Semester Four

Woah. Woah! WOAH!

WOAH!

Its almost May! The semester is almost over! I'm almost twenty! And I'm halfway through undergrad!

Mind blowing!

And naturally, because it's the end of the semester and I'm swamped with work, I decide to blog! =] Actually, this blog post is more of a reward. See, I made a list  thursday night of all the things I had due by the last day of classes, which is Wednesday the 2nd of May. The list ended up being pretty lengthy, 14 items, and some of them are time consuming assignments, projects and labs and such. So I told myself if I finished at least two items on my list a day, I would be in good shape. (This is an attempt to avoid a repeat of an awful experience in which I put myself in a situation where I had to finish 3 labs in the span of 48 hours. They were all due on the same day, just different times: 8am, 6:30pm, and 11:59pm. Throughout that experience, I felt I was slightly suffocating. But worse, I felt I was turning in work that was not my best effort, not up to my expectation. Although I miraculous did pretty well on all three labs, I want to avoid, as much as possible, having ever to do that again.) As of now, I have 6 assignments left and four-ish days left. However, the 6 assignments left are indeed the lengthy one. Nevertheless, I still feel pretty good and on track. So I'm rewarding myself with a blog post – I also want to make my goal of at least 5 posts a month.

Since the semester is coming to an end, I want to also include an update of my classes before it's too late. This semester has been a semester where I've had great professors across the board and learned the most of the 4 semesters I've taken. So here are some of the things that stick out from my classes:

Click if you want to read more. I've learned some interesting things.

Top of Photonics

This is my view right now from the eighth floor of the Photonics Center: 

You can see the Charles River, Prudential Center, Fenway Park, and the Sky! Click this link to see them better! =]

The Photonics Center is home to the BU's Electrical and Computer Engineering department and the majority of the engineering teaching rooms, along with a company on the sixth floor – I know, it's pretty random. Well, this semester I have been spending a lot of time studying in the upper levels of Photonics, and with a view like that why is this a recent development? The reasons I study on the upper levels of Photonics are yes, the view, and also because it's pretty deserted. I'm easily distracted, and if I study in places where I will encounter people I know, I pretty much will get nothing accomplished. I don't need silence to study though, although the upper levels of photonics are very quiet. I usually listen music. Strangely enough, music keeps me from getting distracted. I think it has to do with the fact that I need a stimulant that isn't work and if I don't have music playing, I will search for a stimulant through other means, i.e. surfing the web or procrastinating. So yeah, I thought I'd share my view with you.

Boston Marathon

The usual marathoners run the Boston Marathon. I biked it tonight, at midnight, with two peers and a crowd no less than 500 people (Pictures to come). And 26 miles is still long, even on bikes. I don't think I would be able to run it. It has a lot of hills, like a cosine graph! Remember how I said I haven't really biked this semester? Well, yeah 26 miles has left me exhausted! Part of it was also in rain. My shoes are soaked! And I am leaving on a hike in approximately two hours. Yeah, last week I was very mentally tired. And now, I'm about to completely exhaust myself physically. Maybe I will start a new once I crash completely.

More later, I need sleep. I just wanted a post out quickly, while the event is fresh in my mind.

Update:

Okay, So my pictures weren't that great . . .  It was dark and raining at one point. So I'll just link to a site that has some great pictures. The third picture is actually of us, the girl in green with the fedora is my friend, and you can see my white bike with a "I bike boston" sticker on the right as well as the knees of my other friend. I'm to the left (my green shirted friend's right), as in not in the picture. You can also see how we hung our bikes – the only compartment of the train to do so. Someone on the train commented that we were either brilliant or the bikes were going to all fall when the train started to move. We were the former. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that we had take the train out 20 miles. Yeah, we're crazy, in a good way.

I'll also show this short video I recorded that shows you just a glimpse of how many people were there and all our red lights!

By the end of the night, I just had red lights flashing in my mind. At one point during the ride, I thought I was losing it. The rain had given the red lights a bubbly halo effect . . . yeah. Since I'm too lazy (and mildly busy) to tell the rest of this amazing tale, I will link to another person's account of the ride. It's a great account and there's a map of the marathon too. I basically had the same experience, right down to the barely exercising throughout winter part.

After the bike ride, I came home and stretched, which is KEY to not getting sore. And crawled into the shower. As much as I wanted to just sleep, I was hiking in two hours, I couldn't put my dirty self onto my bed, and I didn't want to sleep on the floor. Somehow, I managed to wake up for the hike. It would have been awful if I didn't wake up, considering I organized the hike. The hike was great! I didn't have much energy left for the hike so it was just slow and peaceful. Not too exciting. But I'll leave you with a picture from the hike.

That's Boston in the distance.

Sunday's Best

Happy Easter Guys!!

I'm not a particularly religious person. I actually don't know what I am, maybe borderline spiritual, apathetic, atheist, agnostic, zen . . . I don't know. Do I believe in "God"? Not particularly. Do I believe in unexplainable, supernatural events? Definitely. Do I have faith? Yes. Do I believe good things happen to good people? Yes. Do I feel the need to partake in religious activities? Nope. Do I believe in happiness even with little wealth and material possessions? Yes. I kind believe in my own customized religion, I choose what I want to believe. So by no measure am I religious.

Anyway, today, I woke up deciding that I wanted to hide chocolate eggs for my roommate for Easter. So I did just that. I went to CVS right when it opened – riding my bike for the first time this year! I know we're already more than a quarter into the year, sad – bought two bags of chocolate eggs, and hid them in my room. That's how I always celebrated Easter in my family. My family is not Christian at all. So for Easter, my parents used to hide candy eggs for us to find, and then we would paint eggs. That's it. Nothing religious at all. It's just a fun holiday. And I wanted to have fun today, even if it's just for a tiny little bit. Another part of the reason I woke up wanting to hide eggs is because I haven't been living. I've just been doing. And really, the little moments in life, make life all the joy to live.

As you can see, I woke up today feeling so much better than I have in past weeks. Not exhausted anymore. And that's because yesterday, I did nothing but sleep, watch Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, do some laundry – but I didn't fold the clothes until this morning in – and sleep, or laid in bed. See, Thursday night, I didn't sleep. I pulled an all-nighter, my work was taking longer than expected and I had to be up early on Friday to greet the new prospective students at open house, so sleep was not an option. But on Friday afternoon around 4:30pm, I crashed and didn't wake up until 2am, but went right back to sleep until 8am Saturday morning, totaling about 16 hours of straight sleep. I tried to do work Saturday but I was still too tired to do anything, so I slept early again. In the end, pulling an all nighter was the best thing for me. Because if I never pulled that all nigher, I would have never slept 16 hours straight. I would have just kept trucking along with 3, 4, maybe 5 hours of sleep a night and that would have been awful. I would never have fully recovered. I would never been able to take a real shower (when you're tired, your showers are too quick to enjoy). I would have been in a trance kind of state, and that would have been problematic. I would never be as productive as I could be. So here's to finally feeling better. But unfortunately, I have a lot of work to do. But at least, I'm living and remembering the small moments.

Hope your Easter is also going well.

Rambling . . . and Ann Spade

I'm tired. Really. And I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just wading through life. I feel as I'm losing myself. There's only a month and some days left until summer break. Yay?! I don't know. I don't really have any plans. I just need rest. I know it.

Well, I ran into this video earlier. I like this cover of "Think Good Thoughts". I listened to the original afterward, but it wasn't as good – people say this all the time, but really. Ann Spade rarely does covers but when she does, they are always great, simple, and acoustic covers. Thank you Ann! You know, she was one of the first youtubers I subscribed to, back in 2007, freshmen year of high school. I was young back then. The interweb wasn't as populous as it is now. And it use to be more anonymous. What ever happen to not using your real name on the interweb? Gone, that's what happened. Google, especially, is campaigning for the abandonment of usernames. Social networks are dominating. Facebook accounts are linked everywhere. Oh gosh, what am I going to do about Facebook . . . I really dislike it.

But yeah, THINK GOOD THOUGHTS!