I've been contemplating a lot of things recently--our class's impending graduation, the EE department and its maligned graduates, many of whom are my good friends, the past a year ago in Japan, and the fault of my own judgment in understanding the real nature of things. Everything seems so difficult now in comparison to the way things were just two ( Read more... )

Today I ran into Dr. Inoue near the post office, on my way to mail something out. This weekend is Parent's Weekend, and she was with her husband (an American, apparently!) and their three-year old son. She actually stopped to talk with me and even remembered my name and that I had asked her for a recommendation for CS coterm two years ago. I was ( Read more... )

Failure is a rather difficult thing to grapple with, as it manifests itself differently for each person. Since early on at Stanford, we simply weren't supposed to ever be capable of failure. It was something one could read about in the news, hear about happening to someone else, but concerning oneself and one's friends, it simply wasn't supposed to ( Read more... )

Despite not having any shortage of job offers in the tech world, I decided to drop by the tech career fair today at Arillaga. If for no other reason, I wanted to say hi to the guys at Microsoft, see how they were doing, and meet the recruiter who hired me, if she was around. I ended up giving a resume to Apple, Yahoo, and eBay along the way since ( Read more... )

I returned from Seattle last night from shamelessly pandering my soul to Microsoft and Amazon and answering questions which supposedly test "competence." For internships, it seems it's not really possible to get companies to outsell one another; most companies have a fixed annual budget for interns. I really wanted to see blood this year too. Well ( Read more... )

Some lessons in life are tough to learn, lessons like not overworking, not expecting the world especially when competing against olympiad-class grad students, and the fact shortcomings, anger, and bitterness are natural parts of one's existence. I've lost count how many times I've ignored those lessons and received reminders that I unfortunately ( Read more... )

Back in Japan, the TA for ee108b, Nikola Stikov, didn't make us do the labs for the class. (Side note: these are substantial projects that are among the bane of the existence of EEs.) This is both out of the desire to show clemency to us, the war-wearied abroad engineering students, and the fact that the equipment for the class in Japan was simply ( Read more... )

As a young, naive sophomore, I made my way to Packard, on my way to making perhaps one of the most egregious errors I ever allowed my judgment to nudge me into. I was on my way to declare my major in EE, with a specialty in Signal Processing. A little less than a year prior to that point, my former RCC had told me he was majoring in EE with a ( Read more... )

I remember a quote from Minority Report, what I named Movie of the Year 2002, that is oddly and eerily relevant 4 years later ( Read more... )

So these past several weeks, I've been walking around campus since I didn't have my bike retrieved from a friend of mine yet. It was okay, though, mostly.

Anyways, I still apparently retain some nasty habits from Japan. Namely:

• I look right first when crossing the road. Almost got me into an accident.
• Someone got in my way as I was riding my bike. ( Read more... )