because i've been experiencing with some technical difficulties with uploading, i've started another HELLEN site on blogspot. please visit
http://hellen2.blogspot.com

for posts after August 26, 2006.
thanks!

the campus is reviving with new comers. it's been really exciting for the past week to see new (and old since my med school really likes its own undergrads) faces in and around the dorm. pre-orientation started on thursday and a group of us went around did volunteer acvities in the city, like building houses for habitat for humanity and cooking at soup kitchens. was nice exercise for me who is out of shape. the original plan on the first day was to landscaping the yard of a house but because of the rain, we all went inside and painted/stained boards instead, inhaling the cinnar fumes and getting cancers. it was probably even more miserable for the people who went on the camping trip. throughout the weekend, we were saying "oh those poor moot people."

met another md/phd called allison. and behold, she is pale and blonde, and looks like allison my student in jp3!
 

out of nowhere, my pc started to run very slowly, checked system restore, found that something called "software distribution service 2" is installed, apparantly as a part of the automatic windows update. microsoft does not have anything official about this. afetr googling for a while, found that a lot of people are having problems with it and no one knows what exactly this thing does and why it's causing so many problems, mainly things slowing down, and some random deletion of emails/files, and denial of access to web pages. almost sounds like a censoring tool or something that monitors software legitimacy. (because the applications that i downloaded as freeware were the ones running slow, the windows environment in general.)

i think this is a bug someone created to tip off microsoft. how come MS just never got around to get rid of it? the forum posts about it dates back to 2004. seems like it only affects windows xp sp2.

here's what i did to fix the problem. at least now it looks like it's fixed because i got my normal speed back again.

1) go to control panel > add/remove apps > check show updates
2) scroll down to windows hot fixes, select the fix that was installed around the time the pc started to slow down (for me, it was a security update installed at 8pm today, i know it's that one because the pervious one was in july and i didn't have any problems back then).
3) remove this hotfix, you need to restart to finish the removal

i also tried system restore, but as many people said in forums, it does not restore to a point BEFORE this update.

oh, and don't forget to turn off automatic update. i was so stupid before that i let windows automatically download AND install them for me. now i choose to only get the notices and select what to download and install myself.   

as i was walking down hillhouse ave today, noticed that  the shadows of leaves on the trees were out of focus and wondered why. the time was around 1pm, so the sun was shining directly from above. the shadows of street lamps which were of the smilar height were pretty sharply defined. but the tree leaves were blurry and the space betweem the leaves were almost perfectly circular, very very out of expectation for something found in nature. the circles of light were also of almost uniform size for those near each other. isn't this strange? i tried to reach my hand as high as i can to see if my fingers go out of focus, but i guess i wasn't as tall as a tree. the circular light space might be useful for painting foliages, a delimma that as bothered m.s. for sometime. 

a friend is coming to visit me from china this friday and staying over for the night. since i've been living in my pig pen for almost 3 month and my laundry card is nonfunctioning, i am running out of fresh sheets and pillow covers. of course i can't let her sleep on my dirty sheets, decided to take a walk outside.
suddenly remembered that there was a fabric store on chapel street. i used to go there a lot during freshman and sophomore years. they had all kinds of fabrics from silk to cotton to fleece, at very reasonable prices. there were some even for $1 a yard! so i thought it's a perfect place for me to get a few yards of pretty cloth to use as lennin, at 1/3 or less the price i will pay for bed covers in the bookstore or urban outfitters. filled with excitement, i walked over to chapel street-- however it now looked so much different than what i remembered from a couple years ago! i just can't find that fabric store. the two wig stores which used to be my favorite place for hair accesories, were still there. but the fabric store next door has evaoporated. instead, there were citi bank, dunkin donuts, us post office, and footlocker. so i stepped in a clothing store that calls itself a botique, and asked the muscular black man who's the manager, "ah, i am wondering, there used to be a fabric store on this street?" "oh you mean howard brothers. it closed down." "did they move to somewhere else?" "no, it just closed down." oh no! >O< there goes my plan to buy pretty sheets for my friend.
i asked the guy if there were any other fabric stores around here-- the answer was "not around here, there is one in hamden, joanne fabrics" oh geeze another chain store.
so sad that all those good cool local shops are being replaced by chain stores which doesn't sell anything useful and is so expensive! "resist chain stores, support local business" should the slogan for evert american town!

college tours BEFORE you get admitted.
it's summer and the campus is flooding with college toursists. especially the HUGE groups of asians, the arrogant second generations, the proud parents hoping their sons and daughters would become dragons, and the even more arrogant asian + white 1/2s. also the not so interested annoying suburban white girls, and their "oh this is the responsibility of the parents to take their children to college tours even though it's so much trouble for me to travel this far with the kids" parents.
here is why i think college tour before admission is such a waste of money, time, energy and mental space--
1) all the info about the college's academic reputation, lifestyle, curriculum, etc can be found online nowadays and they are more than enough for you to decide whether that college is worth your effor to put together an application. the tour guides of the guys at the admissions office won't tell you any more than what you already know from internet research.
2) in case you see a campus which is really pretty on the tour and you fall in love with it, it will be even more pitiful when you are rejected from that college. it's better to not have an absolute favorite before you apply, or you will commit suicide when they don't take you and you want to go nowhere else.
3) if you absolutely wants in person contact at the college and here a real voice tell you it's like this and that, many colleges offer call in phone chats with students and admissions officers. it's not necessary to visit, and on the phone or by email, you get more personal attention than in a conference room or on the noisy streets with a HUGE group of similar trouists.
3) it's not too late to know the tinny binny details of a college after you are admitted. that's when you look at what how big the dorms are, taste a meal in the dinning hall, sit in a class etc -- in order to decide whether you want to spend 4 years there. if you do the college tour after admission, you only have to tour the colleges that you got in, so you feel more powerful and confident. hey now it's really that you are choosing them!
ok, you may ask, if i don't tour before i apply, what if i miss a really good college? well, the suggestion from me is, you have to choose which colleges to tour, right? and that choice is based on some info. so why not just apply to all those colleges? or do more research and look narrow down the candidates a little bit. unless you are just a lazy bum and think of college tours as a form of vacation and escape from high school.

time asia put out its selection for "best in asia 2006" and named hansheng the "most esoteric magazine." wondering what this is, checked out hansheng as available in the sterling library, and behold, this is so cool!
hansheng started out in 1971 as an english language magazine that introduces chinese cultures to foreingers, then it added a chinese version in 1978 or so. for about 10 years, it still remained the regular magazine type of publicaiton. you can recognize its look from issue to issue (it used a square block/ checkered cover design, 10x12 or so size paper). pretty colorful for magazine of that time. then in early 90s, the magazine changed it direction all together. the english version no longer exists, and each issue focused more specifically on one aspect of the chinese cultural/ethnic arts with indepth research and rare and hard to find photo infos. the design changed even more greatly. each issue has its unique layout, size, and paper material (from rice paper, to colored construction paper to cardboard). each issue becomes a book on its own. the content is very interesting and informative, almost making the issue an archive/encyclopedia on the topic and definitely to be treasured.
i borrowed two issues, the cardboard bound colorfully illustrated #69 on chinese string ties, and the elongated rice paper #63+64 on traditional charcol powder portraits. have been learning a lot already so far.
this is the kind of innovation i've not seen in a magazine. this is the kind of magazine i would LOVE to work for. each issue is a fresh new feeling, presents new challenges for interviews, writing, illustration, photos, and best of all design. i feel like i can fully realize my creative site by tuckling on each issue as a project. hanzheng editors, can i have an internship with you guys?

went time travel to the future this morning, saw how human is living. (by this, i mean the wandering of the soul, which origins from the thought. this is actualy ni kuan's theory, how human thoughts has absolute speed that is truely instantaneous, faster than light, and the soul if it can follow the thoughts can also achieve this free state to wander wherever, whatever time it wishes.)
anyway, the future i saw was in a polarized genetic distribution. there were midget human and giant human. the smaller  people were about a foot high, but with prefect proportion to mordern humans, and the bigger ones were about a few feet above me. the funny thing is, they were living happily together. the small guys didn't mind building their houses with high ceilings and big closets and invite the big ones to live with them and dine at the same table. i was able to visit a house owned by the midgets. they had a tenant, who was a female student and a giant. it sounds like a harry potter story. we had dinner together, and at the end, we were going to take a picture for sovenier. they used something resembling a digital camera, but it had a laminar flow surface for display. i asked them a couple questions, including if the two races intermarried-- yes, the genetic will accomodate it, but the midget form is the dominant heritance. the answer that left me the deepest impression was that they didn't know what year it was. i guess it's been a while since they've forgotten or abandoned the christian carlendar. so i told them that we used to record time by marking the birth of a certain guy a zero point. they must have invented/found a better way to keep track of time.
also i opened my laptop and showed them pictures of victorian harbor and tokyo tower and asked if those things were still around. i also tried to explain the concept of transmitting tv waves with tokyo tower. it appeared almost laughable that people were so fond of the shadow of a moving man in a box.
at the end, i asked the student to send me an email and i will reply. she will be able to see my email by searching through the archives of the year 2006. but unfortunately i came to consciousness too early and didn't have time to exchange email addresses.

after watching oshin (a long long morning drama series aired in japan in 1983, total 297 episodes), started to think about the misery of poverty mentioned constantly in the show. really lack of money can turn people away from their relatives, to hate their siblings, to sell their daughters, and betray their friends. one of the central theme of the show is the fear for poverty, for oshin, for her brother shoji, her husband ryuuzou, her son hitoshi, etc etc... everybody is striving to avoid poverty, to crawl up from the bottom of poverty, to fight off poverty. money is good, and the show says that if you really have a goal in your life and try to get it, your will power will aid in your success. but the show also says that there is something more important than money (however, be reminded, the show is not idealistic, it's about reality, and that is the reason a lot of people were touched by it, and made oshin their role models), by giving negative examples like kawamura (oshin's son, you's comerade in the army, who later became a money lender and "not believe in anything but money") and hitoshi whose failure essentially come from his pursuit for money and money alone.

nevertheless, after all, oshin's world is far away. the poverty in her memory is from the beginning of 20c, more than 100 years ago. the time when most japanese in the countryside ate radish rice and remained illiterate for life. but what made me want to write this entry, is today, i discovered a closeby example-- my cousin. he is quiting high school, and works in subway (the sandwich shop) to support himself. i mean, working is great, i have worked in stores and restaurants too, since i was 13. but i never took those part jobs just for the sake of money. money is good, even the little earnings from waitressing were useful. but i always thought of working as a social experience, like a process of being out there and know the world. i know i have something more i wanted to do as a career and means to support myself. from what i hear, my cousin is very excited about working and earning his own money, so he can buy this and that, which somehow stroke me. he is not quite in poverty-- his parents have respectable jobs with good income, but his movement reminded me of something desparately trying to crawl up from poverty. i can't pinpoint the different between him working in subway and i working in jiyuuken the noodle shop, but maybe it's the fact that he's quit high school that makes the difference and makes me unsettling.
 

7/2
night-- leftover curry with rice

7/3
morning-- 1 cup cheerio with vanilla wafers + milk
1 peach
night-- leftover curry + somen noodles
salad (lettuce, peach, carrot)

7/4
morning-- 1 yogurt + 1 peach
night-- leftover somen noodles + salad

7/5
mornig-- 1 yogurt + 1 peache
night-- frosted flakes + milk, 5 rice crackers,  snack peas

7/6
morning-- 1 yogurt