12:25

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.