General

My reluctance to post sooner in the New Year was due to the lack of the words of wisdom I had wished to express. If you saw through this, yes I was lazy.

New Years weekend was enjoyable. My friends and I didn’t exactly watch the ball drop as planned. The weather wasn’t as cold as I thought it’d be, but the rain and some hail made waiting and walking around troublesome. It was kind of funny waiting in some line with the periods of rushing, pushing, shoving and then finding out that we weren’t in an ideal spot to actually see the ball. My only gripe is that there wasn’t enough time to really further explore the city. Still the time spent there was memorable, hanging out and joking with my friends. There was definitely a lot of food consumed that weekend.

The last three days, I spent the majority of my time reading Dan Brown’s Angels & Demon. Great book, I think I like it slightly more than DaVinci Code. Although from having read Brown’s previous books Digital Fortress and DaVinci Code, I could see the patterns of his plot. In addition to reading the novel, I also filled the time reading Marvel’s House of M comics. I guess I didn’t spend as much time with playing video games or watching all those movies I had as planned. I guess I’m more interested in reading, not because I’m a bookworm (I don’t read as often), but I like to excercise my imagination further.

The last week of break is coming and I don’t think I have anything out of the norm planned, probably brush up on some engineering work and continue with the job hunting.

It would have been much more interesting if I was able to attend the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

The weekend went by pretty fast as usual. I had a busy and enjoyable weekend.

Good luck to everyone with their finals.

So I just recently signed up for the Blockbuster rental service that’s similar to Netflix. I have a free one month trial period. I figured I can stock up on films to watch during that winter break, figuring how bored I’ll be. My first priority during work though is to finish up on the prep and research for job hunting during the spring semester.

So far the movies I have on the queue are:

- Batman Begins
- Sin City
- X-Men: X-2

I also have queued up Firefly the series. This will also be a great opportunity to catch up on the 80s cartoon shows that I use to miss, because my parents wouldn’t let me wake up extremely early to watch cartoons like: Transformers and Thundercats. Any other suggestions for movies or series? I only watched part of season’s one Lost and most of season two. I’m not sure if I want to watch every single episode.

I guess I also have Soul Caliber 3 for the PS2 to play during break, even though its been sitting on my desk now for a week as I don’t have a PS2 here on campus.

I shouldn’t even start thinking about my plans for break yet, the semester isn’t over yet. I have like 3 projects due around next Monday. I also ordered the accelorometer chip for my senior design project for my team, I actually can’t wait to get it and the team starts to work on it. I’m tired at researching all this stuff and want to start on the implementation.

A chart of the caffeine contents found in various stuff:

Caffeine

I’m going to need a lot of this in the upcoming week. Too bad the effects of caffeine consumption aren’t instant, takes awhile to sink in.

On a side note, Mozilla released Firefox 1.5 a few days ago. Download it now. I’ve also switched from using Outlook 2003 to Thunderbird as my default e-mail client of choice.

I found this psych article interesting. Now I know I’m not that wierd. I always have a habit of waking up 5-10 mins before my alarm clock goes off. Usually I hate this, since when I wake up it’s hard for me to go back to sleep, only if it’s for a few more minutes. I guess I won’t be escaping stress soon.

Ever wake up five minutes before your alarm rings? This mysterious phenomenon isn’t just bizarre coincidence. We are all equipped with our own internal alarm clocks and, best of all, they even have snooze buttons.

Jan Born and fellow researchers at the University of Lubeck in Germany have discovered what may be the first biological evidence for the curious ability to wake up at will. Anticipating the time you want to rise seems to trigger the release of hormones normally secreted by the body in times of stress. About an hour before you’ve planned to get out of bed, these secretions increase in preparation for the “stress” of waking.

Stirring Sound of Stress

Other strange sleeping habits of mine is that I never learned to use the “Snooze” function and I have problems taking naps during the day.

When I have time I plan to add more stuff to the navigational menu like RSS feeds, seperate categories for some links, etc…

I also want to add a random banner rotator or just theme switch.

This of course will happen once I decide to take a break from my school work. Yeah, these things are quick to implement, but once I start working on it, I end up wasting more time being unproductive.