My powerbook has been crashing the past few weeks. We are talking about hard (kernel-level) system hang-ups here. For weeks, I tolerated the inconveniences associated with system crash and rebooted my machine every time without complaints. But when my mac crashed over 20 times over the course of last weekend, that's when I told myself "enough is enough."

I really like the way Apple set up their Apple Stores. A typically Apple Store personifies the Apple culture right on the mark. Its uber coolness and hipness appeal to both the young and the old (like me). The staff are friendly, passionate, and knowledgeable on their products that they sell. I have grilled the store staff with several hard computer-related questions before and they have responded well to my questions. But far from being satisfied because of my powerbook problem, I brought my mac to the Apple Store in CambridgeSide Galleria last night for a technician (or what Apple call an Mac Genius) to look at it. As I described my problem to Mr. Mac Genius at the store, it suddenly dawned on me that I had added a new variable call extra RAM into system a few weeks ago. Innocently enough, the 512MB DIMM module fits right into the powerbook and it is even recognized by the system; however, but I was starting to suspect that the DIMM is the cause of my problem as the problem started surfacing after I had installed the RAM module. For this reason, I told Mr. Mac Genius that I am going to revert my machine back to the original factory memory configuration to test my hypothesis, thereby possibly avoiding my powerbook from being sent back to Apple for service. So far, my powerbook has not crashed since the reversion.

Unfortunately, we found another problem during my visit to the Apple Store. Apparently, the base of my powerbook is slight warped and not laying flat onto the table surface, consequently causing the powerbook to wobble when I type. Mr. Mac Genius told me that I should send the powerbook back to Apple for service. There is actual a good chance that I may actually end up with a brand new powerbook as replacement for this flaw. Hmmm... That's quite an appealing suggestion.

8/17/2005 11:04:56 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Mac

Yesterday was great day for me. First, I declared summer semester officially over after turning in my final paper for Fabrication Technology. What a relief. I can finally start to enjoy my summer. But the day got even better. Other than the great news from TPP, I got a few of surprises in my mail as well. I was happy to receive a rebate from Apple for their Student Union promotion within 2 weeks of mailing my rebate application to them. The big surprise, however, was my receipt of a refund from Comcast. They said that I double paid for my July bill and they are refunding me the surplus. Sweet!

8/17/2005 12:11:43 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Personal

Other than the heavy school load and apartment moving, another high stress that I experienced this past summer was my admission application for Technology and Policy Program (or TPP). Since TPP doesn't accept GMAT but GRE scores as part of their admission application, I had to take the GRE 1 1/2 months ago. The stress and efforts spent in the TPP admission process finally paid off today. It is now official, I was notified earlier today that I have been accepted to the TPP program. In other words, I will be pursuing 2 degrees simultaneously at MIT.

So what made me decide to suddenly take a policy track in my academic pursuit? I think it was my self-affirming experience in last year's tsunami disaster that made me contemplate on how responsible and pragmatic engineering can help to solve issues and problems confronting the human society. I grew up asking big questions, so naturally I want to broaden my academic interests to include economics and policy. Specifically, I am interested in assessing opportunities, hazards, and benefits of nanotechnology in society and politics. With this in mind, I need to start searching for research opportunities and a thesis advisor in this area. Also, with this new development, I won't be graduating in June 2006 as originally planned, but by January 2007. For once, I would just like to take my time to finish up my classes and be more engaged with the student and research community at MIT. I am glad; my academic plan at MIT is finally taking hold.

8/16/2005 11:36:45 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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School

I was supposed to run the Witch City Triathlon 2 weeks ago. But due to the excessive school load I couldn't find time to train and eventually gave up on running the triathlon. Today, I received a surprise refund check from Fiske Independent Race Management or F.I.R.M, the organizer of the event. Kudos to the organizer for the cash.

On a different note, the evening run today was great. With my chest pain gone, my strides were strong and my posture confident and relaxed. The temperature was nice too. Overall, it was a good run. I just have one more thing I need to do today: to complete my final paper for Fabrication Technology. So let's get it over with...

8/15/2005 8:32:32 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Sports

For people who have read the excellent book The Whale and the Reactor, are immediately familiar to Langdon Winner's thesis on how technology are often design, built, and then deployed in society with little concern for sustainability, humane regard, and conservation. Being a fan of the book, I was especially excited when I found Langdon Winner's blog on the Internet earlier today.

8/15/2005 5:30:25 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Blog

For dinner last night, Brian R. and I went to Sushi Express, which is known for its inexpensive sushi offerings. The sushi was so-so. It was not fresh enough to satisfy the picky taste of mine. But knowing that bad sushi is after all compelling food, the dinner was still better than the regular food that I eat. While checking Citysearch for their review on the Sushi Express, I saw that the restaurant scored a 9.0 on the review. I am curious what other factors beside taste were used to judge a restaurant in their resturant review? I just don't see Sushi Express scoring an almost perfect score on any restaurant review. Not that I have anything against Sushi Express but it is hard to believe that Sushi Express is in same league as Fugakyu and Ginza, 2 fantastic Japanese resturants in Brookline but scored only a 9.1 on Citysearch. Another problem I seem to have with the rating system with Citysearch restaurant reviews is that the scores tend to be inflated. When I rate restaurants, I do consider other factors such as atmosphere and price, but with a strong skewing towards food taste - the pertinent criterion. If I am doing the judging, Sushi Express scores a 6.0 from me. But to be fair, sushi, more than any other food, is highly dependent on the quality of its ingredients. It may be hard to serve good sushi with the kind of pricing that Sushi Express is offering. So I would still recommend that place for sushi but only if you are on a shoestring budget.

8/14/2005 12:49:25 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Food

Last night was an interesting night. I met up with Dinesh, a SDM 04 student, at Tavern in the Square to talk about MIT, SDM, TPP, and life after MIT. After dinner, I went home to catch up on the research required for my Fabrication Technology paper while watching my favorite Sci-Fi TV program, Stargate SG-1 (yep, it was productive night). I took a quick break at 11pm to meet up with Dave, Christian, Matt, Brittany, and Dave's friends who are visiting Boston at Grafton Street.

Earlier this morning, I stopped by at the SDM office to pick up the graded final paper for our Supply Chain/Operations class from my mail folder. Yahoo! our team got a perfect 100 for the paper. Next, I spent the entire afternoon unpacking (I finally found time to unpack the remaining stuff at my new apartment). Later in the afternoon, I played tennis with Fanny. It was good to hit the ball after 2 months of inactibity. Believe it not, I was actually hitting much better today than I did 2 months ago. Too bad Fanny will be returning to Amsterdam in 6 weeks. I will sure miss playing tennis with her. It was a scorcher out there. I was drained not from working out but the heat and humidity after an hour of tennis.

8/13/2005 11:23:19 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Personal

I believe that I am the one person left in my SDM cohort who is not done with school just yet. I had decided to take 3.371 - Fabrication Technology, a class that's not normally taken by SDM students, at the beginning of the semester. Yeah, Fabrication Technology is one of my classes that I have elected to take as part of my grand career plan of picking up an additional speciality while studying at MIT. I only have a final paper on a topic of my choice due next Tuesday. I did a partial research on the topic yesterday and it seems like I have enough material to write about a 10-page paper on polyimide and electronic packaging. Unfortunately, with most of my other classes complete, my motivation has really waned the past few days. I better get this paper done soon before I have zero motivation.

8/13/2005 8:15:27 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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School

My classmate, Yoav, had written two insightful articles about his experience in consulting. The articles can be found here and here. I was struck by his comment on whether to specialize in a specific field or to seek for inter-disciplinary competence. Interestingly enough, I have heard arguments on specializing versus generalizing from my numerous conversations with classmates and friends. Overall, many people have advocated a specialist approach but with experience working different industrial context. In other words, if you are an IT person, understand about a few area - manufacturing, aerospace, public sector, etc - where your IT skills can be applied. I am in a juncture in my life where I am contemplating about changing career and even industry. I have a general direction on where I am going but I don't have the specifics yet. But that's the beauty of being in graduate school; I get to ponder and experiment what exactly I want to do by actively engaging in electives, career opportunities, activities, and the school student community.

8/12/2005 8:59:03 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Personal

Prof. Thomas Eagar said the following during one of his lectures in Fabrication Technology: "Always keep things simple, that's why complex system doesn't work." Aha... He was alluding to the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) concept. People familiar with software programming are immediately familiar with the KISS expression. Programmers are constantly reminded that implementing less code is more. In terms of generic designing, the simplicity philosophy brings consistency and durability to a design. Some of the most elegant designs are simple, take Apple's iPod as an example. But the mention of simplicity sparked my curiosity in how KISS is discussed in my System Engineering class. With all our big discussions on system/product designs and methodologies in my System Engineering class, why hasn't KISS been explicitly mentioned in class? But a closer examination reveals that the KISS concept is indeed well entrenched albeit implicit in the tools and frameworks that we learned from System Engineering. For example, Quality Function Deployment (QFD) advocates the design of a set of specifications that meets customer expectations by actively listening to the voice of the customer. So not implementing a product with extra features that customers don't want adheres to the philosophy of less is more or KISS. In Lean Thinking, the advocacy of simplicity is more obvious, although Lean practitioners would call it value driven and waste reduction. In the terms of applying a sound design framework, a designer simply can't go wrong with a simple design guideline like KISS.

8/11/2005 11:57:37 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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School

My blog has fallen victim to blog spam or link spam the past week. Luckily the spam affected mostly earlier blog postings. Since I am responsible for the maintenance of the blog application on my website, I needed to install a spam filter software on my website to prevent further spam. Thankfully, all I have to do is to turn the anti-spamming feature on and update the software with the latest spam filter list from MT-blacklist.

8/11/2005 9:37:53 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Blog

Yesterday, I had the most stressful day of the year. There weren't anything yesterday that were causing the stress but the cumulative excessive amount of work (school, work, and personal) has finally taken its toll on me. Plus, having future uncertainties, like the sale of my condo, career, finances, only exacerbate the stress. Usually, my high energy level would help in negating the effects of stress and sustain me for a while. But lately, with my energy level dipping to a 3-year low, I am simply burnt out psychologically, mentally, and physically. I am also losing my intellectual and mental sharpness because of stress.

I would usually feel great for the rest of the day after a run in the morning. Not yesterday. Yesterday's morning run with Brian was the worst ever. I hardly stop to walk during a run; but, I started walking halfway through the run after feeling a severe pain in my chest. After the run, I felt exhausted and lethargic for the rest of the day. I am overwhelmed with so may things to do that I have been having 5 hours of sleep (including weekends) on average and jumping rushing from one activity to another, often without rest in between. I start to question the value of doing too much in too little time. I am slowly realizing that "biting more than I can chew" is not a good strategy for my well being. I must, therefore, learn to relax a little and not to get burned out again.

8/10/2005 6:28:15 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Personal

Living in Boston, I always perceive the Big Dig as the epitome of government waste. But the upcoming Gravina Bridge project, with its $315 million government budget, is staled to overtake the Big Dig in terms of wasteful spending of taxpayers' money. Check it out from various sources:

1. Taxpayer.net
2. Yahoo! News
3. South Alaska Conservation Council
4. Alaska Wilderness League

8/10/2005 1:48:48 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Politics

It has now become a tradition within my network of friends that Penang is the indispensable choice for group dinner whenever Brian is visiting Boston. So the choice of having last night's dinner at Penang was obvious as Brian is in town for the canoe trip. The turnout was decent: Eimear, Milt, Jonathan, Brian, and my sister Alisa showed up. After dinner, we went for some drinks at the People's Republik, one of my favorite bars in Cambridge for its laid-back, friendly, and unpretentious atmosphere. I am glad that I was finally able visit the People's and to have a few pints of Magic Hat, which is always on tap and served fresh, for the first time since moving to an apartment across from the bar. So Ilana may have her Warren Tavern, I got my People's.

8/9/2005 4:22:14 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Social

Accounting is finally over. For our accounting final, the professor had us download Johnson & Johnson's 10k statements the day prior to the exam and use it as a source of reference for all our financial analyses in the test. Yesterday's accounting final wasn't as hard as I had expected as I nailed several questions right on. However, my lack of good time management and familiarity with the Johnson & Johnson's 10k financial statements cost me dearly as I was unable to answer at least 2 questions on the final. In hindsight, I should have just skipped the morning Supply Chain/Operations class to examine the 10k papers meticulously to better prepare for the final, especially coming out from a weekend of heavy partying.

8/9/2005 4:18:30 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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School

As some of you may have known, I am a huge fan of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. But the show isn't the same now that they have the new desk with boring desk chairs on the set. In fact, the quality of the show has deteriorated slightly ever since the couch was taken off from the set. The old couch really needs more representation from its fans. So join me in a campaign to bring the couch back to the Daily Show.

8/8/2005 11:43:08 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Personal