Toland, you need help on math?

my sored arms are finally going away!!! I couldn’t lift heavy for 3 days since I made that bet with cari. For those who know me whenever there’s a dispute, I usually end up saying lets bet. Me and my stupid instinctual reactions ended me up with 50 push-ups which I still owe cari 3 cause I only did 47. (died after the 47th one) Well, at least I found out sueon was willing to *cough* for me. That’s what ~friends~ are for. Hehe.

I had a major reality check. “Toland, you need help on math?” – mechy last nite. This sentence kept on going through my head and I finally realized that my stubbornness was dragging me behind. I was unwilling to admit defeat to math and always saying math is something I can learn on my own. After practically stucked on a problem for 1 hr, I requested help from johnyip, mechy’s roommate who was also in my class. I realize this is no longer high school and in a group of nearly all top 10 students from their high school, I can no longer keep my status as high as I thought it would be. 8 ppl within the past few days doubt my ability to take both multivariable calculus and linear algebra/differentials together. For the longest time, I’ve had no doubt about taking them together cause math was math, something that I can comprehend easily. But after some meditation, I realized why everyone was shocked and more importantly that I need to work my butt off if I wanna pass the class.

Picture of the Week has been updated. Remember once again, patience is a virtue. Hehe. -_^x

I HATE MULTIVARIABLE CALCULUS!

Hikaru no Go – 19 came out last nite (I was so excited!!!!) and I was so going to watch it after it finished d/ling that I ran outta stuff to do. So a tornado called Toland (as liam depicted) came and did a massive spring cleaning to our common room. It feels a lot better and more comfortable to have a clean common area. Didn’t seem like I did much at the time but today I received a lot of thanks. Of course I watched HnG afterwards and went to sleep @ 6am.

Had to get up early this morning to mail off a package. The postal office experience just keeps getting better and better. I was 5th in line and it was my turn in less than 5 minutes. W00h00! Also had to change grading options for my psych class cause I just have too much on my hands right now.

I HATE MULTIVARIABLE CALCULUS! =( Spent 5 hrs doing some lousy hw on max and mins in the 3rd dimension. Why couldn’t they just teach us the LaGrange Factor and skip all the tedious work.

Picture of the week is ready to resume its proper glory. Although this weeks pictures didn’t come out too well, I believe most of u will enjoy them.

Also, 3 days ago on Saturday, I forgot to congratulate this year’s Mark Keppel Environment Science Fair team for carrying on our the tradition of winning 1st place. CONGRATULATIONS!!!!

Asians and Alcohol

nothing too interesting happened today besides 4hrs of vigorous psych reading with chris, so I’ll go on to a topic I’ve been inspired my alphabons and n0rybic to talk about: drinking.

I’ve been told by alphabons that drinking wasn’t meant for Asians because instead of getting drunk, we get sick. A few days ago, n0rybic came upon me and said he felt sick after drinking and didn’t get the desired feeling everyone was boasting about. Here’s a summary of what goes on inside your body after you drink:

Metabolizing alcohol is a 2 step process. Alcohol -> ADH -> Acetic acid, which after your body flushes it out of your body. The feeling of drunk or getting high from drinking occurs during the first conversion. Asians have a gene which speeds up this process and converts all the alcohol into ADH rapidly. Therefore, many Asians have a very short period where they’re actually feeling high from drinking. ADH is a toxin and because of the rapid conversion, we have a high build up of ADH inside our body which causes us to be sick. Therefore, if you’re asian and don’t feel good after drinking, that’s normal because as some would say it, “It’s part of our genes.”

The above can be supported by this article: Metabolism of Ethyl Alcohol in the Body

Talking about drinking, I remember what my friend milkmandan says about doing drugs. He says the drug you should do if you don’t want to be caught is acid. LSD, cocaine, marijuana, shrooms, and all other drugs all enter the bloodstream so if they do a blood test, you’d definitely be caught. Acid on the other hand does not enter your blood stream but into your bones. The cool thing about acid is that after you feel high the first time and u wake up the next morning, give your back a little crack and all the acid will come out and it’s getting high all over again. Hehe. I just found that to be a very amusing info.

Happy Birthday ZUltimaZ!

Today’s my bro’s bday so I’d like to wish him ~A HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!~

Yesterday’s news got too long so I decided to talk about Armageddon here. My dvd’s finally arrived (w00h00!) and Armageddon was the first one I watched. It’s always been one of my favorite movies especially the ending where tons of touching speeches all come together. 4th time I watched it and I still get teary.

Today I had Chinese mu-shu (mushoo) with lori and milkmandan. It was SO good!!! Sigh I really missed food from home. Was suppose to go to SF today but didn’t really feel like shopping today + chris wasn’t going.

A ton more happened today, but too tired to tell u each and every bit, so I’ll end my news with a link. Hope you guys will enjoy it. ^_^x

Blackout!

Since I missed yesterday again, you guys get a special long one today.

The power went down since 5pm yesterday, right when I was taking a nap. I can recall the exact second and the exact details. I was lying on my bed. First was the lights, then I heard both damion’s and my computer power down. Then my fridge went out. Then the panicking screams outside my room: WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?!?!?!? I turned around to look @ my clock to check the time and guess what, that went out too.

Let’s backtrack, I had 2hrs of sleep the nite before and got up @ 7:30 for my 8am class. Went to jamba juice for our biweekly* lunch get-together with acuneo. Got myself a cherry charger, it was pretty good, but $4.25 was a bit expensive.

  1. occurring twice a week < - I mean this *
  2. occurring every two weeks (www.m-w.com)

After coming back home, I decided to take a nap and when it reached 12:30, I decided to ditch the remainder of my classes. Returning back to where I left off, the power went down and people were panicking everywhere. People were returning because their classes were canceled. Basically, the whole UC + dorms lost electricity due to some main power failure. Our DC had to close down because many machines in there run off electricity. So liam and I met up with carol’s suite and ate Japanese last nite. Really good stuff, however serviced sucked. We were constantly being ignored due to our obnoxiousness and our young age.

Came back after dinner and found out we just got assigned more physics homework due tomorrow. Those stupid communists >:o(. Had to do the hw in the tv lounge where they brought in trucks with natural gas power generators lighting up the whole room. Poor martin. He had to stay till 1:30am last nite since he’s senior clerk of the foothill frontdesk. Poor dude didn’t eat anything till I brought him a slice of pizza @ ~11pm.

So most of my suite went off to a jazz club and acuneo and I decided to goto metreon to watch a movie since I got 4 free tickets. After entering the bart station and missing the first train, we called moviefone and realized that there wasn’t anything playing anymore. This was @ 11:30pm. Sigh, so we walked back, but I found out staying @ a dorm was worse cause there was N..O..T..H..I..N..G to do! Acueno went to bed and I sat on the couch playing with my flashlight as if it was a sword. Sorta brings back childhood memories (~drools~). Those were the days, when I #1 samurai, #1 ninja, #1 mob king, #1 fighter, hehe. I went back into my room and tried to read my popular science magazine. Lemme tell you, flashlight and reading don’t mix unless you’re in a movie and your parents just told u to goto bed. So I went to sleep @ ~12am (one of the earliest times I can remember).

Woke up the this morning @ 10am to the sound of my alarm on my cellfone which I’ve never heard before and actually got me excited. Morning went by with nothing much happening, then @ 2:44pm, I heard 3 beeps and I began screaming (is that the correct word?) in joy. Everyone was rejoicing with the power back on. This experience was one of the weirdest however also enlightening. Basically I learn I cannot live without electricity. -_^x

Random Crap

I’m really sorry again about not posting yesterday. Yesterday was such a boring day that there really wasn’t anything to write about besides me acting like a zombie going to 8 hrs of classes. (yes I went to every single class yesterday)

For those who watch movies on their computer, DivX 5.0 is out. Not many movies support this codec yet, but supposedly better compression with higher quality, so pretty soon movies will be using DivX 5.0 instead of the current 3.0. I wonder what ever happened to 4.0alpha? It was out, but not too many groups used it and now 5.0 is out. Hehe.

Today it was pouring like crazy (said it was raining like a b*tch earlier to a friend and I was wondering how my language ever became this vulgar). After dinner, although it was only a ~40ft dash, I was completely soaked. Before I left for dinner it was only sprinkling, so I didn’t bother with an umbrella. Then it began to hail for like 3 minutes non-stop. Oh well, it was fun. ;p

As for the picture of the week, another temporary picture has been put up, but will be soon be replaced by the real thing (hopefully tomorrow when it doesn’t rain). The temporary pictures is really a little project my friend beardseeba put together. In a moment, you’ll find out why I bolded the beard part. Hehe. -_^x

My friend shortdog (known each other since 9th grade, but only through a name and never in person. part of my #psx clan) just found my website and here’s what he has to say:

[7:14pm] <shortdog> What’s yo name?
[7:14pm] <shortdog> You brandon?
[7:15pm] <shortdog> Drunk (suzanne) is a funny pic
[7:15pm] <shortdog>> Heh
[7:16pm] <shortdog> Carol is pretty cute 🙂
[8:46pm] <shortdog> N/m Toland
[8:46pm] <shortdog> Heh

Her?

something very weird happened today. As I was sitting in Math53 lecture and doing my hw, suddenly a bunch (is that the correct word to use? Group? Band? Ponytail? Whatever) of hair came flying back and landed on my paper. I was going to ask that person to move it, but suddenly everything got weird. I looked up and for a slight moment, I thought it was her. Similar hair, similar ears, similar earrings, even similar clothes. Head was just a bit smaller though. For the remainder of the class, I was trying to catch a glimpse of her face, but she sat in front of me so it was difficult. When class was finally over and she turned around to get up, and to my disappointment, her face didn’t resemble hers at all. Oh well.

Now that I’ve talked about her, here’s a picture my friend goshtic sent me which I thought was a picture of a really cute & beautiful girl which somewhat resembles darryl’s roommate’s poster, but mines prettier.

For those System of a Down fans, my friend bahamut-x found a hilarious clip that I think you will enjoy.

Teknoman!

sorry about no update yesterday as I’m sure many of u were disappointed. Hmmmm, what did I do last night. Oh yeah! If you noticed, I’ve been offline for (let’s see, 6am to 6pm) a bit over 12 hrs. Been awhile since I did that. Had to defragment and benchmark my hds. Getting a new IDE/RAID controller in the next few days and need to test to see if I should swap my hds over to the new controller. (am I getting too technical here for u guys)

The long awaited monthly subscription of michelle’s life arrived yesterday. Yay!!!
As for March 3rd, it’s RANDY’S BDAY!!!

This really sucks, I had something in mind I was going to tell you guys and was planning to say it since yesterday, but never had a chance to type it up and now I can’t remember!!! This happens to me a LOT! Sigh… maybe I’ll remember it later.

I’ve updated my Links page. The pictures should be nicer and added 2 more friend’s page to it. If u want your page linked, feel free to email me. Contact information is on the top of this page.

After talking to liam for awhile, the stuff I wanted to talk about finally came back to me. Actually 2 things came back to me. #1 was if anyone watched cartoons during their junior high or late elementary school, they’ve gotta remember Teknoman! Awesome series and I just d/led episode 1-38 last nite. Quality is eh, but sure brings back memories. Watched the first episode with Liam last nite. 2nd thing was that u know those nail clippers which comes with mini swords and u take them and let your stuff animals fight with? I finally knew how to use them! I’ve known them to be can openers but all I did before was punch holes into the can and pour it out. (if u didn’t know, I’m talking about that hook sword). It’s really cool cause I opened the enter can lid of a can of tomato soup yesterday.

Well back to anime time ^_^x

DVD Drive!

yesterday was actually a pretty cool day. First I went to my psych study. It was testing our reaction toward death. Before continuing reading, think about this question to yourself: How do you feel about your personal death?

Guess that was enough space for you to think, hehe. Well, I personally had a somewhat positive response to it such as that it was a natural part of life and I’m not afraid of it, but because I know it will happen to me someday that I try to live everyday to my fullest. The thing they were testing for was how we generally respond to negative or positive events. Death I would presume is a negative event, but they are finding more and more support that many don’t view it as so, but instead many view it as a positive event. I personally don’t want to die, but I really don’t have any grudge against it. Maybe it’s like that commercial on tv where they say babies learn how to walk, see, talk, and love when they’re small, but when do they learn to hate? Hehe, I’ve always wondered when do we really acknowledge that we will die someday. Is it innate? Or were we taught it through the many means of media nowadays? Just something interesting to ponder on.

There wasn’t much to do on a Friday nite. Most of my suite was out… Going to retract my previous statement. I GOT MY DVD DRIVE!!! Installed it and it works perfectly. Did I tell u guys I got bought a dvd drive 2 days ago? Really fast shipment. Now I can’t wait for my dvd’s to come. Hehe. Here’s the list I bought: Armageddon, Blade, Deuce Bigalow, Terminator 2, Twister. Sigh, can’t believe they ran outta Fight Club. One day… I’ll get you Fight Club, just wait for that one day!

For the first time of the week, I got to see Martin. It was a fun little get-together and we went to dinner afterwards. As I thought my high-point of the day was when I got my DVD Drive, I was so wrong. My friend Lori went home and brought her car over. So I went cruising last nite in a Saab convertible with 2 other friends + Lori. Really really fun. Blasting music @ 90dB (+/- 5dB), everyone was staring @ us. First we went to some donuts place and got donuts holes, just fried and glazed and still HOT, not warm, HOT. Then we went to Safeway (Vons in SoCal) and bought booze and I got my Downy balls! Hehe. Really interesting night.