12:25

Sterling Memorial Library is the largest library on campus. It is built to resemble a gothic cathedral. When you go in the front doors, you are greeted by the huge arched main lobby. They even went so far as to make the circulation desk look like an altar. SML has a number of large, high-ceilinged reading rooms, my favorite of which is the Music Library. Behind the circulation desk is the entrance to the book stacks, which is a 15 story monolith that house the majority of the library's over 4 million volumes. The Stacks are pretty creepy actually, full of narrow shelves of books and a few desks here and there. I honestly thought that the Stacks and the main part of the library was all there was to it, but then one day some of my friends showed me another part of the library that I didn't know existed. There is a small 6-story portion of the library that had a number of smaller rooms and collections. The room where we decided to study in had a number of tables and couches,...

This year's Harvard-Yale Game was here in New Haven. The location of the Game switches off each year between here and Cambridge. The busses from Harvard arrived the night before the Game, and the next day, everyone made their way over to the Yale Bowl. The tailgate parties were quite great. There was a lot  of food. And of course, the giant inflatable Handsome Dan: We all filed into Yale Bowl after getting our fill of food from the tailgate. Last year's game, we lost 10-0 to Harvard, which was especially miserable with the addition of the freezing weather. But surprisingly, we started off surprisingly well this time. We somehow managed to get a 10-0 lead before the half of the first quarter, which we managed to hold for a while. The half-time show was quite interesting. Both the Harvard and Yale marching bands gave a performance, each based off of some story. I couldn't make out what Harvard's was about. First they had some guy with a red cape chase around a...

New England's autumn foliage is always an amazing sight to behold every year. By around mid-November, most of the trees have turned bright yellow, orange, and red. I took a few photo tours around campus and New Haven before the trees shed too many of their leaves. Davenport College Upper Court: I walk along Elm Street outside of Old Campus pretty much every day. It's interesting to see its scenery change throughout the year. It can be quite pretty on rainy days. Old Campus is where all the freshmen dorms are. The dorms are around the perimeter, and in the middle it's almost like a huge park on campus. I have class on Old Campus every day, and once in a while, they come around with rakes and leaf blowers have gone around and piled away the leaves. Coming from Science Hill, I took a slight detour and went by the New Haven Green. Anyway, by now, most of the leaves have fallen off the trees. I haven't had the chance to jump into any leaf piles this year,...

Undoubtedly, Fridays are always something to look forward to after a long week. For me, this is especially true for Fridays evenings at 5 when I finish my last class of week, a four hour long chemistry lab. Normally, we leave when we finish our experiments, but today's lab for me was unusually ridiculous. Part of our experiment involved mixing an iodide solution with n-heptane to dissolve some of the iodine in the n-heptane so we get an aqueous layer containing the original solution containing iodide, diatomic iodine, and triiodide, and an organic n-heptane layer that contained just iodine. My lab partner and I had to start our experiments over twice. The first time, we ran out of our aqueous solution because some technical difficulties with a volumetric pipette so we couldn't do the third trial of the titration. As a result, we had to start over. However, when our second mixture separated into the aqueous and organic layers, there was this mysterious layer of an unknown su...

When I went outside today morning beneath the rain and overcast, I knew that today was an especially cold day. I had a shorter than normal lunch today (my lunch is already short because I have 20 minutes until the next class) so I could go back to my room and don my peacoat and grab the umbrella since I was going to go up Science Hill later today. As I went to dinner with a few friends, I was once again grateful that I lived in the same building as the dining hall, which meant that we could just go through the basement to go eat rather than having to step outside, because it was really cold outside. I managed to take a peek at Yahoo Weather before I left and was surprised that the temperature had already dropped to 38 degrees Fahrenheit. After dinner, as I was working on finishing up my chemistry lab report, I suddenly received an IM from a friend who told me to look out the window. Surprised, I saw large flakes drifting down among the raindrops. It is the middle of October. And it is...

Saybrook had a "Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream Social," where we had ice cream that was prepared using liquid nitrogen to rapidly cool it down. They had some interesting flavors. There was the more conventional types like Oreo, blueberry/lemon, cinnamon/sprinkles, and there were a apparently few that were less conventional like Cheetos and salad dressing. I thankfully managed to avoid the Cheetos tub, but I inadvertently got a scoop of the salad dressing, which was, aside from the scent of ranch (which I associate with either ranch or Elmer's Glue), wasn't really that bad. It in fact tasted like cream cheese. I'm guessing the logic behind using liquid nitrogen to cool it down is that the cooling process would be more rapid and that the ice cream ends up becoming smoother because the water has less of a chance to form ice crystals. This reminds me of my friend's summer research project for STARS on the formability of bulk metallic glasses, which are a kind of amorph...

Tonight was the TAS (Taiwanese-American Society) Dumpling Night, one of our signature events that we hold every semester or so. Just for $5, you can have all-you-can-eat dumplings and all-you-can-drink bubble tea (well, until we run out of bubble tea, which actually does run out very quickly during our events). As Dumpling Night is one of our main events, we had to ahead of time prepare a lot of dumplings. By a lot, we mean over 3000. Last year we made around 3,100. This year, after we finished prep, our final estimate was around 3,300. Our dumplings are all hand-made, down to the filling (though we bought the wrappers because hand-making the wrappers would really take far too long). The event turnout was amazing. This afternoon before the event, we had about 260 people confirmed as "attending" on our Facebook event listing. I don't have the final count of how many people actually came as of yet, but it was definitely a lot, and we were rushing (and struggling) to keep u...

One of the perks of sophomore year is that I finally get to live in Saybrook College, my residential college. Freshmen (except for the freshmen of Silliman and Timothy Dwight Colleges) live in the dorms on Old Campus. Saybrook and Branford (to which Saybrook is physically connected actually) are the two oldest residential colleges at Yale, established back in 1933. One of the first things I noticed when I went into the Saybrook courtyard for the first time freshmen year (and I still do now) is how beautiful the gardens were, especially against the backdrop of the stone buildings. Saybrook actually has two courtyards, Killingworth Court and Saybrook Court, but to save some syllables, we just call them the Grass Courtyard: And the Stone Courtyard: Yes, the "Stone" courtyard also has grass, but supposedly a few years back, there was stone paved in the areas where there is now grass. But in any case, it still had more stone than the Grass Courtyard and it was a convenient way to...

There are a lot of great places to get an excellent view of the New Haven skyline.

Candlelight vigil for Annie Le. It has been a very sad few days on campus. It is hard to imagine that something like this has happened here. I pray for Annie and her family, for comfort and solidarity in a time of loss and grief. She will be dearly missed by all of us.

Friday: First rainy day of fall semester. The rain certainly made the trip from Old Campus to Science Hill all the more eventful and slightly less convenient, especially with Prospect Street Bridge being closed, which means the usual shuttle that runs on that route no longer does. I hear it now goes somewhere else, but I'll stick to walking for a while. One thing I realized that huge umbrellas are quite common here. I got one of my own after my older one was blown apart by a sudden gust of wind. In any case, it is quite nice to be indoors too.

Microsoft's Stephan Hoefnagels, the Senior UX Designer came and talked about the process of creating the Windows 7, the upcoming version of Windows to be released this October. It was very interesting to get a peek of the work that goes into creating a product like Windows. What was amazing was how much attention to detail was necessary for designing even certain aspects of the user interface that seem insignificant. I've actually tried out the Windows 7 Beta and the first Release Candidate when they became publicly available, and I think that Windows 7 is very promising. Even the first beta ran very smoothly. They gave out some free stuff too: Sadly, I didn't have much luck with the raffle. However, I am grateful for MSDN AA. And, as always: I can pet a badger and microwave a souffle. I can also crush a can in creative ways using my mind. So, let's talk.

I've been motivated to start blogging again. My old blog is on hiatus until I get around to setting my website up again since I moved everything to a different host. For that blog, I mostly wrote about tech, design, site updates, etc. This blog will be more for thoughts, snippets and snapshots of daily life, and experiences. This blog will be, as a result, more "personal" (though not too personal of course). Also, since I enjoy photography, I will be posting a good number of stuff I shoot here before they hit my Flickr . Stay tuned.