It was fun although it never brought about the same feelings when I hung out with Dear.

Each break, either I flew to Ann Arbor or Dear flew to LA. It was mostly me traveling to see her because she had to work. Each visit was so much fun. We got to play snow, find good things to eat, and renovate our apartment.

One of the best visits was summer break in 2008, where we got to go back to Thailand for a month then stay in Ann Arbor for another two months. We got to see our best friends in Thailand, plus we had our own time in USA afterwards. We traveled to places almost every single weekend. To me, that was marriage!

When summer ended, everything came back to normal: loneliness. I decided to join a party of several Thai people who studied at UCLA. I ended up with a couple of new Thai friends. It was nice to see Thai friends again. At least they spoke the same language I spoke to Dear.

And there was thanksgivings. Dear was able to squeeze out some free time from work so she flew to LA and that was a blast. I can tell you that the food in LA is wayyyyyy better than in Ann Arbor.

We went back to Thailand during Christmas 2008 mainly because my Mom had heart surgery. Instead of going to places, we both took care of Mom and slept in the hospital for more than a week. It was still considered family time though.

Time flew and when I looked at my calendar, it was spring break again. It was my last spring break to be alone, and I thought it was a good idea to surprise Dear with an engagement ring I bought from money I made, not my parents money. I can't explain enough how much she lovvvvvveddddd it.

My last quarter at UCLA went by pretty fast because it was the thesis quarter. Everything seemed to be in a rush and it was June 4 before I knew it. It was the day Dear flew to LA for my graduation!

This was too important an occasion to have normal food. We dressed up and headed to Beverly Hills. We went to a luxurious restaurant and ordered one appetizer because we couldn't afford a full meal but the atmosphere was worth the investment.

From that point on, we never got separated again.

And that's the story of Um and Dear's reunion.

Agenda for my next blog entries

2009-07-09T17:43:00.000-07:00

So there's this huge gap between the previous blog entry and this one. You wanna know why? I've graduated!

Yeah, so much has been going on in my last quarter. The number one event was the reunion of Dear and I. Next was the visiting of my parents and my sister. Then my graduation. And finally the road trip from Los Angeles to Ann Arbor. Oh, actually the real "finally" was the unpacking in Ann Arbor.

The sum of everything was a wonderful experience and I'm gonna write everything down in my blog as history.

See you soon!

Do you fold your underwear?

2009-05-25T11:18:00.000-07:00

After close scrutinization, I finally came to a conclusion that this blog entry isn't PG-13, so here it is.

"Not Folding Your Underwear is a Time Saver"
Amarin Phaosawasdi

========
Abstract
========
In this article, we explore and discuss what betterment entails from not folding or ironing underwear.

===============================
We Shouldn't Fold Our Underwear
===============================
There are two main reasons I think people shouldn't fold their underwear.

First, underwear is small. Unless you have a butt of breast like a mature elephant, you will need more detail ironing/folding underwear. That wastes time.

And Second, you normally don't wear underwear without normal clothes on top of it, so there's no need to worry if there are wrinkles.

I believe this is a huge contribution to the time management research community.

=================
On the Other Side
=================
The are some people who still believe folding underwear is for the best of human life. I will categorize those people below.
1) Perfectionists. These people can't bear the fact that their underwear is gone unfolded.
2) People whose mother/father/girlfriend/boyfriend has full control of the closet. If they don't fold their underwear, they won't get allowance or they risk getting a break up.
3) People who are over-sensitive and become itchy from wearing unfolded clothes. These people need their clothes folded for health reasons.
4) People who live in other people's houses. They need to look tidy; otherwise the owner might kick them out.

I don't fit into any of the above, so I don't want to spend time -- that could otherwise be used on my thesis -- folding my underwear.

============
Related Work
============
We've read several time-management articles and books. Most of them attack web-surfing and checking email. This article focuses on folding underwear which is a novel research area.

===========
Future work
===========
So far we have discussed why we shouldn't fold underwear. We haven't proposed any new algorithms for doing so in a manner that will make the most efficient use of time.

Burgers

2009-04-27T23:04:00.000-07:00

Oh boy, this week was pretty unhealthy.

I didn't plan this.
It was pretty much a destiny, and I doubt if six consecutive burger days will ever appear again in the chronicles of Amarin.

It's a record that must be remembered.

Wednesday, my Chinese friend invited me to co-op, which is a housing near campus. We had a burger buffet, where you make your own burger and eat as much as you want.

Thursday, I had Inn-N-Out with a Thai friends just because I craved it.

Friday, I had Carl's Jr. with my supervisor, aka friend.

Saturday, the CS department had a picnic, and guess what? They had BBQ and burgers. I had one, and took one home.

Sunday, I stayed home almost all day, so I microwaved the burger from Saturday for lunch.

Monday (today), I had a burger at Bomb Shelter, a fast food store near the building I had class.

How's that? Impressive, huh?

Listening

2009-04-27T00:26:00.000-07:00

I was born in USA, but when I was five, I had to move back to Thailand because of family matters.
So I would consider myself a native Thai speaker.

I excelled in English classes at school because of my English background, but I always considered writing damn hard.
Making the grammar correct was one thing, but writing concise and coherent paragraphs was a pain.

After I graduated from college, I worked in an international company, where email (in English) was the main method of communication.
That helped my writing a lot.

After working for two years, I wanted to study further.
A while before I applied to UCLA, I had to take the TOEFL.
They switched to something called the iBT TOEFL that year.
It contained four components:
Writing, okay as long as I write emails in English every day.
Reading, okay as long as I read English books every day.
Listening, okay as long as I watch sitcoms every day.
Speaking, whaaaaaa???

I didn't see that coming, and I didn't see a decent score on the speaking component coming either.

At that time I though speaking was the hardest part of English.
But after two years in USA, I find listening the hardest.

People in USA don't speak like New Yorkers we see in TV shows.
People here speak fast, sometimes they mumble, and many people have accents: Chinese, Switzerland, Russian, Japanese, Indian, African American, Texan, and the Latino accent which I find the hardest to understand.

I wonder if Americans have problems like this.

I think my friend is a genius

2009-04-20T22:54:00.000-07:00

I just came back from a computer programming competition.
I didn't win anything and in fact several undergrads scored better than me.

BUT...

The winner who made no errors at all was one of my friends.
I'd bet he finished in 30 minutes (the whole thing was about 3 hours).
This is one guy I'll definitely never equate.
He's a true genius.
The best thing about him is that he's so laid back.
He's not those nerds who study all the time.

And what's good about them?
Well, they use less time in understanding and doing what we would otherwise spend an hour on.
Isn't that good?
You have more free time in life.

It's all about using our precious time as worth as possible.

Man, I envy him.
He has more time for Nintendo and music.

Being a good person VS not being a bad person

2009-04-18T22:28:00.000-07:00

Suppose there was a man who was so nice. Everybody in the world is aware of his good deeds. But then one day everyone found out he was actually a criminal.

Now there's another person who never did anything good for the society. He has a happy family with a couple of dogs though. And this guy never committed a crime.

Who do you think did a better job of being human?
I would rather be the one who never committed a crime.

Let's make this a bit more complicated.
How about this?

If somebody you loved was pointed in the head with a gun by a stranger.
The stranger tells you to kill a lady you don't know right across the street.
If you do so, he will let the person you love go.
If you don't, he will kill the person you love.
What would you do?

I'd do neither.
I'd probably run towards the gunner like a maniac, hoping he'd shoot me in a way that I'll survive.
Then hopefully he will run away leaving everybody safe after I'm down.

It's just a thing I ruminate in my free time.
Hope it never happens.

And my line was crossed

2009-04-16T22:44:00.000-07:00

For the sake of anonymity I'll try to tell the story giving out the least information I can.

I've been interacting with this person who's pretty immature and unprofessional I would say.
He/she always talks back to me, swears all the time, and has belittled my relationship with Dear.

I have done a good job being patient with him/her but today I snapped.
A childish act was made, and I had to clean up this person's mess.
Well, I didn't blurt out anything, but in my mind I've had it.

I'm probably going to forgive him/her by next week thought because it's a good thing to do, but anyway I think I should blog this to see how many times I will snap this year.

On the bright side, if I'm gonna be somebody huge, I'll have to be able to deal with these kind of people all the time.
I'll take this as a great exercise. :)

What's wrong with being a physicist?

2009-04-13T22:05:00.000-07:00

So there was this day I had dinner with my Thai friends. Interesting enough, we were all from different fields: physics, biochemistry, chemical engineering, math science, and computer science. We had a conversation and it got to the point where we were discussing if everything in physics was an assumption.

For example, we observe nature, we come up with F = ma and we test if the formula holds. If it does all the time, we assume that this is fact. However, if one day we discovered that F = ma + n, where n is the mass of an alien far, far away, then that fact is not a fact any more.

Everybody (except me) began to thrash physics and the physics guy. "So is everything we're relying on, based on assumptions?!!"

I let people bombard him because
1) he always disdains my joke attempts, so I let him get some taste of his own medicine.
2) arguing with 3 more people is no use. They're not gonna listen to me.

So for reason number 2, here I am writing a blog.

I tend to appreciate physicists to be able to come up with a methodology to work with something unknown.

Math is a language defined by human. It's accurate, and whatever is proven, ummm ... is proven. People define 1 + 1 = 2. Skeptics don't believe in such, but I do because it's based on how we define it. If 1+1 doesn't equal 2, then we're probably interpreting the equation in another language than math.

On the other hand, physics is the study of nature. Nature wasn't created by human, so we don't know what lies beneath the mechanics of the world. Proving something in physics is like trying to figure out the Coca-Cola solution: we know how Coke tastes but with don't know how to make it. Only Coca-Cola Inc (which can be compared to Mother Nature) knows the exact mixture. The best we can do is try to guess solutions and taste them over and over. If we come up with something that tastes pretty much like Coke, we "assume" we had it.

Well I guess physicists have done there best to come up with their "assumptions" nearest to the truth of nature, so I respect them. How could we possibly do better than that?

Dealing with people

2009-04-09T22:51:00.001-07:00

I remember when I was in high school, one day my friend said to me that all us geniuses (he's referring to people in the sciences, engineering, medicine) will end up being working for them businessmen.

Back then, I thought it was a bit unfair that celebral people ended up working hard for people who make phone calls and go to meetings.

About 5 years from then I got to know a whole variety of people. How should I list this? Cool, selfish, lovable, nice, smart, dull, you name it plus the combination, but not necessarily the permutations (what a nerd), of those. I must say that dealing with people is SUPER HARD. When there's about 3 people or more, it's almost impossible to make everybody happy or at most satisfied.

After all we are social animals and we have to deal with other people all the time. Admit it, if you have at least one best friend, you are a social animal.

Here's a point I'm trying to make. How many hours a day do you spend on your lab experiments? If your lab has people -- and I guess most labs do because they would be out of business with no people -- then you're dealing with people. When you have lunch, when you travel to the lab, when you're in the elevator, there must be some point where you interact with another human being.

This is why managers make more money than scientists: they are skilled at things that consume most of the time in our lives. But wait, we must not forget that scientists are the ones who made great creations in the world.

So the take-away for today's blogging is: If you want to be a millionaire, do business. If you want to do something for the world, be a scientist.

How to insult me

2009-03-15T12:48:00.001-07:00

I've come up with some tips for anybody who wants to insult me.

1. Ask what I think is cool, then say it's nonsense/funny/horrible.
2. Say that I'm not committed.
3. Ask me some questions. If I can't answer them, say that you'll ask somebody who's clever.

I've been through all of the above, surprisingly by some of my good friends, and it wasn't fun at all.

What boyfriends want

2009-03-01T21:58:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine recently broke up with her boyfriend for real.
The reason I said for real is break-ups don't happen that easily.
You usually get pseudo-breakups and then the next thing you notice is you're still a lovely couple.

Back to the main idea, she was so sad and blamed herself the reason for the break-up.
She said she probably wasn't the type her ex liked.
One good thing about breaking up is you know your flaws and get to improve yourself. She absolutely took advantage of that.
She asked me, "What do men like and not like?"

Well...

Men don't like women that are too touchy. Men tend to say or do stupid little things such as not calling when the call was assumed. Girls shouldn't take that too seriously.

Men don't like women that need them 24/7. They need some of their own personal time, or time with their friends.

Men don't like women that keep asking them to do something they don't really like. Suppose the lady likes going to the movies, but the guy doesn't enjoy movies that much, it would be a pain to be asked out to a movie often. Special occasions are okay though. Just make sure it's not too often.

Men don't like women that want total ownership. Men have friends who are women because they are also considered "friends". It's insensible not to let your boyfriend talk to women that are just his friends.

Men don't like capricious women. We know there exists something out there called a menstrual period, but sometimes women can be way too unreasonable even without a period.

Men don't like women that tend to argue whatever they say. Another way to say this is that women that are too smart can be annoying because they know so much and like to correct every single detail.

Men like women who are crazy about them. A sentence like, "To me, you're more attractive than Brad Pitt" makes a man feel special.

Men like women to take care of them. When men feel bad/sad/grumpy/etc., women seem so sweet when they ask and try to help.

Men like loyal women. Do I need to explain?

That's pretty much the main things a reasonable man would ask from a woman.
It actually looks indeed like a best friend relationship. The only difference is the degree of romance.
Finally, I don't represent men! This is just my personal opinion.

Good luck!

How gentle are you on computers?

2009-02-23T20:28:00.000-08:00

Or more generally, how gentle are you on anything you interact with?

I have a co-worker, whose name I won't mention, who treats computers the way the TSA personnel handle your baggage at the airport. If you don't relate to that, I'm meaning that he's not gentle at all. I wish he/she took it a bit more easily when handling stuff.

I thought it would be kinda fun to create a quiz and see how well other people do, so here we go!

Side note. I figured recently that one of my good friends also wasn't such gentle a person. He/she is still my friend, so don't worry if you get a high score on this test.

If your answer to the following question is YES, you get one point for each.

- When your computer freezes, do you get mad and hit the keyboard or pound your desk?

- When your computer is loading something, do you try to click on something repeatedly rather than waiting patiently?

- Do you normally hit enter hard?

- If you have a device with a touch screen, such as a printer, do you press the touch screen as if it was a real button, rather than gently pressing it?

- Do you place your DVDs with the sensitive side down when not kept inside their envelopes?

- Do you drag your chairs, instead of lifting, when you move them?

- When you get in an elevator, do you press the "door close" button repeatedly?

- When you eject a DVD from your DVD drive or DVD player, do you push the DVD feeder back into place rather than pressing eject once again?

- When you can't close a door properly, would you slam it rather than trying to figure out where it's stuck?

- Do you often find yourself being too blunt and hurting other people's feelings?

- Do you often say, "I hate it when ..."?

- Does your sentences often lack words like "in my opinion", "seems", "kind of", "to me, it's ...", "probably", "might"?

- Do you answer yes-no questions with a short yes or no, instead of explaining afterwards?

- Do you say "what" or "huh" instead of "sorry" or "can you explain a bit more"?

- Would you laugh at something you find funny, even though another person highly respects that thing you're laughing at?

All rightee! How much did you get?

The takeaway: There's nothing wrong about not being gentle. However, from time to time you might unknowingly break or hurt something, including other people's feelings.

Death & Love

2009-02-11T18:04:00.000-08:00

I've recently been encountering a lot of signs pertaining to death.

One of my friends stopped by and wrote on my facebook wall. I went to that person's facebook page and saw a link to a blog. Skimming through a couple of entries, I found one about death.

Another day, my Mom emailed me right out of the clear blue sky recommending a book named "The Last Lecture" to me. I just borrowed it from UCLA's college library and figured out that it was about a computer science professor facing the last stage of his life because of cancer.

Even on TV the night before, there was a police pursuit. It was a domestic violence followed by a catch-me-if-you-can driving. It looked like another daily crime to me, but when I read about the news the next day, I found out that later, that man killed himself.

Coincidence or not you name it, but these events striked me to think deeper into life.

If you were to die, what would keep you from not dying?

My answer is so simple. I don't want to die because if I did, Dear would have to be alone. For this reason, I must live no matter what.

How about other people? How about other people who study hard to be number one? How about other people who just like to have fun and party? How about people who have no plans what to do next?

I personally think that human are born to share the love one another and create a peaceful society. If that's not part of your life right now, would you consider doing so?

Attitude

2009-02-09T17:03:00.000-08:00

Today I texted my sister to ask how she was doing.

She replied that she was doing well and she finally got a new job with high pay but boring.

When I reached home I went online and found her, so we chatted.

She was back from her two-week-dentist-visit trip in Thailand, and she talked about how she missed home.

I asked her what she would do when she goes back to Thailand.

She said that she's considering being a lecturer at Thammasat University. However, she heard from two of her friends who work there that it's not that fun to teach there because of the "backstabbing". Her friends told her that there was another guy who graduated from a US top university who belittled them behind their backs to the department Chair . He basically said that those people didn't graduate from a university as prestigious as his.

Wow... Even the smartest people DO have attitudes and patronize others. I don't like that one bit.

We both came to a conclusion that universities accept smart people with disregard to their attitudes. This is why industry job positions usually need the interview: so that they can know their prospective employee's attitude.

Attitude is very important in the workplace, in my opinion, because people might end up doing the same job for 20-30 years. That's more than my age right now.

The point being, if I happen to become an employer, attitude actually comes first, then knowledge and credentials follows.

The Curse

2009-02-07T15:52:00.000-08:00

There was a soccer game in Thailand called the Traditional Chula-Thammasat Match, or something like that recently. It's an annual soccer game that's been going on for about 60 years I guess. Just like the way Yale and Harvard have the Yale-Harvard game, or the way Liverpool competes against Manchester United, or the way UCLA and USC meet in football.

I remember that when I was in Thammasat, we never won. But since I'm gone, they won this year.

Back to USA, UCLA (my current university) lost to USC last year's football.

There was also this time when the Thai soccer team got into the semi-finals or so in the Olympics. I read about there success on the news but the moment I started to watch them live, they lost.

It's not over, a Thai tennis professional performed really well in a particular year. I heard that he won againts somebody really tough. Again, the next match I watched him on TV, he lost.

Is this a curse?

The scooter

2009-01-29T21:54:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I was waiting for somebody around a restroom on campus.

I brought my scooter with me, too.

One can truly know the weight of a scooter only when that person takes it to campus every day.

It's not light, as far as I know.

The point is, I didn't hold my scooter. I put my scooter on the floor and stood there waiting.

Then a guy walked by. He was about to enter the restroom but stopped when he saw my scooter.

"Is that your scooter?"

"Uhuh."

"I use a scooter too. I don't see many people on campus use them."

He did make a good point.

I see bicycles and skateboards a lot, but not many scooters.

Why's that so?

Let's see the pros (+) and cons (-) of using a scooter.

+ it's faster than walking

+ it's cheaper than a bicycle

+ you don't have to touch the parts where you have stood on when you hold your scooter (as opposed to skateboards)

+ it can go inside buildings

+ better control with the handles makes it harder to hurt other people

- you can fall from a scooter because of a small rock

- it doesn't look cool like a skateboard

- you need a lot more power than using a bicycle when you go uphill

- bicycles and skateboards can go much faster

I personally think that the last reason is why people don't use scooters that much.

Anyway, I'm not gonna switch.

Don't keep iPods in your car

2009-01-22T11:28:00.000-08:00

I remember there was this one day last year when I saw the car next to me being broken into. The windows were broken and something inside the car was probably stolen. I was about to leave USA to have a nice summer break in Thailand. What a good impression before I was about to leave my car sitting there for 3 months.

An interesting points was that my apartment was garaged, so how on Earth would somebody be able to come in and break into people's cars.

It happened that the garage gate was left open that night. The lousy management were too lazy to keep opening the gates for the maintenance people to come in and out, so they decided to leave the gate open.

It's not over yet.

About two weeks ago, I was about to drive my car to the groceries. When I went down to the garage, a lady was cleaning up a mess of broken glass on the floor. Yes, her car was broken into. In fact, her car was next to mine again. I guess she left her iPod inside her car because I saw an Apple cable.

Two cars that parked beside me on each side got their stuff stolen. I'd better be more vigilant from now on.

This is why there's a watchdog in my car.

I have a nobel prize

2009-01-09T14:06:00.000-08:00

I was having lunch around north campus yesterday, and I saw a couple of tourists walking around and taking pictures.

After I finish lunch, I was about to head back to the lab, and one man asked me if I could take a picture of him and his friends or family or whatever.

Why not?

After I took the photos, he viewed the pictures in the camera to see if they were okay.
He said, verbatim, "You have a Nobel prize for photography."

I'm flattered.
Since I have the potential to get a Nobel prize, I believe I can do anything.

The 2 iPhones and the Restroom

2009-01-09T13:53:00.000-08:00

I mentioned in my previous post that I took 2 iPhones to Thailand.

When I reached Thailand, I called the lady who asked me to buy the iPhones and she wanted to buy me lunch.

On the day of my free lunch, I visited my father at the hospital he was working in. I went to the rest room and, you know what, I forgot the 2 iPhones in the toilet!

Twenty minutes after I left the hospital for lunch I realized that the pink bag that contained the iPhones were not in my hand. I called the hospital immediately and had someone look for the pink bag for me. Thank God it was there. I almost spended around $1000 on my carelessness.

The Stuff

2008-12-16T22:36:00.001-08:00

I normally go back to Thailand every Christmas.
(Well, it's only been 2 years I've stayed here.)

Each time I go back, I buy gifts such as chocolate and souvenirs for my beloved friends in Thailand.

This year's a bit different.

I bought a laptop for my Mom. Check.

I bought Christmas decorations for a bunch of my friends. (They all fit well in one large baggage. Yes the big one that goes under airplanes.) Check.

One of my supervisors at my old working place asked me if I could get her two iPhones. I ordered them from eBay. Check.

Two of Dear's friends ordered five packages of Philosophy cosmetics and had them sent to my place. Check.

One of my friends ordered a Coach handbag and had it sent to my place. Check.

My Mom asked me to buy a couple of M&Ms for the Christmas party at our house in Thailand. Check.

My Dad wants a particular hairgel not sold in Thailand. Check.

One of my friends asked me to order some bluetooth-dongle-electronic-circuit thingy, whatever you name it, and take it back to Thailand because the distributors don't ship to Thailand. Check.

A new friend here asked if I could take a small bag with some stuff inside back to Thailand and send it to her family. Check.

My coworker asked if I could take to Thailand Crest Whitening Strips. Check.

Somebody I knew recently asked if I could take a super-expensive, non-specified item back to Thailand for him. Still unchecked, but it might be shipped to my place any day.

Boy, am I everybody's hero or not?
If something happens during customs check, I'll let you know in one of my next blog entries.

This Christmas is gonna be interesting.

Residency

2008-12-14T16:47:00.000-08:00

So the day before, I had lunch with a bunch of my friends.
On the way back, I had two friends -- Hung and Jerry -- going the same way, so I gave them a ride.

In the car we had quite a conversation. Here's how it went.

First we were talking about our holidays.
I said that I was going to go back to Thailand the following Friday after my wife Dear takes the exam.
Jerry asked me what the exam was for, and I said, "She needs to take the exam if she wants to become a resident."
I was assuming they knew the progression of how one would become a doctor in USA.

They didn't; they thought of something totally different.

They started asking me what the exam was like, and I found it surprising that they found it surprising that Dear had to interview some patients.

Me: (Of course, if you want to be a doctor, you have to know how to diagnose a patient.)
Them: (Why would somebody need to know how to interview a patient?)

More questions followed.

Hung: Really? Why?

Jerry tried to reason about it.

Jerry: Maybe in order to become a resident, we need to be able to help people in case they need first aid.
Hung: Wowwww... USA is so strict. I don't think the Immigration Bereau is being reasonable.
Jerry: But I had a friend who became a resident. I don't remember him interviewing a patient.

Eventually I figured out that we were talking about two totally different stories.

Um: Ohhhh! So here's what I mean. If you want to become a doctor here, first you go to college, then you go to medical school, THEN you become a resident.
Hung & Jerry: Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!
Jerry: So maybe the word comes from the fact that she is becoming a resident in a hospital.
Hung: Yeah.

I don't know the etymology of the word but it was quite funny we were able to maintain the conversation for that long without noticing that we were talking about something different.

Facebook

2008-12-14T12:38:00.001-08:00

This blog entry is nothing but a test to see if Facebook sees my blog updates.

The Calculator

2008-11-14T11:14:00.000-08:00

It's the seventh week in Fall 08 already.
I'm taking a statistics class, namely, probability with applications to poker.

It's just a probability class but the examples are all about poker. Sounds fun? Well, it's okay.

I just had its midterm and, man, it was tough.

It wouldn't have been that tough though, IF I HAD BROUGHT A CALCULATOR!!!
Yeah, I forgot to bring a calculator.

Imagine me doing 97.45*82.15 or (13*45)/(51*49) by hand while everyone else uses calculators.

So basically it was a struggle, but I managed to ballpark a lot and hopefully get the right answers.

The funny thing was after the exam, I called Dear.
She asked, "Why didn't you use your cell phone's calculator?"

Stupid me...

The Light Poll

2008-10-11T10:04:00.000-07:00

Since I accidentally dumped my soccer shoes several months ago, I've never got a chance to play soccer until recently. (I brought another pair of shoes from Thailand.)

As usual, my fellows meet every Friday. When I arrived, about 15 people were already there.

It wasn't that fun because there were a lot of people from nowhere -- it was supposed to be a computer science play.

We were playing at one corner of the field, in the vicinity of which were cement floors, air ducts, and a light poll (for the huge lights, you know).

People were playing safe whenever they got close to those human creations. Except one man...

This asian guy was on the opposite team. Their defense passed a long ball over to the right where this guy was, ready for attack.

He ran, I would say quite fast, focusing on the ball. Then BANG! He hit the poll full-speed.

He was still conscious, but with blood all over his face. An ambulance came 15 minutes after the accident.

I'm now scared of polls.

The Electric Drumset

2008-10-01T22:32:00.001-07:00

So I've bought a used electric drumset from craigslist.
Boy I'm loving it!

This quarter I'm finally gonna have a performance somewhere (I hope).

Academic Blog

2008-09-25T18:47:00.000-07:00

Well, considering it's like a hobby, my next blog about computer science ideas shouldn't really be called an academic blog.

As you can read in the first paragraph, I'm gonna write a new blog about ideas that occur to me before I go to sleep or while walking to the department.

I kind of got inspired by a guy named Alex, who was a PhD student I know at UCLA.
Today I met him to get some advice for doing my Master's thesis.
He suggested some cool ideas and pointed me to his blog.
http://awarth.blogspot.com

I should have a blog like that and perhaps one day I can be a cool PhD like him.

The Used Car

2008-08-18T12:38:00.001-07:00

After I reached Michigan for a week or so, Dear told me that a Thai fellow was selling her car to Dear. I agreed. It was a 2001 Corolla and looked good outside despite the small crack on the windshield. We got it for only 4000 bucks. (Kelly's Blue Book said it was worth 7000).

One week after that, we bought the game Wii Fit from somebody on craigslist because it was sold out almost everywhere. We took the highway to the sellers place.

Now the highway we took had a speed limit of 70 mph. This means if we drove lower than 60 mph, it would be unsafe. Our car indeed made 60 mph but it shook the whole way. What a scary ride...

When we got home, I searched for answers in the Internet to see what made cars shake. I found out that it was most likely to be the tires.

The next day, I took my car to an auto-repair store and got my tires replaced and aligned for $225.

Some more days later, I found that a once small crack has grown into a potentially dangerous one that was about 1 feet long.

I took our car to a windshield repair company and it cost us $200 to replace it.

So the car actually wasn't $4000, it was around $4500 plus two days off work.

Yesterday we found out that one of the lights were broken. When we opened the front hood, we found that all the mechanics inside were full of dust.

Well, at least we need another $2500 to make it worth $7000, but I hope we don't get into trouble and lose our precious time too much on this Corolla.

Vitamin B

2008-06-10T16:16:00.000-07:00

My wife finished medicine from Thailand. She's been studying for the USMLE exam and she's gonna take it this Monday. (The USMLE is a standard test for people who want to be doctors in USA.) Due to employment & study reasons, we've been separated for a couple of months since January, but now she's with me.

Last week, during some lunch, she told me to have some vitamin B. She said it's good for the brain.

Vitamin B must be taken WITH food. Yes, with food. Not before the meal, neither after. It's something about the absorption.

Anyway...

There's this one class I usually only get about 50% of what the professor was talking about. He goes so fast over the material. One minute in your reverie means one board you're behind. Maybe I was exaggerating, but the point was, he teaches really fast.

The magic pill worked. I understood the material much better!

Coincidence?

The Impersonator

2008-06-08T21:52:00.001-07:00

Facebook is really popular in USA. However, when it comes to Thai people, it's Hi5.

One day, I got an email saying that somebody added me as a friend on Hi5. I clicked on the link in the mail to figure out who that was, and it was a face I've never seen before.

I'm careful about adding friends, so I did some research. I went into that person's account and see if I knew any of her friends. I found this one guy, named Aleksander (not Alexander), who looked exactly like my best friend in Thailand (who of course had a different name).

I gave my best friend a call, so he could see this homepage by himself.

His first words when he saw this guy was, "Whaaaa? I haven't even had a chance to see this picture." Aleksander used my friends graduation picture!

We both wondered where the heck he got that picture from.

My friend tried to contact Aleksander to see what was going on.

Let's see what happens next...

Russell

2008-06-08T21:45:00.000-07:00

Whenever I call somebody, whether it's a store or a restaurant, people can't get my name.

It's Amarin! A-M-A-R-I-N!

I guess this is why Korean people have English names; because there names are so hard to pronounce.

So I'm Thai, why can't I have an American name?

Let's see, when I was working in Thailand, I used to have this joke where I'm a person with 2 personalities. The first person was Amarin, the normal me. The second person was a calm and smart guy. His name was Russell.

From now on, whenever I'm gonna say my name on the phone, unless it's important business, I'm Russell!

The Soccer Shoes

2008-04-17T19:56:00.000-07:00

Last Fall, I bought a pair of soccer shoes for playing soccer at UCLA -- we usually have a Friday computer science soccer match.

This quarter I decided to enroll in a soccer training class (at UCLA).
I went to the first class, had fun, then returned home.
I put my dirty shoes inside a used grocery bag and left the bag in front of my door.

Five days later, my room was filled with garbage, so I decided to tidy up my room.
Guess what, I used grocery bags to trash garbage and put the garbage right next to the bag with soccer shoes.

As you might have thought, I dumped all the bags, including the one with my shoes, away.
The night before the next soccer class I was thinking so hard where I left the shoes, just to realize that they're long gone.

Darn it!

Soy Milk

2008-04-01T20:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had a chance to have dinner at the Misuwa Japanese Market with two of my Taiwanese friends, namely Hung and Michelle.

After we had nice ramen, Hung offered to ride Michelle and me to our apartments.

Michelle's apartment was nearer.
When we got there, she asked us if we wanted to come up, so we did.

"Would you guys like some soy milk?", she asked us when we reached the room.

I said, "Well, I remember that I was afraid to drink soy milk when I was in Thailand, but yeah I'll try. Thanks."

That "afraid"-ness was confirmed when I sipped the glass of soy milk she handed me.

So now I have 3 things I hate:
1) spiders
2) mayo
3) soy milk

Writing a Book

2008-03-08T23:54:00.000-08:00

If I had to list out my childhood dreams, writing a book would not be there.
Those days were filled with joy and freedom from stress, and the only thing I thought about was which video games I wanted to play each weekend.

I didn't say that my life sucks now. I'm only saying that I have become more serious with my life and would like to do something for other people.

Indeed, writing a book would be fun.

It's almost the end of the second quarter at UCLA already and I've learned so much. I now understand ideas that I was never able to grasp before. How pleasing will it be if I could share what I've learned to other people? We're not talking about using copyright lectures here. We're talking about using my new knowledge and come up with my own book -- a book I would use to teach students if I were a professor.

Just thinking of it gives me the smile. How about making ideas real?

The high pitch voice from an old man

2008-02-22T11:04:00.000-08:00

I normally record lectures with my iPod.
This way I can go back to revise what I studied at my apartment.

Now there's this professor who resembles Steven Spielberg in my department.

Do you know those kind of sounds that happens when you speak while there is secretion in your throat?
If you know music theory, your sound goes harmonic.
In plain words, your normal sound becomes a high-pitch at a small moment.

That's exactly what happened to professor Spielberg.

While he was teaching, he blurted out this voice.
Everybody didn't bother to laugh except me.
I was giggling for about 20 minutes at the very back of the class.
Thank god I didn't sit at the front row; the professor probably wouldn't like to see students laughing at him.

I know this isn't a good manner, but I still have the kid within.
I promise I'll be more reserved if it were a more important meeting.

Taiwanese

2008-01-22T23:04:00.001-08:00

Repeating what has been said in my last blog entry, Asians are all over UCLA. When I heard the name UCLA, I never thought that there would be such a huge asian community here.

To be more specific, Taiwanese are all over the place.

In the orientation only, I met 3 Taiwanese.
Wherever I go, I hear Chinese (and I bet a large percentage of what I heard was Taiwanese).

My biggest Taiwanese encounter happened after a seminar. (The seminar it's a subject which the department invites famous people to give some talks to the students).

As I walked to the elevator with my Taiwanese friend, he met a couple of friends and they joined our walk. The time we reached the elevator there were 8 people including me and my friend. As soon as the doors closed everyone except me was talking Taiwanese!!!

This is one thing I would like to do with foreigners if I'm with a group of Thai people.

My first Thai friend at UCLA

2008-01-06T05:27:00.000-08:00

Since I've been here, I've seen Asians walking everywhere.
Surprisingly I didn't find any Thai people at all.

I'm studying computer science, and every Friday they have this computer science football thing going on.
After I got my first football suit, I decided to join them one Friday.

We started with only 6 players, but after a while we had a full team as more people joined.
When the game ended, I had a chance to know the people I play with.

I asked them, "Hi, what's your name? Where are you from?"
Most of the answers to the second question were, "Korea".
However, when I asked one guy, he didn't answer.
Instead, he asked me (in Thai) if I was from Thailand.

I've finally met the first Thai, plus he's also studying computer science!

The Hard Professor

2007-12-02T03:27:00.000-08:00

UCLA is quite worried about students not having enough basic knowledge.
It has this thing called the breadth requirement which lists a set of class we have to complete before the fourth quarter or we'll be kicked out of college.
It consists of those computer science classes I learned while I was an undergraduate.

However, there are professors-in-charge of each course to whom I have to speak in order to determine if the courses I took in Thailand is equivalent to the courses offered here.
If the courses are equivalent, then I can waive them.

I emailed all the professors-in-charge to ask them what they would need to see, and all of them who replied (some didn't reply) told me to take my transcripts and course syllabuses.

Transcript... I think I have a copy somewhere in my PC.
Syllabus... Get out of here!

How am I supposed to get the syllabuses of courses I used to learn in Thailand 3-5 years ago?
Well, email the professors is the answer, but it's not that easy as it looks like.

Professors at my university are notoriously unresponsive.
You have a 20% chance of them replying your email within 2 weeks, provided that they replied!

I gave a shot and, yeah, I wasn't lucky.

But I needed to waive the courses because I wanted to study something more interesting than courses I have already taken before.

Here's how it went.

I called a friend in Thailand and asked him to contact the computer science department directly.
Two days and I've got all the syllabuses in my hand, hah!

I went to see all the professors-in-charge, and found a diversity of personalities.

One professor was sooooo nice.
"Welcome to UCLA!!!" he said.

One was nice, but strict.
"Well, I'm afraid you'll have to take the course again. But you can always sleep in the classroom."
I swear he did say the last sentence.

One looked nice, but I'm not really sure.
"Hmmmm. Nya, this isn't a good time."

One looked a little bit formidable, but when I talked to him he kindly said, "I'm sorry. I have some papers to finish. Can you come again in an hour?"

Now the last one's somebody.
I've seen students review this professor badly at http://www.uclaprofessors.com
He looked mean and disagreeable.
I was brave enough to meet him just because I wanted to waive the course so badly.

When I went to his office, the door was closed.
At first I thought that he wasn't in the office.
However, I made an appointment so he should be in the office.

I knocked the door, and he welcomed me with an indifferent face.
I sat down and gave him the papers.
He skimmed through them and noticed that the course number in the syllabus was different from that in the transcript.
"Why are these different?"
"They have changed the curriculum in the past few years, so a lot of course numbers were changed," I answered.

He didn't seem to be happy with it.

"Well," he said. "The thing is I don't know if the new course and the course you had taken are equivalent."

Now comes the fun part: he started asking me questions from the material.

"Do you know what TLB is? Translation look-aside buffer?"
"Well I don't know exacly what it is, but it has something to do with addressing."

"Do you know what DMA is?"
"I'm sorry, I think I forgot what it is."

"Do you know what ISA is?"
...

These questions kept coming and coming.
I thought to myself, "Darn it, I'll have to take the course, right?".

However, I managed to answer about 1-2 questions, and that seemed to please him.
After shooting me with those questions, he looked at the papers again for a while, and finally said, "Well, I think you've got it."

Whhhhhhhhhhheeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww...

The gas leak

2007-11-25T03:12:00.000-08:00

Ding-dong.

I ran to the door in my pajamas (at 11.00 AM).

"Can we come in?"

It was the apartment's handy guy who fixes everything, and his partner.

"What's wrong?", I asked.

There seemed to be a gas leaking problem going around in the apartment and they didn't know where the source was.

Have you ever seen those action movies?
The room is filled with gas and somebody lights a match.

I don't want that to happen.

They checked my oven for a while and found nothing interesting.

They told me they would have to stop the gas supply of the whole building and it would take some time to fix the problem.

That day my microwave was the hero.

The Dead Neighbor

2007-11-08T09:12:00.000-08:00

One morning, when my wife and I were leaving the apartment, we found a police car parking in front of the apartment.
I thought it was nothing while my wife suspected that something has happened.

In the evening, when we came back to our apartment, we found a van.
It looked like a carpet-cleaning company van to me, but actually it was a van to pick up dead bodies!

We asked a policeman who was standing around what was happening.
He said that somebody died in the house next to our apartment!

I wonder how that happened? Hopefully, it's just an accident.
However, I will make sure that all doors and windows are locked every night.

My New Shoes

2007-11-03T18:13:00.000-07:00

I had a chance to go to a place called the "3rd street promenade".
It's like a shopping street with lots of stores.

I kind of liked its name because it sounds like "3rd street lemonade".

I entered a shoe shop as I wanted a new pair of sneakers.
When I found my favorite pair and was about to pay, the seller did some advertising.

"Let me show somethin', man."
He pulled out the shoe floor from inside the shoes.
"Look. It's paper. It's nothin'. Not good for your knees, your ankles..."
Then he showed me another shoe floor made of synthesized rubber or something.
"Just try them. It's your decision."

I ended up buying those shoes that were healthy for my knees and ankles.
Boy he sells good.

The Smoke Detector

2007-11-03T01:04:00.000-07:00

One day, the elevator in my apartment somehow stopped.
The doors were open but the elevator was unable to operate.

At first this was acceptable, but it became annoying as it happened quite often.

My wife told me that she had noticed something inside the elevator before.
It was a note saying that the elevator was last inspected some date in 2005.
Well, that might have been the reason.

After days of walking up the stairs, we finally got a letter from the manager telling us what was going on.

He said that the smoke detectors around the elevators were very sensitive,
and if somebody smoked, that would stop the elevator.

Should I believe this?

Maybe, because there were no dead elevators since then.

The Noisy Room

2007-11-02T01:20:00.001-07:00

Somebody in the room above me likes to make stomping noises.
I assume that he's a male because I think men tend to walk like that.
I wonder what he is up to.

Is he playing a game?
Is he jumping around?
Is he very fat?

Why can't he walk a bit gentler?

Moreover, I hear loud music every weekend.
First I could tolerate it, but one day I thought I had to do something.

I walked up to his room to see how loud the music was.
The sound wasn't from his room!

I figured out that although the stomping was from above,
the music was from below,
and it was the music that annoyed me more.

I heard several women talking so loud (why don't they just lower the volume, idiots?!)
with the music in the background.

I wrote a small note saying, "Please lower the sound of your music. Thanks a lot :)",
and sticked it to the door.

It surely worked.

The Guitar

2007-11-02T00:40:00.000-07:00

I'm a music man, and I've never got to play any music since I moved to LA.
What a pity.

One day I decided that I should get a guitar,
so I started off searching for guitars at eBay.

I'm quite watchful when I buy stuff at eBay.
At least I must read the buyers review on a particular seller before buying from him/her.

I came across a seller that looks good: thousands of items purchased and 99% rating (which means every 1 people out of 100 hated this seller).
I doubt if I would be that 1% so I decided to buy from this seller.

One week has passed by and I haven't heard of anything, not even the shipment notification.
I tried to contact the seller several times through eBay's messaging services.
My message was never replied.

So where's my money?

Finally, I called the seller, and got the answer.

When you buy stuff through eBay, you have something that's called a "Paypal Account".
The PayPal service kind of makes money transactions over the internet more secure.
Or too secure?

I became a PayPal member since I was in Thailand, and that Paypal account was associated with my address in Thailand.
Now I'm in USA, and I want the guitar to be shipped to me here, not Thailand.
Clever PayPal warned the seller that I might have been an imposter because my shipping address didn't match my paypal address.
Talk about that!

Fortunately, I got a refund.

The next thing I did was open a new PayPal account that was associated with my address in USA, then order again.

This time it was smooth.
I ordered a guitar and a guitar stand.

The next two days, I got the guitar stand.
One day after that, I got another guitar stand!

Adding the word "stand" after "guitar" doesn't make it more valuable,
and I didn't order 2 guitar stands.
I called customer service immediately.
Chris, the person who answered the phone, told me that he will check that for me,
and I can wait for an update within 1 day.

He didn't sound like he was lying, but why have I waited for 2 days and still got nothing?

I called him again, and he said that he would tell his director.

Two more days...

I called him again, and he said that he would see his director right after he hanged up.

Two more days...

I finally called Chris to cancel my order and give me a refund.

The next day, I ordered another guitar from another shop at eBay, and I got it 5 days later.

The Deposit Machine

2007-11-01T22:51:00.000-07:00

One new word I learned here is ledger balance.

It means the money you claimed to have but needs to be verified by the bank.

For example, if you go to a deposit machine and say that you are going to deposit $100,
but you actually inserted a $20 bill.

You ledger balance will be $100, and your "available balance" will be $20.
You can't use your ledger balance until the bank verifies it.

So this is something stupid I did.

One day, I wanted to deposit $500 dollars.
I entered $500 on the deposit machine, and tried to insert five $100 bills.
As soon as I finished inserting the first bill, the machine told me that the transaction was complete.
I said, "Huh...?", in my mind. "What about the rest $400?"

I went home with my money and checked my balance online.
I found that ledger balance is $500, but available balance is $100.
I had no idea what ledger balance meant but it sounded bad.

What if I reverse this thing?

I tried the reversal process a few days later.
I entered $1 into the deposit machine, and I inserted a $100 bill.

"Thank you, your balance has increased by $1", is a paraphrasing of what the machine displayed.

I tried again, but this time I told the machine that I was going to enter $10. (But inserted $100 again.)

Double idiocy...

Now what am I going to do?

I tried to call my bank, but all I got was a maze through automatic voice options.

So I contacted my bank online instead, which took them about 2-3 days to answer.
They said that they will investigate it for me.

Fortunately, I got my money back in almost a month.

What a relief.

The Sofa Bed

2007-11-01T22:31:00.000-07:00

One thing convenient in America is the delivery service.
Anything you order can be delivered right to your home.

My case was an exception.

I went to IKEA ( a furniture store)
and I ordered a table, a bed, and a sofabed.

The way they deliver stuff here is
1) you tell them the delivery date and time
2) you wait for them on that day
3) they will call you when they are in front of your apartment
4) you go down and open the doors for them

There was no problem with the table and bed.
However, there was something special going on about the sofabed.

On the delivery date, somebody called me to open the doors.
I went down to the door and found nobody, except a truck parking next door.
When I say next door, it's about 50 meters away (I think that's far.)

I stood there for about 5-10 minutes, then the truck drove away.
I thought to myself, "Could it possibly be that truck? No way."

I called IKEA and they said that I would have to reschedule a delivery with a fee.

Why the hell do I need to be charged again when it's actually their fault?
However, I had to pay eventually and this is my first experience with IKEA!