I have upgraded to version 5.
Version 4 was a private testing operation.
I’m finally writing out some actual blog entries and am making a fresh new start.
Please visit: http://blog.ncjsite.com

Here’s some interesting video…

Hi from Multitouch Barcelona on Vimeo.

Wow… It’s already finals now…

Hmm… These are the finals that I have to take….

• Physics of Musical Sound (Monday)
• Spanish (Tuesday)
• Calculus 122 (Friday)

Studying for Physics of Musical Sound now… what we call PMS…. hahahahahhahahahahaha -0-

It’s that time of the year again…
The time when a year comes to an end as well as a year starts all over.
It’s the time of the year, in which I:
- Notice how I never keep my promises of updating blogs
- Try to keep updating in the new year
- Try updating knowing that I will fail miserably
- Trying to find a new start….

dunno what i’m trying to say here.

Everything simply put, Happy New Year!
Hope everything was OK in the past year and will be OK in the coming year as well.

As funny as this may sound, I’m actually not in West Wing cluster doing my programming homework…. I’m actually in another dorm that isn’t mine… I’m at Welch…

Anyway… I believe that nothing is really working out as I planned lately… Nothing seems to be going to my plan… Then again, one could always argue that I never really had a plan to begin with (as everyone knows, I really don’t think much about life to begin with…), but I do have some kind of goals and future in my mind… However, I must admit, that nothing… really NOTHING is going as planned!

My friends are all going through trouble, including myself…. Sadness TOTALUS…

random comments here on my blog… just to let my emotions go… T.T

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.

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.

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.

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!

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)

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

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…

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! ^__^

Yes… I’ve been lazy once again and have decidedly not updated this blog for a while now.

Well… what’d you know… I’m updating it this very minute LOL

Anyhow… For those of you who are in Korea at this current moment, here is my phone number while my time here: 010-9442-3473
For those outside of Korea, you should mark: +(00) – 82 (korea country code) – 10-9442-3473

So yeah…. that number, you can call, and I will answer. Simple, eh?

My dad brought me back a Diesel watch from the business trip he had to Ecuador.

Nice looking, nicely worn, nicely big, nicely designed.

very nicey indeed.

Well… the formula should be re-written like so:

Monkey’s Brain + Robotic Arm = Breakthrough in history where bioengineering rocks the world

So yeah…. I can’t find the link to the news right now, but it should be that difficult to find it. I saw it on the news sometime this past week.
Apparently, some scientists decided to put some needle that is as thick as a human hair in the back of a monkey’s neck. Supposedly this is the place where your spinal chord starts and all, where the brain sends signals to your body, telling it to move. So this needle thing goes into the back of your neck, and starts reading the electric signals that the brain sends to your body. The signal is then translated to the machinery (which technically doesn’t necessarily have to be attached to the body), and the robotic arm moves through thought! (Yes, just as if you got a replacement for your arms, which I hope are perfectly fine)

The freaky part of the news is that the success rate is 60%. I wonder what happens to the the other 40%; paralyzed monkeys?

This time, I’m planning to write about my dad’s experience with Avianca a few days ago. He was traveling to Ecuador on a business trip this past Tuesday. His flight was early in the morning (7ish?) and therefore he left the house at 5am heading towards the airport. When he got there, the workers at the counter tells him that he might not be on the plane; a flight to Ecuador 2 days ago has been canceled and the people were kept pushed on to the next flight.

A cancelled flight 2 days ago held my dad from traveling that morning. Avianca managed to cut the number of people who were getting pushed to the next flight down to 50 (still a lot), but still saddening. Normally, an airline will make an emergency airplane, or another flight to Ecuador, to compensate the cancelled flight. Apparently, Avianca either has no money, no planes, or doesn’t care about its customers to do such thing.

The next flight was in the afternoon and my dad figuring out that both his meetings that day would be unattended anyway, decided to take the 9:30 pm flight. The compensation was either a $350USD coupon for use in Avianca or a stay during the day at a hotel. With bad service in customer care, I wonder if people are willing to spend the 350USD coupon they received….. During the receiving of the coupon, when it got to my dad’s turn, they claimed his was already given; someone snatched other people’s coupons…. Doesn’t that show the quality of the people here? Some brave enough to do such low class thing in an international airport, which could be arguably called the face shown to the world by a country when a foreigner first enters the nation.

Whatever… My dad had a good flight back and he’s still a little pissed off about it, but yeah…. Shame on you Avianca, tish tish.

Yes… I finally bought a pod machine as I wished for. The irony was finally solved during a Juan Valdez visit to Andino about a week ago. For about a year, Juan Valdez sold pods to the general public, despite the fact that there are no pod machines available to buy anywhere in Colombia. Screwed up, eh?

Oh, in case anyone is wondering, pod machines are those coffee machines that you see lately in many hotel rooms where you can simply put in this circular filter paper covered ground coffee into a machine and you get a cup of fresh coffee on the go. A mimic version of the coffee machines used by baristas.

Anyhow, I payed 99000 pesos (roughly 60 USD) for the machine, but they also gave me three boxes (a dozen pods in each box) of different pods; mild, balanced, and strong flavor. I think it was a great deal.

Anyone want to come to my house sometime? I’ll become your barista and brew you the best Colombian coffee! Just come visit me! (Yes… end of senior year = boredom)

I just wanted to write down a laundry list of things that I wish to speak on my blog when I get the time to.
I have time to write things various times in the days lately, but I always forget what I wanted to write you see..

• Avianca, Ecuador incident with my dad
• Uribe in CNG?
• SIS (Professional sponsor change)
• Prom
• Senior Farewell
• Pico y Placa extension?
• Monkey brain + robotic arm
• “TaLK” – KOR gov program
• Cyworld – minilife
• CMU
• Music Downloads
• Tutoring – money factor
• F1 Visa
• Korea during summer vacations
• Diesel watch my dad brought
• Shopping spree at Santa Ana Mall
• Earthquake
• Lakes in China
• Camera
• Photography
• Final Exams
• Goodbye
• Laptop for College
• Pod Machine

Yes… it has indeed been a long time since I posted here on wordpress… the end of the year for seniors had been such a long journey….

I’ll start updating on what i’ve done… After all, this blog is not truly directed to “readers.” (Probably because I have none). In fact, this is more of an online diary/journal and records of stupid retarded thoughts that passes through my head.

Hmm…….

How annoying. After a full week (and add a few days) of just going around everywhere with Ji (she was here for spring break) and Jurgen and Laura among others, I really don’t want to go back to school tomorrow. All other schools resumed today; ours resume tomorrow. yay!

They say that they’re getting rid of two half days to make up for it, but it’s all in may, when we, seniors, are out of school busy doing SIS, so I guess it really doesn’t matter. This week has been a very unique one. To tell the sincere truth, it was either Ozzy or BBC every single day including one night out to Andres where we ate fantastic meat and arepa de choclo among others. I have to admit: Bogota was looking very empty and dead and ghost-town-like, but it has been the best time to drive around the city. With no cars to block your way, it was the best.

Oh yeah… we actually went somewhere… for the day… We went to Villa de Leyva, in which case the “we” refers to my family and Ji and some other new family in Hyundai and a family of my brother’s arguable best friend. We had interesting looking German food there (yes, German… yes, random…) and roamed around the place (shopping) while the little kids were taken off by my dad to some monastery made of fossils. That was an interesting day…

*sigh*… you know… lately there are so many times where you simply let out a sigh…
I gotta admit that senioritis is slowly hitting me and knowing March 31 to be all the Ivy’s deadline isn’t helping much either.

 *sigh*

Am I the only one who heard this nonsense?
KFC no more, here comes KGC – Kentucky Grilled Chicken

After much concern about obesity and trans fat and other things, Kentucky Fried Chicken decided to grill some of its original menus too.
In fact, I hear that they are actually going to open new chains with the name of KGC.

Interestingly weird, if you ask me.

Sometimes I fall into a dilemma

Am I running towards the road of my life?
or
Is the road coming towards me?

There are times in which my life seems like my childhood memory;
Like the 2D graphic racing games in which the roads come rushing towards you
as soon as you feed the machine two quarters.
I simply have to sit down in the driver’s seat and wait the road ahead.

Seeing myself out of the game,
I’m always running.
Running over the road I create towards a goal I don’t exactly know.

Running without time to hesitate,
to an end I maybe see,
Without a doubt, I keep running.

Without the time to look around, I simply run towards the goal.

… 

Before the two quarters’ worth of time is over.

I’m normally not a big fan of politics. In fact, I really couldn’t care much as long as my daily life isn’t interrupted by it.
However, for the first time ever, I decided to make an opinion about the foreign relations of Colombia.

The story goes like this:
Colombia’s military manages to catch a famous (I don’t know what exactly this part is about) guerilla member named Raul something on Saturday March 1. The only problem is that this military activity takes place in Ecuador. There’s not only a well planned silent catching/killing of this guerilla member, but there is open fire. Simply put, Colombian military went to Ecuatorian lands and started firing in potentially civillian-filled zone.
The Colombian government finds a laptop with the Raul guy. In the computer resides many important guerilla information dating back to more than 3 decades.
Ecuatorian officials are furious about the incident on Saturday and declares no more diplomatic activities with Colombia. They send their troops to their border with Colombia.
The supposed important information is (supposedly) leaked. The information claims that Chavez helped funding the farc.
Chavez gets mad at this type of mocking from Colombia and also closes all relations with Colombia and sending their troops to the borders.

My Comment:
It pisses me off to see the Colombians here not really making much of an effort to make things better. A lot of people in school are like: “We open fired in Ecuador, but we caught the guerilla. They weren’t collaborating so we did the job ourselves, so what?” well… the “so what” is that you normally get permission from the other country or plan something together.
It’s screwed up, if you ask me, as to how the only “leaked” information is about Chavez and his background from his coup d’estat (funded by farc according to the info) to how he funds them in return now. As is all “leaked” information from the government. It was probably done purposely. I find this utterly disturbing, as the action was anything but diplomatic. Yes, I do acknowledge Chavez being crazy and all, but the Colombian government to simply say that “Chavez did so and such,” then the only daily press in Bogota (El Tiempo) pretty much naming him a guerilla is very undiplomatic. Couldn’t the Colombian government wait more than simple 3 days to just (indirectly) announce everything?
The funny thing is that all the Colombians think nothing of this mysteriously leaked information and blaims Chavez for everything.
However, wasn’t Chavez who, after all, saved the kidnapped people about a month ago?
Speaking of this saving incident, there’s another comment that I would like to make.
Firstly, I don’t understand why Uribe believes in not paying the guerilla. “B/C they will kidnap more to get more money!” Yes, fine. Then why not tradeoffs? The government refuses… Even when you’re at war, the two opposing sides to trade offs. Technically speaking, aren’t we at war against the leftists?
So yeah, Chavez. I mean… Why couldn’t Uribe simply wait a few more days when Chavez said that he was going to rescue them? Did it hurt his pride so much to sit there and wait while a neighboring country rescued their citizens? Did it hurt his pride enough to make open speeches as to how ”Chavez is a liar” and a fool? Open aggression is not the best way, Uribe.
My writing may seem a little pro-chavez right now. I’m not; I really am not. I’m pissed off, though, as to how the Colombians and the Colombian government are anything but giving thought to others. The Colombian government, in my view, did a good job brainwashing the people to see one side of the same coin and use blind hatred without reasons to…. well.. hate and offend. It’s stupid and hurting themselves.

Another question in mind is… what happened to Sarkozy? First off, it pisses me off how the Colombians talk about Chavez and how they hate them and have no clue about even who Sarkozy is. Afterall, even without his scandals of divorce and new marriage and the new wife’s ads in some Italian car company, Sarkozy is a strange character indeed; especially to a Colombian’s eyes (should be, anyway).
Am I really the only one in the whole entire school who knows that Sarkozy got all excited to come down here in the borders between Colombia and Venezuela and wanted to rescue “Betancourt” himself? Sarkozy claims how Betancourt has French roots and therefore will need French aid. He did, anyway. Now, his news is completely buried by all the things happening here around, but how come no one that i’ve met even knows who Sarkozy is? Ignorant, brainwashed people, are the only people I met, I guess; way too many though.