AiriZel: Thoughts

So I’m absolutely exhausted. Both mentally and physically. I definitely need a break at some point. <-- Me almost 2+ weeks ago. This second installment to the NSLI-Y series is hella overdue. So without further ado...

Korea – The Homestay – First impressions

Well today is the morning after the first night at the homestay. Man, not what I expected. From what I undestood, the homestay program was supposed to put us with a traditional korean nuclear family. That is to say a mother, father, and kids. Instead I and Nicolas Pang (a very bright kid from Hawaii) ended up with a god-fearing grandmother, similar in style to that you would see in a western movie in regards to an old grandmother figure.

So what does that mean? It means near unlimited freedoms equivalent to what I have not only in the home, but also what I’ll have when I’m in college. Simply put, the grandmother of this small apartment lives by herself. If you put it into the perspective of a grandmother living alone, the apartment is not that bad at all. I could definitely live in something like this by myself (which brings me to the funny point that I may not have a suite room year 1 at Yale. But rather a very big room. I don’t know how that’s going to go). That said, for the three of us, it’s a bit smaller than anticipated (but not overtly uncomfortable by any means).

In addition, the son, IE the hypothetical father figure of this house seems to work all the time, living away from this apartment. In addition, the grandmother is a god-fearing woman who attends church everyday until 6PM. So what does that afford Nick nad myself? Well we get keys to this apartment and the freedom to come and go as we please whenever. That’s a lot more freedom than I thought I’d have, but also we lose out on the immersion into Korean families. I feel worse for Nicholas than I do for my own situation, having grown up in in fact a Korean nuclear family, knowing that my father sits at the head of the table, knowing that the respect I show to my parents is infinite. Nick will never have that experience at this rate.

That all said, the family is still very supportive as if we were college students. The grandmother graciously took us to the nearby YMCA equivalent so that we could spend 31000 won to open membership. I’ll probably be heading there every morning from 6-6:30 or around that time (with the exception of maybe wednesdays when the program takes us away). She also took us into town, which is about 1 km away I think from this apartment complex, where we bought bread, power adapters (since the prongs on american adapters differ), and ice cream. Lots of ice cream.

So moving on to talking about last night. Man I could not sleep well. I constantly felt like I was waking up, and my back couldn’t seem to realign itself with the bed. Meh, hopefully tonight will be better. Also, my eyes seem to be failing me lately. I don’t know if it’s because I’m tired, but I can’t seem to focus my eyes on people. Words and letters no problem. People… they seem to be blurry at a not that far distance. I’m thinking it’s just a lingering effect of my jetlag, but if it continues when I return to the States, I’ll get a contact in my right eye or something.

Back to the living of Korean life!
-Sebastian

So things to take away from me last year… I was considering my living arrangements in L-Dub (yeah I should be worried haha), I expressed my initial doubts about the current situation (ooo! a developing plot point), and I went to the gym.. Again, typos and stuff weren’t fixed to save the authencity of a computerized post haha…

-Sebastian

I haven’t had a legitimate blog post since I moved something over from my English seminar in Late January. Oh well. February is a bad month. Heh.

Anyway, I’m porting another post. This time it’s from YaleLawTech.org, which is the blog for my seminar on Intellectual Property in the Digital Age. Good stuff.

You can find the actual blog post here. But if you don’t want to visit their, well to be honest more beautiful blog website, here’s the entire text of it after the break.

read more »

So Google Chrome’s apparent securities holes were well… apparent.

Yesterday, an accidental ad click led to a Google Chrome exploit that installed Antivirus Live, a rogue spyware (I’d even go as far as to say virus) onto my computer. After attempting to quarantine it myself in safemode, I failed (being unable to completely kill it before it propagated itself the next start up).  Luckily, my Thinkpad T400 comes with a built in factory reset button (useful if I ever decide to sell this extremely awesome machine). After using the included software to retrieve some files (namely about 300 MBs of photos recently updated. Being somewhat paranoid, all my files are backed up in 4 places. Using Dropbox, there’s a copy of all my notes and assignments and other important files on my netbook, the dropbox server, and the laptop. The 4th place is an external harddrive that I keep files on as well. ).

What have I learned? Well a few things.

• Being paranoid has its benefits. I didn’t have any hesitation giving up (saving myself hours of headache) and resetting my system to its factory functionality. In whole, the entire recovery process has taken 4 hours (and a lot of that was making sure I got the 300MBs of photos onto an external without corruption)
• Dropbox again proves itself to be amazing. All my magic decks, assignments, notes, and important information just simply stayed safe. Installed dropbox on the fresh install and boom, it starts to put those files back on here.
• Google Chrome’s amazing speed has its consequences. It really does have some security issues.
• Firefox again claims itself as my default browser. It also helped that because I had backed up my google chrome bookmarks on firefox, I could just sync those back in.
• I’m not running any of my customized desktop interface applications (rainlendar included). This makes me sad, but I just don’t have to time and energy to reconfigure everything to my own need. Maybe I should have backed up these files too (but given that I edited my desktop over a period of 3 months, I really lost about 2 months of customization).

Anyway, a few funny last notes. Yale’s Freshman Holiday Dinner was overhyped, yet enjoyable. It’s definitely an interesting thing to see a 20 foot long piece of bread and lobsters thrown into the crowd. The ice sculpture thing was awesome as well.

Well that’s all folks. I have an econ final next monday and then I head back to LA the following Tuesday

-Sebastian

EDIT: Edited for a reason. heh.

If someone were to ask me what my lasting impression of attending Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s conversation this past Saturday was, it’d simply be that she has a very soothing voice.

Her intelligence is unmistakable and her demeanor is very elegant, but the thing that really left an impression was that she put the people in the room at ease with her voice.

It’s a very interesting quality to have. Especially as a moderate Supreme Court Justice.

-Sebastian

Japanese is a lot harder than I thought it would be.

Seriously. It’s not easy.

-Sebastian Park

(Mini posts might be the way to go for a while. Hell, the twitter feed is here too )

Just a quick post. I’m at Yale! My room is cool, roommate is great, everything is amazing except there’s not enough hours in a day.

Oh well.

-Sebastian

So I’ll be attending Yale next year, but in making the decision, I toiled for long hours to come to the decision I did.

Here are a couple of things I did to figure out my decision (starting with my list of regrets):

List of regrets:

If I choose to go to Yale (not Stanford): I’ll regret the weather (possibly), the Silicon Valley opportunities, Symbolic Systems (as a major, it’s awesome anyone at Stanford should check it out), the calming effect of the campus (since I was in 9th grade, whenever I visited Stanford, I felt a calming sensation as I walked around the main quad), the people (Jane, Minh Dan, Arnold, Cameron and all the other awesome people I met there!)

If I choose to go to Stanford (not Yale): The awesome opportunities (of a non silicon type), the Residential College system, the housing (separate from the residential college system), the east coast culture, a change in scenery, a stronger humanities background.

So how did I decide between the two? Well… I flipped a coin. Strangely enough, it landed Tails (For Stanford), but I said because it landed in the cup, I wanted to flip it again. Because of that sentiment, I realized I must be leaning towards Yale.

Conclusion? College choices aren’t a logical extension of what you are currently doing. You just have to follow a feeling.

First and foremost, I’d like to say that I’ve decided to go to Yale.

In part actually because Stanford people are way jumpy.  I mean seriously guys! I hadn’t even decided yet and I had Stanford people already jumping on my back about how I’m retarded and how I’ve made the worst decision in my life! (which by the way is the funniest thing I saw today, excluding the comment I heard at the Panorama picture in which people said “Will the people in the back please put their shirts back on”)

Honestly, I love Stanford and with some luck I can come back to the west coast to attend Stanford at a graduate level sometime in the future. I just feel despite logic towards Stanford, I wanted to go to Yale.

Just thought I’d let everyone know

-Sebastian