Everyday

Long time, no blog.

I haven't blogged in a while. Although I could discuss all the different types of research I've been doing, or the amount of work we've all been putting in for being TAs, i'm going to focus instead on random things I've cooked in the last month--mostly simple dishes, but still, for some random reason, i decided to take pictures.

in an effort to be less frivolous with money, as well as improve my relatively poor skills at cooking, the efforts in the last month are available below.
Shepherd's pie, layer of ground beef w/ onions and peas (with beef broth and homeade demi-glace, courtesy of a friend), covered with a layer of mashed carrots, covered with a layer of mashed potatoes, covered with cheese.

Chinese sausage with fresh bamboo shoot, chinese green beans sauteed in garlic and "hairy gourd" with ginger and marinated wine.

Spicy sausage, diced tomatoes & heavy cream, and spinach with farfalle pasta.

Mini cupcakes. not from scratch. ::COUGH:: mix ::COUGH::

Cinnamon streusel muffin (not from scratch). I realize that not from scratch is often tasty, and not too bad (enter gasp here)

Back to work...

workin

Well, time has caught up with me and I have realized that I need to write more. After this quarter is over, if this blog is still going, I'll try to document more of what is going on in my life.

Right now, it's mainly a lot of schoolwork, and I haven't been as dedicated as I hoped to be to my research project. BCATS, stanford's Biomedical Computation at Stanford Conference went well, and I was glad to be a part of the planning committee this year.

For now, however, I should sleep...tomorrow involves a lot of work...

Also, as a side note: I'm from Ohio. The election this time around was especially nerve-wracking.

What the heck is wrong with my leg?

Just got back from the NLM training conference, which was at the NIH near DC this year. The whole trip was great, because the BMI-ers were able to hang out a bit before and during the conference. With this fun, however, comes a price.

For the last two days, I started getting a sharp pain in my leg, along the shin. I thought it was shin splints, and that it would go away after a few days, but today the pain got so great that I was hobbling around and walking at an incredibly slow rate. Maybe I'm just weak, but I have never felt so much pain in my leg before. I guess it's kind of comparable to a charlie horse, but not along the muscle.

Oh well, tomorrow to the doctor it is. The doctor today on the phone sounded a little perplexed, as well as everyone else I have asked for advice.

Here goes nothing...

Impractical insomnia.

I should not have coffee. Why oh why did I drink coffee?!

For most people I know, coffee is a mild stimulant that they imbibe in copious amounts in order to desperately stay awake.

For me, coffee makes my brain and heart race, my appetite continuous, my stomach a little queasy, and my emotions a little crazy.

Senior year of college, I was up to about 4-5 cups of coffee a day. I cut myself off, however, and switched to tea when I arrived here.

Occasionally, I still have coffee. One example of this is today. I had one and a half cups. Hence, why I am blogging at 2:30 in the a.m. Coffee...ah, coffee...it keeps me very awake, and a little disturbing if you are with me at the time. Today, the limited amount made me a little jumpy.

I don't feel ready for bed.

I really do have a lot of work to do tomorrow.

I came home about half an hour ago, and began to ponder what types of sleep aids I have in the apartment. Musing over the items in the cabinets, I went over to the fridge and looked at a bottle of wine that my old roomate left before she moved. I grabbed the cork for a second, and thought...nahhhh and put the bottle back.

What else do people use to sleep?

Warm milk, sleeping pills, soothing lavender...all of these things I do not have in my apartment.

I have instead, foods that are high in sugar content, tea, and

...coffee.

Oh well, I shall try to sleep now in the hopes that tomorrow I will not feel extremely exhausted.

Remind me not to have coffee.

IT IS SO HOT

My goodness, it has reached an incredible 99 degrees here. It's not as bad as North Carolina (HUMIDITY), but not having air conditioning means that sleeping at night semi sucks.

I wish I had a pool.

I just got something given to me in the last day that is just incredibly huge for me, and I feel super super undeserving, and now this weekend i will try to do work and live up to expectations.

And eat food.

I really worry...I think that people think I'm much more capable than I am because I really try to discuss a breadth of information. In reality , however, I feel really insecure about my capabilities to go in depth for a topic, which is what a PhD is.

Today was great. After a long day of meetings and whatnot, we went to Rick Myer's farewell bbq. I remember emailing him a long time ago to inquire into possibly working for him, only to find out that he is leaving for Huntsville Alabama, where one of my best friends Sailaja lives.

After the bbq, a few of us got together to watch grey's, and then I drove to Sarah's to pick up her and Adele. We then went to Cupertino for frozen yogurt, but ended up going into a chinese restaurant (advertised as a potsticker place, but really just another restaurant), having a second dinner, and then going to Yogurtland.

It was a festive evening. I will put up the one or two pictures I took. I'm so bad about putting them in my blog...

Celebratory...changes?

Dinner was great--ended up being 16 people at Buca's, and then we went to fraiche afterwards. The pictures are on facebook, yay! Since it was my special day, I treated myself to...a talk. Heh, I decided to go to a talk by Martha Bulyk, who is at Harvard Systems Biology and a really great researcher/speaker. I made a total fool of myself when I interviewed with her...

I am up now, however, because i can't sleep.

I went to bed an hour ago, and instead my mind is swimming with all the things i need to do, and i'm finally getting excited about the new lab and thinking that maybe i actually have the ability to do this project. I just finished working with Atul (and wished I had gotten more done), but I know that I've gotten to know the lab (really great people) and I should move to the next project. Now I'm starting with Serafim. The computational problem and the biological problem are both completely foreign to me, so we will see how this goes. I'm so excited to learn it, however.

i played squash for the first time today with Sarah, Annie and Karen--I highly recommend it. I've never played racquetball, but it's similar. Apparently playing squash ruins your tennis game, and vice versa. So far, the only thing I can do decently is serve in squash, and my backhand kind of sucks because i'm afraid of scraping the wall. It's a great workout, though.

semi full weekend--trying to keep saturday open for getting work done, since I have a lot of stuff next week.

I'm so grateful for all the people I have met here, and the friends I have made at home and in college. It is great knowing that at 3 a.m., you can always call someone up and have a philosophical discussion that includes everything...from the serious to completely trivial matters, such as mucus.

Not that mucus is trivial.

Just saying...mucus is inherently amusing and disgusting at the same time.

Awesome morning

I had to document this, and I'm not sure if anyone will find it particularly interesting, but this made my morning. I wake up, and as soon as I sit up my phone rings. I will not document the time at which I woke up, for the simple fact that I am ashamed.

Me: (groggy) "Hello?"

Mar: "T CHENNNNNNNNNN!!!"

Me: "Marium"!

Mar: "T Chen are you sleeping?"

Mar: "No Marium, I just got up...(hears laughter in the background) whoa who's there?"

So Karen's in Ohio (I'm from Ohio, and these are my best most awesome friends from home), so she and Marium are with Prasanthi and her sister...sigh I miss them. :(

After I hang up, though, the following ensues:

::BEEP::

Text #1: We miss you pal good luck this week!" (accompanied by some weird picture of marium flashing what only can be interpreted as gangster signs)

I chuckle amusedly, and then I reply and then prepare for my day.

::BEEP::

Text #2: check your facebook prasanthi sent you kind of a strange message and after she sent it karen sent you another one trying to take credit for it. this is the

The text stops here. I will imagine that either one of the other girls wrestled the phone away from her, or by accident she only sent part of it.

I decide to go take a shower. Upon my return, I see this:

Text #3: this is for real, marium now. the opposite is the truth. karen wrote the 1st msg. :) Bye!!

So in my confusion, I didn't have time to check facebook, and I went to have lunch with my father. The text messages sat in the back of my head, however....which one was real? Was the last message karen trying to mess with me and pretend to be someone else? or was the first one right? Who knows? THE SUSPENSE BUILDS.

Not until late afternoon, however, when I had access to facebook again, did I realize...oh I should check my wall!

I notice, as documented in my phone, two posts.

At least they didn't lie.

Post 1.
tiffany, you are such a good friend to me. I think it's okay that you are a man and an alcoholic. I like you just the way you are. Have you told all of your friends your real name? Just in case, it's Armando. Now the world knows. talk to you soon!

Great.

Now everyone knows my nickname from high school.

Post 2.
One guess as to who the true author of the previous post is.
Here's a clue. Her name starts with K and ends with aren.

AHA!

So the second text message WAS A LIE!

LIES! IT IS ALL LIES!!! OH THE HUMANITY.

By the way, I am not a man.

And I'm not an alcoholic.

karen's actually the one who is a man.

just kidding, karen. please don't come to california and attack me.

This has been my day, besides the eating food with family and trying to get these projects/papers/presentation done.

I have to write a LOT of pages in the next 2 days. Wish me luck.

Ah, the little things in life...

Food

The retreat was awesome. I need to put some pictures up, which I will...eventually.

The applicants were amazing this year.

I'm so excited--it's hilarious because we are excited that they're amazing, yet at the same time you know that these are the people who are going to probably kick your butt in everything...

It was funny, because last year a lot of people didn't know what I did for my research, and this year a lot of people did. It just goes to show what one year's difference makes (perhaps in demographic as well).

Went to Cupertino with my friend Erik and my mum who is visiting. We ate at a restaurant there, and bumped into a kid I knew from violin when we were little! His parents were here for parents' weekend. Also, Subarna met up with us at Ranch 99 to do a little awesome shopping. Afterwards we went to the safeway in menlo park, which is, by the way, pretty darn large. It's very similar to like meijer or dorothy lane in ohio, but I haven't seen groceries like that here in California so much.

It's a little...foofy.

And now i have a phone call. So I shall go now.

edit:
The people who live above me set off their fire alarm. I spent a tense 20 seconds thinking...please, please please let it not be a fire so i can stay in bed...

Friends

So my friend Aakash last week suggested that we go visit the museum/mausoleum on campus, but since I had a lot of work I suggested that we all go this week.

Fast forward to one day ago, where Aakash tells me he's sick. I'm disappointed, but there are like 5 people confirmed so we decide to eat at the museum anyway.

Somehow, more people kept on getting added until I had a head count of 7 for lunch, and then 9, and then finally it ended up with 12 people at lunch, because Alex, David and Marc happened to be having lunch together and decided to join us too. It was fun times. Poor Aakash! It was his plan and he wasn't even there!

I just realized, however, that I am a HORRIBLE friend. I threatened to block one of my friends on instant messenger about 2 weeks ago, and then I did it. I completely forgot until today, when I was wondering why I hadn't chatted with them until now.

...I wonder if other people go through these daily oopsies.

How to boil water

Well, it finally happened.

I became so mundanely satisfied in my inherent ability to time the cooking of rice correctly...I turned on the stove, put the rice and water in the pot, and left it alone.

Fast forward one hour later...

::BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE::

My ears perk up.

Hark, what is that sound? Ah, probably some student burning something, like in the days of college. Silly students.

Wait.

I don't live in a dormitory.

I live in an apartment.

That is my smoke detector.

AHHHHHHHH!!!!

I jump out of the room, one of my slippers flying off and hitting my roomate's door as I run towards the stove. I quickly shut off the stove, grab the pot and stick it under cold water, as I grab today's daily advertisement (thank goodness I didn't just toss it out as usual) and run back to my room to fan at the smoke detector.

::BEEEEEEEeeeeeep::

I pace back to the stove, and then commence dumping out the rice, scrubbing the black bits, and muttering angry curse words at the fact that I have destroyed my favorite pot.

::BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE::

SHUT UP GAH

After fanning, I call my mother after scrubbing for about 5 minutes for help. Ah, all is not lost. To remove the black bits, apparently the advice is to boil the pot with water in it, and then use chopsticks to loosen up those carbon pieces.

Good to know.

Dag nabbit.

a brief window into my life as of ... today

although this is only my first real blog entry, I have two or three entries that I started but did not finish. Why, may you, my probably one or zero readers, have interest in my mundane everyday complications? perhaps I shall grab an entry from a few weeks ago, and proceed with that outline.

1. Give tutorial on how to properly install Dragon NaturallySpeaking preferred on Windows Vista
   
2. Address important computer health safety habits
   
3. List what I have been doing for the last month and a half.
   

all of my blog entries are written -- well not really written I guess -- by dictation into voice recognition software. It is a method that helps conserve my hands' energy for doing work such as code, and at the same time allows me tothink out loud (which is an added benefit). The problem, as you will probably see, is that often I will have grammatical mistakes. I apologize for these, I try to catch them as I go along.

1. For the last year and a half, I have been using voice recognition software. For the last two months, however, I have not used it as often because I decided to get a computer that did not have it installed. the first time I tried to install it got fed up after a while, because it kept on telling me was incompatible with vista.

   here it is, step-by-step in case anyone happens to Google my blog (yeah right)
   

   
   
   1. download NaturallySpeaking Preferred 9.5. it is a little more than 1 GB in size, so you need a fast Internet connection. I burned my copy to DVD, so I could install a copy on my new computer.
      
   2. Run the file. Here is where I ran into a problem. What it might pop up with, is the problem that your computer is not compatible with the newest version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Specifically, that your processor speed is too slow. What happens is that Dragon NaturallySpeaking thinks that your processors to slow because it checks for your idling processor speed. One way to remedy this, is to set your power options to be "always on". This means your hard disks never shut off, your computer never goes into standby, or hibernates. this should be an option for this in the list of possible power options. If not, you can just mess with one of the setting options, like I did.
      
   3. hopefully, the software will install. I was super excited to find out that this works, after many many tries of trying to figure out how to get this to actually succeed. I even ran a bunch of programs at the same time as the installation for good measure, even though that's usually a bad idea.
      
   
   
2. Computer health safety
   I started going back to physical therapy. I used to go at home, and then at Duke. it is really interesting here, because my problem seemed to be much more common than anywhere else I have seen. Subsequently, they know what to do with me here. what I find it interesting, is that since I have been trying to do proper ergonomics over the last three or four years, I always end up creating problems that change over time, depending on what ergonomic factor I am leaving out, and have yet to discover.
   

computer setup.
• make sure your keyboard is at a comfortable level such that the angle of your elbow approximately 90°. All too often I see someone sitting at a desk with her hands arched way over the top of the desk their wrists bent crookedly over the keyboard.
• your wrists should not be turned in a weird position. This is why like my curved keyboard, because my wrist can stay relatively straight. the drawback is that sometimes the keyboard is a little bit too high.
• Don't flick your wrists many times when you are using or moving the mouse. Whenever you are not typing or using the mouse, bring your hands back to your lap. NEVER type while resting your wrists on the table. This adds a lot of pressure to the area that is most sensitive to carpal tunnel syndrome.
• your monitor should be relatively high, such that you do not have to bend your head down to look at the screen. It should be a good angle directly across from your head.

  habits
  

• Take frequent breaks. This does not mean checking news online, or checking e-mail, or looking at a web comic. this means get up. Go to the bathroom,walk around a little, or just end up and stretch a bit. There are these great PowerPoint slides that you can find online, and then set your computer to play it at every certain interval or time of the day. I have two ergonomic stretches that I set to go off at 5 p.m. each day on my old computer. I still have to copy and use that on my new one. In order to do that on a PC, you can just create a new schedule task to run the PowerPoint.
  
• arch your back and sit up straight. this has apparently become my problem. I need to sit up straight to help fix myself. If you wan to sit up straight with less effort, try to lean forward, and then sit down by placing the back of your butt at the very back of the chair. When you straighten yourself back up you'll notice that you are sitting taller than you would normally (taught to me by PT here). Sitting straight has always been one of my problems, and I am sure it is a problem for anyone who uses the computer extensively. Often, you just want to sit back, lean back in your chair and kind of slouch for a bit. I suggest integrating slouching into your walk around time, if you must. You can go curl up on the couch for a minute, when you come back to your chair, you want to be sitting up straight when you are using computer.
  

since tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and since my family is here, I suppose I should go to bed for now and write more about my actual life tomorrow. Tomorrow is Turkey Day. For anyone interested, feel free to Google this term:
bustergophechiduckneaealcockidgeoverwingailusharkolanbler

Happy Thanksgiving!