It has been a long time since my last entry. Right after returning from Florida, a rush of exams and work came with the week.



We left our apartments in Oakland for the airport very early in the morning. Thanks to King's early flight and Joe's willingness to send us to the airport, we were at the airport by 5.30am. A few days prior to our vacation, Pittsburgh was enjoying a warm Spring-like weather but on the Monday we left for Florida, it started snowing again. The timing was just right. We escape the return of the cold by flying south to sunny and warm Orlando, Florida.



It was my first time flying United Airlines and it is also my first flight on a 757. It is very much to my delight since Malaysia Airlines has none of those in its fleet dominated by 737s. The cabin is much wider and longer but still it is 3-3 seating. I had a feeling of Dejavu when I arrived at the terminal in Orlando. Is this the airport Kevin's (Home Alone 1) family rushed when they realized that Kevin was left in Chicago?



We stayed in a Sierra Suites which is along the International Drive, a long stretch of road lined by hotels and entertainment spots targeted at tourists. The room is spacious for 6 of us in each. By the way, there were 13 of us: Me, Kenneth, King, Chern Yih, Seng Keat, Eunice, Phey Yuen, Ken Yu, Joo May, Brian and his gf Angela, Wendy and Ding. The hotel is reasonably priced and our stay came in a package with three theme park tickets. I like the kitchen in the room. Unlike other hotel kitchens, this one in Sierra is perfectly complete. It has a refrigerator, dishwasher, microsave, pots and pans, plates, forks, spoons and knives, cups, a roll of kitchen towel and a coffee making set. There was no oven but who needs the oven when there's a barbeque pit at the pool area downstairs?



On our first day, as what most Orlando tourists would do, we visited Magic Kingdom in Disney World. I'm so amazed on how much land Disney World occupies. It's like an estate big especially with lots of trees still untouched surrounding it. Basically, Magic Kingdom is a place for kids and for adults who want to revive their childhood fantasies. I am not a big fan cartoons anymore, not even a big one when I was small. The rides were good though epsecially the one with drops and suddens turns (no 360 vertical spins please). The Space Mountain was the craziest of the most. It was a rollercoaster but we couldn't the tracks above us. All could be seen was a dark dome ceiling but lots of stars. But after straining my eyes at the flashes of light zooming above, I realized that those were the trains that were moving. Indeed, the right threw me around at quite an amount of Gs. Basically, the we rolled down from the top, making sudden turns in absolute darkness. Good thing I was seating on the second seat from the front so I could see what were coming. We attended a Philharmagic Concert too which was 4-D movie show. We had to wear polarized sunglasses in order to see the 3D effects. The 4th dimension was the tangible effects water splashing at you.



The next day was spent entirely in Universal Studios. I find it's better than Disneyland simply because I prefer real-life movies than cartoons. There were the cars in The Fast and The Furious. My brother will die to set his eyes on this cars. The Philharmagic equivalent here was Shrek's 4D show. Most of the rides Universal are simulations. I particularly like the Twister simulation where we witnessed a simulated tornado in a room with gale force winds. Another great simulation was the earth quake one. It was about experiencing an earthquake in a Los Angeles (or San Francisco) subway. A tanker truck came "crashing" down towards us and it caught fire. On our right, water gushing in as if a dam has just gave way.



Seaworld was our third destination. I was quite skeptical about how appealing this place could be to me. However, seeing Dolphins and Killer Whales in real life for the first time made me think otherwise. There was Shamu, the killer and the other one which I can't remember the name but the largest killer whale in captivity. I took a lot of photos of the dolphins and whales doing their impressive trained jumps. I just wonder how could these large mammals rocket out of the water. Their tails and fins must be very strong to exert such huge hydrostatic force (ehem..physics eh).



I always look forward having good food during vacations. Not neccesarily expensive but at least unique to the region or even better, exotic. Though not exotic as our kebabs in Little Russia, New York, last Winter, the grilled ribs I had in Seaworld was awesome. The queue for it was an hour long and it cost quite a bomb. It was grilled with wood fire. My vocab in describing food is quite limited so all I can say of the barbeque ribs is DELICIOUS. The southerners are known for their fabuluous grills so I furthered my fulfillment of cravings for their meaty diet by trying out the steak at Hard Rock Cafe. It didn't taste as good as Chili's in Kuala Lumpur. However, HRC Orlando is freaking huge. I would say it's 5 times larger than the one in Concorde, KL.



Our Orlando trip was also a picture-filled vacation. I took a record of 586 digital photos. That was me alone. The rest of my friends took around the same number too. So, every night before we went to bed, we would have a gathering around my laptop and watched the photos we took for the day. This trip introduced us to taking candid shots too.



We came back on Friday night and our home Pittsburgh welcome us with cold weather and snow. It was a first a bit bitchy to have urself waiting for 28X in the cold. I almost lost my bag when I accidentally left it while taking out my friends bags. I cannot forget Chern Yih's deed of running for the bus although he didn't manage to get it. I managed to stop the bus by chasing it after while I stopped at the Craig Street traffic lights. Running in temperatures below zero can be deadly I think. I nearly fell sick that night but luckily Kenneth insisted that I took a hot bath. Swalllowed two tablets of American panadol and I was fine the next day.



A mountain pile of work waited for me after the vacation.

I still can't believe that I live just 2 blocks away from a world class museum. I took for grantedthe existence of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh until I dashed for an emergency visit to its toilet while waiting for the bus last Friday.



Phey Yuen and I visited the musuem this afternoon after mass. I find it to be much bigger than what it looks exteriorly. From the front, it looks like an ordinary, black, squre building but as we stepped inside, the sense of being a superior art gallery started to set in. Since both of us are CMU students (Phey Yuen aka H. S. Kho..hehehe), we got in for free. We started with the art gallery. I can't believe how many 15th century paintings were there. None were from really famous artists, at least to my shallow knowledge of the arts world. I really like the 15th century Italian paintings that depicts religious events and messages. I remembered reading in Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code about Leonardo Da Vinci playing pranks with his religious paintings. For example, he included a woman-like figure in The Last Supper/. But here in the museum, nothing strange or fishy was seen on the paintings. Some were intriguing though like a fly on the foot of a throne where the Madonna sat with the child Jesus.



Phey Yuen and I were the only ones taking photos I think. At first I thought it was not allowed but after asking a security officer whether we could do so, we found out that it was okay to do so. Most of my snapshots for the day were of the hall that holds parts of ruins of buildings in France, Rome and Greece. I just couldn't believe how Andrew Carnegie could have the money to ship all these to Pittsburgh and restore them indoors. Even the National Museum in Kuala Lumpur is not that elaborate in its exhibits. Even better, the staff in this Pittsburgh Museum, were extra friendly and were ever willing to answer questions. Another admiration on how Americans value their jobs. I don't find this back home especially in the government sector.



Both of us came back at 4 and started cooking pasta for the evening's dinner which was also a celebration of Chern Yih's birthday on Monday. I didn't turned out well as far as I think although Phey Yuen was commenting it to be good. I think cooking for a large crowd with a medium-sized pot made it tough for it to taste nice. I'd rather cook for two with much more 'control' over how the pasta would to turn like. I'm a big fan of the Italian delicacy. So much so that I would have my own homemade pasta sauce refrigerated for ocassional (frequent maybe) midnight snacks.



Paokong, as what's Chern Yih's affectionately called by us is now 20 years old. He's the innocent but hilarious one among us. I especially enjoy listening to the way he sums up his life in words, words that goes very local to me with his Manglish slang: "Last semester, I played games a lot. This sem, I watch anime a lot. After school, download anime, sleep for a while and do homework." True enough. He's indeed an anime freak now that his birthday wish was for faster downloads in Kazaa. He even wanted to send me anime to me but unfortunately, the transfer was cut off during the middle of the night. Paokong's the intelligent one among us too. See how much us guys admire his ability to tell immediately tell whether a series converge or not.



I must end now and start sleeping for the next to hours. We're going to Orlando tomorrow for the Spring break. Flight will be early at 8am and even earlier to leave since the helpful Joe will be sending us in his rented van. I might not be writing for next 5 days until we return from the warm and sunny South on Friday. By then, lots to tell and lots of pictures to upload too. Florida, here we come!

"Go away, go away. Don't haunt me"



since my last blog on Wednesday, so much things have happened but I've yet to write anything. I shouldn't delay any longer.



"My most recent programming assignment was hellish, at least to my average intellgence. Writing a class tha was later tested by some test code written by Professor nearly institutionalize me. I'm experiencing what my senior upperclassmen felt coding for courses like 15-211, 15-213, 15-212 etc. I spent the entire Thursday afternoon in a Wean Windows cluster punching keys into what seemed to be a blank wall. I finally finished it the next day after realizing that I needed to overwrite the .equals method in order for the binarysearch and contains methods to work. Actually, I slept at 3 and jumped out of bed 6am after realizing that the program was due in 6 hours. Somehow between 6 to 9, it felt like it was dream because I continued my sleep after submitting it. This assignment worries me. It's an indication of what the rest of the semester in 15111 would be. I'm tempted to take 15211 since a minor in robotics requires it.



After waking up at noon Friday, I went out with the rest of my fellow freshmen to Monroeville which was an hour away from Oakland. Sorry, friends. If it was not for my volatile stomach that led me to a quick lao sai at the Carnegie Museum's toilet, we wouldn't have missed the 67A at 3.45pm. Anyway, being in Monroeville after months of not going to shopping mall reminds me of our first week in Pittsburgh where we ventured into the well-established shopping centers all over Pittsburgh in search for household items for our new apartments (yes, all of us live in apartments for our first year). But this time, there was less of a pressure to spend. My debit card was only billed for a belt and a pair of cargo shorts. The outing to Monroeville centered most my drink with Seng Keat and Chern Yih at Cinnabon's. We felt like some old men at a coffee shop talking about the past since we were whining and complaining how overworked we have been for the 1st half of Spring 2004. I pity Seng Keat with 251 course which I believed is the hardest hurdle for any CS major in CMU.



Yeah! Phey Yuen arrived in the evening so we picked her up from the Greyhound station after shopping around in Monroeville. I've not seen her since she was here for Winter break. I guess she's like part of our family of freshmen in Pittsburgh. After Rafiq, her number of visits to Pittsburgh is the second most after my fellow MARA scholar, Rafiq. Both are from Penn State in College Park. After dinner at Lulu's, we had night spent on listening to tracks on napster, piano at mudge from 2am till 4am, and another round of talking about music till 6am.



I'm now getting worried of getting my physics lab and report completed by the end of Spring Break. The next 5 day will be in Orlando. It's very hard to work when the rest of friends are enjoying themselves. Ok ok. I must start complete my Speed of Sound notebook after this. Procastination sucks.

Attended an Interpretation & Argumentation class with my friends today. I dropped the course during the first week of last semester. I think it was a ridiculously challenging course for me a non-native speaker then. Maybe it was too early and too much of a shock for me to delve into an American-style writing class. Back home, there is hardly an open discussion. Every topic that our English teacher gives, even in UiTM, are subjected to a certain type of content. The topics were not that tough too. On the other hand, the theme for my I & A class was "sweatshop labor". My goodness. It took me a day or two to really understand what's the theme about. The amount of material I had to read was horrendously a stockpile of advanced literature, at least to my standard. 10 pages in 3 days? I'm a slow reader unlike my good friend Seng Seng in University of Chicago. Perhaps the ultimate reason that drove me out of the 76-101 course is giving opinions in discussion with other American students. They are not the average American students but those who make the cut to enter Carnegie Mellon for courses like Computer Science, Engineering and Music. I couldn't believe how well depth in content and language were my peers response to the topic. I still remember the name of my then intructor, who is like me, was new to the country. He was and I think still is pursuing a PhD in English in Carnegie Mellon. I remember clearly that on the first day, he rushed into the class panting as if he was being chased by a panther. "Hi. I'm so and so and I'll be your nightmare for this semester." He indeed was one for a week for me.



The undergraduate curricullum in Carnegie Mellon is kind enough to offer an alternative writing course for non-native speakers considering the number of international students in this school. I took Reading & Writing in Multi-cultural Settings that forced me to wake up at 8.30 am every Tuesdays and Thursday in order to be in time for meeting half an later. The rest of the semester was fine although I find it was irrelevant for me to join in a discussion the topic about Model Minority when I'm clearly not. Furthermore, I have been in the states for less than 6 months then and hardly there was time for me to read the newspapers and magazines on racial issues.

Yea. Physics lab ends after 20 mins of short notice by the professor. Usually the lab last for 2 hours.

The weather is so nice outside with skies more or less clear and the nice cool air blowing. I just wish I don't have this programming thing to do..sigh..



I just wrote something at random to Daphne just now...



"Have u ever thought of being in Heaven means being comfortable of having God around you? I asked myself this question once... What if we are tempted to sin Heaven? My uncle Edmund told me that being in heaven means being comfortable with God's ways. So, if you sin, you will not feel comfortable. I think that's how a holy person is in Heaven. God to you is no more a burden. Some people may say "I don't sin at all. I can go to Heaven." But then, is he really feel having not to sin is a burden? If I think holiness is a burden or something you wanna have so that you go to Heaven, I think that will qualify me to go to Heaven. Indeed, heaven's gate is so small that it's small than a needle's eye coz holiness is something you want to have sincerely. Being in heaven is something you want to have sincerely.



It's really hard, for me at least, to have a sincere relationship with God. Many in this world, I think, takes religion because they want something for it. Even sadder to say, that's how some Christians market the faith to non-believers. I came across a flyer in New York City last winter that says that by going to church, you'll have lots of blessings. What if worshipping God brings you no blessings at all? In the old testament, there are examples of people who are generously blessed by God for being believers ie. Abraham and King David. But there examples where one is taken away from all the comfort and success he had but still his trust and loyalty to God remained unshaken ie. Job. Ultimately, I think, Christ's Passion is the perfect example on a true relationship with God. He was stripped from all the fame and respect he had a week ago when He triumphantly entered Jerusalem but remained through to God till His very last breath as a man among us. He foresees the triumph of His death is not for Him but it's a triumph for mankind. In other words, He sacrificed himself not for His glory but the glory of His father and all those who believed in Him."



Hope it makes sense.

"Is it merely an illusion? pls, tell me it's true.."



Doing Chem Exam with a tall, orange hat on? What do u think? My professor took a polaroid photo of me struggling to solve mass balances in single unit processes. He was so nice to give us unlimited time to complete the supposed-to-be-2-hours exam. Most questions were on guess so there was a lot of playing with the ideal gas law.



Santana... most listeners attribute the wonder of his songs to his top-notch latin blues licks but I think the strength of his career weighs a lot on his fellow band members. I'm listening to Victory is Won from his Shaman album, a post-Supernatural album which is a complete jump into the late 90s pop style. Still, the skills of his drummer, keyboardist, bassist, percussionist and trumpet players builds the essence on Santana, the band.



I'm quite he realizes that. If one visits Santana's official web site, there is a section entirely devoted to giving credits to his band members. I think being a musician in Santana's band is like being called to an exclusive fraternity of musicians with the "world-class" touch.



I wish one day, I can be in it too.