The battle has been over for more than 48 hours!

After 3 months at the Southern front line, our troop took position of the war. Towards the end of the battle, the enemy became more intensive than ever. With all the modern weapons and technologies so-called “projects” and “finals”, the enemy seemed to have access to our minds, our daily activities and even our sleeping patterns.

There were countless nights that my com-rats and I had to stay up in order to fight against the enemy force, fight against the “quizzes” and the “tests”!
There were countless nights that my com-rats and I had to run away from the bed — in order to stay awake all night to protect our base, our grades against those cold blooded but yet hot-explosive “projects” and “finals”!

By December 17th, most of my brothers and sisters were shipped home so they can rest up before the enemy strikes again (according to our intelligence agents, it’ll be as soon as January 5th). Yet, until December 20th, two other brave souls were still fighting by my side: Pvt. Janevski and Pvt. Mercer.

We each had different duties, and mine was to guard against “projects” launched by the enemy’s dictator Hall and dictator Dant.
Dictator Hall’s “projects” were long lasting, but they were easy to deal with. On the other hand, dictator Dant’s “neural network” was just coming at me like a hungry shark.
By the 11th hour of December 21st, I have successfully gained control to dictator Dant’s “neural network project”, the last “project” of this battle.

“Victory!” I screamed with joy and pride…

(to be continued)

Okay. I have to admit the title is a little bit odd, but that’s the best I can think of for this entry. Yes, I’m back, back from a ridiculously crazy semester.

To be more precised, I just came back from the adoration service of Collegedale SDA Church. While waiting for my friends, who are at a later service, I decided it’s a good time to come up here for a little catching up and or reflecting my life for the past months. As mentioned, this has been a crazy semester. Right now is probably the best time for blogging. With my procrastinating personality and the end of semester coming, I’ll never have the time to get up here, and I really miss writing in this little corner.

I actually am wondering what has been keeping me so “busy” lately. I mean, sure things change, but this semester just suddenly swallowed me like a monster. On a scale of busyness from 1 to 10, I’d give this semester a 9.5, versus the previous semesters, just about 7…

Anyway… what have I done this semester?

• I am officially a member of Collegedale SDA Church. My baptism happened on 8/23 this year.
• I have been exercising a lot, daily… very proud of this idea.
• I’m still enrolling in 16 credits, just like previous semesters. There are 3 classes that I particularly enjoy: Health for Life, Developmental Psychology, and Artificial Intelligence (even though my grade in this class isn’t looking too fine )
• I helped out a little bit over at West Side for Jesus, a great ministry that I especially enjoy.
• Softcess is gradually shaping up, more on that later.
• Made some new friends
• Lost some weight
• Injured a couple joints
• Oh, almost forgot about the ESL program at church. I’m co-teaching English as Second Language at my home church (Collegedale SDA, of course).

Yeah, I guess that’s it. Doesn’t look too bad. There are always a few more things I’d like to accomplish, but overall, it’s satisfactory, or acceptable. Well, I work a lot more this semester, that’s probably why I feel busy all the time. I have to say this semester flew by fast, I really can’t believe it’s almost Christmas. I really am excited about it (Did I mention the semester is tiring, too?). So excited about it that I even have some Christmas widget on my dashboard (I usually don’t put funky things on my dashboard, just for efficiency purpose):

George

-The End-

This week, precisely Tuesday & Wednesday, I finally had a chance to stay off campus the first time this summer (Yup, sad for me). My friend had a business trip to Memphis and it’s quite a drive (5 hours); he invited me a long so that he wouldn’t have to be in the car by himself for 5 hours. During those 5 hours, I also had a chance to finish a book, a very small book that I’ve had since last semester — The Lotus and the Cross: Jesus Talks with Buddha by Ravi Zacharias. I’ve had some thoughts and questions since I started the book, and I certainly had more after finishing it. Before I talk about them, I’d like to share a story I saw on facebook, the story that made me decide to write this entry.

Tiger and Buddhist

An old story tells of a woodsman who lived in the mountains of North Korea. While working in the forest one day, he was attacked by a huge tiger. The woodsman seized the tiger by the tail, and the tiger began turning around in circles, trying to get his teeth into the woodsman.
A Buddhist monk, out for a walk, was attracted by the noise and sauntered over. The woodsman, upon seeing the monk, cried out, “Please take my ax there and kill this tiger before I am eaten alive.” Read the rest of this entry »

When I started this blog, a couple of my friends asked why I chose this name. Some of them said this was a ridiculous domain name too. I can see that from one perspective, “Have you met Steven” seems a bit self-advertised. But, when I decided to start blogging, the whole point was to jog down valuable thoughts I have, and it still is. Then after a while, I can meet my-old-self and see what changes I have made, are they positive or negative. Yup, it’s all about me, but if  my current friends, or my yet-to-be-friends can know me better from reading this blog, then that’s a bonus.

There is a reason I write a blog entry about blogging. I recently got recruited by Southern’s Learning Support Center^[a], to help the new JumpStart students get ready for college academically (and maybe other aspects), or in short, to be a tutor . Today, the outdoor education department hosted a rafting trip for them, and I’ve been dying to go on trips like this. In addition, it’s a good chance to get to know my students better, why not!?

In short, the trip was great (yes, it has to be bolded, it was that great). The boat I led went smoothly. We only got stuck twice, which was actually the best comparing to the other ones^[b]. After the 3 hours of rafting and viewing the beauty of nature, we had fellowship time and some good food, thanks to the amazing staff from Southern’s First-Year Experience programme. During dinner, one of the students came up and asked if I were a freshman blogger. She told me that she wasn’t sure if she should come to Southern, but she decided to come after reading the blog^[c]. At that point, I thought to myself “Man! I always know that one of the deans read my blog, and a couple friends did (for the first couple ones), but I never would have thought what I write actually helps the students make their decisions. Good thing I wrote things quite positively. And the PR department should give me a bonus too.” I was inspired.

Never thought just the little thing I did every Sunday night, or Monday morning, the thing I always procastinated and complained about would make such a big difference.

1. For short, I refer to Southern Adventist University as Southern. [↩]
2. The water dropped a couple inches. [↩]
3. Apparently, the question was just to start the conversation. [↩]

While many PC users are looking forward to Windows 7, many Mac users are also dying for the newest OS X: Snow Leopard. Most new features sound nice, but not so impressive (After all, this is just a small upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard). However, there is one particular thing that caught my attention: Out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange.

Some background about Microsoft Exchange (ME): This Microsoft technology is very popular in the business world. It allows users to manage emails, tasks and daily events such as conference, meeting, etc. This doesn’t sound much exciting, but a good size business would go nut without using ME or an equivalent system. For example, if I am assigned a project and need to setup a meeting with other employees^[a] to gather specs, figure out solutions to the project, etc, (or just planning a party ), this is all I need to do: Read the rest of this entry »

1. This happens very often, if not every single day. [↩]

I was reading a book Zach gave me, The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, and I came across the section he talks about his childhood dreams. I thought to myself “What are my childhood dreams?” My thoughts stumble as I couldn’t think of a single thing I dreamed of as a child. Finally, I remember that I used to dream of being a police officer. Then I wonder why I wanted to be a policeman; after all, I grew up with LEGO (still loving those), power rangers and their action figures. Why didn’t I dream of being a superman, or being one of the power rangers? Does it some how reflect who I am and what I decide to study, and to do?

I was brought up in a realistic home (which I don’t mind, but it think it kills some of my creativity). I wasn’t into music, drawing or any kind of art. I remember drawing the same thing on every single free-drawing assignments, a house — a simple combination of squares, rectangles, and triangles. As I grew up, I found computers exciting. Yup, I got introduce to computers through a computer game. After a couple times hearing my dad yell at me for breaking the computer^[a], my mom decided to send me to computer classes during the summer and I got introduced to word and spreadsheet.  If I’m not mistaken, I was in 4th grade. That was when I told myself “One day, I’ll be like Bill Gates!” (Not having to go to school and is still that rich and famous, of course! )

Back then, I was a total slacker, and probably still is . I would lie about finishing my homework so that I could play my action figures or watch TV. My parents hired a college student to come and make sure I finished my homework, help me with the assignments if necessary, and eventually teach me new concepts. That went on for a couple years until I had to take the computer classes at school. The college student, my home teacher, realized the computer ability I had, and I was doing pretty well at school, so he asked a friend of his, a computer guy, to teach me. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Just to clarify, it wasn’t my fault. Dumb Windows 98 first edition and Windows ME failed themselves. [↩]

This is a new and weird thing, but give the first video a try and see if it catches your attention.

Get excited -- Meet Milo

You are probably thinking: ‘Great! More reasons for the nerds to lock themselves in their rooms. More distraction from my schoolwork.’ And certainly, talking to a computer / imaginary friend does not help socializing… Before my comments bored the devil out of you, take another look at this video. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my bad habit is that I don’t like to learn to use someone else’s product when I know I have the ability to make it.

Throughout years of programming, Date and Time has been one of the things I find annoying to deal with. Luckily, I didn’t have to do much with date and time since most of my work is done around the database and algorithms, until recently, when I was going to build a new blog myself, which requires accurate storage of date & time (when was this published, last modified etc.).

Most programming language have a pretty decent date & time library, but that also means it’s pretty complicated to use. Those libraries are helpful in most cases, such as (2009, 6, 3, 20, 6, 0) will give me June 3, 2009 8:06 PM. But what timezone is it in? Are you talking about 8:06 PM in England or 8:06 PM over in Washington State? Things get hairy once we have to deal with the timezone, and then daylight savings. To be honest, I don’t even know if the Collegedale, TN timezone is currently -1 or +1 for daylight savings. All I know is that it’s 4 hours behind the UTC/GMT and that’s good enough.

With the mind set that I’m not going to find out if I’m under any daylight savings, I need a way to store date and time in the most accurate way possible: Read the rest of this entry »

HYMS is finally up and running!

I decided to start this blog after being bored to death for the first couple weeks of summer (yeah, my great summer plan was ruined). On the other hand, I kinda miss being a SAU freshman blogger, too.

The domain name has been registered for a couple weeks. I, however, didn’t plan to run WordPress on it, but some custom CGI scripts instead. There’s nothing wrong with WordPress but I don’t quite like its text editor and I want some custom functions for my blog so I was going to ‘cook something up’. Finally, I realized it’s not worth all the effort to build the whole blog just for some random features so I decided to stick with WP.