At Least I’ve Got a Story No One’s Told

Note: The article title is taken from “Whatever Will Be” by Tammin, quite an underrated singer.

After going to a PNC (Philips Neighbourhood Clinic) volunteer orientation session, I stopped at Hiawatha Mall for some grocery shopping. I also got some food at New French Bakery and Hiawatha Pizza. When I first entered the pizzeria, it was around 10. The shop was closed, but the owner came out to kindly tell me that it would take 10 minutes. I took this time to do my shopping at Cubs Foods.

When I returned, I struck up a conversation with the proprietor, a 55 year-old man called Hassan Abdulle, a Somali immigrant. He told me that he worked for 20 years in NYC under a Greek guy before moving to the Twin Cities to start up a New York pizzeria. I had a slice of his pepperoni pizza. It was decently priced and slightly above average for a pizza (much better than the Dominoes crap that gets served at lunch lectures). It’s comparable to the quality of Papa John’s Pizza with better cheese but worse meat.

More interesting than the food was the conversation we had over the counter. I asked him about his experiences with and thoughts on Somalia, Hajj, shisha, and halal food. We also got to talking about my background as a med student. Upon hearing this, he volunteered some symptoms for me to diagnose. Later, the conversation drifted to China’s economic development and the presence of minority groups in the PRC, especially Chinese Muslims. It seems that this guy is already quite famous in the community, having interacted with many shoppers in this manner.

It’s experiences like these that light up my day. No matter where I go, I always make an effort to strike up conversations with people. Discovering each person’s unique story is personally rewarding.

The End of an Era

This sombre note marks the passing of several fixtures in my life, some important and some seemingly insignificant to those not privy to the inner workings of my mind.

On a macroscopic level, George W. Bush is no longer the president. President Obama has not been president for long, but he is already making some yearn for the “good old” days under Bush, when budget deficits were reasonable. Though, Bush’s deficits were seen as atrocities at the time, but they pale in comparison to what Obama has racked up in his first few months. Sure, Obama promised change, but being vague on that actual change being implemented allowed him to woo hesitant moderates. His policy proposals have been hastily sketched by insider, and he hasn’t demonstrated the courage to resolve important issues such as Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, Iran, North Korea, climate change, unemployment, financial reform, and health care. There are too many platitudes and too little action coming from the White House.

For me personally, it’s the end of my time at Berkeley and the start of graduate education, most likely in medical school. While some would be ecstatic at such a chance, it’s really more of the same bore that I endured in undergrad. I’ve always felt that I can make a much bigger difference and definitely be much happier in the real world rather than being stuck in academia.

Locally, Cody’s Books has ceased to exist. I know, it’s old news, but it reflects the growing demise of small businesses in the Berkeley area. It pains me each time I walk around on Solano, Telegraph, or Shattuck to see large franchises take over. Amanda’s restaurant is titled Feel Good because it sure does feel good to patronise a local establishment. Hopefully it can survive for a while and represent the true spirit of Berkeley’s iconoclasm.

The recession has also sadly brought an end to Elephant Pharmacy, a local fixture for six years. Although their prices were high, they offered excellent customer service and a friendly atmosphere.

Done with Finals!

For most of us at Berkeley, Saturday concluded the last finals of a brutal fall semester noticeably affected by budget cuts.

I was “completed” on Monday (thankfully), but the realization that normalcy had returned didn’t hit me until Friday, when Julia came down to Berkeley and hung out with me for two days. We wandered the streets and bookstores of Berkeley doing some window shopping, ate at Gelato Milano, Pizza My Heart, and Little Hunan,  and watched The Tale of Despereaux at a late-night theatre in Emeryville. It was all very low-key and surreal.

My actual final exams went terribly. Due to flying all over the country for interviews, I missed the entire last 1/3 of MCB 110 and IB 131 lectures, which were my earliest finals (both on Friday Dec 12). MCB 110L also decided to throw in a professional lab report and final exam earlier that week. So, I ended up pulling an all-nighter using online tips to keep myself awake. I’d say that the cram session was helpful in that I definitely knew all the material for MCB 110, but I was just so tired during the exam that eating a chocolate bar (not recommended!) to energize myself ended up making me crash midway through the exam. I had to resort to Wendy’s techniques of chewing and biting my tongue just to keep my neurons firing.

IB 131 went a little better considering that I was deep into the B range (the class has no +/-) after the first exam. A perfect paper on the second exam helped things, but that left me with needing to score 46/50 or better on the final to be at 90.5% and right on the brink of the abyss (shades of French AP in high school). So, right after MCB 110, I had 3 hours or so to rest and compose myself by surfing Phoronix and Electoral Vote on the EECS computers. Then, I headed over to a crowded Wheeler Auditorium for the IB 131 final. I was reasonably confident on 43 questions of the final, but the 7 problems that Prof. Diamond didn’t review caused me some heartache, considering that I was clueless about the last 1/3 of the course and didn’t have time to webcast them. Some very educated guessing and reasoning using other problems gave me 3 out of the 7, landing me right above the cutoff. Needless to say, I was quite ecstatic (in my subdued way) upon receiving the results, but that paled in comparison to Julia’s excitement after I told her. If memory serves, her face lit up and she gave me a pseudo-hug.

As for medical school applications, the tidings on that front is not good. Out of the 20 schools that I applied to, all have given me secondary applications, but only 5 have interviewed me so far (chronologically: UCLA, Michigan, Washington University in St. Louis, UCSD, and Minnesota), even though my stats are way above the average scores at every single school. Though none of those 5 have rejected me so far, the extended hold (likely meaning deferment until January) is not a good sign. *sigh* The first acceptance is always the hardest; getting it would mean a big load off my back. Also, comparing myself to other applicants on SDN made me regret being an overrepresented ethnic group.

Now that I have recuperated and recovered from the devastating all-nighter by sleeping for 10+ hours every single day since, I am set to resume my regular life over winter break by catching up on reading, blogging, replying to emails, AnimeONE, and coding. I’ll also look into studying for next semester’s courses ahead of time, even though the actual courses are in flux.

HTPC Blues

This Thanksgiving break, I decided to head home to set up my family’s HTPC, which had been recently down for “repairs” due to my installing new hard drives. There are two of them – a 250 GB refurbished WD drive that was sent to me for warranty on my old drive that failed and a 160 GB Seagate scavenged from previous PCs. The chassis is the remnants of a Dell Vostro 200 slim tower and the rest is a mix of some scavenged parts. All in all, it has the following specs: Celeron E1200 (1.6 Ghz, 512kb Cache) bought for free with an Amazon gift card, 1 GB DDR2 667 MHz RAM from the Vostro 200, the same Foxconn G33 motherboard complete with an integrated Intel 3100 GMA video card, and a DVD-ROM drive from the Vostro 200. When I bought it last spring, it cost $499 from Dell Deals and came with a C2D E4500 and a 20in LCD monitor. A pretty sweet deal at the time! The computer connects to the HDTV (Sony Bravia) via a VGA cable and an analog audio cable; it is fast enough to play HD (720p) video.

My parents, being computer-challenged, need some form of windows, so to minimize my support time, I first tried to install Windows XP and immediately ran into a problem with the bios settings for the SATA controller. In IDE mode, the cd would not load, and in RAID mode, the SATA drives were not recognized. The only recourse was to move the computer to Vista.

On Vista, I wanted to keep things simple by presenting only two partitions, one for the system and one for media files made by combining the two drives in RAID-0. Luckily for me, the onboard Intel Matrix RAID can do this and abstract away the number and type of underlying disks. By default though, the motherboard only supports RAID-1, which provides data redundancy but not the increased storage space I want.

Some shrews googling later, I found a few links that described how to install a hacked Dell bios that allows the onboard Intel Matrix RAID to support RAID-0, which is the mode I wanted to use for the partition storing media files. However, when I tried to flash the bios to the hacked one, I was greeted by a message that I couldn’t flash to the same version. Doh! The next step was to create a boot disk (from Windows or from Linux) and to flash from DOS. This worked, but I spent a few nerve-racking minutes at a dark screen with copious red block letters warning me not to unplug the power.

Well, it turns out that Matrix RAID isn’t much to speak of. It’s a fake RAID card that presents a single drive using a dumb controller without much of hardware RAID’s benefits. All split writes/reads are offloaded to the CPU in this implementation. The cynic in me thought that Intel did this on purpose to find some use for the abundance of CPU power we have these days. Matrix RAID’s main failing isn’t the high CPU consumption during data transfers; it’s its inability to recognize two unequally-sized drives in RAID-0. This means that I could only see 320 GB (2 x 160 GB, the smallest drive). The rest of the space on the 250 GB drive apparently would go to waste. *sigh* Linux md-raid doesn’t have this limitation!

There was one more thing to try – pure Vista software RAID. Both XP and Vista on certain versions (I know Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate do this for sure) intrinsically support striping a volume across two block devices. However, when I tried to do this from Disk Management in the control panel by converting to dynamic disks, I got an error message saying that the operation could not be completed. Apparently, a few people have encountered this error before, but there is no fix in the wild. *shrug* Another senseless regression from XP that makes Vista so unusable.

Rather than try to convert my parents to Linux, I decided to just keep Vista on the larger drive and have three distinct simple partitions; perhaps my parents can split the storage of TV shows and movies.

Career Meltdown?

A friend and I had dinner together a while back, and midway through, we chanced upon the old adage: What’s a nice young Jewish boy got to do to make his grandmother proud? He needs to be a doctor, lawyer, or investment banker and marry a nice Jewish girl.

Well, so much for that. Investment bankers and finance-related fields are feeling the pinch. Law schools are so abundant and have such a low barrier to entry that many graduates have trouble finding jobs (or at least jobs that let them repay their tuition). What about medicine? Traditionally, medicine has been relatively stable in employment opportunities, lifestyle, and compensation. However, with burgeoning health care costs, doctors are being asked to do more with less.

Other attractive and high-status areas for brainiacs to work in include academia and venture capitalism. Well, the number of positions in academia that open up each year is far outstripped by the number of post-docs in search of them. Let’s not even talk about compensation working as a post-doc researcher for the rest of one’s life.

Entrepreneurship? Not here in the Bay Area at least. Venture capital firms are pinching pennies, and getting seed funding is harder than ever.

I guess we can still take consolation in that if everything does go to high hell, we can survive by penny-pinching like Paul Navone. Alternatively, if you live in California, consider becoming a prison warden. With the state of things, it’s going to be a job in high demand.

Recovering From a Hard Drive Crash

One of the lessons I’ve had to learn the hard way over the years is to have multiple backup copies of everything important. Unfortunately, disaster struck at the opportune moment when I was transferring files and didn’t have a backup copy. The story goes as follows:

I had just built a new computer and was transferring all my important files (~160 GB or so) via an external hard drive to the new RAID 0 array. After testing to make sure the RAID array was functional and that all the files had been successfully copied, I formatted the original hard drive for use in an older computer. The intermediate files on the external hard drive was already deleted in the move operation to the RAID array.

Now, electronics had been failing at an alarming rate in my Berkeley apartment that I’m starting to wonder whether it’s built on top of an Indian burial ground or something. First, my roommate’s PSU blows up in a surge. Then his USB speakers start to crackle and hiss and finally stop working. My new desktop boots about 1/2 the time and the other half fails to initialize the PCIe video card, spitting out a string of beeps (8 short ones according to a guide) in a BIOS error message.

One morning, I woke at 5 to the sound of clicks coming from my computer. In my sleepy haze, I thought the clicks were due to my roommate’s computer, which he had forgotten to turn off or something. After waking an hour later to check, I noticed that my computer had started itself up in the middle of the night and that the clicking was coming from one of my hard drives.

Anyone knowledgeable about RAID arrays would know that RAID 0 is the most insecure of the types, offering no extra protection but boatloads of speed and capacity. Failure of one disk means the whole array goes down. Indeed, my computer wouldn’t even boot anymore, throwing out a boot device not found error.

After feeling dejected for a while, I tried a trick I learned from an online post. Following the instructions, I removed my hard drive, wrapped it in a few Safeway bags, and froze it for a day. However, upon plugging it back into the computer, there were no more clicks (at first), but the device was still not recognized. It had to be RMA-ed with Western Digital.

The most worrying part of a hard drive crash is the associated data loss. Indeed, I had lost all the preencodes, scripts, files, programs, ISOs, and bookmarks that took me a few decades to accumulate. (BTW: Yakushiji Ryoko that week was slightly delayed because of my computer issues) Since this happened so quickly after building the computer, I had not yet had the time to transfer files to an external drive for backup. The original source drive had been formatted for use in another machine, and frequent use had probably overwritten what remains of the raw files on the sectors. One expensive option left is to use a professional data retrieval service to recover information from the failed drive. However, the problem there is that recovery can run up to a thousand dollars, and there’s no guarantee that the clicking wasn’t due to the head carving lines on the platter, which would irrevocably destroy all data. Furthermore, the fact that recovery would need to sync all the drives in the array when recovering raw data is even more problematic.

One hope remained in the external hard drive that I had used to temporarily copy files. With any luck, the files (albeit a week old) would still be on there as ghosts. When any file is deleted in Windows, the metadata associated with it (where it is, how bit it is, etc.) is removed and the space is marked as free. However, the contents are not actually deleted until something else writes there. I immediately called home and asked my parents to stop using the external drive and to hold it until I could retrieve data from there.

When I did have a chance to look at it, there was the dilemma of finding a program that can recover files for free. Many unerase programs cost money or have limited # or sizes for files that the demo version can recover. I finally stumbled upon NTFS Undelete, which has a crappy interface but nonetheless did the job effectively. One by one, I dragged out the files onto a separate drive, checked CRCs where they were available, and inspected the contents when they were not. My rough estimate is that all but two text files emerged unscathed, but I didn’t bother to retrieve large ISOs, preencodes, and games because of their large sizes and high chance of corruption with no way of verifying.

From now on, I resolved to be more careful about my data. RAID 1 arrays with high redundancy seem like better choices than RAID 0 now that I have endured a crash. External drives are fine, but for me they’re somewhat unwieldy when backing things up. They’re probably a good choice for backups every month that can be stored at a remote site. I also investigated online storage servers, but none of them appealed to me. I ended up settling on a software Linux RAID 1 array of two 250 GB hard drives with an external drive backing up important small files every month for offsite storage.

Telemarketing Scams

Early yesterday morning, I was rudely awakened by a call just as I was about to enjoy my last day at UCSF. The caller was using the number 925-230-2800, which I had never heard of. The voice on the other side claimed to be from the Oakland Tribune and requested payment on an automatic renewal package. Now, I had paid for a packaged bundle of papers at the end of last year from a few suckers posing as poor college students, but quickly canceled after the 8 week trial period. The Tribune was among them, but unfortunately never arrived. The SF Chronicle also billed me for automatic renewal, but fortunately that was cleared up and the fee was rescinded.

On the phone, I stood my ground and refused to pay. I claimed that I had never received the paper and that I didn’t want to be automatically renewed. In response, the caller asked if I was ___ living in ___. He mentioned those details in response to my angry retorts. Apparently that’s a common tactic because people are generally more trusting of those who have that information. Indeed, I was instantly taken aback, but having just that public info should actually have raised alarm bells. Tip: ask to confirm the date of subscription, the account number, and precisely what the charge is for. In the end, the caller repeated asked, “The bill is ___, do you want to pay over the phone?” Another tip: Never give any financial information over the phone. Needless to say, I yelled obscenities at him.

Afterwards, I did some research on the number. For starters, the Oakland Tribune uses a 510 area code, not a 925 one. Next, the number 925-230-2800 already has online complaints of being a scam #. Finally, calling back resulted in a “voice mail full” response for someone named “Turnkey Solutions.” Obviously a scam.

It seems that this kind of stuff is not that rare either.

The Meme’s Being Going Around

Your result for Which Chess Piece are You Test?…

The Rook’s Hawk

Congrats! Only 12-16% of the population score this!

The Rook’s Hawk is like a judge. They have a great sense of right and wrong especially in their area of interest or responsibility. They are devoted to duty. They are punctual. People who set their clocks on others are typically measuring their time with the Hawk. It is common to perceive that the Hawk is cold or aloof. They frequently protect their emotions via practicality.

They work systematically to get the job done. When a new procedure is proven, they can be depended upon to carry it out. The Rook’s Hawk is deeply frustrated by the inconsistencies of others, especially when it comes to commitments. They will keep their feelings to themselves – but when asked expect truth over tact. They are quite able to make the tough call and carry it out. You will find the Rook’s Hawk at home in government, schools, military or any other organization which maintains strict hierarchy. They are the traditionalist and are perfect for balancing out the idealists of other types.

The Rook’s Hawk thrives on organization. They keep their lives and environments well-regulated. They bring painstaking attention to detail in their work and will not rest until satisfied with a job well done. They are obviously hard workers. They will sort through ideas and find the most practical ones, again revealing how common sense prevails in this type. This ‘Pawn’ is the cornerstone of an ethical working society. They are centered on dealing with the present and most practical affair. They observe life and promote consistency in society. They value loyalty and others are best to acquaint themselves with this type if they wish to gain a fruitful insight to what makes the world tick.

Take Which Chess Piece are You Test? at HelloQuizzy

Boys > Flowers

While walking through the streets of Berkeley to deliver aid packages to the homeless, I saw a pretty, bored, and blonde girl selling flowers in a street corner shop. I approached her and asked for some recommendations in choosing flowers. She perked up instantly and showed me a purple assortment (I have no ability in recognizing flower types). After buying them, I indulged in a sniff and offered them to her saying, “A girl as pretty as you shouldn’t go without flowers.” She was obviously startled, and after stammering and blushing, accepted them with a wide smile.

To complete the second good deed, I found the first homeless man I saw while walking down Shattuck (and it took quite a while, almost to Hearst). He was in the middle of picking leftovers from a trash can. With his quaint, disheveled appearance and stolen shopping cart filled with trash bags, he captured the spirit of Berkeley perfectly. I went up and offered a bag. “Excuse me, I have some food and money.” He squinted his unfocused eyes, and breathed through his marijuana-induced smile, “Thank you, sir.”

Then I was on the BART train, headed home, when I witnessed a strange sight. Two people sat together on seats perpendicular to mine on the corner of my left eye’s peripheral vision. I assumed that they were a couple, given that the man repeatedly leaned over and whispered into the woman’s ear. They talked in low, hushed-over voices and both looked serious yet disgruntled. Then, with no warning, the woman, who sat on the aisle seat, got up and marched to the other side of the train, leaving her purse in the hands of her man. They both remained quiet throughout the ordeal. Two stations later, the man, wordless all this time, strode over to her seat, threw her purse on a seat, uttered a word (didn’t catch it in time), and left the train at Fruitvale station. Near Union City, the woman called someone (I assume a friend), and said that she was visiting some university but didn’t know how to get there. She mentioned that she had probably passed it. By the sound of it, I assumed that she refered to CSU Hayward. Nothing eventful happened after that and we both exited at Fremont. Strange night indeed.

Better than Drugs

Wow. What a real trip. For a wonderful high, just ponder the origins of the universe, its expansion into the void, how the void came to exist, and how the initial energy/matter was seeded. Better yet, do so after looking at this photo.

I did that and my mind just went haywire. Thoughts and images of a thousand generations of progress flashed so quickly and dissipated. My vision blurred; my nose became cold, just as if I had sniffed some coke. In an instant, it was over. Just a flickering reminder of the experience remained.