Hey there, everyone can read about me and aaronlehmann's exploits in Asia here: asiatrip_08.

To see Aaron's photos, go here.
To see my photos, go here.

Enjoy!

"When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, 'I've been on line since yesterday morning,'" Ms. Cribbs told The Associated Press. "They kept shopping."

-New York Times: Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death

Testing the new Powershot G10!

Why is it so dark at 6:30? Gah!

Since I turned 18 and became able to vote, I've prided myself on trying to remain moderate. My political view can basically be summed up as "highly progressive social reform with regulated financial conservatism." As a result, I often find myself at odds with people who consider themselves liberal or conservative because there's bound to be something I disagree with them on. Living in Berkeley I am drenched in dyed-in-the-wool liberals who will stop at nothing to make me vote for Obama. Fortunately for them, this time I do support Obama this time around, so I can fit in.

People seem to be taken aback when I criticize him, though. While Obama is really an intellectual (one of the first intellectual presidential candidates I've seen in my life), he isn't the salt of the earth for me. To make a really brief example, I think he wants to spend too much considering the economic situation we're in, and god damn it he won't shut up about "change." But that won't stop me voting for him because, among other things, I'm excited about having a black president. Yet that doesn't mean I am 100% behind him.

But many people here are, and I don't like it. I feel like Berkeley has drunk too much of the Obama Kool-aid in general and it's hard for people to sit down, lose their biases, and work hard on seeing whether they actually like all of the presented policies from the candidate they support. I've met too many people in the past couple months who say they "support Obama 100%." How can that possibly be? They can't realistically have thought through all of his domestic and foreign policy and said, "OK, I've studied all this and determined that I am fully behind it." Not that I have gone this far either - but I feel like I read more about politics in the news than many do, and making a bold statement about 100% support ought to require more study than what I have done.

Berkeley is a very politically active place and its (usually) intelligent inhabitants deserve to raise their political standards by learning to not take the candidate they support for granted. It's important to make a decision about who you want to vote for, but it's also important to make sure you know exactly what you're in for if you do. Does anyone else feel this way?

P.S. Republicans can be equally bad about drinking their party's Kool-aid. This story disgusted me.

Tags: politics
Current Location: my bed
Current Music: Nirvana - Something in the Way / Endless, Nameless

I got steve's korean bbq and a fly landed on my kimchi and instantly died

I just finished BioShock - what an incredible game. Despite how much I really enjoyed the plot, the artwork, the maps, the voiceovers - a few serious flaws caught my eye and I'm wondering whether these bugs are specific to the Bioshock version that Steam distributes:

• It's impossible to easily swap the order of plasmids. There should be no reason a Gene Bank is required to swap the position of Incinerate! and Enrage in your inventory.
• Even in the Gene Bank, it is hard to swap plasmid positions without replacing them with another plasmid first (e.g. to swap Incinerate and Enrage, replace Incinerate with Bee Attack or whatever, replace Enrage with Trick Big Daddy, replace Bee Attack with Enrage, replace Trick Big Daddy with Incinerate.) This is the bug that hassled me the most.
• Moreover, if you upgrade a plasmid (e.g. Incinerate 2 to Incinerate 3), some internal state becomes out of sync with what you see and the order of all your plasmids gets messed up. To fix it you have to replace all your plasmids at a gene bank, exit, reenter the gene bank, and add your old plasmids back in the desired order.
• The subtitles are often quite wrong compared to the voiceover. I suppose they didn't think people would be simultaneously listening to the voiceover while reading the subtitles.
• Near the end of the game, the "Find the parts of a Big Daddy suit" goal was still plastered on my screen even though I already had them all.
• Not a bug, but a conceptual nit: Conceivably, it should be possible to abandon a hack before it hurts you. Currently, the only way to abort a hack is to just let the puzzle blow up.
• Another gameplay nit: Leadhead Splicers seem to be inordinately powerful very far into the game, even after you have completed all the research on them. I usually ended up just freezing them and breaking them up with the wrench.
• Conversely, the machine gun seems to be way more useful in their hands than it is in mine. I can pump most things with bullets and nothing really happens.
• The map is pretty hard to use. It needs to always center on where you currently are, but it only does it sometimes.
• The developers should have added a way to focus on a particular subject for photography. Many a time I've wanted to take a picture of a Little Sister but end up taking a picture of its Big Daddy instead, not meaning to at all. Of course, it only wastes film, so it doesn't matter much.

With such a huge list of grievances one might think I got too annoyed with this game's flaws to enjoy its qualities. But really, it was great. I got the Bad Ending though, and once I get a better graphics card I'm going to replay it for the good one.

Anyway, now I can get back to real life / work / school. I really sat there for quite a long time playing.

Current Location: the damn computer i've been at for hours
Current Mood: drained

Dear Ms. Cucarola,

Allow me to introduce myself. I am a current resident of Casa Zimbabwe; this is my first semester here. Already I have grown to love its distinct personality, which is exacerbated by the vibrant murals on almost every wall. The murals and writings are from various eras in the house's history and act as a snapshot of those times for us Czars in the present day to think about.

When I learned that these walls were to be repainted during CZ's seismic retrofit in an effort to make the house more "welcoming", I was appalled. Decades of CZ heritage would vanish over the course of just one semester! It would no longer be Casa Zimbabwe, but just another building in the coop system.

To me, this effort sounds akin to painting over the graffiti on the remnants of the Berlin Wall - an obvious chronicle of a tumultuous time in Germany's history - so that it looks better for tourism. Tourists sure do love clean walls!

(Before I go on, let me make it clear that I have no problem about the walls that need to be knocked down in order to effect the seismic retrofit. This needs to be done in order to secure the *safety* of CZ residents, and though I deplore the partial loss of CZ heritage, I fully support the goal.)

What a pretentious rube, you say. This kid believes that his house has comparable historical significance to the most heartbreaking symbol of national separation in recent history! But I believe CZ deserves that distinction with respect to Berkeley. Painting over the Berlin Wall fragments would cause an worldwide uproar; painting over CZ would cause a Berkeley-wide uproar. And it damn well ought to.

This is not to say I fail to understand your reasons for proposing this action. I understand that, often, Casa Zimbabwe falls victim to what we have dubbed "scream and runs" - where new residents, not having seen the house before, arrive for move-in day at the house. They become offended at the various facets of the house's personality and immediately cancel their contracts.

Bluntly: They had it coming. They should have visited the house before accepting their contract. CZ isn't for everyone, but for the people who love it, its uniqueness and personality mean a great deal.

I'm sure this is not the first email you have received today about this issue which so many people in our house care about. In any case, thank you for reading this and I hope this helps you make the right decision for CZ's future.

Sincerely,

Joshua Kwan

Current Mood: distressed

I just designed an actual computer processor for CS 61C. It works.

Wow.

... I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past twenty years, really. You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like - static... CDs are small. There's no stature to it. I remember when that Napster guy came up across, it was like, 'Everybody's getting music for free.' I was like, 'Well, why not? It ain't worth nothing anyway.'"

-- Bob Dylan, Rolling Stone, September 7, 2006