Agatha Christie

Hi Readers,

I've had plenty of free time in Africa, such as sleepless nights due to jet lag, boring nights on Kilimanjaro, or traveling on the bus (as I am doing right now, back to Nairobi). During this free time, I've been writing blog posts, watching videos of Andrew Ng teaching machine learning, or more commonly, reading all the Agatha Christie books that I could store on my phone. During this trip so far, I've read 7 of her books: And Then There Were None, 4:50 From Paddington, Black Coffee, A Caribbean Mystery, Pockets Full of Rye, After The Funeral, and Dead Man's Folly.

Let me start of by saying that Agatha Christie is a phenomenal author. For me, she's done for detective stories what Isaac Asimov did for sci-fi novels. I find myself unable to put down her books whenever I start reading them.

She is also amazingly good at throwing red herrings into her stories. I don't think there's been a single story where I've been able to deduce (or even guess) the murderer correctly. With a single sentence (for example, "she touched the flowers with a satisfied smile"), suddenly that person is a suspect and the flowers probably have something to do with the murder...or not. And then at the end of the story, the twist is always unpredictable (maybe she is allergic to those flowers or something, I don't know...I just made up that story).

But the most fascinating aspects of the stories is how the storyline challenges what we've been taught about storytelling while growing up. The most unpredictable factors in these stories are almost always what was left unsaid, rather than what was said. A murder can be committed for a great reward at the end, or for a pittance, or for no reason at all. The background setting, which we usually gloss over, is now massively important. The narrator is now used for deception and misinformation. It make one feel very off-balance while reading one of her books.

But that's probably why there's always such a huge sense of relief and satisfaction when you finish one of her stories. Because the deception and lies are finally over and resolved satisfactorily. And you can finally go to sleep now...at 5am.

-FCDH

PS the bus is approaching Nairobi and the sky is a very angry and dark purple color over the city. There's lightning everywhere too. Looks like another African thunderstorm!

Mt. Kilimanjaro

Hi Readers,

Today (December 27, 2012) marks the successful ascent of Uhuru peak on Mt. Kilimanjaro by my friend GS and I. Kilimanjaro is the tallest mountain in Africa, at around 5950m, and located in northern Tanzania.

We first took a bus from Nairobi to Moshi, where many trips to Kilimanjaro depart. On the way, I saw a wild giraffe munching on a tree! GS didn't believe me, but I think he's just jealous. The land border crossing between Kenya and Tanzania was very interesting. The bus first stopped on the Kenyan side, where you lined up to get your passport stamped by Kenya. Then you walk across the border to the Tanzanian side, where you line up to get your passport stamped again, before getting back on the bus. The border looked so porous that I think you could've just walked across without a passport if you wanted. Certainly nothing like the land border between Canada and the US that I had seen before.

Kilimanjaro requires that you hire a guide and maybe porters as well. These aren't cheap; any type of trip up Kilimanjaro is at least a thousand dollars per person. We booked our trip quite cheaply, with a company called Mar tours. The team turned out to be a guide, an assistant guide, a cook, and 6 porters...just to serve the two of us. If there was ever a thing called luxurious mountain climbing, Kilimanjaro would be where you would find it.

As there are many number of routes that climbers can take to ascend Kilimanjaro, we decided to take one of the longest routes, called the Lemosho route, over 7 days. As the longest route had the most amount of time for acclimatization to the tremendous altitude, we figured this would give the highest possibility of a successful summit. As a challenging addition, we decided to take the most difficult and dangerous route for summit day, called the Western Breach route. This route is infamous for a rockfall that killed three American climbers in 2006.

Long story short, the first five days were not very eventful. It involved us traveling from camp to camp, all the while moving higher and higher in elevation. Each day we were served three meals in a mess tent, and an afternoon tea as well. The meals were the best things about the trip. I definitely didn't get tired of the food this time, unlike Pico de Orizaba, when I was ready to throw up the protein bars after 2 days.

By the end of the fifth day, we were at a campsite called Arrow Glacier campsite, at around 4600m. It was directly next to the steep slope that made up the Western Breach, and during that day we had the pleasure/horror of hearing endless rockfalls echoing across the slope. I thought for sure that we were going to die from one of these when it was our turn to go on the slope.

For the final summit climb today, we woke up at 1am and were ready to go by 2am. As we began going up the slope, GS and I both agreed that this is probably the most dangerous climb that we've ever done. The slope was very steep and covered in snow, and everybody lacked crampons (since somehow every guidebook says Kili does not need them). Worse, one of the guides even lacked a hiking pole, so eventually when the going got tough enough, I had to lend him one of mine. The guides also lost the trail numerous times, so we had to scramble over ice-covered boulders right next to hundred-foot cliffs to get back on trail. I was surprisingly calm, despite the fact that a small slip anywhere in the first 2 hours would mean serious injury at the minimum.

I was undeniably relieved when we finally crested the crater rim. Another exhausting zigzag up the crater walls and soon we were taking the obligatory summit pictures (along with hordes of tourists that had come up the easier way). I had brought along 3 flags to pose with: Canada, Taiwan, and the LGBT rainbow flag. I heard audible gasps from the assembled crowd when I pulled out the rainbow flag and posed with it, although I'm not sure of the reason why.

We were supposed to spend an additional day on the mountain after attaining summit. However, because we made such good time down the mountain, and also because the weather was crap (it had rained every single day we we on the mountain), the guides encouraged us to make it all the way to the park gates so we can spend the night in real beds. What followed was a 6 hour non-stop sprint down the mountain from the peak.My legs are currently hurting more than they did after the marathon. But it's all over and we survived!

Tomorrow we are returning to Nairobi. So ends our brief mountainous tryst in Tanzania!

-FCDH

First Impressions of Africa

Hi Readers,

It is currently 3:30 am local time, and I just settled down into my hotel bed in Nairobi, Kenya. The past 40 something hours have been a whirlwind of flights, and airport terminals.  I started the journey in San Jose, and passed through LA, Frankfurt, and Addis Ababa (AA) before finally arriving in Kenya. The most interesting part of the trip so far must be the 17 hr layover that we had in Ethiopia.

We arrived to the AA airport at 6am, and since our next flight wasn't until 11pm, we decided to go out into the city to explore. Ethiopian Airlines graciously provided us with a transit stay at their hotel in downtown AA. We pretty much hit 4 birds with one stone: all 3 meals for the day were free, we didn't have to pay for the transit visa, we got a free bus ride to and from the airport, and we got a free hotel room where we napped off some jet lag.

After some napping, we went out to the Merkato marketplace in AA, which is the largest open air market in Africa. We were accosted by a guide masquerading as a friendly student eager to practice his English, who took us to the market and showed us around.

My impression of my first afternoon in Africa was mixed.  On the one hand, the smells everywhere in the city were quite horrible. Vehicles spewed jet black smoke, and the smell hanging in the air was always a mix of smoke and garbage. The people looked at me weirdly, and I heard a lot of "China!" and "ni hao ma" everywhere I went. Some kids even broke into Gangnam style as I passed them. On the bright side, the city felt very organically vibrant. The market sold a wide variety of things. People were selling animals like donkeys and chickens, furniture, construction materials like steel rods, and more traditional stuff like food and clothing.

The stay in Ethiopia was interesting but quite exhausting. By the time we finally arrived at the Nairobi airport, I was ready to drop and sleep anywhere I could. Surprisingly, the process of obtaining a Kenyan visa upon arrival was very easy and quite straightforward. We also managed to find our luggage successfully (a miracle in my mind, given that we had 3 layovers over 40 hours and that our bag had somehow arrived to Kenya on an earlier flight than us).

I can't help but be thankful that everything had worked out so well!

Cheers,
FCDH

Pico de Orizaba

Hi Readers,

During Thanksgiving break, I went on a trip to Mexico with my friend GS, with the primary focus being a summit of Pico de Orizaba (5,636 m / 18,491 ft), a volcanic mountain which is the 3rd tallest mountain in North America (after Denali / Mt. McKinley in Alaska, and Mt. Logan in Canada). Here is the full story of the journey to and from the mountain, in case it is helpful for those who will go.

From Mexico City, we first took the metro to the San Lazaro station, and walked to the TAPO bus station right next door. From there, we took the Estrella Roja bus to Puebla city's CAPU bus station, before transferring to a Valles bus to Tlachichuca.

Once in Tlachichuca, it took us awhile to find Senor Reyes place because we took the wrong exit out of the bus station and apparently nobody in town knew where the PEMEX gas station was. Make sure to exit the bus station by going through the building it is stopped at (and not out the road it drove in on), turn left out the front door, make a left at the first street you come to, and make a right at the first street after that. Senor Reyes place will be on the left hand of this street. We found Senor Reyes place too cold at night, so be sure you wear layers or just sleep in a sleeping bag.

The next morning we woke up early to prepare for the trip. You can put your valuables that you don't want to take in a plastic bag and give it to Senor Reyes for safekeeping ; non-valuables can be put in the luggage storage area. The ride up the mountain is done in an enclosed flatbed truck, which leaves at around 11am. It is easy to get carsick in this truck, so make sure you prep for that if that is a problem. Halfway up the mountain the truck will stop for pictures and bathroom break. Around 1pm the truck will arrive at Piedra Grande.

We felt good enough to hike up to the lower alpine camp right away and set up a camp there. Many people just stay at Piedra until summit day, but just a word of warning: the scree trail up from Piedra can be confusing even during the day. Constantly look for small flags and/or cairns (small rock piles) to guide you up the correct way. The lower alpine camp is around an hour and a half from Piedra, and the upper alpine is located a further 45 mins further, at the base of the labyrinth. We weren't really able to sleep either of the nights that we stayed at the mountain, and we didn't have Diamox so we don't know if it helps at all. Upon returning, I amused my friends with stories of hallucinations during these 2 nights without sleep.

We spent the second day around the labyrinth area to acclimatize, and the morning of the third day (2am) we did the alpine start. This was much earlier than we needed to leave at, but we wanted a relaxing climb. We wasted a lot of time at the labyrinth trying to find the correct path that required as little rock scrambling as possible after putting on crampons. In the dark it was quite hard, and by the time we reached the glacier it was about 5:30.

As naive as we are, we thought that we would be able to reach the top by sunrise. Once you start climbing, it doesn't take long to realize how long the actual climb will be. The glacier seems quite endless and the lack of oxygen becomes quite apparent very quickly. We spent close to 4 hours on the glacier before we reached the summit. On this part, you should stick to the path shown by the flags and not try to head towards the summit that you see, because this is a false summit (and there are two more false summits if you head this way).

Reaching the summit was a great feeling. We had missed the sunrise and there were a lot of clouds, but the view was still amazing. It was a cool thought, that we were probably the tallest people anywhere on the North American continent at that moment (because it is not a typical time to climb Denali or Logan). We took the descent very slowly because there was another group behind us who were supposed to return on the same ride back down. Therefore by the time we got down to Piedra it was 3 already (the other group finally arrived at 6pm). One of the guys from the other group had peed his pants on the glacier because he was so tired.

After getting back to Mexico city, we spent another 4 days there, and saw places like Teotihuacan, Coyoacan, and the Museo Anthropologia. It was quite an amazing trip overall, even though the entire sleepless time on the mountain, I was cursing myself for coming. Chalk up another awesome life experience!

-FCDH

The Coolness of EE 263: Linear Dynamical Systems

Hi Readers,

I am taking a break from the homework in one of my classes at Stanford, EE 263, titled "Linear Dynamical Systems." It is a heavily linear algebra based class. Ah heck, it's all linear algebra. This is my first ever linear algebra class that I've taken, and it is kicking my ass with gusto. In my undergrad, I tried 4 different times to take linear algebra, but each time I ended up dropping the class, because it was just SO DAMN BORING. But this class - wow! It is incredibly interesting, and super applicable too! Let me explain.

When I tell people about this class, the inevitable first question arises - "what is a linear dynamical system?" I'm not 100% sure, but the way I describe it, it's a system that somehow can be formed into the form of y = Ax. To put it in real world terms, it is a system A, which behaves with a linear fashion to input x, such that it can reliably produce output y.

It sounds pretty ridiculous when I first heard it. But it's absolutely unbelievable, the kinds of questions we have put this to use. A lot of systems in the real world are roughly linear, and this class teaches you many methods to resolve problems in real life. Our midterm questions were all applied linear algebra questions. For example, let's say you have an ecosystem where the animal populations were all in equilibrium, and you release some number of animal x into the ecosystem, and watch the fluctuations of all other animals. With linear systems, you can reverse the process. If you wanted animal x to increase by a certain number at a certain time, there are ways to reverse the equation so that you know exactly how many of each animal you need to release into the system at time zero in order to achieve your goal.

This class teaches you a lot of applications of this. The easy one is of course, if you are given the input x and system A, to find output y. Or, given a limited set of input and output, figure out what the system is, and use it to predict what the future outputs will be. Or, given what the output is and how the system behaves, how do you trace it back to the input?

I never really thought linear algebra could be fun. And to be fair, there are times during this class when I just want to bang my head against a wall and just turn in incomplete homeworks (because they are SO long!). However, I think it's fantastically useful, and I hope to be able to use such things to build models of systems in the future. This seems especially apt with medical imaging, since much of medical imaging is based upon the idea of model construction and optimization.

Anyways, it's late and I should go home to sleep. Just wanted to start blogging again - my blog has been so neglected, and I want to revive it.

Cheers,
FCDH

Anniversary

Hi Readers,

I remember exactly what I was doing a year ago today. It was a Sunday, and I had an interview with AUO at their Milpitas office for a summer internship. I hadn't gotten much sleep the previous night, because of a party out in the courtyard of our building which made me unable to fall asleep. Lacking a car, I asked a friend, who lived in Milpitas at the time, for a ride to the interview. He drove me there, and I had what was possibly the easiest interview that I would ever get in my life. I mean, why wouldn't a Taiwanese company want to hire a Taiwanese national, who happens to go to Stanford, who's an EE, and who happens to speak both good Chinese and English?

After the interview, I was so tired that I asked the friend if I could crash at his place and snooze for a bit before going home. He said yes, so we went to his place, where I crashed on the couch, and almost fell asleep before he came and offered his more comfortable bed. In a semi-groggy state on his bed, I rolled over and snuggled with him. The rest, as they say, is history.

Today marks my anniversary with this wonderful guy. We've gone through both wonderful times and rough times, but I wouldn't trade the time we had together for anything else. I've matured a lot from this relationship, and I will always look on the time we had together fondly, regardless of what happens. It's unbelievable that a whole year has passed already. It seemed like only yesterday that we were making out on his bed, having completely lost track of time, and having to lie to our friends about why we were an hour late for an Indian festival we were supposed to go to (we said we had "car problems").

I'm not a fortune teller, and I can't read the future. But if the future is anything like the present, I'll take it. =)

Till next post!

Cheers,
FCDH

Summer: Part 1

Hi Readers,

I'm sorry that I have neglected this blog for so long. This summer was quite busy, and I simply forgot about it until now. So here is a little post about what I've been doing all this time.

This summer, I worked at an internship at a company called Maxim Integrated. No, it's not the magazine (though it would've been cool to be a photographer for the Maxim magazine). It's actually a company that makes integrated on-chip solutions. My project at Maxim involved doing some work with video processing using the iPad video encoding format, as well as some work involving Maxim's gate drivers and various LCD panels. The work was fun and very interesting, and I learned a lot about LCD technology. I also re-learned a lot of digital design in my quest to coerce the FPGA into processing video data for me. Unfortunately my quest was not completed before I had to leave by the end of the summer, but I hope that all my work wasn't in vain.

I had an eventful summer, with all of my friends nearby, and being in California as well. I climbed the fabled Half Dome at Yosemite with one of my best friends SB, which was super fun. We started the climb at 2am, and reached the top around 9am. I was fully expecting us to have to turn around halfway up, because SB was slightly out-of-shape, sick, and hanging on to his inhaler the entire way up (asthma?). However, he pushed on relentlessly, and I was super proud of him for accomplishing the entire climb. Pictures below!

A week after climbing Half Dome, me and a few friends decided to go summit Mt. Shasta, and take a glacier training class through Shasta Mountain Guides. It was a great experience, and it was the first "real" mountain climb that I did. I did do Mt. Fuji a few years before, but that was more of just walking up a trail, while Mt. Shasta involved a lot of use of crampons and an ice axe. We drove up on a Thursday night, climbed to the base camp on Friday, did glacier and snow training on Saturday, summited to the top on Sunday (leaving base camp at 3am!), and returned from base camp home on Monday. It was extremely tiring, but so rewarding. There were some low points, of course. I experienced pretty bad altitude sickness the first day, so I was glad that we had an extra day to acclimatize to the altitude before summiting. We also ran out of water on the way down the mountain, leaving us all very dehydrated. There were very steep parts on the glacier, on which I thought that I would slip and drag us all to a lot of broken bones. However, the good parts way outweighed the bad parts. We (butt-)glissaded in all sorts of poses (head-first, foot-first, on the back, on the stomach, etc) and learned how to stop ourselves, which was super fun. I also did some boot-glissading on the way down the mountain, more because of sheer exhaustion, but also because our guide Polly encouraged me to give it a shot.

While I was climbing the mountain, I remember looking up at the summit and thinking, "omg that is so tall and so far away...how in the world are we supposed to make it to the top?" Even as we got closer and closer, the same question still lingered in my mind. It wasn't until we made it to the summit and looked about, that I realized how far up we had actually walked. It was such an uplifting moment, to realize that we had successfully summited one of the most technically difficult mountains to summit in California.

That's all for now. More to come later.

FCDH

The Cables at the top of Half Dome

Me and SB at the top of Half Dome!

Me at the top of Mt. Shasta

Falling into Disrepair!

Hi Readers!

Sorry I haven't been keeping up my blog recently! It's been tremendously busy - I'll update it soon, I swear!

Just a quick update. I'm going to Chicago for a friend's wedding this weekend, which will be my first ever wedding that I attend! Excited!!

-FCDH

Oh hello, Student Government!

Hi Readers,

I'd say I was pretty involved during my undergraduate years at the University of Illinois. However, there was one area where I wasn't, which was student government. However, that all changed here at Stanford! A few months ago, while I was taking a break from studying, I saw an email from the Stanford elections commission, telling graduate students to "apply now!" to be on Stanford's Graduate Student Council. I almost closed the page, but then I was like, "meh, if I close this window now I'll probably just waste more time on Facebook anyways. It's not like I'm wasting time by filling this out..." So I filled out the application, wrote a brief (and somewhat BS paragraph) about what I wanted to do on the GSC, and didn't give it any more thought.

Well, turns out there were only 16 graduate students who were competing for 14 spots on the GSC, and I suppose I was lucky enough to be one of the 14 who were elected to be on the GSC. At the time, I really had no idea what I had gotten myself into. I didn't really even know what the GSC did, other than that they threw pretty big parties and planned other events for the graduate students here at Stanford. All that changed quickly with the transition meetings with the old GSC, where we learned all about what student government is (supposed to be) about. 

While the general election only elected people onto the GSC, the GSC held an internal election afterward to determine the new leadership team of the GSC, namely the chairs that would help guide the GSC. Here was where things began getting more intense. The initial front-runners for the chair positions had a falling-out a couple of days before the internal election, so another GSC member tapped me to run with him as co-chairs. We did, and managed to win the internal election! So now I am one of the co-chairs of the new GSC!

So far it has been an exhilarating ride. I've had a blast learning about the inner workings of the university, and I am very excited to be able to work at making a difference to the students!

That's it for now!

-FCDH

Wind Surfing at Stanford!

Hi Readers,

So some of you may know that I've recently started taking wind surfing classes here at Stanford. Yes, Stanford offers wind surfing classes, because it is so awesome. I was debating about taking the class, especially since I had suffered a cut to my leg the week before and it would hurt to put the wetsuit on. However, since it is only offered every spring, I finally decided to take it, and it was a fantastic idea!

So to start off, Stanford is humongous. It's so large, in fact, that it includes several lakes. There are acres and acres of land which are part of Stanford, but which are not developed in any way. This includes a lake called Felt Lake, which is located behind the campus, on the other side of 280. This is where the windsurfing classes are held.

For a course fee of $100, everything is included. Even though I wasn't sure that a wetsuit was necessary, I bought one anyways, and it was definitely a great idea. The first time I tried the water, it was freezing cold. I was nice and toasty inside the wetsuit (and blubbery as well, since the wetsuit made me look like a seal).

Wind surfing includes a board, a sail, and a boom. The board is what you stand on, the sail stands on top of the board so you can catch the wind, and the boom is what you hold onto with your hands to direct the sail. The first class taught us how to assemble all the parts, and how to balance ourselves on the board.

Once you are on the board, you have to pull on the sail until it stands up straight. This is probably the hardest part of learning how to windsurf (so far..there's only been 2 classes). Balancing is really difficult, and if the wind is strong or unsteady then it's hard to stay on the board. I fell a lot that first day. A LOT. But on the second day, it got a lot better! I was able to move around the lake using the wind, and it was really fun! It also helped that the second day had much better weather than the first day.

I found that the hardest thing to do, once you start moving, is to go upwind. It is a problem - once the wind blows you down to the end of the lake...how do you get back? I found this out early on in the 2nd class, when I found myself at the very edge of the lake and unable to go back. Fortunately, one of the TAs came by and guided me on how to zigzag across the wind, heading slowly upwind the entire time, in order to get back. Whereas I spent 10 mins getting to the end of the lake going downwind, it took well over an hour and a half to get back up the lake again.

Stanford really never ceases to amaze me with what it has to offer. I love this place!

Till next time!
-FCDH

Alpha Waves

Hi Readers,

So I'm on a blogging spree tonight. I think I'm going to try and catch up on as many blogs as I humanly can before I fall asleep midway through a blog.

So this quarter, I'm taking a class on Diagnostic Devices here at Stanford. It involves a lab section where you actually get to use a lot of medical devices to try it out. For example, for the CT scan lab, we placed several objects and took CT scans of it. You get the picture.

This past week, what we did was called EEG, or electroencephalagram (spelling might be wrong). This involves placing electrodes on your head, and recording your brain waves as your are performing different tasks. The tasks that I had to do involve watching a picture as it flashed at a predetermined frequency, grinding my teeth and blinking my eyes while looking at a white screen, and closing my eyes and relaxing.

The last exercise, where I had to close my eyes and relax, is supposed to bring out the "Alpha" waves from your brain. This indicates the 3rd most active level of brain activity (after delta and theta waves), and the waves oscillate at around 10Hz. When I did the exercise, I could hear the lab manager say, "Whoa! Look at those massive Alpha waves! Those are humongous!" I would periodically open my eyes just so that I could see what the Alpha waves look like. He's right - they are gigantic in comparison to the beta waves that were recorded with the flashing image.

He also joked that I must have an Alpha personality, to which I merely shrugged my shoulders and gave him a smile. =)

In fact, my Alpha waves were apparently so strong that the comparative phase drift was small. Normally, natural non-event induced waves tend to phase drift over 360 degrees during a measurement. However, mine was so stable that they were complete confined to a 90 degree quadrant. The lab manager said that this is extremely rare, and that I would make a good function generator. He was joking, but he had a point - when they took the Fourier transform of my brain waves, the signal-to-noise ratio and the spurious-free dynamic range was quite substantial.

Now I wasn't really sure what that meant. Is that a good thing? Bad thing? Neither?

So I did a quick Google search about Alpha waves, and it came up with loads of goodies. Tidbits which I'm not sure that I should trust, but I thought I'd post about anyways. Apparently, having large Alpha waves indicates that you are a very stress-free person, and can come up with creative ideas and solutions to problems. It means that I can go from an alert stage to a relaxed stage very easily. All of these sound like me, and best of all - I'm now proven myself (somewhat) to be relatively stress-free most of the time! I'm wondering if an EEG taken 2-3 years ago would have shown the same thing. I think I'm a lot happier and relaxed now than I was during my undergrad.

Anyways, this post was just a random musing on the Alpha waves that they measured from my brain. I'm glad that my Alpha waves were so large, since it could mean that I am very stress-free. Hopefully I'll stay that way!

Till next post!
-FCDH

Epic Roadtrip: Arizona + Utah

Hi Readers,

I have not written a blog post in a long time, because...I forgot. So here's a short post about my President's Day Weekend, when I embarked on what was probably the best trip that I've had in America. This happened almost 2 months ago (and I started a blog post about it 2 months ago..) but I'm just getting around to it now.

Starting a year ago, after seeing a New York Times travel article about it, I began planning for a trip to The Wave in Arizona. To go to the Wave, one must obtain a permit, which are given out in a monthly online lottery process. 10 permits are granted per day, and in the lottery process you can choose 3 days in a month to try your luck. For an entire year, I tried my luck every month, and failed every single month. In October, I received the prized email that I had been waiting for, which gave me 4 permits for the day of February 17th, 2012. I had applied for the date blindly, and by sheer luck it turned out to be the President Day's long weekend. So excitedly, I gathered 3 other people (GA, NO, and AZ), and began planning an epic trip. And an epic trip it was.

Because my hiking permits were for Friday the 17th, that meant that we had to arrive in the area by Thursday night. Therefore, we planned on flying to Las Vegas on Thursday night, renting a car and driving to Kanab, UT, and staying the night there. Potential problems began emerging very early on. We almost missed out flight to Las Vegas, we were delayed an hour in getting our rental car, and by the time we had arrived to Kanab it was 5am. I was worried a lot that first night. Worried that the others wouldn't be able to wake up in the morning in time for us to drive an hour to the Wave and to do the 6-mile roundtrip hike, or just worried in general that something would go wrong and we wouldn't be able to go to the Wave.

But, it turned out to be amazing! We woke up around 9am, and got to the Waves around noon (after an intense 8-mile bumpy dirt road). We hiked for 3 miles to get to the Wave, and it was very worth it! The weather was fantastic this time of year, around 80 degrees and sun-drenched. The Waves themselves were smaller than I had imagined, but it was just so awesome to see what I had dreamed about for so long. We took loads of pictures there and then headed back, in the midst of the tall shadows cast from the sun's rays on all the weird rock formations.

The next day we hit up Bryce Canyon. Bryce is quite indescribable, almost like a fairyland. There are loads of rock formations called Hoodoos, and the sheer extent of them are quite incredible. We spent the majority of the day driving around to all of the viewpoints and taking pictures. We did manage to get in a hike around the rim of the Bryce Amphitheater, and we saw the sunset. The scenery was really beautiful. If it weren't so cold and covered in snow and ice there, we might have been able to do more hiking. Oh well, save it for the next time!

The day after, we hit up both Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park and Zion National Park. The sand dunes were not bad to look at, but the snow covering them definitely made it a lot less exciting. They essentially just looked like giant snowdrifts. However, we spent 2-3 hours there just having fun in the snow. We rolled down the sand dunes, had snowball fights, and built a snowman. It was a really fun time! By the time we left the dunes, there was not much time to fully enjoy Zion (not that we could have done much with only a day there anyways), but we still got to see the amazing scenery there. It reminds me of Yosemite quite a bit. As we left Zion all exhausted, we stopped by an awesome burger place, courtesy of Yelp, before continuing our way to Las Vegas for the night. We had intended to celebrate GA's birthday that night in LV, but we were all so tired that we crashed soon after reaching LV.

On the last day of the trip, we took a detour from the "boring" way back to SF, and decided to take the highway through Death Valley National Park. It turned out to be a very nice and meandering route through the desolate wilderness, one where GA suffered from car sickness (there were a lot of windy turns) and we almost didn't make it back to SF in time to return our car.

The trip was tremendously fun! Here are some pictures. Cheers!

At the Wave!

Bryce Amphitheater in Bryce Canyon

Our awesome snowman!

Overlooking Zion Valley

Me and NO

-FCDH

Le Sigh

Hi Readers,

I just kinda had a fight with my boyfriend and now I feel awful about it. Absolutely awful. I wonder how he puts up with me and my stupid antics. I didn't even give him a chance... I was just throwing out my arguments, and not listening to him at all. 

Ever had that feeling when you know "oh crap, I took it one step too far?" Well, it happened to me today. I didn't realize how much of a jerk I was until afterward. I wish I could take it back...I just want to hold him in my arms right now, and tell him how sorry I am to make such a big deal out of nothing. 

The worst part is, he's been joking recently that he didn't realize that I was so mean when he first met me. Now I'm starting to wonder - are they jokes?

I'm remembering some of the horrible things that I've done in the past to different people. 

Maybe inherently I am a bad person. Why did I keep on pressing my argument, even after he has apologized over and over again, and has taken all of the blame on himself? 

I am starting to see some traces of my dad in me. My blood runs cold at the thought. Maybe genetics cannot be averted after all. 

I will have to watch myself more carefully in the future, to make sure I don't just lash out at the people I care about the most. How could I let this happen? 

-FCDH

Stanford Quals!

Hi Readers,

I started writing this post 35 days ago, before I actually took quals and found out my results. The fact that I haven't finished it until today speaks volumes as to how busy I have been. This quarter has just been waves and waves of shazam and I'm finally starting to dig myself out of all this crap. I just turned in 2 final projects, and I have another final project and final hw set due on Monday. After that, 2 finals stand in my way of snowboarding and other spring break plans. Yippee!

AND I PASSED THE QUALS!! FIRST TIME TOO!!! I was unbelievably happy when that email came. =)

Anyways, this post is going to talk about my experiences taking the qualifying exams at Stanford. When I came to Stanford , the EE department head (Professor Mark Horowitz) was very adamant about it not being a big deal. He said that first years should not worry about passing or failing their first time, and that they should just treat it as a practice their first year. I think he's slightly out of touch with the EE students. When do we not freak out about anything? Especially a test that is, even if only symbolic, a somewhat traumatic experience for all who go through it.

Here's what the quals nominally entail:
-10 oral exams with 10 different professors, each 12 minutes long.

Here's what the quals actually entail:
-at least a month of frantic studying
-a complete 8-hour day of running around to different rooms
-lots of sighing
-sarcastic professors making fun of you
-well-meaning professors unintentionally making fun of you
-having absolutely no idea if you passed or failed

Here are some tips and hindsight:

Studying
-A quals study group is a great idea. I usually don't work in groups, but studying for quals in a group is a phenomenal idea, since there are many people at Stanford who are smarter than you.
-I started really studying for the quals a month before I took them. This really was not enough, and I should have started studying earlier, so I could cover more. It was pure luck that I passed the first time.
-Do not study your group 3 and 4 more than your group 1 and 2, even though you might not be very good at them. The group I ended up doing the worst on was group 1, while groups 2, 3, and 4 ensured that I passed.

Professor Selection
For quals, you must make your professor selections from the list that is given to you that year. There are many different fields your professors can be chosen from. All quals students have to choose 20 professors to distribute into 4 groups, and 10 quals professors will be chosen from those 4. Students will rank their groups from 1-4, with 1 being the most preferred, and 4 being the least preferred. 4 professors will be chosen from group 1, 3 from group 2, 2 from group 3, and 1 from group 4. The maximum professors from any one field that can be chosen is 4.

Given knowledge of this, it is possible to "game" the system a bit, by selecting professors in special ways. For example, if there are 6 professors in the field that you specialize in, you can put 5 of them in group 1, which will ensure that the 6th will not be picked if placed in any other group (because the maximum 4 professors from group 1 will have been picked already). If you game the selection process carefully, it is possible to minimize your chances of getting professors in areas that you don't want. My four areas were devices, physics, E&M, and circuits, and yet I managed to escape with 4 professors in devices, 4 in physics, and 2 in E&M. Sheer luck! I would have performed poorly on circuits.

The Arbitrary Scores
I tried to smile the entire way through my quals, but it was hard for many reasons. For one, you have absolutely no idea what criteria by which the professors are judging you on. You don't know what the right answer is, whether or not there were more parts to the problem that you didn't answer, or whether you made a good impression on the professor or not. You are struck by the arbitrariness of it all.

And that's really the word of the day: arbitrariness. When I received the final breakdown of grades by professor, it completely floored me. Here were the big shocks in the scores:

1. My group 1 professors (Devices) gave me the lowest scores. I had Professor X (anonymized in case we were not supposed to reveal this information), who I thought I did relatively well on. 1.2/10 after curving. How I got that, I had no idea, and still have no idea. Professor Y asked me if I was in signals and systems at the end of our session. Ouch.
2. Physics and E&M profs love me. At least, I did better than 75% percentile of students on all of them. I had no idea how to answer Professor Z's question, and made up an answer, and the professor told me at the end of the session: "your answer was wrong. You may leave now." 8/10. WTF?
3. I performed either extremely well or extremely poorly. It was either below 25th percentile, or above 75th.

I lost complete faith in the quals system after the scores were published. Some professors that I thought I did well on didn't give me good scores. Some professors that I thought I failed gave me fantastic scores. How this is supposed to measure your ability to do research, I have no idea.

But that's over. It was a very traumatic experience, but one that all Ph.D EE students will be able to complain about for years to come. And I passed! That's the important thing. =)

Till next post!
-FCDH

Twisted

Hi Readers,

I feel like there is a giant weight above my head, ready to drop and crush me.

I am torn between two desires, and I don't know what to do.

I want to freeze time, and savor what I have without having to worry about the future.

I want to bury my head in my arms and scream in frustration.

My insides are twisted with uncertainty.

Tears.

Stress.

I want to run away from all that plagues me.

One thing at a time.

Quals.

Pull yourself together.

Relationships.

This is not a time to be weak.

Life.

-FCDH

Speed Bumps

Hi Readers,

I feel like I need to write this post to remind myself how to be happy by myself. Being in a relationship, I'm becoming too complacent about my own personal happiness, more specifically the source of my happiness. I must remember how to derive happiness from other places and other activities than just from him. Life passes at an unyielding pace. I've become so used to going at a breakneck speed through life, that being in a relationship is throwing my sense of happiness all off-kilter. I must come to realize that other people travel at different speeds through life.

In the past 2 months, I have come to find that the road through this relationship is littered with speed bumps. Like the stereotypical bad Asian driver, I lack hindsight, and believe that the last speed bump I passed through will be the last. Naturally I get frustrated with all of the speed bumps, because it necessitates a repeated process of acceleration and sudden braking as the speed bump comes into view. At the current moment, I find myself in a state of mind where happiness is only garnered when one has reached the destination point. I find myself constantly frustrated with the speed bumps, not because they are there, but because I keep putting the expectation into my mind that I'll be able to speed, and keep having that expectation broken over and over again.

I have forgotten what I used to do when I didn't have a car. I used to walk or bike, and enjoy taking time out to smell the roses or to appreciate the scenery. I would explore paths through the forest on a whim, and enjoy the journey itself as well as upon reaching the destination. The world is still full of unexplored wonders. But now, all I do is wait around for the next time I'll get to see him? On average, I shouldn't be feeling less happy than I did before I was in the relationship. It is a paradox.

I love being with him. It's simple, easy, and I can find happiness with a phone call and a short drive. But I must stop myself from turning into this domesticated animal, dependent on others for my own happiness. Since he has put up his speed bumps, I must somehow learn to put up my own speed bumps, to prevent myself from being disappointed. More than that, I need to remove the destination from view, in order to stop my expectations from hitting a brick wall over and over again.

Let me turn off the GPS system and go for a joyride. Destination unknown.

-FCDH

A Year's Summary

Hi Readers,

So much has happened in a single year, both in my own life and the world around me. From the Arab Spring to the earthquake in Japan, billions of lives were dramatically changed all around the world. Don't Ask Don't Tell was repealed, and the war in Iraq was ended. Herman Cain and Michelle Bachmann became household names, and Rick Perry's political career took a nosedive.

On Jan. 1st, 2011, I didn't know what my future post-graduation held. I thought I had equal probability to go into graduate school or industry. For grad school, I expected to be in UC Santa Barbara or Berkeley. Stanford didn't even factor into my calculations. I had applied to Stanford simply because I had ordered an extra leftover transcript and I thought it shouldn't go to waste. Look where I am now. Funny, eh?

Did you know that I was interviewing for full-time positions? I had interviewed until the final rounds for a position for Mitsubishi in Japan, and for National Instruments in Texas. A part of me thought I would go to industry for sure. Why not Japan? Why not a clean break from my past? Was I too scared to go through with it? Is that the reason why I chose to come to grad school?

I couldn't have seen myself entering another relationship so soon. I didn't even know anything about California. Sure, I had heard that there were more gay people here, but then again who knows? Am I even attractive to others? Could I even get anyone if I wanted to? I knew only one thing - I would learn how to face the world bravely, alone or not. But I was scared shitless.

My resolutions for this year.
-Learn Surfing
-Visit South America
-Learn Arabic
-Summit Half Dome
-Visit Redwood, Mt. Lassen, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and Joshua Tree Natl Parks
-Visit Chinatown in SF! (haha this one should be easy to achieve)

New Years is always a time for anxiety and excitement. I am curious to see what the next 365 days will bring, and what the future me will think of the current me.

-FCDH