Get rid of the clock on your taskbar. It will be life changing. I’m not even joking. That was the best on-a-whim decision I’ve made in a whole hour. It was the highlight of my frigging hour, or perhaps not. I can’t be sure how long it’s been, now that I don’t have a stupid clock anywhere on the screen. You know what, put a sticker next to your computer desktop clock, and every time you glance down to look at it, you’ll see the sticker and remember what I’m saying here. It’s absolutely ridiculous how much I used to check that thing. I checked it more than I check Tumblr or Google Reader, and I’m checking Tumblr right freaking now. When I’m doing homework, I give myself breaks at the even time intervals, to sort of celebrate passing a checkpoint.… more →

The clock that runs the bell system at school is wrong. It’s accurate to 4 decimal places, but still loses slightly more than a second every day. This pattern has consistent since I noticed it over a year ago, even on weekends and holidays. But occasionally, the clock jumps forward and overcompensates for the lost time. These haphazard corrections usually occur after vacation breaks or on late start days. The facts stop here, and the speculation begins. I refuse to believe that such a distinguished school cannot keep an accurate clock. The only explanation is... conspiracy! But seriously, there could be something going on here. I know that I have heavy confirmation bias when I say this, but I am confident that somehow, this marginal error in timekeeping has intentionally been left uncorrected because of something related to tardies. I’ll… more →

Catching sleep is no problem for me. I’ve been blessed with a wonderful 2nd period schedule this year and the last. I don’t pull all-nighters very often. I can’t even pretend that IB or anything else I do is demanding enough to make me lose sleep. Ha, I even have time to write on RogerHub.  But I still have sleep-related problems. I’m many-fold more productive and responsible after midnight, when I have the house all to myself. That’s when I do English essays that require deep thinking and concentrate harder on my work. Tumblr and Reddit have come to a standstill1, and most of the daytime distractions disappear. I wish I could get up early each morning and go take walks in the sunrise, but that’s not what’s going through my mind when the most annoying alarm sound in the… more →

Ever since I got my Kindle, it’s just been reading and reading all the time. It’s tough to describe in words, why it has such a profound effect, why I prefer it to a DS or a tablet1 or even a real paperback. Part of it is the form. It doesn’t smell like library books do. I don’t have to crease the page, holding it open. Part of it is having so many books with me where ever I go. Above all, it’s probably the associations attached to reading: intelligence, culture. But really, this is all it took? Reading is so much enjoyable with the device. If I didn’t have one, I likely wouldn’t bother reading much. I can freeze the oceans, fly to Titan, and ha, I can learn C on this thing. All the nonsense coming from the… more →

When it comes to extraneous information, people do the stupidest things, and I swear, this sort of idiocy knows no bounds. Even on History IB/SL Internal Assessments, you’ll get parentheses intermixed with em dashes and [brackets] partitioning off some irrelevant information about Joseph Stalin’s economic policy1. You may scoff in wonder at my use of footnotes on RogerHub, but let me give you the full story before you dismiss them as a pretentious show of unnecessary formality. Often times, there’s information that’s not pertinent to a narrative or argument, but I want to include it for some reason, be it self-justification, disclaimer, literary citation, or further reading. Conventionally, I would wrap keywords in a hyperlink, or I would set aside an explanatory paragraph enclosed in brackets and italics. But in the spirit of a semantic web2, that just doesn’t feel… more →

On the way home, I saw a blue graphing calculator on the ground on La Puente Rd. The cover was lying directly over the line of broken white lane dividers, safe, so long as cars maintained reasonably within their own lanes. The detached circuit board, whose protective cover was missing, having been ripped off by the massive shearing force of car tires, wasn’t as fortunate: it was slightly to the left of the outer lane, where tires were frequent to step over it. Even at a distance, one could hear the circuit board collecting tire tracks as an occasional car happened to position it’s tire correctly. Seeing the defeated state of the calculator, you could almost say that drivers were aiming for it1. I mean, I lose things all the time, but who2 would have imagined that their calculator was currently taking… more →

So my sister has this broken laptop that nobody uses. Its screen freezes, its battery doesn’t hold a charge, and it has one too many stickers on it. One afternoon, we decided to salvage what we could from it, so I installed Ubuntu linux + SSH, so that I could control it from my own computer. On that first day, I got the wireless working and set a static private IP, and I was pretty damn proud. Today, about 20 minutes ago, I was testing the audio card with some songs that I uploaded. So, I’m listening to Dead and Gone by T.I. and mplayer gets to this one part where he’s rapping about cardinal directions1. For as long as I can remember, I associate certain characteristics with each of the four directions. East is the rich, excessive, and superficial society that prides… more →

This blog is monochromatic and so boring without the pictures. Here’s a nice colorful box to change things up:

I picked up a telemarketer call today. [long pause.] Telemarketer: Hello, can I speak to _____? Me: He’s not interested. Please remove us from your list, please. Telemarketer: [more casually] Yeah, um. Telemarketer: Okay, thanks. Bye. [More pause, then I hang up.] Hey these guys have the worst job in the world, give em a break. Some people’ll go online to complain and look up do-not-call lists and some people will file in small claims court1. Apparently, some telemarketing companies have a policy where they can’t hang up until you do, even if leave the phone. Of course, listening to whatever crud you might be playing is orders of magnitude better than harassing families at dinner. You think you’re doing them a favor, and you’re probably right. The world’s a lot less scary when you figure that people are people just like you. See this page. ↩︎

I’ve been taking runs around my neighborhood in the morning for a couple of days. It’s absolutely exhilarating. I like the steep hills that ascend 10 or 12 feet so that you can’t see over the top from its base. It’s like you’re climbing up to something great thats waiting for you. And the sunrise on the horizon is something you don’t ever get to see unless you’re up at 6:30. Hey, people should do this more often. But wait, they do. There are joggers that join track and field and do crosscountry and they must see magnificent sunrises all the time. I feel rather out of place talking about running when I really haven’t seen the sun for 6 months. If you think about it, it’s likewise socially unacceptable to discuss basketball unless you follow its teams and play weekly. There are usually… more →

I lost my pencil recently. It’s the pencil with which I took my SAT’s and finals and math homework and everything for almost three years now. Together with my team of 0.38mm ultra-thin Pilot G2’s, they’re like sperm and eggs. I’ve got plenty more new G2’s in the bookshelf but that pencil was really something irreplaceable. Though the Pilots were quickly spent writing out long biology study guides, it was the pink Dr. Grip that takes 80% the grade with scantrons and essays. Damn it, now I’m stuck with some scrawny yellow girly thing. It’s like losing a piece of history. To make sure I don’t lose these too, here are the highlights of the postit1 series (hah, pun, see highlights?) from the past couple weeks: I’m thinking about the possible criticism somebody could come up with after scrutinizing RogerHub’s blog design.… more →

What’s with all these songs that talk about living like there’s no tomorrow? How could someone possibly advocate this message seriously? I thought the goal was to get kids away from present-hedonism. The whole education paradigm is centered around be-bored-now-but-invest-in-your-future-or-it’s-gonna-suck-for-you-one-day. It makes no sense that these songs apparently are all about combating this. Like what the hell? Propagandists, get your act together. Either you can screw kids up and turn them all into depressed reckless pleasure-oriented backward-thinking furiously-procreative druggies, or you can go back to crafting your conformant close-minded unfaltering unquestioning clones for the benefit of mankind and the progression of some arbitrary measure of standard of living. Hey, either way is fine for me. Just don’t go like halfway. I’m getting mixed signals here.