I tried carpooling with Scoop. Richard picked me up — his house is one block away from my house and his office building is right next to mine. He must have been one of the earliest success stories of online dating. He married his wife in 1996, through Match.com. To make it more dramatic, his wife is from China. “She was one of six women in Asia back then on Match.com,” Richard said. “I flew to China to meet her, and a few months later, I came back to marry her.” Continue reading “[Day 791] The first Chinese woman to get married via online dating”
[Day 703] Hitchhiking in the US
Before selling my soul to the Computer Science god and enjoying all the privileges an elite education could provide, I was a reckless hitchhiker. For 9 months, I hitchhiked across Africa. Hitchhiking was also my main mode of transportation in Israel and South America. The highlight of my existence was when I was featured on the list of “fantastic hitchhikers” by the Lonely Planet author Anick-Marie Bouchard. Continue reading “[Day 703] Hitchhiking in the US”
[Day 696] I lost my hair virginity
I was in Orange County and this showed up in my inbox:
This made me feel a bit rebellious so I wanted to do something different. Dying my hair was one of the things I’d wanted to try for a long time but never did. For one thing, I’ve heard that dying my hair could potentially damage it. For another, I’ve spent my entire life learning to accept my hair for what it is so I was worried that dying my hair would only make it worse.
[Day 683] It must have been love …
.. but it’s over now.
I finished the last exam of my Stanford career today. Halfway through the last exam, I kept checking my watch to see how much longer I had to pretend to care. Looking at the tense, sweaty faces around me, I had that strange out-of-body experience of looking at my past self. “Whatever is happening now, it’s already in the past.” The outcome of this exam wouldn’t affect my future self one tiny bit. It was over. I’d already checked out. Continue reading “[Day 683] It must have been love …”
[Day 636] Instant karma
Last week, I was being a bad person.
One, a girl living in my house wasn’t very nice to me and my friend. She wanted to explain herself, but I just walked out on her mid-conversation. I wasn’t even that mad at her. I just don’t like people who aren’t nice to my friends.
Two, there’s that one American English teacher in Vietnam whose story has been upsetting me for a long time. First, he made a condescending video showing how his parents react to the way Vietnamese people speaking English to prove that Vietnamese English teachers can’t teach English, together with another video instructing Vietnamese people on how to dine with westerners. Dude, if you make your living in Vietnam, you’d better learn to dine with us, not the other way around. Continue reading “[Day 636] Instant karma”
[Day 626] I gave a lecture to 400 students
Today, I was invited to give a guest lecture for the class CS224N: Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning. I was excited. First, I’d never given a lecture to such a big audience before – there are 400+ students in the class. Second, it’s Richard Socher‘s class. He’s hands down one of the most chill professors I know. For some reason, he always looks like he’s just got out of bed and we occasionally catch him biking down the stairs to the classroom. Third, I’d always heard that speaking at NVIDIA Auditorium is lit and I want to try it out before graduating. Continue reading “[Day 626] I gave a lecture to 400 students”
[Day 622] Is your life parallelism or just mere concurrency?
Today in our parallel computing class, we learned about two concepts that people often confuse for one another: parallelism and concurrency. Concurrency is when you deal with a lot of things at once, while parallelism is doing a lot of things at once.
For example, concurrency is when you switch between doing homework and chatting on Facebook with your friends. From your perspective, you’re making progress in both things and it feels like you’re achieving parallelism. However, the reality is that you’re merely doing concurrency. You do one thing at the cost of not doing another.
Parallelism would be to have two copies of you, one doing homework and one chatting on Facebook at the exact same time. Which is, of course, not possible. And that’s why multitasking is just a myth.
[Day 612] eBay always asks difficult questions
Which option should I choose? Option one is cheaper but it would make the package arrive earlier, and you know, how am I supposed to appreciate the value of a product when I don’t even have to wait for it?
[Day 604] New year, old me
I think I’ve either had a pretty good year, or repeated life misadventures have really lowered my standards. I ended 2017 on a happy note, watching fireworks by the river, eating street food, and screaming at random strangers while Dani was silently judging. I found myself working hard, building stronger relationships with people I care about, and having a lot of fun. Here are some of the things I was happy about in 2017:
[Day 515] “I’m a pianist/juggler”
Today, Tucker had an extra ticket to “Mads Tolling & The Mad Men.” Tessy thought she should be the one going instead because it was almost her birthday and she *thought* she knew more about classical music than I did. “Do you even know what jazz is?” she asked. “Yes,” I answered.
I was excited about the show because Mads Tolling was a two time Grammy winner and I had never consciously been in the same room with a Grammy winner before. I was pleasantly surprised by how classy everyone in the room looked. Men were all wearing shirts or suits or both, and women were wearing dresses. By everyone, I meant everyone except Tucker. He came in jersey, tech hoodie, shorts, and sandals. When I was biking back in the cold I also realized that he was driving back. “You could have picked me up,” I screamed at him. “Yeah I suppose,” he said.
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