wei.dumpBrain()

I absolutely hate it when I’m on BART, listening to music on my iPod, and hearing the music of the person sitting next to me. This person wears headphones, yet this person’s music is loud enough to disrupt my music, which I would have been able to hear clearly. Either this person is deaf and has the volume completely turned up, or this person’s earphones suck. Either way, I do not care to hear this person’s music when I’m trying to enjoy my own. I mean, isn’t that the point of earphones? This happens way too often and, thus, it deserves a ranting.

Today, Gmail announced its latest Lab, the Forgotten Attachment Detector. This isn’t one of those extra features that’s there only to make Gmail cooler or flashier. This is an essential feature that directly solves a problem: users occasionally (often, for some of us) forget to actually attach the files they mention about in their emails. It’s something so essential it leaves you wondering why no one has thought of this before. I love it. After all, it’s the little details that make great software great.

What’s even cooler is the engineer who implemented this, Jon, is one of my best friends and was my roommate this past summer when we both interned in Silicon Valley. He’s incredibly smart and works harder than anyone I know. During his internship, he would always work long hours and even worked a few weekends. It has paid off. Millions of Gmail users can now activate his Lab, knowing they will save themselves plenty of embarrassing, attachment-less emails.

How’s this for something totally random…I saw a racoon at school just now. It was fat and furry, and ran down the steps after starring at me for two seconds. I haven’t seen a live racoon for about ten years. They look like thieves.

Why am I blogging about this? It seems pointless, doesn’t it? Well, whenever I’m bored, I want to read about something interesting. And, this incident seems quite amusing.

Steve Jobs announced the new iPod Touch (more slender with volume controls and external speaker) and, on Thursday, I ordered one online. This is something I’ve never done before — let me explain. I’ve used many Apple products, but this is the first one I actually bought. I do have my own iPod Shuffle, but I “won” that (ask me in person if you want to hear the story). Also, this is the first time I bought a new gadget almost immediately after its release. Sure, I didn’t set up a tent and wait 8 hours in a line for it, but it’s the closest I’ve come to doing that. To make a contrast, I bought my Nintendo DS about 2 or 3 years after its release.

Anyway, I can’t wait to hold it in my hands. It’s on its way from China at the moment. I can finally have my whole music library in one place and be able to choose exactly which song I want to play. Of course, shuffling is still good sometimes. But, the iPod Touch can do so much more than that. I’ll be able to play with all the cool (free) apps from the App Store, surf the web in a revolutionary way on a 3.5″ screen, and be the coolest kid in class (until everyone else gets one). Wow. This is amazing.

So I got dropped from both my Computer Security and User Interfaces waitlists. Great. Why? Because I’m not a senior. Now I have to take Statistics 2. It’s unfortunate not because I don’t like Stats 2 (in fact, I think it’ll be very interesting), but because I’ll only be taking one computer science course this semester (Operating Systems) and I’ll have to figure out how to stuff those two CS courses into my already-planned future semesters. Furthermore, Stats 2 is not a required course for me at all. It’s basically for units, an A (hopefully), and getting a good understanding of statistics. This is most likely the worst thing that’s happened to me in months, but I guess I’ll have to make the best of it.

These days, I typically get around 6.5 hours of sleep every night. People say 8 hours is the recommended amount of sleep most people should have, but I rarely get that much. The problem I have is I just can’t seem to make myself go to sleep early enough. Even though I promise myself to go to sleep around 11 p.m., I always find some reason to stay up just a bit longer. I do this despite knowing I’ll feel miserably sleepy in least one class the next day. Doesn’t that sound pathetic? I guess this is similar to why countries still go to war despite knowing pain, suffering, and death is inevitable. But, I’ve really got to work on sleeping more. Like right now…I really should sleep.

This summer, I learned I’m more likely to get things done when I write them down. To-do lists are my friend and they should be yours if they aren’t already. Writing my plans and goals down allows me to specify exactly what I want to get done with. In the past, I’ve been lazy and never wrote anything down. I just did what I had to do as it came to me. But, I’ve learned my lesson, and it is true that a little planning goes a long way. So, without further ado, here are my plans for the semester:

1. Do well on exams. Exams — they always find some way to screw me over, even when I think I’m doing well in my classes. My first midterms last semester went very well, but went down hill after that. I’m not quite sure what happened there, but I’ll make sure that it won’t happen again.

2. Work on my website(s). I really, really need to work on Pokemon Dream. This is a creation of mine that I’ve put so much work into and has given so much back to me (you have no idea). But, I’ve worked very little on it in the past year. So, seriously, I need to work on it. There’s so much to be done. Also, I need to work on weicool.net, my personal website. This blog happens to be the first component of my personal website.

3. Time management. With infinite time, anyone can pretty much do anything. It’s the limiting factor for everything. If I optimize my usage of time, I will get more time and therefore be able to do more things. Honestly, I think my time management sucks. Hopefully, that won’t be the case after this semester.

4. Innovate. I plan on constantly coming up with original ideas. I feel that during the past two years of college, I’ve lost much of my innovation, and even my character. I want to regain my creativity and bring back Wei. I’ll be blogging about new ideas I come up with, so stay tuned.

Alright, I think that’s about it for now. More interesting stuff to come!

Believe it or not, this is my very first personal blog post. That’s right, after nearly nine years of using the internet, I’ve not blogged once — until now. Well, I’ve written hundreds of pieces of news for Pokemon Dream, but those weren’t personal. I guess even this won’t be as personal as I’d like; the internet is a weird place, and I wouldn’t want everyone to know what I ate for dinner last Tuesday (wait, I don’t even remember). I’m blogging because a) lots of folks are doing it, b) I sometimes have the urge to express myself but nowhere to do so, and c) to practice my writing.

I plan on eventually developing my own blogging system in Ruby on Rails, but I’m not sure if/when I’ll have the time to do that this semester. Anyway, I hope to write often, so check back if you’re interested!