Erwaman's Personal Journal - June 2010

The last official day of finals was Tuesday, May 11, and commencement wasn't until Monday, May 24. The approximately two weeks between these two dates is known as Dead Week. However, the day after the end of finals, you're kicked out of your term housing at noon unless you're a senior or a master's aide. However, if you fall in one of the categories below, Yale gives you free housing on Old Campus:

• You're part of the Spring Salvage team, which goes around collecting unwanted furniture, electronics, clothes, etc. They collect all this stuff and put it on Ingalls Rink, and then have two days when people in the Yale community or affiliated with non-profits can come and take anything they want. Anything remaining is donated to charitable organizations, but there's usually not much left after the open house days. [See my friend Joy Sun's blog post about Spring Salvage.]
• You're part of one of the many performing groups that perform in the days before commencement, such as the band, the theater, the orchestra, the Glee Club, the Guild of Carillonneurs, the Whiffenpoofs (an a cappella group), etc.
• You're pretending to be part of one of the groups mentioned above in order to secure free housing for Dead Week.

There were a TON of social events planned for Dead Week, but I'll just tell you about my favorites:

• Food! The dining halls were closed, so we had to feed ourselves some other way. We designated one suite's common room as the Band Kitchen, aka the B'Kitchen. That room, we stocked with about four microwaves, five fridges, and tons of nonperishable food like Chef Boyardee, Easy Mac and Cheese, granola bars, cereal, bread, ramen, and random miscellaneous crackers and cookies and stuff. Some of it was free; some of it you had to pay for, but the prices were pretty cheap (it was mostly food people were trying to get rid of anyways). I didn't eat any of the microwaveable stuff or the ramen, but I did eat lots of nuts and crackers and random stuff. The food in the B'Kitchen was pretty terrible for you, but it was good for satisfying some morning cravings and a good place to bump into other bandies and chat.

  I also ate at some places I had never eaten at before in New Haven:

  • Basil - an Asian restaurant that's like Ivy Noodle (a common latenight food/hangout place) in price and selection, but superior in atmosphere, cleanliness, and service.
  • The food carts up on Science Hill! So I have not had a class up on Science Hill since spring of freshman year. But I decided to go scope out the stuff the Spring Salvage team had collected in Ingalls Rink, which is up on Science Hill, and since I was up there, I decided to grab lunch at one of the numerous food carts along the street. It was quite tasty, the size was good, and the price reasonable.
  • Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana. Mr. Sciaino always asks me whether I've eaten at Frank Pepe's or Sally's every time I visit the Whip. Finally, I can say I have. One Saturday, I went to the farmer's market by Little Italy with some bandies and bought some very fresh chocolate milk and coffee milk. Since we were there, we decided to go eat lunch at Pepe's. Frank Pepe was the originator of the New Haven-style of pizza, also known as the apizza, which is known for its thin, crispy crust, and for plain pizzas that consist of just tomato sauce, oregano, and grated romano cheese. The ingredients are very fresh - I particularly enjoyed the tomato and spinach pizza - but I think in general, I still prefer a thicker, more chewy crust and more meaty toppings and more cheese.

    Later on, at our pizza tasting event, where our social chairs ordered pizza from four different pizza joints around New Haven (including Pepe's), I got to try Pepe's famous white clam pizza, and that was much heartier and more satisfying.

• Playing 18 holes of frisbee golf (late at night)! The band does this two or three times per year, and has a 18-hole course planned out, but this was my first time playing. The "holes" are emergency blue phones. Once your frisbee has hit any part of the blue phone or the pole the phone is connected to, you have completed that hole. The blue phone then becomes the tee-off point for the next hole. Below is a map with the course marked and each hole labeled par/strokes I needed/cumulative score:

  

  We skipped hole 15 because there was a parked cop car with flashing sirens and a police officer interrogating a person in another car at the intersection of Prospect and Sachem. I was the first to get to hole 16. When everyone had gotten there and we were about to tee off for hole 17, my frisbee was nowhere to be found. Many people helped look for it, but even though I had just been milling around the blue phone, no one could find my frisbee. I think God stole it. Fortunately, I had a backup, though it was a crappier frisbee, but I managed to play the last two holes with it without suffering much.

  I finished the course with 102 strokes, +4, leaving me tied for fourth place, if I recall correctly. I look forward to playing again and strive to finish under par next time.

• Gusto. Hmm, what could this be? Something involving a gust of wind? Flying kites? Paper airplanes? Windsurfing? Actually, gusto is kickball with a twist. The twist is the offensive team can score points in TWO ways:
  1. Running around the bases to score a run OR
  2. Drinking a can of soda or beer.
  Each can drunk is equivalent to one run.

  Now, this might sound pretty stupid, but with about fifteen people per team and people constantly downing alcohol, things got rowdy pretty soon. It's always pretty entertaining watching drunk people and even more so when they're playing a game and getting into arguments about rules and calls.

  Another memorable event from Gusto was one pitch, during which a squirrel ran into the path of the kickball and was struck on the side by the kickball. The squirrel spazzed, leapt into the air, freezing there for a second like a cartoon character that's just run off a cliff, and then continued to run along its original path across the playing field and up into a tree.

  Gusto was surprisingly fun and exciting, though my mouth and body were feeling weird after consuming three cans of soda. I don't think I've ever consumed so much sugar in such a short period. In fact, I bet the negative effects of three cans of soda worth of sugar on your body is significantly worse than three cans of fairly low alcohol content Keystone Light beer. (Oh yeah, then toward the end, I split a beer with someone else.) Yeah, Gusto definitely has to be a once a year tradition, for health concerns.

  Oh, and the final score was Squidwings (squids, woodwinds, strings) 106, BrassKBB (brass, Kappa Banga Banga (drumline)) 126. The Squidwings outdrank the BrassKBB, but the BrassKBB outscored the Squidwings something like 50 to 16.

• Lake Compounce! This is an amusement park about 45 minutes north of New Haven but still in Connecticut. It's a relatively small park, compared to Six Flags or Dorney, but it still has its share of good rides and coasters. Another perk was unlimited, free soda, all around the park. There were Pepsi dispensers with various drinks (like you see at fast food restaurants) and small Pepsi cups next to them located at many food joints around the park. Despite the free soda, I mostly drank just water, since I had brought my water bottle with me and I don't like drinking too much soda. [Gusto had not occurred yet, so saving up for Gusto would be another reason not to drink soda though it didn't cross my mind.]

  I was a bit disappointed that the water park portion of the park wasn't open the day we went. However, the wooden roller coasters - Boulder Dash and Wildcat Coaster - were pretty good, though head bangers. My favorite memories, though, were from the Pirate Ship ride, which was just a giant pirate ship that swung back-and-forth, lengthwise. I liked that the ride only rotated in two dimensions, so it didn't bang my head and body around. But what really made this ride memorable was a spontaneous thing we did. Three of us were sitting on one half, seven of us on the other, and we were facing each other. As one half rose up into the air, the bandies on that half of the boat screamed at the other half, and then when the boat swung around and the other half was raised, the other half screamed back at the first half. We continued doing this for the entire ride and even got some of the other riders to join in. It was silly, but so much fun. Then we went on the ride again and sang our band song "Love Boat" over and over again. Then we went on again and sang Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance". Such fun times.

• Finally, apart from all the online chess and StarCraft I played, I also helped edit the Yale v. Brown football game for the YPMB Year-in-Review Montage. I used Final Cut Pro (Mac) for the first time. Though I was annoyed I didn't know any of the shortcuts at first, I thought Final Cut was a pretty well-written piece of software and fairly intuitive to use [I guess I usually consider intuitive software well-written.]. Also, one OS X user interface design element I liked was how folders are laid out in an explorer window (or whatever it's called on a Mac) when you navigate through subdirectories. The picture below is an example of what I'm talking about:

  

  I like how as you go deeper into the folder hierarchy, the explorer window still shows you the previous few folders you went through to get to your current folder. This is pretty useful if you're moving/comparing files between folders or need to access files in many different directories.

  I'm gaining more appreciation for Macs as I use them more, but I still prefer Windows in general and a Windows keyboard.

  Anyways, OS ramble aside, I also participated in the filming of the class of 2012 sketch (each class makes its own comedic video aka sketch), which was also edited with Final Cut. It's on YouTube and I've embedded it below for your convenience:

I'm not at home nor at school, so there's no dining halls and no home cooking. Thus, I either have to eat out or buy groceries and cook for myself. I've done a little bit of both.

When I'm hungry, I like shoving food into my mouth as fast as possible. Thus, bananas and fruit in general are favorites. Also up there is cereal and bread (with peanut butter, my favorite!). Of course, chips, candy, crackers also fall into this quick, ready-to-eat category, but they're less healthy, so I try to avoid them by not buying much of them.

However, I also know most "fast" food consists mainly of carbs, and a diet of pure carbs isn't healthy. So I do cook occasionally. My roommate Zhao Wang bought a lot of groceries from Nob Hill Foods Pharmacy and Ranch 99, but he's been eating out with Chinese coworkers a lot, so he hasn't been using many of his groceries. The produce he bought will go bad at the pace he's using it, so he said I could use anything I wanted. I'm pretty indifferent about what I eat, but I don't like letting food go to waste, so to combine these dispositions, I frequently make "fail omelets" and stews. These dishes are pretty generic and bland, but they can utilize lots of food.

So what is a fail omelet? You can probably guess. Normally, if I'm trying to make a successful omelet, I'll use two eggs, which will cover the entire bottom of a pan, then I'll fill one half of the omelet with the omelet stuffing, and then I'll fold the other half of the omelet over. However, a fail omelet occurs when you put too much stuffing in and you either can't fold the omelet or the omelet ruptures from being overstuffed. Since my goal is to use as much produce as I can, I just cover the entire omelet with stuffing (which usually consists of mushrooms, onions, cabbage, carrots, asparagus, celery, tomatos, potatos, and the like). My method of preparing stuffing is to just chop everything up into small pieces and dump it in. I know there's no chance of folding the omelet with all the stuffing I put in, so then usually I just decide to cut up the omelet, too, into scrambled eggs.

For stews, the "stuffing" is the same. Gather lots of produce (like that listed above), cut it up on a cutting board, dump into a pot of water. Scramble a few eggs and dump that in, too, if you like. Let the stew cook for a while - how long is pretty much based on how soft you want your carrots and potatos to be - I like them mushy soft.

Oh yeah, and what do I do for flavoring, you might ask. Well, since I'm fairly indifferent about my food, I just use water, not chicken broth, as my stew base. I occasionally use salt and pepper for flavoring, but I find it's much easier just to squirt in a bunch of ketchup or pour in some soy sauce. For fail omelets, I do the same - squirt, pour in the sauce and then mix around. Or I just do it in my bowl after I've taken the food out of the pot or pan. We still have lots of produce left, so I think I'm going to make another stew later today.

Besides my generic fail omelets and stews, I have actually tried following some recipes, albeit very very simple ones. I made corn on the cob and baked potatos following these recipes: HowToCookCornOnTheCob.com and HowToBakeAPotato.com.

Oh yes, for lunch at work, I started out by sampling each of Oracle's six dining halls (except the 100 building cafeteria, which is closed) - there's one on the ground floor of each building. There's a taquería, a bakery, American and Italian cuisine, and Asian cuisine. The food is decent at a reasonable price and a good way of exercising portion control. However, ever since we've had a surplus of produce in the refrigerator, I've been packing my own lunches, which might be a peanut butter sandwich, baked potato, or stew as the main course, plus fruit or yogurt and a snack (chips or nuts) on the side. Also, Oracle provides its employees unlimited free soda, coffee, and tea. I drank a few sodas during the first couple weeks, but after that, I'd had enough of them and their sugary unhealthiness, and just drink water from the water fountain, using the same water bottles I use at Yale. I know a lot of tech companies offer free drinks to their employees, and I remember thinking this was such an awesome perk when I heard about it, but once you try it out, you either get sick of the same sodas pretty quickly or stop drinking them for health reasons. I would much prefer free meals, like they offer at Google or Bloomberg (boo, they both rejected me).

Finally, on the weekends, I've been visiting Max Chang at Stanford and Jeffrey Huang at his house in Los Gatos, and I've eaten some free meals in the Stanford dining halls, in Jeff's home, and outside, including my first time at In-N-Out Burger. The menu was very simple, with just a few burgers, fries, and drinks listed. However, Max filled me in that you can order your burgers or fries "animal style" to get extra sauce and onions. I just got a regular cheeseburger, but we shared some animal style fries, which are fries topped with melted cheese, grilled onions and Thousand Island dressing. Very unhealthy, but very tasty.

So that's the scoop on my cooking and dining. Feel free to recommend recipes to try or places to eat at.

After starting college, I no longer went to as many cubing competitions and found myself cubing less in general. Instead, I played StarCraft, excited by the new Collegiate StarLeague, and that along with band and academics kept me busy. Nevertheless, I always had my cube collection in my dorm room and now and then I would still get the desire to cube. This was especially true over winter break and spring break.

During winter break, finding myself with free time and not distracted by college activities, I got back into cubing and focused on big cubes (5x5+), practicing with my new V-Cubes. I had never practiced big cubes too seriously, and my past competition results reflected this. Even though I would place well or even win the 3x3 event, I was usually ranked lower in the 4x4 and 5x5 events. So during winter break, I finally focused on improving my big cube times, starting with the 5x5. I soon got my first my sub-2 minute solve, and less than a month later, I achieved my first sub-2 minute average. Not too long ago, I had considered any solve under 3 minutes to be a good solve. I was amazed at the improvement a little focused practice resulted in. Inspired, I worked on 6x6 and 7x7, breaking 4 minutes and 6 minutes on them, respectively. For 6x6, I even set a sub-4 minute average in late January.

In February, I got busy applying for summer internships and stopped cubing as much.

Then, in March, after applications were done with (or at least slowing down) and spring break arrived, I again found myself with some free time and got back into cubing. This time, I decided to try switching from the Petrus Method to the Fridrich Method. This was probably the third or fourth time I've decided to do this. The last few times I decided to do this (in 2007 and 2008), I soon reverted to Petrus within a few weeks. There were several reasons:

• Though I knew my times would be slower since I wasn't used to Fridrich yet nor had I learned all its algorithm, it was still frustrating to see slow times in my practice and feel clumsy using a new method.
• I was still actively going to cubing competitions and knew I was in no shape to compete using the Fridrich method.
• Part of me still had a sentimental attachment to the Petrus method, as the first method I learned and as a more elegant, intuitive method than the Fridrich method.
• It seemed like a daunting task to try to reach the same level of proficiency using the Fridrich method as I had had with the Petrus method. After all, it took me over two and a half years to achieve my first sub-15 average with Petrus. I did not want to have to go through another long journey to achieve the same times with Fridrich.

However, this time my resolve was stronger, and after three months, I'm still using Fridrich. I've charted my progress, which I think helped me stick to Fridrich, despite several times I wanted to switch back to Petrus.

My best times with Fridrich so far are 10.41 (single) and 15.35 (average). I still haven't reached my best times with Petrus - 9.61 (single) and 14.67 (average) - but it's only been three months, and I think by the end of the summer, I can finally break my 3x3 speedsolve PRs, which have stood since 2008.

A couple weeks ago, I also decided to go to the Berkeley Summer Cubing competition on July 11. This will be my first competition in almost a year and the first competition I will be using Fridrich at. I know if I practiced Petrus from now until the competition, I could probably do better with Petrus, but I've already made the decision to switch to Fridrich, so there's no turning back. With a few more weeks of practice, I think my Fridrich will be decently competitive, though I know I still have miles and miles and miles to go before I reach the 11 or 12 second averages needed these days to place in the top 3.

I only brought two 3x3s and one 4x4 to Cali, so I only signed up for 3x3 and 4x4 events, but I'm glad it turned out this way because now I can focus my training on a few events. While practicing 4x4 speedsolving, I snapped a center piece and didn't have my replacement pieces (aka another 4x4 to salvage pieces from). Fortunately, Jeffrey Huang was kind enough to let me borrow his 4x4. Since picking up his 4x4 last weekend, I've already snapped one of his 4x4 center pieces and worn off one of his corner piece stickers, but to fix these problems, I just salvage pieces from my broken 4x4.

Tonight (6/20), I broke my 4x4 average record, with a new best average of

This is over 2.5 seconds faster than my previous best average of 1:17.96, set last summer. I think my focus on big cubing (5x5 through 7x7) over winter break and January paid off, since I haven't really been practicing 4x4 much, and I've set a new PR after only a week of serious practice.

However, besides improving my official 4x4 speedsolve times, what I'd really like to accomplish at this competition is to improve my 4x4 blindfolded time. My only official solve so far was 27 minutes, 49 seconds. I took my time on that attempt because my sole goal at the time was to solve a 4x4 blindfolded officially and get on the scoreboard as one of the (as of 6/20/10) 53 people in the world who have solved a 4x4 blindfolded officially. Now that I'm on the scoreboard, I want to get a solve under 20 minutes. I think that's within reach if I practice.

I'm pretty excited for the upcoming cubing competition. I've been out of the cubing circuit for a while, and I'm looking forward to hanging out with some fellow cubers for a day. It'll also be great to see a lot of West Coast cubers that I've heard of but never seen in person.

One of the nice perks that Oracle provides interns is a rental car that they pay for and insure. You can also get a bike from Oracle as well, but I just got a bike from my brother, who uses one at Stanford but has gone home to the Northeast for the summer. (It's like we're trading spaces.)

Well, I arrived at SFO on Saturday, May 29, and two days later, on Memorial Day, I drove down to Cupertino Village to have lunch with Jeffrey Huang. It was very crowded, as expected for Memorial Day, and the parking lot was pretty crowded. Fortunately, I spotted someone pulling out and signaled to take the spot. No one fought with me, but as I was pulling in, I heard a grinding sound on the passenger side toward the rear of the car. Crap. My car was scraping against the car to the right. As I tried to straighten out, there was more grinding and the car to my right's alarm went off. People started gathering and watching the spectacle.

I backed and forth many more times, trying to right my car, and in the process, I scraped the car to my right some more and set off its alarm a second time. Finally, a man stepped forth and did some directing for me and I managed to separate my car from the one next to mine. I was pretty embarrassed, but I thought about the Alaskan crab fishermen I watch frequently on Deadliest Catch on Discovery Channel, and the extreme lifestyle they live - the long hours, the bitter weather, the stress of empty pots, the danger of the Bering Sea and the heavy metal pots - and I realized my situation paled in comparison. I could deal with it.

I surveyed the damage (Kocotter style), and there were several several-footlong scratch marks along the sides of both our cars. I think the scratches on other car looked worse because the scratches stood out more on his black car than my silver one.

I wasn't sure what to do, so I went in to the restaurant (Korea Tofu House) and talked to Jeff about the incident. He said I should probably leave a note for the other car's driver. While heading back to the cars, I decided to call my parents for more advice.

While talking with my dad on the phone, the other car's driver returned, got in the car, and left before I did anything. I guess that was a convenient resolution. When I got back to the restaurant, our food was already there.

After lunch, we drove back to Jeff's house, where I washed my car, seeing if I could remove some of the scratches. I managed to remove some of the black paint I had caught from the other car, but I couldn't get rid of most of the scratches, since the silver paint of my car had come off. It needs a recoating of paint.

Ever since this experience, I've been super paranoid in parking lots and usually park where there's a lot of room (like where there are two empty spaces next to each other). I'll park further away in order to find an easier parking space and to avoid any accidents.

I feel like I've been driving quite a bit since I've arrived. Every weekend, I've been doing half hour to forty-five minute drives either to Stanford or Los Gatos. I feel much more comfortable driving now; it's almost second-nature now. However, I find myself a bit reliant on the GPS my mom lent me. It's so convenient! Just type in the address and it'll tell you how to get there, and if you mess up, it'll recalculate the route and find you another path from where you are. You can't get lost. It's really fun just following the GPS's directions through local roads to get to your destination. Highways are really boring. Though 280, which cuts through some hills, is very scenic.

I've also been biking quite a bit. I bike to and from work every day - Oracle's only about 2 miles from my apartment, which one can very comfortably cover in 15 minutes at a leisurely pace. Last weekend, I went biking with my roommate (CMU master's student) and two fulltime Oracle employees (CMU alumni) on a trail that runs along the SF Bay:

This weekend (6/26-27), I did more biking down in Los Gatos with Jeffrey. We biked along the Los Gatos Creek Trail. On Saturday, we went northeast:

and on Sunday, we went southwest:

It's really nice just to be outdoors and to bike along these scenic trails. It's relaxing and stress-relieving.