Fall

It’s unbelievable indeed…

Time has passed and the temperatures are announcing that fall has finally and officially has come.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been over a month since I began to attend CMU.

I remember someone telling me that once you’re passed October you will survive for the remainder of the college life. I’m really doubting that now that October is finally approaching and I only have one month left to figure out whether I am truly surviving this whole entire college deal.

Before coming to college, everyone made a big deal out of it. How the professors won’t be nice as the teacher I had in high school, or the thought that everything is going to get so tough and life won’t be easy. The stereotypical thoughts of college including making new friends, creating a future, and life time goals… these were all just repeatedly put into my head that it lost its meaning to me.

Prior to the whole CMU experience, I had no fears about college. In fact, one could argue that I had no thought nor opinion whatsoever regarding college to begin with. I dearly lived in the present and thought nothing of what lay ahead of me. I literally lived today as if there was no tomorrow. I wasn’t psychologically ready to be hit by this “college experience.”

What’s true, from what I found out, once I’m here, is that making new friends as a college student is harder than making new friends in the kindergarten playground as a 5 year old. But once you get to know the people, they’re nice. Once you’re through it, you truly understand that making new friends isn’t as bad as what people tell you.

The workload? Sure you’re spending sleepless nights in the library many times a week, but again, it’s not as bad as people claim to be. It’s doable.

Library

It’s been a long day. Again. We spent the whole night at the Hunt Library once again and there was quite a few episodes last night.
I would obviously rather not go into details here, but I can say that it involved pills. Whatever the case is, I can assure you that everything is now ok.
I was planning to get my programming homework done so that I wouldn’t have to stay up all night today, but I guess I will be spending my night at the west wing cluster once again. This would mean a full night of annoyance and grungy people. It would also probably mean a long night of photobooth fun. LOL.
*sigh*.. Today is going to be along day with four classes despite being a Friday. I really hope that I could rest some time this weekend. I’ll see how that goes.

iPod nano

oh! Guess what?!

I received the new iPod nano! The blue one to be exact! (I prefer the green one, but I didn’t buy it so I guess I won’t be complaining)

I’ll talk about it later.

Announcement

Well guess what!

I’m not at the West Wing cluster today!!! yay!!!! haha

The reason as to why I’m not at the West Wing cluster today is somewhat similar to the announcement that I’m about to make to all CMU students…

The Hunt library is now open 24 hours for the remainder of the fall semester!

So yes… It’s 5:44 am and yes, I played around with Photo Booth again some time in the night, and yes, I’m not sleeping. But NO! I’m NOT at the West Wing cluster! haha.
I’m at the first floor next to “The MAGGIE MURPH Cafe” (which is closed anyway from the students ODing on double shots), writing this blog post up into my beloved WordPress that keeps me in contact with myself from the future to the past. (whatever the heck I was trying to say there…)

So yeah! I’m probably going to be writing my midnight posts from the Library now. In fact, I might just as well move in here because you can sleep here too! The power sleep thing that’s here next to the tables is amazing… I just tried it out; not slept in it though, yet it’s the best thing ever. It actually rotates and moves and vibrates and lights up inside to wake you up once the timer is done. Hilariously nice.

Anyhow, I was just thinking that I should post pictures up here as well. It seems so bland to see my blog without any visual impact. After all, the layout isn’t helping either, eh? Red and Black and no pictures. Just words. It all adds up to no fun. Anyway, I’m probably going to radically change my blog soon. Maybe I should’ve just not said anything at all because I might not do anything about it, but whatever. Right? haha

So here’s the deal CMUers!

The Hunt Library is now open 24 hours until the end of the fall semester!!!!!!!
Make good use of it!

West Wing… again

My first visit to the West Wing cluster was 2 days ago… or technically 3 days ago… wait… it’s morning now on Saturday, so 4 days ago…
Wow, day counts are getting so hard these days and time flies!

If day counts aren’t your thing (apparently it’s not my thing), I shall tell you that I first visited the West Wing cluster on wednesday. I was working quite hard at the library, doing math and other whatnots, then at 3 am, we were thrown out with the annoying ringer. For those at CMU, they know what ring I’m talking about. It’s quite hard to describe in words; something like a muffled 3 short school bell rings that scare the hell out of you when you are concentrated in your work and hear the – what it seems like – earth shattering sound.
Anyway, we (meaning myself and 3 others) decided to go to the West Wing cluster, because the UC is always way too cold with the AC turned on to the max.
I was astonished with the amount of computers (of different operating systems; macs, windows, and linux) as well as the smartboards, the wall (which was a whiteboard on its own), and small group study area.
That night, I left the place shortly after arriving, procrastinating, deciding to sleep. As I walked home, I thought to myself, ‘I’m definitely going back there some time.’ The sad bit is that I ended up there every single night then after until now.

The next day on a Thursday night, the usual bell goes off at Hunt library and I walk to West Wing to finish up on my physics homework and get a quick start on my programming assignment. Around 3 am, Minji walks in claiming that she needs to print something… Young ha, Minji and I ended up staying up the whole entire night showing each other our home towns as well as vacation places on Google Earth (we love the caribbean). Oh, I almost forgot; we also reminisced upon the latin american way of “partying.” We miss Tequila awfully a lot. We stayed until 7:30 am and went to Schatz to eat breakfast and I went straight to class… on Friday.

Friday, now yesterday, as weird as it seems to me right now (I still believe I’m stuck on Thursday night), the programming people taking 15-100 with Roberts had our assignment due the next morning. We initially went to Hunt library to quickly find out that they close early on fridays – at 9 pm. We quickly gathered our things and headed out to… the West Wing cluster.
We pretty much wrestled with our laptops while staying there; frustrated over not getting things done right, we tried to enjoy our time together, laughing while looking at the photo booth pictures taken from my mac the previous night. It was soon 1 am and Young ha and Sang ho went back home (Sang ho is not taking the course, yet he decided to tag along; he seemed to have enjoyed my selection of music on my iPod. Boys Like Girls, anyone?). I was left with Jiho for the next hour and Jiho simply gave up and went home, telling me to call him as soon as I’m done, whenever that may be. I did. It was 3:30 am.
He asked to meet at 6:00 am; I agreed. And guess where we met at… West Wing cluster. Jiho reluctantly gave up on the assignment; he just couldn’t find the files. We are now at the UC, looking outside at the gloomy day with the drizzle trying to find out where we could eat breakfast. CMU seems to assume that everyone is sleeping in late on saturdays; the earliest ones opening is at 10:30 am unlike 7:30 on normal weekdays.

I must say, my quick attraction to the West Wing cluster and naive thought of “wanting to come study here again,” was a… … stupid one. I ended up being half of this week now; I actually spent more time there than the amount of time spent in my dorm all this week. Now, it seems to have become a second home to me on CMU.

Oh, West Wing cluster, how I despise you, you remind me of the work I’ve been doing in there for the past few days! (I believe I’m genuinely going crazy lately… more on that later)

West Wing Cluster

I’m at the West Wing Cluster at CMU here.

It’s actually quite nice here.
A bunch of PCs.
A bunch of iMacs.
Hightech looking whiteboards with scanners on them.
Big plasma screen.
Some kerboros thing or whatever. I still don’t get it.
Printers.
Piano in the lounge next door.

All good… All good….
Only if I could finish my work now…

The reason why I’m here?
Well… I was at the library rotting away in my books and “Processing,” then got kicked out because it was closing at 3AM… I must admit though, we were busy messing with the Photo Booth application on my macbook pro… Laughing out loud, reminding ourselves of the “silent library” videos on Youtube.

Anyhow, I’m in the West Wing cluster now and probably have to go back to work.

Nack signing out for the day… or the previous day, shall I say.. haha

NCJ V3 – CMU

I made a new “version” of my blog.
It’s now called V4 – CMU2 (Start of Sophomore year soon!)

New blog! I’ll officially start blogging after finals…

Physics

I’m taking a physics course named “Matter and Interactions I.” It’s named 33-111. I’m in section G.

I’m starting to hate it… The problem is that I understand all the aspects of topics covered in the course, but the book seem to use some random ways of describing them. Definitely not used to the wording.

I have another problem now… I’m not feeling confident in the class. I used to be the one who always raised the hand to answer the questions in Physics class in High School and even if wronged by Laura Durrance, I really thought nothing much of it. However, now I lost all the confidence I had in the subject.

I’m doing the homework (which is never called homework but “assignments” numbered by weeks) for the class that’s due tomorrow. I am currently doing number 3. It’s a simple question of a mass hanging on a string and another string pulling it horizontally at the middle of the string and creating an angle theta on the original string with the vertical. The simple question is to find the force on the second string. I quite simply came up with mgtan(theta) as the answer. But now I’m doubting myself. After using all these vector notations to describe everything and having struggled in problems 1 and 2, I am really doubting myself of the simple answer, which I came up with only after 4 lines of equations and a simple drawing.

My confidence and pride towards my answers are now gone.
I feel like an important part of me has been torn away.
It’s like a shark loosing all its teeth and having to feed from a straw or something. (Yes, I know that analogy was weird… but so what?)

*sigh*

I wish I gain my confidence back in Physics.

Physics
Physics
Physics
Physics….. 

Back to Blogging

I have decidedly made action towards my blogging. I decided to start two blogs.

This is one of them, which I’m restarting. The other one will be on Tistory; a Korean blogging site.

So… today, I was feeling inspired to write a post on my blog that has been long forgotten. It’s true that I haven’t updated anything in a long while. In fact, I think that’s all I’ve been writing about in the recent posts; no updates.
Readers! (if any to begin with) I assure you that now I will start updating this site as often as possible!

I started to feel emotional in the past weeks after starting classes and decided to write blogs again. It keeps me busy from thinking of other bad thoughts and it helps me keep track of myself in life.
My first blogging experience, or any type of web experience for that matter, all started with the introduction of xanga. People in the states probably know what I’m talking about. Xanga… Getting around HTML coding and using CSS style sheets in the “about me” section to make it all look pretty. Joining site like blogring.net or createblog.com in order to find layouts that other people made and put it on your site. It was a similar experience to the myspace phenomena that happened a few years back.
Then again, now we have facebook. It’s such a shame that the play on HTML doesn’t work anymore; all profiles look the same, save the subtle differences created by crap 3rd party applications that feel the boxes of other “friends’” profiles…

Talking of friends on Facebook. I just found out that I have over 500 people registered as “friends” on facebook. To be honest with you, I don’t think I have that many friends. In fact, there are quite a number of people that I don’t even really know; they are friends of friends who decided to become my friends. Weird, eh? I was met with true happiness when I found my 3rd grade teacher or when I got a friend request from my 7th grade best friend that I lost contact with, yet I must say… It is saddening that friendships has gone online to “what are you up to?” on a virtual wall with people that you see everyday. The small talks that go on online. The wall posts or e-mail or IM for that matter, has lost its true beauty and purpose.

It is with much regret that I confess my numerous amount of e-mail accounts. It all started with nackchoon[at]daum.net. All Koreans have one of these; or shall I say hanmail. Then I figured that hotmail was the thing that was “in” and made myself a nackchoon[at]hotmail.com. Sadly, I didn’t use it much and got way too much spam in it and changed it to ncjung[at]hotmail.com. This e-mail address is probably the longest lasting address. I still use it today; not for personal mail though. Official information kind of a deal. I also made a nackchoon[at]yahoo.com e-mail address because IMing was a big thing on Yahoo Messenger for quite a long time. I was pulled into Korean sites again and I needed a naver ID in order to log into the “Cafes.” Hence nackchoon[at]naver.com, then soon found out that a service named empal gives you a lot of storage and also made nackchoon[at]empal.com. Then came the gmail fever. nackchoon[at]gmail.com came. The only problem seems to be that I get waaaaaaay too much spam in there and the filter doesn’t work well; it almost certainly puts my genuine e-mails in the junk folder and gives me all the things I don’t want in my inbox. I was recruited as a beta tester in the windows live wave 1 and I got myself a live.com address. nackchoon[at]live.com. That’s my current personal mail. When live address became official, I also made ncj@live.co.kr for those random sign up things. iTunes account, amazon account, apple web store, random web signups etc. The most recent event, however, is mobileMe. Apple apparently killed its .mac accounts and started mobileMe.
Oh, by the way. I have two school e-mails: njung[at]cng.edu and nackchoon[at]cmu.edu
After a week into school at CMU, I noticed that being notified of e-mails coming into the “Andrew Mail Account” is a smart move. I tried to synchronize my iPhone with my e-mail addresses. The problem is that Apple and Microsoft hates each other. None of my windows live account would work on the iPhone. Gmail would work, but as I mentioned earlier, gmail is crowded of spam. My decision? Open a mobileMe account and forward all nackchoon[at]cmu.edu e-mails to nackchoon[at]me.com.

So here’s the verdict on e-mails and Nack:
official things? ncjung[at]hotmail.com
random things? ncj[at]live.co.kr
personal things? nackchoon[at]live.com
urgent things for me to get during school time? nackchoon[at]cmu.edu or nackchoon[at]me.com

Wow… this blog post was horrible. I started to talk about one thing and moved into a completely different story. Whatever the case is, I simply want to say that I’m starting to blog again and e-mail addresses are annoying and facebook is only useful to a certain extent and social networking has lost its true meaning.

If you read the whole entire post and understood it, your IQ is probably something in the 10000000 range haha. Thank you for listening to my babble! ^__^