I read this book, it was good, interesting. I like it better in the beginning, it was still good at the end but there is some sort unhappy stuff, which I don't like.

maybe be others would just think this is strange but i think it is pretty cool. i got a pretty awesome bruise from playing soccer yesterday. i got hit on my thigh by a ball moving fast from only a few yards away. it stung for a minute or so, and after that not a all. now it just feels like a bruise. there is a somewhat large area with bruises, its not all one bruise, but in some parts its like part of a ring around an about 6in circle, with smaller bruises inside. the cool part is that there are some places where i can intersecting red lines that are parts of outlines of the hexagons etc on the ball :-P

I've been meaning to write a post about stuff during winter break...its a bit late now. Christmas was good as always. We had snow at our house on Christmas day, which was very exciting, that is the maybe the first time that has happened since we moved to Oregon. I went snowboarding at Mt Hood with my sister and neighbour, which was fun. Um, there was more stuff, I don't really remember now.

Anyway, what I want to share that prompted me to finally write this was something that amused me just now. There is a website (and also an application on facebook) where it gives you a word and you pick which word out of four choices means the same thing or something similar. If you get it correct they donate 20 grains of rice to help end world hunger. So, I was doing this, and one of the words that came up was encephalon, and the answer was brain. The only reason I any idea what this word meant was because it was used in a video game, Xenosaga, and that amused me.

Oh, and yesterday was pancake day (shrove tuesday, mardi gras, fat tuesday) :) but I didn't have pancakes :/ because I was playing intermural basketball :). We lost our game, but we playing the team that is also the practice team for the real school team, and we didn't lose as badly as the team that played them last week. :) Anyway, pancakes tonight!

lots of basketball this weekend, good stuff :). played basketball with people Sunday afternoon, went to a Suns game on Friday with people, and went to watch Caltech womens team vs. Southwestern College which was the best part of the weekend. i got to southwestern by a bus ride that took about 90 min including waiting in the middle to transfer to another bus. the game was pretty good, but at times not good, Caltech lost 67-76, apparently better than when they played them the week before at tech. after the game i went to dinner with them, it was good to see and talk to some of my old teammates. :)

I made more stuff from the Japanese cook book I got last Christmas a few days ago. I made one of the things I made at Christmas (okonomiyaki - cabbage pancakes with various toppings like pork, shrimp, seaweed flakes, okonomiyaki sauce), and a couple of vegetable dishes (spinach with peanut sauce, carrot and daikon salad). I had some oknomiyaki when I was in japan, so it was interesting to compare. There are a couple different styles from different areas, and I had both, Hiroshima and kansai. I was originally going to make it all for dinner on Saturday, but going to the stores to get stuff took too long, in part because I rode my bike to Trader Joes for the first time (other times got rides from people) and didn't quite remember where it was. I was at the right intersection but 90 degrees off, so went on a four (?) mile detour to check other intersections before getting back to the right intersection and finding it. oops. Prepared some stuff on Sunday but didn't actually do it then because had a soccer game that evening (our last game of the season is this weekend :(). Monday my advisor had a dinner because has some visiting volcanologists from Russia. There was some interesting stories and conversations, and some people (including my advisor) drank a lot. Tuesday I was going to finally make the food ... but then was in a bad mood when I got home and snacked on stuff instead. Wednesday it finally happened and it was yummy :). Sometime in the next couple days I will eat the leftovers.

I am a bicycle.
I am a triangle. (equilateral, point at top, green at edges to translucent in the center)
I am a shoe.
I am a zoo. (zoo rhymes with shoe)

these are random thoughts that keep popping my head...its like I hear the thoughts instead of thinking them

one of my roommates last year had a skateboard she didnt use anymore. i tried a few times through the year, on our driveway and the sidewalk in front of our house. they were worried i was going to hurt myself, i insisted i would not. when she moved, i bought it from her for $5. since then i have used it a lot more, though still not very often. i have gone to school, around campus a bit, and back home four times in about a month, each time at the weekend or an evening to avoid when there are lots of people on campus. i improved a lot, especially in the first time i tried that, but im still not very good or confident in my skills of avoiding people. im hoping i will continue to use it more. some people ive talked to who skateboard or use to suggested going to skate park, they said it is a lot of fun, and it seems it would be, though i imagine it probably will involve more of me falling.

why is glass half full suppose to better than glass half empty? you see the good instead of the bad? but, what if half full means you were in the middle of filling it but ran out or something happened so you couldnt finish. half empty could mean it was full, then you drank half of it, so now its half empty. either way there is still potential for filling it more again, but at least when its half empty you know you actually drank half a glass. i guess you could switch the fulls and empties around for all that, but i kind of think it makes sense to measure how full it is when you are in the process of filling it and how empty it is why you are emptying it. though i guess you could use whatever it is closest too, and maybe that is the point. either way, whether it is good or bad depends how it got there and whats going to happen next.


ok, i really am going to work today, not going to let myself waste lots of time reading random stuff on internet

edit:

from wikipedia:
Is the glass half empty or half full? is a common expression, used rhetorically to indicate that a particular situation could be a cause for optimism (half full), pessimism (half empty), realism ("that depends on whether you are pouring or drinking"), functionalism (twice as large as it needs to be), logical (the other half is filled with air), cynical (it will be broken soon enough anyways, so who cares?), pathological (water causes drowning), phrenological (a bump on the head by the glass would cause a bump in the skull) or as a general litmus test to simply determine if an individual is an optimist or a pessimist. The purpose of the question is to demonstrate that the situation may be seen in different ways depending on one's point of view and that there may be opportunity in the situation as well as trouble.


I guess what I was thinking is sort of like the realism?

Why is that when I get sad/frustrated/unhappy/lonely the phrase "I want to go home" thinks itself, when I don't think thats really what I mean? At this point I'm not really sure where I think home is. To some extent the house I am living in here, but I also think "I want to go home" when I am here in the house. Oregon is home, but I haven't really lived there for a while, so more and more it's where my parents live. Since whenever I was little and learned I was born in England, and my family British, I've wanted to be able to consider England home. When I flew back to LA to go to Tech for the alumni basketball game, the word home was floating around a bit as landed in LA, I did live there for four years recently, but I don't think thats home.

Current Mood: at myself

You're The Mep Report!

Hilarious but random, you captivate all of those who spend
time with you. While you think a fair bit of yourself, others seem to think
even more of you, though you personally find this baffling. Flightless birds
play a major role in your life, though no one can really figure out why. You
manage to pull everything together in the end despite your penchant for
discussing literally everything at once. You honestly believe you can save
the world with Tonka trucks.


Take the Podcast Quiz.

last few weeks have been busy with classwork, bbqs and other fun stuff, and planning trip

not done with the term, but finally finished the last two assignments, which were somewhat never-ending because they were programming numerical models of stuff for numerical methods class and computational fluid dynamics class

did talk for graduate student seminar (SESEGRS - pronounced c-c-grrs) today, i was very nervous, partly because i hadn't thought much about the research it was about in the last month, because it was the first time i've done a talk like this, ive done class presentations and group meeting but that's it, and because presentations are always scary and i tend to not do well with them or communicating what im trying to say well. people said it was good, but im not sure i believe them, i didn't explain stuff very well or in much detail, and had a hard time answering questions. the prof who asked the most questions who was the only seismology person there (neither of my advisor type people were there, seismology or volcanology) sent me an email after suggesting we talk talk sometime about stuff to do with it that is more quantitative, so that is good.

few of meetings tomorrow, pretty much ready for both, first one for the project computational fluid dynamics class, and another to discuss what im going to try to do with my research this summer, and also to figure out details of going with one of the seismology groups to eastern oregon for a few weeks to help dig holes and install seismometers in them which should be cool

final wednesday morning for planetary volcanology class, should study for that

and getting ready to go to japan for two weeks leaving thursday! very exciting

a couple weekends ago i went on my first fieldtrip which included staying overnight. it was pretty cool, except for a couple people getting kind of annoying, but I guess that is to be expected. it was for the planetary volcanology class (the other classes im taking this term and just reading papers or are numerical methods stuff, so not so likely to include field trips). we went to the mojave desert and looked at basalt stuff in images and radar and in real life. we went to amboy crater, pisgah, cima volcanic field, and hole-in-the-wall (though apparently there are many hole-in-the-walls). it the first time ive been camping while ive been here. i kind of forgot that for most people coolers involve ice that melts (instead of icepacks or frozen food and organizing stuff so use stuff that should be cold first), so my sandwiches got all soggy, but i was able to eat snacky stuff plus get food from other people. the food was good, and so was the drinking :p. ive drank a lot more often while ive been here at asu...and ive also started get more used to beer, i still wouldnt say i like it, but i dont dislike it anymore.

i think i was going to say other stuff but i havent posted for a while so i forgot stuff...im only posting this now because im completly failing on concentrating on work today...i would have just given up and gone home but i have class later.

ooh...planning trip to japan for couple of weeks at the beginning of summer...very exciting...hopefully it will actually happen

i think i tend to ask the wrong questions... trying to get something explained i somehow don't get the explanation i need for stuff to make sense because i am asking the wrong questions... trying to certain information from people i dont get the information i want ... trying to find stuff online i search for the wrong things and dont find the information i want when others find it easily... trying to find what i need to do so that i can do what im suppose to be doing, i ask the wrong question and end not able to do what im suppose to be doing for longer than should have

Current Mood: frustrated

this is when programming is annoying...it runs...but it doesn't do what its suppose to... the numbers are exploding...and ive checked everything many times...time is running out, and i have other stuff to do...arg

Current Mood: frustrated

got an email kind of like what tina was talking about but a lot more to it:

( the email )

this term i started going to the geophysics/geodynamics "coffee hour". each week someone takes a turn picking a paper which we all read, they summarize it, then we discuss it and whatever comes up related. not surprisingly, (i think at least), i havent really said anything, a combination of not knowing much about what we are talking about and me being afraid to talk. this week the paper was about experiments done on postperovskite, a phase of materials which they think might exist near the core-mantle boundary inside the earth, maybe related to the D" region, where there is a discontinuity in the seismic velocities. in the discussion this got related to trying to determine the heat flow since knowing about the phase transition can help us determine the temperature there. one of the profs was trying to get us to talk about how we use that to determine the heat flow, which was actually a large portion of the geodynamics class last term. no one was saying anything, so i finally said something, maybe not very clear, but i pretty much said that we have equations for conduction, and we say something about the heat production in the middle, and we use what we know about the temperature and heat flow at the boundaries and we solve for stuff. and he was like, thats exactly it. :) then we went on to draw a picture and talk more about exactly which boundaries we could say something about the temperature, and assuming that certain parts were adiabatic, and saying that we werent thinking about convection at all just conduction, and writing the equation to start with. and i had gone back to being afraid to saying anything. but, i did saying something, because it was something we used a lot in class last term, and it was pretty much exactly what he was looking for. so, yeah, kind of cool :).
i need to stop being afraid of stuff. its something im continuously working on.
oh, and i should say stuff in the two classes im taking that include class participation as part of the grade.

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah


arg
that didnt really help

Current Mood: frustrated

so sometimes, if im not sure what i should do, either one thing or the other, im afraid to do the wrong thing, so i do neither, even though i know that is worse

bah

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 75% Superman 70% The Flash 65% Iron Man 55% Green Lantern 50% Robin 47% Hulk 45% Supergirl 38% Batman 30% Wonder Woman 28% Catwoman 20%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

the girls won their first conference game ever yesterday!!! its so exciting!!! i wish i could have been there. i was thinking sometime in the last couple days that they would win this game...and now they have :). dude, i want to talk to people and be excited, but again no one is around...maybe i could actually call someone...but that would be weird. even though i wasnt there and im not a current member, i want to celebrate this. it also amuses me that it they beat pomona because one of my profs/advisors here went to pomona for undergrad i think.