i booked my tickets yay yay yay~!! i will be going fer thanksgivin. givin thanks fer the luaus, the pineapples, and the surfer boys. 

In other news, hehehehe i'm lovin DH again. It seems to be taking itself a lot less seriously and melodramatically, which is good because it was getting so depressing and they weren't doing it well.

I'm convinced my Mac is self healing~!

I fell off my bike, my Mac tumbled over onto the ground, along with the 12 cans of diet soda i was holding in one arm. This happened after the ramp-less transition from road to curb for which i refused to get off and push. So I turned on my mac and it made such depressing, yet tuneful, noises and continued to do so every time I started it up from sleep until lo and behold, it is now as quiet as a dead animal.

I, however, apparently do not learn. Except I did recently acquire the skill of riding with one hand, so my faith in my abilities is not unwarranted. And there's no blood! Ha ha! Plus, I now have all my soda for the week. And, thanks to my trusty sling bag and my expensive, yet now i see worth it, laptop case, I have nary a scratch on the hardy mac and henceforth can lie to any apple vendor in the future as to the validity of my warranty. Should this unexpected sound-making be the symptom of something more serious.

I live to ride recklessly another day!

8))))) So, I added one more class to my schedule, a pointe class, and the teacher they brought in this quarter for the class is Muriel Maffre, who danced 17 years as a Principal Dancer with the San Francisco Ballet. I'd almost rather spend my time watching her demonstrate the exercises than me doing it. One of the kids in class totally went up to her for an autograph at the end of the session.

My design class Rules. And I mean like, Rules, like I wanna cry on the first day of class already because all I get to do this for is a year. Simply put, it is just Play. But with all the resources, the technology, the insight to turn it into a kind of design methodology that turns ideas into corporations. It sounds so idyllic and dreamy but when your class involves making a water blaster, a paper bike, traveling to Germany, video conferencing with Audi, Nasa, Apple, or whoever you're working on a project for, a weekly brainstorming class where you go to the lab, they serve you beer, and you are to sit down and design for an hour.... you know this is so going to be the shiz. 

I am very much enjoying my holiday and am particularly lazy for this happy, carefree life style to change. Wake up.. read a book.. sleep.. read a comic.. eat... watch csi.. an easy, reliable, repeatable remedy for happiness in life.

I'm currently reading 'Lean Six Sigma for Dummies'.. which is really quite dorky. But I'm doing it less out of curiosity for management science and much more out of tickled delight to discover that Jack Donaghy's 'Six Sigma' is actUally a real thing. It is turning out to be surprisingly interesting though.

And then whilst reading and pondering the Electronics-Free Gait-Automated Leg at the back of my head, it suddenly occurred to me that I could have made the swing mechanism an entirely different way, and I had been all caught up about the gears inside not being allowed to move and hadn't realized that if they boTH moved together, I have an even better system than the nonsense one I had originally. And because the mass is now all shifted to the joint, I have a much easier system to move than before.

Why I'm still dwelling on this project 4 months after it's completed... well it not working in the end obviously bothered me. I still have these far-sighted beliefs that it will be a good thing one day. I felt I spent far too little time on it, despite it swallowing my senior year whole, and by the end of it I took a few too many shortcuts that led to makeshift, slipshod, really nonsense ideas barely holding the thing together, and particularly, I knew from the start that my swing mechanism was wrong but kept being too swamped to change it. Eh, well, I wonder what being able to solve it now will do for anything, but this can graduate from my senior design to one of those backyard, toolshed projects that hobbyists do on the side to make projects that nobody really trusts.

Really want to make the best use of my time as humanly possible in Stanford and the thought of it is already stressing me out. Was thinking about the excitement of starting the next year but realized there's hardly any excitement, only a tinge of trepidation actually. There are a million things I know I want to do, a million things I know this is my last chance to pursue, barely 15 classes I can take, and only 24 hours a day.

I've squared off 3 of those classes already -- a design course lasting the year. It's an incredible course on project design and project management, and highly fortuitously, to fill their girl to guy ratio I got a spot almost automatically. I'll work with an external company, student partners from around the world, get the chance to fly around the globe in development of our project, and the excitement and pure titillation of what I anticipate to learn is already exhausting me.

It's my last year to be free, it's my last year to learn, it's my last year to prepare myself to be as relevant as I can to the next six years of the job waiting at its end. I want to understand military strategy, I want to specialize in biomechanical design, I want to be savvy in design and innovation management so my department maintains its continual relevance to the SAF. I want to climb the rocks of yosemite, snowboard the slopes of tahoe, gamble the slots of vegas and drive down Route 1 with the top down. I want to party like I'm blameless, and rub shoulders with the greats.

I want to learn golf, join habitat for humanity, sing for a group for the first and last time, join a rock climbing club, reignite my passion for ballet, choreograph again. It's the year where I can see what I've done with the last 3 years, come to realize how very, very valuable time can be to learn, to play, to live and to laugh, seen the great and terrible weight of treasure in every second and seen the propensity of my mind to expand beyond my wildest imaginations. I've found a glimmer of the wealth of experiences awaiting me, tasted the ambrosia of knowledge, dipped my toes into the sea that lies beyond the shallow shores of self discovery. I've seen that my dreams have been paltry, had three years to find they were easily surpassed, and three years to fully understand the transience of this inadvertent freedom to the world. And awareness of just the single, solitary, lonely year left, worth ten times its weight in gold, has made this revelation one of acute and unaccustomed pain. I await this year with bated breath and cannot let go of it lest I lose a single moment to anything but the extraordinary.

Last night my family followed my godparents to their weekly social dancing, and I ended up having an awesome time learning the foxtrot, mambo, waltz, chachacha.. and I danced with my godfather, did the rhumba with my Daddy, and then a 70 year old man taught me to disco :)

http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_418626.html?vgnmr=1

Uhhhh.... I have become a little less secure about my job security. So this fellow with a PhD in cell biology, was working in A Star until he got retrenched last year, and after failing to find a job in anywhere else, governmental or educational, decided to start becoming a taxi driver. I can actually see his field of expertise as highly skilled but probably considerably small. Anyway. Point was, he has a really amazing blog, http://taxidiary.blogspot.com/, that documents all his trips bringing Singaporeans to and fro and is more enlightening and revealing of Singapore society than anything ever before. He documents his encounters with prostitutes, monks, homosexuality, executives, happy people, sad people, drunk people.. it's really eye opening to read.

i <3 skateboarding 8)) 

HAHA I bought a skateboard!!






ANd i TOTALly don't know how to ride one ^^^^^ FUN FOR THE MONTH! it has a shark! can you blame me?