Going Home

In a few hours, I will be on my plane, flying home!

Home, sweet home. I can do anything I want. Eat, sleep...oh yes, that's pretty much what my "anything" is.

Won't be able to post from there, though. I heard blogger.com was blocked there.

So see you next year!

You Are Going Home?

Our department is interviewing new faculty candidates, again. I guess it means we are expanding.

As the tradition goes, everytime a candidate comes, the department will appoint 4 graduate students to have lunch with him/her.

I was picked for today's lunch.

During the eating and talking, the candidate asked us, among other things, what we were going to do this winter.

When it was my turn, I said:"I am going home."

He sounded surprised:"What?? You are going home???"

"Yeah."

"And your advisor agreed to let you go home? Who's your advisor?"

"Err...Dr. B."

"For how long?"

"Err...a little less than a month."

"Will your advisor still want you when you come back?"

I studied his eyes behind those frameless glasses, hoping to see any indication that he was just joking.

I saw none. He was serious.

The disdain in his eyes annoyed me.

Since when had going home become a sin?

"For my defence,"I tried to prove I wasn't a slacker,"I haven't been home for like 5 years."

"OK."

Well, somewhere, some day, some graduate student's PhD life will be very long and very hard.

Just not here, not in this department, I hope.

OMG! Is That Meat In Your Food?

Red meat link to arthritis risk

Red meat risk for endometriosis

Red meat 'cancer threat'

Less meat 'means a longer life'

Update Freak

I am an update freak.

I like software with the "Check for Update" option. I like clicking "Update Now!" buttons. I like seeing dialogue boxes with inviting "Update Availalbe! Download?" messages. I like watching rapidly growing progress meters. I like these so much that I check many many times a day.

In fact, anytime I unnecessarily open a new tab but don't really have anywhere to go, I will subconsciously click that dot-circle icon at the upper-right corner of Firefox to go to its homepage and click "extensions" to see if there's any new ones. Or, at other mind-blank moments, I will open Norton Antivirus or Lavasoft Ad-ware or Spybot or Spywareblaster to check for new updates.

It's like using CPU idle time to search for ETs or attack SPAM servers.

It worries me that I spend so much time on just checking for updates. To open and close these programs alone takes a lot of time and energy. So I think there should be a program to automatically check, download and install updates of all the updatable software installed on my harddrive, with just one convenient click.

One thing I hate about updates is that sometimes I can't download them. Like today, I found out there was a security update for Mac OS X. I wanted to install it on our lab Mac but I couldn't, because I didn't have the privilege to change any system files. I hate this powerless feeling.

Life is hard for an update freak.

Gadget

Friday. "Paper Day".

Feng was today's discussion leader. The paper was good, but the copies of the paper were bad. All the figures were fuzzy, and some were just black blocks with different shades of grey dots. It was like a Jackson Pollock's black-and-white art collection.

It wasn't Feng's fault. When you copy a color picture on a black-and-white xerox machine, the colors are lost, along with the details. We usually work around this problem by print out one color copy on my boss's Epson Ink-jet printer. But it was broken last week, so we were stuck with these bad black-and-white figures.

How were we supposed to critically discuss a paper without the figures now?

But Feng was a guy full of ideas. He took out a shiny gadget from his pocket and put it in the center of the table.

"I have downloaded the figures to this thing. So let's look at figure 1..."

It was an ASUS MYPAL A620 PocketPC.

The figures on its screen were of course colorful and sharp. Everyone was riveted. Even the boss murmured something as he was fiddling with it:"What is this thing? A PocketPC...Emm. I should get one of these..."

I was fascinated by how technology had changed our "presentation landscape". Just a few years ago everyone was satisfied with overhead transparencies in presentations. Laptop+PowerPoint was considered a way too "hip" for many professors. But these days everybody had migrated to the PowerPoint land, and the transparencies are used only as backups, "just in case".

Today the PocketPC took the center stage.

Talk about Evolution!

My Correct Name

Today I wrote an email on our university's email system to my committee members to schedule a committee meeting. Before I sent it out, I spelling-checked it. The system said my last name, "Zhong", was an error, and claimed it should be "Thong".

Ugh.

Out of curiosity, I consulted other spelling check systems for my "correct" name.

Microsoft Word and Hotmail seemed well educated. They immediately recognized that "Zhong" might be a last name, but didn't think it was a correct one, and suggested to change it to more common Chinese last names such as "Zhan" or "Hong" or "Zhen" or "Hung" or even "Song".

Gmail and Yahoo, on the other hand, knew a lot about Chinese history. They both believed "Zhong" was actually a misspelling of "Zedong", the name of our revered leader Chairman Mao. I was flattered, you guys, really.

All of them agreed "Thong" could be a correct name for me.

In the future, when machines control the world, and people's names are given by software evolved from these spelling check systems, my reincarnated self will be named "Lei Thong", and my real last name, Zhong, will be wiped out from the system, and lost for ever.