Leaving for Singapore next Wednesday.. i’ve never been so happy in my life.
this sem has just been terrible terrible terrible

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Ridiculously, i haven’t updated my blog for an abysmally long time.
I, however, have updated the rest of my website.

Especially check out my projects page!
http://alexchia.com

I’m flying home to Singapore soon!
can’t wait.. now only the exams stand between me and christmas..

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It’s really impossible to update my blog constantly.
After being flooded by a deluge of work again (it’s CMU), i have to admit that blogging is only tenable during summer/winter breaks.

Regardless, we should be seeing our first snow tomorrow.
It’s early this year!
Will post some pics soon.

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With the onset of Project 3 of my operating systems course,
and multiple interviews, my next 2 weeks might be the busiest yet.

I’m glad that i’ve finished writing a robust threading library for my kernel.
Beh. So much for having time this semester.

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Looks like I won’t be blogging much anytime soon.
Workload is shooting through the roof, even though i enjoy doing most of my work.
(It’s stuff that i’m interested in.)

So blog aside, I might be adding stuff to the graphics part of webby though, created a lot of graphics demos recently for job applications. maybe a tutorial or two =)

11 more weeks to Singapore..
Can’t wait to start work too.

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Average number of hours of sleep over the last 7 days: 3 hours
Amount of homework due in the 24 hours: 3
Number of hours of sleep over the next 24 hours: 0

Career fair’s on Thursday.
I’ll be there.

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Gosh these 2 weeks have been a crazy mess of furniture, homework, shopping and settling misc. bills.

Most of the kitchenware i’ve ordered from Amazon.com are here finally – thanks to the UPS guy who delivers to my doorstep. Amazingly enough, a pair of tongs, pancake flippers and misc. cooking utensils still have not arrived after one week! Oh well.

I made baked honey baby-back ribs for dinner yesterday – soy sauce, honey, maple syrup. Although it turned out really overdone(!), it was still kinda yummy. Will perfect it before letting others try. I made myself some grilled chilean sea bass too, but that turned out really weird, cuz I cut myself waayy too thin a slice and ended up really hungry. Oh well. It’s fun though!

I’m a Teaching Assistant for 15-462 Computer Graphics this semester – pretty fun actually, I love teaching about my favorite topic in front of the class! The graphics cluster in Wean 5336 finally got an upgrade (64-bit machines!) – so looks like I might get to create a shader-related Project 4 for the students after all. GLSL ftw! =)

So I realize I do have a lot of homework, but thankfully my Mondays and Fridays are almost empty. Slept an average of 3 hours since Monday. So i’m REALLYY tired today. But going out with DSTA freshies for supper later. Argh. And o/s (operating systems) is really a lot of work – project 0 took a little longer than i thought.

Yesterday I went for training with the CMU Water Polo team – it was really fun! But zomg waayy more tiring than expected. The actual maneuvering in the water wasn’t as difficult as i expected, and the ball can be caught and thrown with a little practice, but it’s REALLY tiring sprinting up and down the pool, even though each quarter is only 7 minutes. (You say, “Only 7 minutes?!” Give it a go yourself first =)) After training, we went to flagstaff hill close to midnight and slid down on 20 pound blocks of ice – it was surprisingly fun! Together with friends under the star-studded sky – really feels like college. I don’t know how long i can continue training with the team though – I sense that my homework and projects are just going to pile up this sem.

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On a techy note, Google just released its Chrome browser this week – I highly recommend you to go try it out! It’s blazing fast – especially with GMail. It’s basically Safari for Windows, but what I like about it is that plugins run in their own separate process. That means that if like Flash or Greasemonkey quits out on you – your browser won’t crash!

Google Chrome.

However, it’s really buggy and still needs a lot of work. For example, the AJAX script to Sound the Horn in the popular Facebook game Mousehunt doesn’t work at all in Chrome. And during my summer internship, I found a couple of bugs myself which I submitted to the Chrome team to fix. (eg. local HTTP proxy couldn’t be localhost for some reason!?)

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On another techy note, Facebook is enforcing their =“new”= facebook layout, which in my opinion, totally sucks! If they manage to go through with it, despite the huge number of user complaints, it spells out the demise of end-user rights in tech products developed by huge conglomerates. It’s worrying – Facebook has millions of users now, and i would say they have a tremendous amount of power. Let’s hope that our appeals go through. The new Facebook is really ugly – the news feed isn’t center aligned anymore and things are all messy and chaotic. Oh well, let’s see how things play out.

Time to go for supper!
Chionging homeworks this weekend..
And a potluck with the Singaporean grad students this weekend! alrighty (:

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A sign that Google is still functioning properly – searching for "alex chia" in Google for Singapore yields my website and my blog in its first result!

And I’m finally climbing back to the top 5 results in the international google.com page. It must have been the 3 month hiatus when my blog was undergoing a revamp.

Comparatively,

• Microsoft Live Search yields my page as its 9th result.
• Yahoo yields my page as its 1st result! zomg. Maybe i should consider working there..
• Baidu – the most popular search engine in china doesn’t even index my page at all. looks like i should add in some chinese words..

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Back home at last!
Been crazily busy the past week assembling furniture and making tons of trips.

Meanwhile, I’ve set up a photo gallery script at http://alexchia.com/gallery . I’ve uploaded most of the photos from my summer and my new room in pittsburgh there.

Go check it out!

Many thanks go out to Yixin and Frederick for helping me to assemble the IKEA furniture! And to ivan,eddie,ken & rae for lending me their carpet steamer + vacuum cleaner!

Meanwhile, here are a few pics of my room.. (ie. home office =p)

View of my table when you walk in through the door.
Ikea’s GALLANT table series rock! It’s the same one I have back at home in Singapore, albeit a little smaller. But i have MUCH more space here (:

JOKKMOK Dining set – can’t believe it’s only $129!
Really good quality and looks wonderful. Had scrambled eggs and toasted bread with butter here this morning.

Kitchen – Marshalls sells the cheapest and chio-est things!
The dish drainer is from Ikea’s ORDNING range.

Tons of sauces.. cookware due from amazon.com soon.. (argh why so long =/)

Bedroom – HEIMDAL queen bedframe. Inexpensive and functional =)
Queen-size is the way to go :)

Bathroom – not much to say here, except i never have to queue for the toilet in the mornings again :)

Back view of my desk.
This is sooo home office! =)
My dad’s going to be jealous of me..

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It’s labor day weekend but I’m going to be sooo busy doing homework.
I’m glad that I’ve found a partner for OS already, and I’ll be giving my first lecture as a TA on tuesday.

The Singaporean freshmen batch are kinda fun too, will be looking forward to more interactions with them. Let’s see how many of them can cook (:

Gotta run, tata!

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Disconnecting my comcast modem now..

Time to head back to school!

Thanks tim for offering me a ride to the san jose airport!
Flying via United tonight.. it’s going to be a crazy rush of things once i touchdown in Pittsburgh. oh well, back to reality.

bye! for now..

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