Life on the Farm: Reflections from the First Year

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End of First Quarter

Where did the last 10 weeks go?

I won't be updating this blog regularly. Sorry folks, the best way to keep up with me now is through facebook.

Pictures from First Week

I can tell that I am usually the earliest to wake up on the 1st floor. The bathroom lights (which is activated by movement) are usually dark when I enter in the mornings. On Monday, the RAs (Kevin, Wade, Meg, Eric, Gloria, Aaron and Peng) woke all of us up at 7:30 by running up and down the hall, screaming and banging on our doors. I was already awake and dressed, but everyone else was dragged out in their pyjamas to the lounge where coffee and cakes were being served.

My bike is still always parked on the bike rack right outside my room. To get to classes, I cycle out the back of the dorm.

"Good luck Rinc :)"

All over campus, messages written in chalk suddenly appeared over Sunday night.

"FloMo (Florence Moore) PWNS Math 51"

There were hundreds of these messages covering most major walkways.

Entrance to Building 380.

The bike ride to Building 380 (on the corner of the Main Quad furthest from Rinconada) took around 5 minutes. I have my Math 51 lectures in the basement of this building.


I enter this door, make a left turn, and take the stairs down to the basement. After Math lecture on Mondays, I have ten minutes to make it to my IHUM lecture at the opposite end of the Main Quad. On foot, this wouldn't be possible.

Analyzing death in IHUM:Visions of Mortality

The Physics lecture takes place in a very nice little auditorium in the Hewlett Building. The guy at the whiteboard is Professor Blandford, and he uses a Mac. Professor Osheroff also uses a Mac, and so does my academic advisor from Caltech. While we are on the topic, my roommate also uses a Mac, and so do the guys who live opposite us. In fact, 80% of the computers I have seen here are Macs.


For my TB test on Monday, I cycled only 4 minutes to get to the Vaden Health Centre. It can be seen from the back of Rinconada, but is less accessible than it used to be because of the ongoing construction project. The bubble that was injected into my arm disappeared very quickly.

Breakfast on Thursday: Grapes, some melon, cereals, hash brown, scrambled egg, bacon, banana and grape juice

Dorm food has been okay so far. Roughly the same food is served everyday, but there's a fairly large selection of food, so things don't get too dull. The only cutlery provided for all 3 meals are forks, knives and teaspoons. My Singaporean friend, Silvanus, says he will bring his own tablespoon to meals in the future.

Lunch on Thursday: More melon (the same melons are served every meal), salad, cauliflower, fried rice, kway teow, apple, some juice

Dinner: Salad, fruits, Tofu, carrots, tomato, breadstick, some pasta

The only plain water served has lemon and funny things dipped in it with a funny smell. So I prefer to drink juice. Today, I found out how to get green tea in the dining hall. :)

An Adventure Begins: Part 1

Hell yeah!

You scored as The Next Generation, Star Trek: The Next Generation would be best for you The Next Generation 80% Movies 55% Enterprise 55% Voyager 55% Original 45% Deep Space Nine 45% Which Star Trek Series is best for you? created with QuizFarm.com

The original series never really worked for me, but Enterprise coming so high in the list is quite a surprise! I'll definitely watch the movies someday. For now, it's 2 weeks of sitting in my own filth watching TNG before I fly off.

M52A

It's been 8 months since I left school, and I am feeling very vulnerable intellectually. This last week was spent almost exclusively on doing Vector Calculus, and I should have a test for this on either Friday afternoon or Saturday morning.

Since starting Calculus in the office, I have been a hot target for not complying with Office Safety rules. My cubicle is, by far, the messiest, with its scattered scraps of working paper, various pens and pencils that I keep loosing under all that paper, and a reservoir engineering book opened so that when someone walks by, I can say that all the maths I'm doing is for the purpose of understanding flow conditions in a reservoir. We are supposed to lock up all our work at the end of each day, but somehow, I think that no one will be interested in pilfering my failed attempts at deriving the formula for curvature of a graph in various parameters.

By the end of next week, I should finish up PDEs and Lagrange Multipliers, perhaps just a few hours short of the course deadline. I can remember the excitement with which I signed up for the course, but various distractions and work attachments generally kept me too busy for getting too much enjoyment out of this. The text for the M52A course is rather uninspiring, and I hope that I will be assigned better books in university. The lecture videos compensate for this though, and I have made vast improvements in my math solution writing skills. Overall, M52A has been helpful.

Apprentice RE

What a big turn around my life has taken since my last few posts - I keep regular hours now and it's wonderful having a predictable bowel routine. Then again, a full schedule means less time for me to indulge in junk food galore so that's a rather big sacrifice for having regular toilet hours.

Today was the end of my 9th week of work, but I have yet to perfect the art of looking busy. I've had ghastly luck in the way of my cubicle location. The entire office empties at around 5 pm or so, except for my corner of the office! I feel like a complete laggard next to my next-door neighbor, so much so that I think the seating arrangements must have been intentional. My sly, scheming supervisor must have hoped for some of my neighbor's enthusiasm for work to rub off me.

Lately, I have taken to listening to music full time as I slice and dice reservoir data. I can't listen to an album more than a few times before I tire of it. Sometimes I think I spend more time deciding on what music I want to listen than I do on the actual listening. This gives us the following theorem: Happiness is inversely proportional to the number of song choices.

September is approaching and a lot of friends have already begun packing. I still haven't given much thought to packing. From what I gather, Stanford dorm rooms are kinda the size of wardrobes so I shouldn't really give much thought to packing my entire belongings. It's nice that I have been sent 3 books to read over the summer, but so far, work has been too busy to permit much time for reading. We are supposed to discuss the books during orientation week - with our roommates, professors, janitors, and even the authors themselves. It's kinda nerdy, but pretty awesome!