The Bean Pit

I flew back to Ithaca last week. It was possibly the worst flight sequence I’ve ever had in my life and definitely the worst I’ve ever had coming back to Cornell. I think it’s best expressed as a timeline:

Thursday, 8:00 PM - Arrive at LAX

Thursday, 10:00 PM - Airplane delayed two hours

Friday, 12:00 AM - Airplane takes off

Friday, 10:00 AM - Airplane arrives in BOS. Due to the two hour delay, I miss my connection.

Friday, 11:00 AM - Airplane leaves BOS.

Friday, 12:00 PM - Airplane arrives in NYC. Next connection to ITH is at 4:45 PM

Friday, 3:00 PM - I find out the connection to ITH is cancelled. I go to special services and they assure me that I got a seat on the next one, which was at around 8:00 PM.

Friday, 8:00 PM - While boarding the plane, I find out that another guy and I have the same seat. We tell the flight attendant, and she notices that both our tickets have the same name on them. Guess who I’m not? Xing Lu. Special services guy mixed me up with another passenger with the same last name, and I didn’t bother checking my ticket because I was so relieved to have gotten on the flight -.-

Friday, 8:30 PM - I give up working with the special services desk, and I notice that 3 other people (a professor, a visiting scientist, and a Cornell student) are also stranded. We decide spontaneously to rent a car and drive back to ITH.

Friday, 9:00 PM - We begin the drive back to ITH. This was actually the highlight of the trip, because it was interesting getting to know the professor and talking with the other student.

Saturday, 1:00 AM - We arrive in ITH. I stumble into my apartment, and to my surprise my other roommate hadn’t returned to his room yet. He scares me on purpose after I exit the bathroom -.-

Total trip time: 26 hours

As an added bonus to my stupidity, I thought that my TA training session is on Saturday. I went on campus at 8:30 AM only to find out after wandering for 2 hours confusedly that it was actually the Saturday 2 weeks from that one.

Moral of these stories: I win at life -.-

This blog is rapidly becoming a dream journal rather than a daily journal (especially because I am far too lazy to update it daily). Anyway, I had a couple of weird dreams in the last couple of days, and it’s fantastic because I know as soon as I start school again, all of these dreams will disappear due to lack of sleep. Anyway, in one of my dreams, I was a fugitive or something with a bounty on my head, and the bounty hunters were always just random people who had really freaky red masks. They could be middle-aged men, old women, young children, whatever, but they would pull out their mask when I wasn’t looking and then kill the crap out of me LOL. I died multiple times -_- I suppose the dream was Matrix-esque in that the agent whatever-his-face-was could have been anybody in the movie. Whatever. I keep dying in my dreams XD

The next dream I had was one in which I became a super spy. It was pretty awesome, except the location of our mission was in a snowy supermarket… that sloped upwards as you went up the aisles. It was kind of like… a wintry mountain-supermarket hybrid. Anyway, my team and I managed to breach the first line of defense. And then I’m pretty sure I got shot or something XD In any case, I woke up :P

And… now I’m sick XD Yay the only really relevant personal update of the day! I don’t think I’ve done enough over break to write about anything XD But! Just for future note, I will write down that we had a blast going with Brandon to San Diego for 3 days this break, where we did nothing but eat. I think I wrote that down somewhere, but just in case… XD

I always thought that I would never sleep through being killed in a dream. This is clearly not the case. Yesterday, I swear I died at least 5 times in the same dream. The setting was basically the battlefield of two warring factions. The really stupid thing, though, is that I was always on the side of the losing faction at every time point within the dream. Thus, we would always be pushed back to our last defense line, and then we would sit shivering in the corner of some room somewhere, and then they’d barge in and gun us down. The added bonus? One faction, when they had a large enough margin of victory, would bring in their “big guns” to completely annihilate the other faction. On one side, they had tanks. On the other, they had these almost super strong, mechanized humans that were completely invulnerable to bullets. So, either I got blown to tiny bits or I got crushed by an extremely powerful giant. Unpleasant. After about five rounds of that, I came back as a ghost, and apparently there was some family of ghosts that I had angered in some nonexistent prior life. They yelled at me for a little while, and then I dropped down into hell. The end.

In other news! I had a good birthday, and I hope Shaina had a good birthday too :P We went to a shooting range on her “birthday” (one day before, which is when we celebrated it to surprise her -_-), which was a lot more fun than I originally thought it would be XD We played a whole lot of dungeon defenders on mine, which was also fun. Haven’t touched the game since, but maybe when we decide to have another session…

Back to applying for jobs! The hate… it is large! 

The great thing about having a lot of sleep is actually dreaming (or remembering my dreams, I guess). The not so great thing about that is that I somehow manage to convince myself that I have to complete a homework assignment before the break of dawn… one that can only be completed within the dream. So what ends up happening is that I wake up in a panic, frantically go back to sleep, work on this problem, wake up again in a panic because I didn’t finish it in time, go back to sleep… etc etc. The good news? I actually finished the problem! The bad news? I felt really really stupid when I actually woke up -_-

And then I had another dream about navigating a pirate ship… which was pretty cool… until a thunderstorm happened to appear out of clear skies, rip the ship to shreds, and then leave. I think I was also battling some sharks at some point… which is funny because I can’t really swim in real life and would probably get destroyed. I’m also sure you can’t actually punch a shark and have it just swim away.

I also had a stack of endless pancakes at Denny’s yesterday, so that might have contributed somewhat to my insanity.

I will be returning to college soon for my final two semesters (and summer session), and I thought I could increase my productivity and decrease my backpack burden by picking up a lightweight netbook to replace my Dell XPS M1530 while walking around campus (but I’m mostly just a sucker for trying out new tech things). I went to Best Buy and picked out the ASUS 1015PE. This was my first look into the world of netbooks, and it was overall a fairly decent experience. In this quick review, I will go over the basic pros and cons that I noticed in my first day of use with the netbook.

Some of the best features of the ASUS netbook included its long battery life, sub 3-pound weight, chassis design, and responsive trackpad. I was immediately impressed with the look and feel of the netbook with its matte black top and chiclet-style keys, and the multitouch trackpad controls (pinch-to-zoom and two-finger scrolling) were very smooth. In addition, Best Buy rates its battery life at just over 8 hours (ASUS claims it’s 10.5; regardless, I was not able to test out the full battery life). However, there were also some major shortcomings that had to be addressed. I felt that the keyboard was too cramped (my thumbs were almost knocking against each other as I typed), and a few of the keys on the model I received were unresponsive to my touch unless approached from a specific angle (note: I did not experience this with the on-display model). In addition, the screen didn’t bend back too far on the hinge, and since the viewing angles of the screen were not stellar anyway, it was difficult for me to see the screen in certain sitting positions. Based on the issues that I had, I decided to return the netbook and replace it with a Toshiba mini NB505.

Ultimately, I attributed the unresponsiveness of my keyboard to hardware failure and treated it as a defect rather than as a normal trait. However, were I able to replace the defective ASUS 1015PE with a new, fully functional one, I would have been overall very happy with the purchase (but even after searching two separate Best Buys, I could not find another model). Nevertheless, I think the ASUS 1015PE is a strong choice for users (with small hands!) looking to buy a budget netbook ($259.99 at Best Buy) with an attractive design that will endure long periods away from the power outlet. It’s a good netbook, but I don’t believe it’s the best one out there.

I’ll be playing around with my new netbook in the next couple of days. Look for my review of the Toshiba mini NB505 soon!

Hello World!

This is my first blog entry. Let me introduce myself. I am currently a rising senior studying Biological Engineering at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. I created this blog primarily for fun; I will be reviewing new technology that I am fortunate enough to come across, talking about current news and research, and basically posting anything that I find bizarre or interesting.

Hopefully I’ll be able to entertain you for your brief stay, but I hope you’ll bear with me. I haven’t written a proper essay since high school…