Friday, 13 June 2008

End of Spring

Woosh...

Great classes this quarter. Though my attention in classes has been dropping steadily since freshman year. Cancer's enlightening, though I'm not sure I want to study it. In any case, I just accepted a cancer lab, with a Chinese boss.. we'll see how it goes.
Neuro-immunology. It's been a better class than I thought. Some papers were pretty interesting. And I definitely know more about the brain or immunology than before.
Lab. Got most of my little data in a week. Everything else is either cloning or waiting or frustrating over what went wrong. Poster's pretty.

Logic. Skipped most of the classes but it's been fun translating English into symbols and proving things and looking for fallacies. It's like math without the numbers.
Dance. Learnt to appreciate yoga a bit. Visited the museum of contemporary arts. Should have gone there more often. Again, wasn't totally into it this quarter. Senioritis. Maybe I would have appreciated ballet better. I guess I'm too concerned over techniques and too unconcerned with performance. Show.

Psychoacoustics. Read a bunch of crap. Learnt stuff that are of little interest to any non-musician/ non-psychologist. But I am interested. Conducted an experiment on chord perception and concluded that people distinguish chords by listening to the chord colour. A major chord sounds different from a minor chord. A chord not in the scale of C sounds different from C but chord F kind of sound like chord C. Maybe it's because of the relations of chords in the 5ths space, otherwise known as the circle of fifths. Musical training helps a bit in distinguishing chord changes, just a bit.
Mixing & Editing. How interesting. Made 3 pieces. They don't sound fantastic but I've got good grades on them. Once again shows how little they value artistic value and how much they value fairness and meeting the requirements. My pieces always use some sleight of hand trick to trigger laughter. Really shouldn't. First piece had a comical content, 2nd had an unexpected dance, 3rd was just plain lame. I'll post my pieces some time some where when I find a place to host music.

If there are any classes that I wish I took in UCSD, they're music classes. I want to learn recording techniques and maybe actually learn enough math to understand waves and FFTs.

To do: Make real amoeba music.. with music, not water
Arrange Cascada

There.. I've put them on my list. I'd better do them.

I still don't know if my decision was right. The grass is ALwaYs, without fail, greener, where you are not standing on. I feel like I'm just avoiding myself. What an idiot. If it were someone else, I would think that she's chalking up statistics. But it's me and I don't know what I'm doing. We'll see what happens in a year..

Thursday, 5 June 2008

Poster presentation went fine. I did a better job than I thought I could. People visiting my poster seemed like they weren't bored and they were following what I said. My data is ugly, nothing to say about that, but I seemed to manage to draw some crappy conclusion and not get stones thrown on me too much. Only Colin and this lady seriously questioned my data. People were generally supportive.. Alessia is worth quoting. She said "after it's all over, you forget how hard you worked." (and all the other crap that happened in between). It's been fun. I'm surprised at how few people do a 196: 17 out of the hundreds of graduating bio majors? And I'm surprised at how many of them I know. Rick was right about the grapes analogy, you grab one, you grab the whole bunch. A pic of the poster is up on my logblog. Link's on the sidebar.

Terry gave a strange speech yesterday about graduating into the world. I don't know why she gave that speech but it was insightful. It was basically about finding your own style in dealing with uncertainties. There're always going to be uncertainties, and when they come, would you sit and cry? She's a real hippie, so she says we should go sit somewhere in the mountains, by the river or at the beach, somewhere away from noise, and listen to ourselves. What do I want? And write, journal everything.. It's supposed to help find a style to deal with uncertainties. So I'm blogging.

It's no time to get sentimental but I'm surprised at how much I'm affected. Maybe I'm not such a cold heartless idiot. I'm sorry, I'm sad, I'm glad, I'm unsure, I'm confused. Most of all, I don't know what I want. I need that place to go talk to myself. I want to be a Dicty, life's easy, just follow the crowd..