Sazzly

2006-06-04T19:37:00.000-07:00

I graduated! Woohoo! Olin now has graduates! You can read about my graduation in the Boston Globe or you can read a more entertaining version written by IEEE Spectrum.

Before I left Boston, I took a walk around a lake to destress after finishing a paper for a class. Here is a snapshot from my walk around the lake.

The day I left Boston, it was 30 degrees, because there was an artic storm coming through. It had been warming up, but there were still cold days. I had hung up my sweaters in my closet in case I needed them; I don't need them. Today it was over 90 degrees! Not that it doesn't get hot in Boston, it was just a quick switch.

Cool Design!

2006-02-12T06:12:00.000-08:00

I am in a course called Sustainable Design this semester. Our first project is to take a product and reuse it to make another product. The coolest example we were shown was a record that had been made into a bowl. He put a clear sticker over the bottom of the bowl so that you could still see the label. Well, I've been trying to think about products to try to reuse. I happened to find another cool design today surfing the web. This product is a merry-go-round that doubles as a water pump designed in South Africa. The kids play on it, and it pumps water for the village into a high reservoir! Very cool.

Head Covering Paper

2006-01-28T15:57:00.000-08:00

Hey, hey. I've finished my head covering paper. You can read it here.

Mexico Trip

2006-01-22T22:21:00.000-08:00

I just recently took a trip to Juarez, Mexico to build a house in 3 1/2 days! I really enjoyed it. I went with my school's Christian Club, and some Dads through an organization called Casas por Cristo. The Dads came in handy when it came time to swing hammers and sink thick 16 penny nails into the 2x4's to make the walls. First, here's the neighborhood.

The Neighborhood

On the first day we poured the concrete slab. I got to "screen", which involved raking each batch of concrete away from where the small concrete mixer would drop it, and until it filled in our wooden mould. Then we would move a piece of wood like a saw over the top of the concrete to smooth it out (i.e. push down the rocks) and make it level. After we screened the entire slab we smoothed it out even more because it was going to be the floor of the house. The house was only 11'x22'.

slab

On the second day, we put the walls and ceiling up. We hammered together each wall on the ground and then put them all up one after the other at the same time. Our Casas staff guy, Mark, said that our house was the most exact--in terms of being square--that he had made! The second day I got to hang out with Raymundo a lot. He's the father of the family we were building the house for. He would watch as we would try to hammer in the nails, and then they would go crooked, which would make them harder to get in. So he would come over and help us out. I got to translate the instructions we had for each section to him using a combination of Spanish and pointing :). He helped me with some of the words after a while. "El techo" is the roof and "el agujero" is the hole. "El agujero" was very useful when we drilled holes in the walls for the electrical lights and fan and fed the romex through the walls.

walls

On the third day, I did sheet rock with three others. I like power drills :). We started sheet rock in the morning and we finished just as it was getting dark. The others put a black board on the outside of the house, and then chicken wire, and then stucco. They also did the roof.

On the last day, we just did the finishing touches: We hooked up all of the outlets and the lights. They worked :). We also poured a step for the front door and the back door. We decorated their front step with a cross and Olin College.

Done!

Raymundo

Each day, the family gave us lunch! They were not required to at all, but they wanted to. It was usually a bag of tortillas, rice and some type of meat. On the last day, Raymundo asked us if he could make fish. We certainly accepted. He and his wife made us amazing fried fish, served us fancy cheese and a spicy soup with jumbo shrimp! We had come to build the house because we have been blessed and thus, wanted to give to others. Now, he had been blessed and wanted give to us.

Update

2005-11-12T11:45:00.000-08:00

I am happy with my senior engineering project right now. The algorithm we had to write by Thanksgiving has been written already and we are on to bigger and better things. Our company liason and her boss came to visit to help us with our project. They were helpful in propelling us to work as far as we could without them before they came, and in helping us to know how we will do the next steps. I also got to drive the Rhino, which is the project directors's atv with seats and a cover, around Parcel B, which is a large forested area with paths and open areas that our school owns. It was a lot of fun! He had me drive right through the puddles instead of going around them.

He has converted Parcel B into a Robot test track, and is very excited about it, and wanted to show it off to our sponsors. He has even arragned to have the paths plowed in the winter! He's also building a shed with heating and an internet connection so we can work out there in the winter while we're testing our vehicle. He says that at about 10 degrees below freezing your laptop screen freezes and starts to do funny things. This winter will be interesting!

I am halfway through the body of my 25 page paper on Testimony literature in Latin America. I still have a lot of work to do, but I am excited about it. This website http://www.speaktruthtopower.org/ has some great bios and pictures of Human Rights workers throughout the world!

I have started a spreadsheet to track due dates for my applications to Law Schools and scholarships, programs and school rankings. Some schools have some really cool scholarships for public interest law, or have well funded programs to provide money to students for summer internships that do not pay. I plan to write essays during Thanksgiving break, instead of before. and, I hope to visit some Law Schools in southern California while I'm there.

Back to writing . . .

To do before Thanksgiving: a partial list

2005-10-26T18:55:00.000-07:00

Write a 25 page paper on Testimony literature in Latin America

Finish reading a 250 page book in Spanish ('Si me permiten hablar . . .' Testimonio de Domitila, una mujer de las minas de Bolivia) I'm on page 185 . . .

Read two more books (The Inferno by Luz Arce, A Single Numberless Death by Nora Streveilich)
Write, write, write, pause, find quote, write, write, write

Write a 10 page Annotation to my 25 page paper
Write an algorithm for my senior Engineering project first in Java, then in C (But I just found out about eclipse and it is a wonderful Java environment!)
Choose Law Schools to apply to, write essays, take more practice LSATs
Have a personal letter to give to people to raise prayer support and money for a trip to Juarez, Mexico to build a house in January
Spend time with my suitemates*

Ahhhh....Thanksgiving Break will be nice!

*added to reflect a real priority

Top Ten things that have changed since last post:

2005-09-23T17:31:00.000-07:00

10. I am a College Senior!
My school now has all four classes: Seniors through freshmen! I have not met all, okay most, of the freshmen this year, but I have met the ones who joined Christian Club :O) There are lots of exciting things going on this year! We are hoping to go to Mexico to build a house with Casas Por Cristo this January.

9. My car broke down again . . . my brakes started grinding. I know that means: 'Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.' Conveniently enough, I was able to leave my car at the shop on the way out of the area, and have them fix it while I was in California. They also replaced my hood latch cable so that my hood opens!

8. My glasses came with a sunglass clip that magnetically stuck into place. I lost it long ago, but recently decided to buy a replacement. Well, I ordered it in California and had to have it shipped to Boston. It arrived this week, but unfortunately, they flipped the magnets, so my sunglasses stay very effectively unattached to my glasses!

7. I have broken out my frog collection in force in my room once again. Many smiling reminders to fully rely on God.

6. I now live in a suite with five other girls, whiich was arranged by who would most and least mind my Rooster alarm waking them up in the morning.

5. I really like the Red Sox team from 2004 season (They won the World Series, in case you are not in New England), because of a short DVD called Reverse the Curse put on by Athletes in Action in which 10 of the team members talk about their Faith in God and how they relied on God during their games, how it was him who blessed them with the victory!

4. I have again strung my walls with the cards I've received from family and friends over the last three years. They cover quite a bit of my wall space! The cards are so encouraging, and a big improvement over the white space that was there.

Scarriest: a frog with HUGE eyes and teeth making a face at me, from my Mom
Loudest: a bright pink construction paper card with green construction paper framing my name, from my friend Johannah
Highly Memory filled: Card that says "Hey, Sister- you're a year older . . . thankfully that's one thing you can't blame on me", signed 'Tim' in the way I used to scratch his name into the dining room table instead of mine, so I wouldn't get in trouble.

3. I can no longer claim to people's astongishment that my biological sister has light skin, blue eyes and curly blond hair . . . she has become a brunette . . . or at least dark blond.

2. I wrote a paper about head coverings. It's in the revision stages, but I'll pass it around soon!

1. I want to go to law school now. This summer, I heard Gary Haugen from the International Justice Mission speak on the radio. He was talking about how God is a God who is passionate about justice, and he then started talking about when he was sent by the UN to investigate the massacre in Rwanda, and how he realized what God's love for the world really means. He was conducting an interview with a little girl who had barely survived the machete wounds on her neck and realized that God cared so much about whether this girl lived or died. He, over in America, would not have known the difference, but God would have. He came to see God as truly against the injustice in the world, and able to overcome it. He also realized that God's plan for showing himself to be a God of justice is to use his people. So he started up the International Justice Mission, which is a group of Christian attorneys, law enforcement professionals and human rights workers who rescue victims of violence, sexual exploitation, slavery and oppression.

To see the amazing things God is doing with lawyers check out the International Justice Mission .

I think this is amazing, because I have been looking for a Christian group that is doing in human rights work. In my class Human Rights in Latin America, we learned about the atrocities that occured in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and other countries during the 60's and 70's. It's real that people were tortured, recently. I knew God was bigger than how I had seen him before after this class. I knew that Jesus could identify with every person who is tortured, because he was too, for an unjust cause as well. Now I can see how active he is, as in Psalms 10-14, where David cries to him for rescue from injustice and he responds because he does that. I would love to be a part of such a work as the International Justice Mission!

Sad and Joyful News

2005-07-20T18:49:00.000-07:00

I have sad news . . . my digital camera broke. I just realized it today when I was trying to take a picture and about a sixth of the screen was black in my picture. We at first thought the person taking the picture had just put his hand over the lense. The flash tried to compensate for the darkness of the broken part, even though it was rather bright this morning, so the rest of my picture is washed out!

I was trying to take a picture of me and my roommate's sister, Dawn. She stayed with us from Saturday until this morning, and I really enjoyed getting to know her. My roommate asked her what kind of church she wanted to go to: contemporary, traditional, big, small, etc. And she said, "I just want to go to a church where the Lord is working." So, I said that I thought she would enjoy my church. I have seen the Lord working there in many people. There are many new Christians, and there are respectable leaders who seek to follow God's word! So Dawn and my roommate decided they wanted to come to church with me . . . which is a really big answer to prayer actually. I have been praying for my roommate, that she would go to church, because she has been not prioritizing to go, and I want her to go, but I know it is not my place to try to control her. I know that this answer to prayer is just a step along the way.

So, then, Dawn had a friend from school who happened to be home with her family in Boston just this weekend, and she wanted to spend time with her, so they planned to go to church together. Her friend, Irena is a christian, but her family is not. She has a brother in highschool, who is just starting to get interested in going to church, so he wanted to come too. So on Sunday morning, they came out an hour on the T and Dawn my roommate and I picked them up in my car to drive to church. I am glad that I have the car I do, because it fit everyone just fine, with even one seat to spare (although you have to be special or small to sit there :) ). So, I got to meet and worship with two amazing girls this weekend. Irena is thinking about spending a semester next year in Costa Rica, serving the Lord and the people! Dawn is open to where the Lord wants her to go; she just graduated from college with a degree in piano performance.

Irena told us on the way to church that they were waiting at the T stop for me and this car pulled up, and asked if they were going to church, they said yes, and they got in. The person introduced themself as Martha, and said she was there to pick them up. Irena hesitantly asked if Sarah had sent her, because she talked with me and Dawn on the phone the night before to get directions on the T, and knew I would be picking her up. Martha said, no, Amy had told her to pick them up. Irena then tried to ask if Amy knew Sarah or anything . . . and then realized Amy was not me at all or anyone I had sent. They parted with a "I guess I'll see you at church then?" and a laugh I am sure.

Summer

2005-07-10T18:40:00.001-07:00

Here is some fun if you know a bit about Star Trek and you like personality stuff. This one is really quality. They use Myers Briggs letters for the result, but the questions are much more fun and easier to not see through! http://scifi.about.com/library/weekly/aa080201.htm

Star Trek Personality Test Results: INTJ
This test says you are an INTJ (Introvert, Intuitive, Thinker, Judger).* In Star Trek, you share a basic personality configuration with the characters of Jean-Luc Picard, Seven of Nine, and T'Pol.

"Things are only impossible until they're not." - Picard

I originally just read the description of the personality type I always come out with, but my friend who sent me the link made me promise to actually take it, and I'm glad she did, because I enjoyed it very much.

I have been enjoying summer out here in Boston. For one there is great weather--always changing! We had a week of hot and humid weather (80s) when I first got back here. Then a week of cold and cloudy weather (60s) and then a wonderful two weeks. And then this past week, it was nice and sunny for a few days, and pouring rain and cold for a couple of the days. Yesterday the weather was "scattered thunderstorms" so about 6pm a thundercloud rolled into my school. I was outside reading a book, and a beautiful, glorious cloud rolled it, and it was very imposing. It advanced like an army. The wind started to pick up when it covered the school. I understand how God's glory could be shown in a cloud before the Israelites in Moses' time, and they were afraid of him, and didn't want to have to communicate with him. They wanted Moses to be the go-between. I have often thought that clouds in movies are overdone, but there are actually imposing clouds in real life! In any case, the storm lasted about 15 minutes, after which the sun appeared again, and made this beautiful rainbow next to our new residence hall.

Rainbow at school

Oh, yes and my car broke down today. Right after Church. It just wouldn't go when I put it in Drive, so I put it in 1st and shifted manually --pretending it was a manual transmission all the way down to the service station down the road. And the other thing is that my hood release is broken, so he couldn't look at the transmission. So somehow the service guy will get that open. In the mean time, he gave me a 'loaner car!' Can you believe it? The random Shell service station guy gave me a car to drive while he looks at mine! I am so thankful for that. I have never heard of that before, but apparently it happens a lot out here (there are also still places around here where you pump your gas first and then pay). I am so thankful too, because I was able to take my roommate to church tonight, since the guy she usually goes with is out of town. Also I am so thankful because one of the guys at church was a mechanic for a few years, and so he knows about transmissions, and he knows the good transmission place in the area, so he can help me figure out where to have my car fixed once I get the quote. Someone else at Church said they had their car fixed at the place mine is now, and the guy did a good job. I am so thankful for my church family out here! God is at work, and God is good! He has shown himself faithful many times today.

Boston on the 4th

So, for the 4th of July I went to Boston to hear the Boston Pops and watch the fireworks on the Charles. They had loud speakers every 100 feet or so all day playing music and then the concert started at 8:30, and the fireworks at 10:30. It was a great show. Lots and lots of fireworks, and they all looked nice. They were choreographed to the music so that they were slower and more droopy during the country song (and there were hearts at the end of that one) and faster and more upbeat during the more rockish song, etc. I really liked the cubes! They also had happy faces, but the stars didn't seem to work very well. I like the ones that explode out and then the sparks explode more. They lit off 5 or 6 of those at a time, so that the whole sky was filled with little bursts--very organic looking.

Ivy Steeple

Ah, yes. So we walked around Boston a little this weekend, and saw this cool ivy covered steeple to a Baptist Church. The sun was hitting it just right I thought.

Hanging Flowers
In a greenhouse in Needham

Woods!

Triplet tree

Pictures!

2005-06-07T19:43:00.000-07:00

Why Hello. Here are some pics from my recent trip to California--in the Tehachapi area. The LA area just isn't as photogenic, so I didn't take any from my week there. I'm back in the Boston area now, and I've started my internship. I just got to meet and eat lunch with the other interns today. They were pretty cool. One guy brought Hummus, which is a great idea . . . I am making efforts to obtain some.

This summer I'm participating in a food co-operative with 20 other students. The deal is for a flat rate, which is rather low, you can a cooked dinner every night and breakfast and lunch food to prepare for yourself. I cooked dinner last night -- Rosemary Chicken for 20 people! It was quite a time. I had two helpers, which was nice. I set them on cutting up the onion and garlic, and worried myself with how to defrost over 13 lbs of boneless skinless chicken breasts! We were supposed to eat at 6:30 and at 5:30 they were all frozen! Oops. I had planned to bake them, which takes an hour from the dethawed state . . . so we improvised and did a combination of cooking them in pans on top of the stove, and keeping them in the oven to dethaw while they waited for open space. It turned out well, though. In general. We also had an entire bag of potatoes to bake, which I planned to microwave. So, since I didn't think to start those until the chicken was happily cooking, we farmed them out to different dorm-room microwaves. I was the QC on the chicken, so they were all cooked through, but some of the potatoes were a bit underdone, including the one I ate. But hey, there was butter, so it was all good. I rounded out the meal with frozen vegies. There are plenty of those left over, but in all fairness, I left about half of them in the microwave on accident, so people didn't know that we had more.

Well, I start at 7:45 tomorrow, so it's about bedtime -- I'm only up past 10:30 because I got a nap. Wow, how life changes :). I got up before 6am this morning. Well, I tried, I made it at 6:05, so we'll work on that. I didn't foresee this!

2005-06-07T19:42:00.000-07:00

More poppies

2005-06-07T19:41:00.003-07:00

Poppies!

2005-06-07T19:41:00.002-07:00

A crow or a raven?

2005-06-07T19:41:00.001-07:00

Silver Queen Mountain

2005-06-07T19:41:00.000-07:00

A light at the end of the tunnel

2005-06-07T19:40:00.003-07:00

A loaded Joshua Treeh

2005-06-07T19:40:00.002-07:00

Joshua Tree Fruit

2005-06-07T19:40:00.001-07:00

a flower? Here?

These flowers grow by the roadside between Mojave and California City, which is quite possibly one of the dryest areas in California (ranking near Death Valley I am sure). And they just are so green and so white when everthing else is light shades and such.

2005-06-07T19:40:00.000-07:00

Fire's work

Finals are Over! Mistakes . . .

2005-05-13T20:48:00.000-07:00

Hey hey. My finals are over! It hasn't really registered yet, but I'll believe it in the morning I think. I have one more thing to do, a presentation for Expo on a look at Biculturalism from a book I read this semester in my Hispanic Writers in the US class. The book was American Chica, which is an autobiography of a woman who grew up with a Pervian father and an American mother in Peru until she was 10 and then moved to the US. My official title is "A look at Bicultural Identity: a childhood in Peru and the US," and so one of my professors asked me yesterday if I was from Peru :). I'm up to about 7 counts of people asking me if I am Latin American and 1 person asked me if I am Egyptian--and she was Egyptian! And about 8 people have asked me if I am vegetarian, even timbo, who has known me all my life!

Here's some highly entertaining organic food propaganda: http://www.storewars.org/flash/index.html

Pictures and Summer

2005-05-12T23:21:00.000-07:00

I am near the end of finals, so there isn't much time to blog. However, if you would like to find out about the community service projects I helped organize at Olin (it's called Big Converstations Day, because they thought up the idea of inviting speakers and having the community focus on the big picture, and could never think of a better name, so it stuck). I recommend that you go to the feature story on my school's website. Pretty spiffy, huh. I am quoted - which is something I was sent and revised, of course, rather than actually said out loud ever. And check out the picture gallery! I didn't have time to take my own pictures on the day of the event, but our Olin photographer did, so I'll send you off here!

I am happy to be almost done with this semester! It has been full. I got an internship in the Boston area this summer doing Error Control Codes -- which is applied Abstract Algebra and applied discrete math in general, and also electrical engineering at the same time. For example, when you go to burn a CD, redundant bits are added to the datastream, and a special encoding algorithm is performed so that if there are scratches on the CD when you play it, the bits that it cannot read can be corrected to what it was before! It's also used in wireless communications and GPS. We've been learning about this sort of thing in two of my classes. It's cool stuff, and I'm interested to see if I'll want to find a career in the field somewhere.

This summer, I believe a lot of what I will be doing is coding in C to make simulations and test parameters and coding schemes. My brothers laughed at me when they heard because they have told me many times that I will end up in Computer Science, which I resist!

Marathon = Spring

2005-04-18T22:28:00.000-07:00

Yay, Spring is here! I went down to watch some of my friends pass through Wellesley as they ran the Boston Marathon today! Today is Patriot's Day in Massachusetts, which I believe is the day the first shots were fired for the revolutionary war. It's a state holiday, the day of some civil war reinactments and conveniently, the day of the Boston Marathon each year. Two of my friends made the trek, and some of the other girls at the College joined them for several miles at a time. On the way, I noticed that it is spring for some of the trees! The magnolia trees at my college are just starting to open flowers - I really like how beautiful it is that the flowers come first, as if in a hurry to change the season to spring, before the leaves come out. It was a beautiful day today, but a little warm if you were going to run 26.2 miles! A good day for ice cream in Wellesley for the non-lactose-intolerant.

Spring!

As my friends ran through downtown Wellesley, I spent my time cheering them when they passed, rather than taking pictures, so I got pictures of the other runners. Wellesley is the half-way point of the marathon. It has a really nice down town though, so it's strange to see all these cups that the runners drink from and then throw on the ground. Official race people hand out gatorade and water, and little kids and their parents hand out oranges (and sometimes sunscreen) to the runners as they go by.

Cups - Boston Marathon

They are good at using rakes and snow shovels on this coast :)

Rake - Boston Marathon

I hope the spring weather stays!

Florida Trip

2005-04-02T20:38:00.000-08:00

I have so much to tell you! First, I got to go to Florida on my spring break on a Habitat building project. 14 of us from Olin went, and one friend from Wisconsin went with us. 12 of us drove down to Florida in three cars, so that we would be able to go places when we got down there. I have now been to all of the states on the east coast! We stayed in Winter Haven, Florida, which is just about as smack dab in the middle of Florida as you can get.

We got to sheet rock an entire house, and put up siding on two walls of the other. It was fun measureing out the sheet rock and cutting it so that the outlets came through with as little margin as possible. Usually if you take the outlet cover off of your outlet, there's up to an extra inch of sheet rock cut to make it go through. We cut it to within 1/8"! The owners of the house will be impressed when they replace their outlet covers!

Olin Habitat in Florida

We were hosted by a Presbyterian church, which means we stayed in their educational center (pictured below) and they made us sandwiches for our lunches each day. They always made the sandwiches with one piece of white bread and one piece wheat bread each, and the vegetarians got peanut butter and jelly. We did, however, get Finding Nemo fruit snacks one day, which was pretty exciting.

Educational Center

Yeah. So Florida was pretty. It was surprising to me when we first passed the state line into Florida, because there were all these deciduous trees (trees where the leaves fall off for winter) down there. I was expecting a bright dark green lush jungle type thing, but it was really drab green - the color of the palm trees. There were also pine trees! Which brings me to my next observation, that Florida reminded me a lot of California. They have the same sort of looking casual suburbs, with 4 lane roads, and lots of places for U-turns, that Boston does not have. However, they are also very much a part of the east coast, rather than the west coast. I'm not sure if I can explain that statement. Also, they are a part of the south. Apparently, Northern Florida is more a part of the south than central, where we were, but you could see the influences. There are a lot of retirees there, who are mostly from the south or the midwest, so lots of accents.

Beach

Spring Training

Porch

I had a really good conversation with my friend, Clara, when I was there. We were able to sit on this porch, in the beatiful Florida sunset and talk about our lives and what we struggle with at Olin and on the trip, how important our families are to us, and what that means about where we'll work in the future.

I also got to go to an Open Brethren meeting in Maryland that Jessie Kia goes to as we were driving back up to Olin. I knew we would be in the Washington D.C. area on Sunday morning, and it being Easter morning, the other students were willing to make accomodations so that we could go to church. Some of my friends went across the street to a catholic service. They had to be early because it was going to be crowded. The Open Brethren meeting was a very multicultural church, reflecting the Washington D.C. area they are in. I enjoyed meeting some of the people there. I got there really early, so I talked with a lady who has attended there all her life, and I was able to talk to some of the young people during the break between meetings. One of them I was told, is like the president of a club called "Bachelors 'til the Rapture." And I met a guy who interviewd an Olin student for a job! He was the only one there who knew anything about Olin. It was a fun visit.

And then we made it back to Olin, without getting lost (much). :) 'Til next time, good afternoon, good evening and good night.

Cool Silly Math

2005-03-01T15:45:00.000-08:00

Perhaps some of you do not share the exact caliber of my excitement for Math, so maybe I can show you how cool it is. These are from my class called 'Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos.' Aren't they nice? This one is called an iterated map.

Cool Math
Do a little thought experiment with this graph. Pretend that at about x = 0.5 the graph splits into 4 lines instead of 2. Now, the graph has fractals! Isn't that cool².

bifurcation

I have been busy recently applying to research opportunities for this summer¹ in engineering and math. It's amazing how quickly the deadlines have come up. Two applications were due today, and while I have just barely finished my essays for them, I'm just not going to tell them that I attended Cal Poly Pomona for a year, so that I don't have to send late transcripts . . . this is too bad because I took some relevant math classes that year. In order to get transcripts from Cal Poly, I have to mail my request to them and wait for them to mail it to wherever I need it to go! I call that silliness in terms of deadlines!

The application for the research opportunity that is in the area that most interests me, scares me the most: it just asks for my GPA, a phrase for what kind of research I'm interested in and my SAT math and verbal scores! I want to send them an interest essay that's at least a page - I have several things I'd like to include. And I want my cool faculty to send them recommendations, but, they just want my SAT score. I don't even remember my SAT scores. They're from 2000 - that's 5 years ago. Oh well . . .

Pretty
So this is from a model of a pendulum that's a spring. After we turned in our reports, we found out that everyone had the wrong equations! Oops.

Eiffel Tower

Back to work time. :)

¹It seems Shallowbrook is out this year :(, but Lassen is a possibility, depending on which research opportunity I get/accept.
² I don't think this trick will work for my paper due Friday, however.

I've updated my blog!

2005-02-23T21:27:00.000-08:00

Time flies! I get upset when someone's blog who I've been checking doesn't update for a week, and it's been almost a month for me. I apologize. I've been figureing out what kind I would like to do this summer. I thought I wanted an internship doing Computer Engineering stuff, like I learned in a class last semester. So that's what I told our contacts with IBM, and a manager was even interested in me. However, once I was talking seriously about getting the job, I realized that I wasn't all that excited about it. I also realized that I was very interested in what I was doing in my math class: error control codes - which is electrical and computer engineering, but also very math-intensive! And how much better can you get? Both ECE and Math? Beautiful pure abstract math, but also with applications? Did anyone know this type of thing existed? I am very excited about it. However, this is less of an enginnering thing, and more of a research thing. You can still do this type of thing at a company like IBM, but it's the research area. So I decided to tell my interested manager that my interests have changed, and apply for REU's (Reserach Experiences for Undergraduates) in Math and ECE -- and especially where they crossover.

It's funny, I started rearranging my resume to support applying for math positions, and my resume seemed to line up behind it - with all of the classes that I have taken and the tutoring I have done.

Here is a picture from a couple weeks ago when it snowed. It's been snowing pretty frequently, e.g. today it snowed for a little while.

Snow in the hair

Yay for snow! It is so peaceful when it falls . . . this night, it also made a nice powder on the bricks, so we ran down the path and jumped, so we would slide, like we were skiing.

I made a Snow Man!

2005-02-01T20:19:00.000-08:00

Well, I made a Pillsbury SnowBoy to be specific. On Sunday my college had a snow sculpture contest. I had never rolled a snowball into a part of a snow man before, so I decided to join a girl from Bakersfield, California who was also enjoying rolling a little snowball into a BIG snowball. There were about 4 of us rolling snowballs at one point. We had some extras around, so after there were 3 large snowballs on top of eachother, someone put another one on top of the snowman to make four. We liked it, and it was then decided that it looked like a chef's hat, and chef?--why the pillsbury dough boy is a chef! Let's make it? We ended up winning the contest! The other scultures were a snowman asleep at his desk, with math books and calculators etc. around him, a dragon, and a Calvin-and-Hobbs-esque piece of a snowman swimming frantically with two shark fins on its tail.

The Pillsbury SnowBoy

the boy who looks like Humpty Dumpty
Ah yes, so after we were done forming the Pillsbury Snowboy we had a few snowballs left over--mainly mine and another small one, so we made this small boy here. :) He has a mohawk.

Wellesley Icicles
When I went sledding at Wellesley there were these Huge beautiful iciles all over their beautiful buildings!

the Cocoa
As requested, this is the adorable Cocoa--sitting on my dad's lap.

2005-01-29T21:11:00.000-08:00

I got to go sledding today! It was a lot of fun. It wasn't *that* cold today, so it was nice to be outside in the bright sun and sail down the hill. I am thinking about investing in a nice inner tube--as much as the little sled I used was cute, it wasn't very cusiony. I was smiling afterwards, but I did fly through the air a bit after a bump at the bottom.

Here I go

After

I found some cool verses recently in Isaiah written as a warning to the 'women of Zion,' God's people. What amazes me about them is how much stuff they had to try to make themselves pretty. I've just cut my hair recently and am trying to figure out how to wear it, so I've been thinking about it. I was writing out these verses, and noticed how long the list was (I think 22 items). Sometimes it's easy to focus on these things and get consumed by them; you can just see how these women were striving for something they weren't getting, so they kept trying with more bangles. And God's like, 'Christ is beautiful and glorious, and you are as well in him.' Oh, I remind myself, it's about him, that's right.

I read Wild at Heart¹, and I enjoyed the chapter on women. It's very good. In short, without important context, he says women ask, 'Am I lovely? Worth fighting for?' first of their fathers and then of the other men in their lives. This seems to ring true especially with this passage.

¹ yes, it's a book for guys...anyway...I bet more women than men read it :P

p.s. Beck, I'm trying to get a good recent pic of Cocoa for you...she's so cute. And I saw a full grown chocolate Lab today at the sledding hill--the dog would run down the hill by its owner who was riding an inner tube down--so fun. Such a cool dog.

Snow!

2005-01-28T23:10:00.000-08:00

Here are some pictures to give you a view into what my area in Boston looks like right now. I thought I would take some pictures of my car, so if you haven't dug a car out of the snow, you can appreciate it a little more. Here is what my car looked like on Tuesday:

My Car!
I had to go to the store to get toothpaste since my luggage hadn't come yet (and of course chocolate chips for cookies). This time, thankfully the locks weren't frozen, neither was the handle or the door frozen, so entry into the car was okay. When I threw my backpack in and closed the door, all of the snow on the side windows fell off! Which wasn't bad. I'll have to remember that trick. The windshield was a little difficult due to the foot of snow on the hood, which had to be whisked to the side, because the snow was just as deep as the hood in front of the car. The windshield also had a lot of ice on it near the bottom. I was able to scrape some of it off with my nifty ice scraper (an essential like a squeegie in California), but I gave up on getting my windshield wipers out of the inch of ice that encased them.

After This is my handiwork!

Snow at Sunset Olin Balcony
Snow can be really pretty though, especially when it is deep, it just covers over the landscape so you forget what is there (and sometimes the snow plowers do too).

The previous two pictures were taken from inside a building, but for the following pictures, I took a walk into the forest that is nearby. I think it was about 16 degrees when I did, because I could only stay outside for about 20 minutes before everything mildly exposed started to hurt. To get to the forest I had to go over the snow that had been plowed to the side of the road that is there--which was about 3 feet tall--and I knew there was nothing underneath it, in fact the hill goes down there. Going up this mound was okay, but I sunk in on the way down. Then I walked in Ski or snowshoe tracks (I really don't know what snowshoes look like) because they were already a foot down into the snow, and only sometimes my boots would fall the other foot. So there you go :). There's some winter for all you in spring already.

Trees

Forest

Up

Vasquez Rocks

2005-01-26T19:43:00.005-08:00

Here are my pictures from Vasquez Rocks! My Dad actually took the first two, but I really liked them. Look at that beatuful blue sky and all that green, *sigh.* I guess the beatuful 70 degree weather left even Southern California this week.

the Rocks! Taken by my Dad

Chasm - taken by my Dad

Tree

Creek

the View

my Throne This rock seems perfectly made for this!

Extra Sunshine

2005-01-23T19:50:00.000-08:00

Guess what? My flight got cancelled to go back to Boston! I am actually glad. I found out at 4am this morning when I got up to go to the airport. That meant more sleep immediately! I also got to go to Church--which I was glad to be able to attend here--it's different in Boston. It aslo meant another beautiful day in the sun, and a nice nap. I got a great send-off from everyone at Church -- the ones that are following the big storm in the Northeast were glad I'm not trying to travel over there right now. I think it'll be very pretty when I get there with a couple feet of snow on the ground. I sense some pictures perhaps--if I can get away.

I've gotten 4 e-mails now telling me not to come back to school until it's safe and all this is over. One of the e-mail said it was supposed to snow 8" per hour! They really don't need to twist MY arm quite so hard.

I did get to go to Vasquez Rocks and take lots of pictures! It was a beautiful day, and probably a rare day when everything was green around the rocks. We got to climb up the rocks as much as we wanted--which I didn't expect--but was a lot of fun. I learned that Vasquez was a 'bandito' whose hideout was in these rocks. He was caught and hung. The site is also the place where the Star Trek episode called Arena was filmed where Kirk fought the Gorn, among other movies and TV series. Quite the popular place! As soon as I get to school, I'll be able to post my pictures. For now I'm supposed to get back Monday night very late.

The Joshua Tree Pictues are up!

2005-01-22T13:15:00.000-08:00

Untitled
Yay! I was able to figure out how to post these. These were all taken in the beautiful Mojave Desert, near the town of Mojave in fact. The sun was beginning to set, so I had to race the shaddows, but I like how they turned out. I put them on here on a small size--if you would like bigger ones, let me know.

Tomorrow I am leaving for Boston where it's supposed to get 20-30 inches of snow! Yikes! I have gotten three warnings from people about travelling tomorrow - one call and two e-mails, but there isn't much I can do about it now. I much prefer the 70 degree weather we've been having. It's better for taking pictures, taking hikes and reading good books in the sun.

Hopefully today my parents and I will be able to go to Vasquez Rocks - beautiful large rocks that come up at a 45 degree angle from the earth.

2005-01-22T13:12:00.000-08:00

The woman

2005-01-22T13:10:00.000-08:00

That way

2005-01-22T13:08:00.000-08:00

Shaddow

Clears throat

2005-01-21T17:42:00.000-08:00

Hey hey,
Just getting this up and running . . . **stares off to the right to think of what to say**. We'll see how this works, eh?

I am on vacation, and it was gorgeous weather so I got to ride my bike today. It's amazing how much you can feel the slightest hill on a bike. I huffed and I puffed up a hill--whose grade I could hardly see. And then I had to go on a dirt path next to the road, since the two inch shoulders on the 55 mph roads in this town are not quite ideal for bikes! The dirt road had a very noticable hill, but I learned the virtues of standing up and leaning forward on a bike. And the way down was glorious, let me tell you!

The other day I went to the Mojave area and took some pictures of Joshua Trees. I have been wanting to do this for a while! Just like I want to take pictures of good freeway overpasses. I'm trying to get some of my pics up here.