Soccer

I'm not really a soccer fan, but it is a hot topic these days - just look at Le's blog. I'm really glad that the Vietnamese team is doing great. They are really worth being proud of!

Ok, but the Vietnamese team's great performance is not really the reason I'm blogging here about soccer. It's something to the opposite (as to an extent of being very funny... sorry I'm not as patriotic in the soccer business :P) - you guessed it! the recent disastrous defeat of the Chinese team!

I'll skip the technical details and players' profiles (which don't quite ring any bells on me anyway...). I actually don't follow the news on soccer, but all of a sudden all these interesting pieces of information about it simply emerged - from my friends' IM nicknames, from their blogs, etc.

Some nicknames:

"The Chinese national soccer team made me lose all my hope - in 15 minutes they were shot like a sifter!"

"The third-rate team of Asia being successfully eliminated, the pig team returning back to China solving pork price inflation" (a little bit background: 1) the head coach of the Chinese soccer team has a last name with the same sound as pig in Chinese, 2) recently the price of pork was crazily inflated up more than 25% in China)

Here's a bit more from a friend's blog:

Goal:

The ones who can shoot a powerful goal 30 meters away, are the German players.

The ones who can cooperate ingeniously 3 meters away from the empty goal, are the Portugal players.

The ones who can hit the corner flag during a penalty kick, are the Chinese players.

Style:

The ones who would applaud to the referee, are the European players.

The ones who would swear to the referee, are the South American players.

The ones who would spit on the referee and beat him up, are the Chinese players.

Stamina:

The ones who can run with full speed for 90 minutes, without changing the facial color, are the Korean players.

The ones who can run for 90 minutes, gasping frequently, are the European players.

The ones who can run for 90 minutes, sweating a lot, are the South American players.

The ones who can walk for 90 minutes, then lying on the floor cramping, are the Chinese players.

Speed:

The ones who can run faster than the ball, are the Dutch players.

The ones who can run as fast as the ball, are the UK players.

The ones who can run as fast as the referee, are the Maldive players.

The ones who cannot even out run the referee, are the Chinese players.

Attitude:

The ones who treat soccer as their lives, are the African players.

The ones who treat soccer as their jobs, are the European players.

The ones who treat soccer as a game, are the South American players.

The ones who treat soccer as a joke, are the Chinese players.
...

ok, now I see how disappointed people are :P

English

I got to know that many of you have another language as mother tongue, rather than English. In addition, some of you have just been in this country for several years. I felt rather relaxed learning these, since I wasn't so confident about my English. I want to say: if any of you are not confident of your English, no need to worry any more - you've got better accent than this Cluster Assistant! ;)

The environment of UCSD, or in general, universities (particularly in California) is rather friendly for non-native English speakers - mainly because they are so pervasive (professors, students, staff, everyone) :). In such an environment, people are quite patient with crappy-English speakers (or at least appearing so :P).

On the other hand, such an environment is challenging too. Honestly, I wasn't worried too much about my English listening comprehension when I was preparing to come here - we've done quite some exercises, listening to the "standard American accent". However, I had never expected to encounter English spoken in all kinds of foreign accents. -_-! Yes, I know. This is quite dumb. Just think of the same thing: even though we don't have many immigrants in China, you can't expect all the Chinese people to speak the same standard mandarin. Anyway, when I first got here, I found myself constantly confused completely: facing people speaking English with Indian accent, Japanese accent, Turkish accent, ... It does take some training to decipher the English out of these songs!

Being a non-native English speaker, one faces particular challenge when doing presentations. Besides all the nervousness of standing / speaking in front of the audience (thinking "everybody is bored by me..."), the biggest feeling I had was: "my brain is not enough!". It had to deal with the idea I was going to talk about, work on how to bring up the idea on each slide, organize language, watch out for grammar errors (is the verb consistent with the subject?), try desperately to dig out the appropriate words from my blurred vocabulary (typically it would take a long time, many "uh... uh..." and eventually grab a wrong one -_-!), and at the end, if there was still some spared energy (of course typically no), the brain also needed to take a little bit care of the accent - without paying particular attention, my English would sound very much like Chinese. Phew~~~(wiping off the sweats...) Now you should understand why I was so thankful to the patience people paid to me: just consider the difficulty of understanding a technical presentation with incomprehensible accent + wrong word usages + sentences broken by "uh... uh...."

Ok, now you've probably formed some idea of my presentation skills... well, in fact it's not that bad :P

Back to the topic of accents. Ironically, despite being a foreigner, English with foreign accents (except Chinese accent, of course) was quite hard to comprehend for me. But time and practice really helped. Now the accents are not that big an issue. On the other hand, I couldn't differentiate all these regional accents within the US - initially not even the "American accent" from the "British accent". They all sounded some "standard English" to me back then. Now British accent (finally!) sounds so differently to me, and no wonder it gave me so much frustration in the theater watching "Pirates of the Caribbean". Vaguely, now I can even tell some subtle (I know, not subtle to you, but still quite subtle to me :P) differences among the regional accents in the US.

Ok, the topic of English can really run on and on because there are too many things to talk about (you know the pain of learning a new language, and living with it :P). But let me have a break here and we'll continue later if you don't find it boring (and when I am bored, want to blog, and cannot think of any other better topics :) ).

lunch!

While most of you are getting excited by your freedom of eating in Price Center, we got some good news too! :D Quite the other direction - we finally got approved for some free lunch in Cafe Ventanas ~~ ! Hmm, now we are tempted for the long 20 min walk...

Here's the sweet (yet sort of dry) note we got:

Dear COSMOS Faculty;

I would like to inform you that Director Charles Tu has recently authorized that Cluster Assistants may have an occasional lunch at Café Ventanas during the COSMOS Program.

Those persons that are designated as Cluster Assistants must be sure to wear the BLUE COSMOS Lanyard (with name tag) when he or she goes to Café Ventanas for lunch Monday through Friday from 12:00pm to 1:30pm.

Regretfully we can only extend this offer to Cluster Assistants at this time.

--- Yup! good to be a Cluster Assistant!

UCSD's art... o_O?

I feel I should write something about the campus of UCSD as well... After all, it's such a big and new campus for you. Plus, after being here fore nearly 6 years, I probably have dig out pretty much every corner of it.

I like the big campus of UCSD. In general, I like large campuses - particularly ones that you have to walk up and down like hiking to explore.

I wouldn't say UCSD has very stylish or artistic buildings, perhaps except for the library. But everything is quite practical and again, I do like the spread-out campus under the bright sun and cool air.

There is though, a collection of "art work" on campus, namely the "Stuart Collection" of UCSD. You probably have heard about it, and you've certainly seen one - the Bear!

Indeed, the Bear is so far the favorite one for me. I think it's very cute, and I'm so glad we have it right here around our department.

The "Snake path" right close to the library is pretty cool too.

One of the weird ones is the "Trees". Particularly the talking one in the woods near the library walk. Sometime when I walked by the area at night, hearing the tree reading out loudly some poems, in the middle of all this silence, I felt my hair standing up...

There're other ones that I can hardly consider them to be "art" - perhaps my taste is really bad, and I have terribly shallow understanding... For example, the net in the woods... I spent quite a lot of time (and wasted a lot of my brain cells) wondering: "what exactly is that supposed to be used for?" It just seemed so dull that I could never relate it to "art". Considering of its ugly shape, I thought it must be of some extremely practical usage - turns out no! Also, I can hardly appreciate any beauties in the "Vices and Virtues" or "Read/Write/Think/Dream"... Ok, people might call it art, but I think art should be a little bit more than that... ~_~

The "La Jolla Vista View" is a very nice spot with a cool view though. The only thing is that it's hiding at the south west corner of the campus.

Back to our headquarter. The CSE building is a nice one. You might think we were here since the beginning of everything, but that's not true :). We used to be in the building of AP&M, at the other end of the campus. Well, that's a very old building from the 60s (if I remember right). So what can I say about it? It feels.... tough! However, the only thing we are missing by moving to this modern CSE building is the view of the ocean. Locating at the west end of the campus, AP&M has the advantage of an ocean view. If you go up to the top level (7th floor) in the evening there, you can have a really cool view of sunset at the sea. Well, I guess at your resident housing in Eleanor Roosevelt College, you probably can easily enjoy the sunset view as well - so really, you are not missing anything at all :).

Old memory about CSE computer lab

Today is the beginning day of the programming thread for COSMOS. Everything about the basics of programming for media - the language of python, bits, binary, hex, RGB,... It really reminded me of the time when I was exposed to those notions - nearly 10 years ago??? How shocking.

This post is actually inspired by David - through two steps though. On Monday, the first day of COSMOS, during the "figure-out-who-likes-what" interaction he told me that his dad was from the same undergrad college as me - that was really a nice surprise :) In fact, I remember his parents sitting with him in the first row during the Sunday introduction session. I guess Joe's introducing of me really had put a label of "From PKU" on my forehead, but too bad I was not able to identify such a same label in the audience... :P Anyway, that really reminded me of my undergrad college, with the following second step - I saw the nice picture of the CSE department building on David's blog - I felt I really have to post some pictures of the buildings in my undergrad college.

Here they are! These two identical buildings standing facing each other are called "The South & North Pavilions" in the Peking University (or Beijing University, whatever you like to call it). Yes, they look very traditional and artistic. But guess what, the North Pavilion was used as our computer lab. Can you imagine all us CS majored students wandering through the scene of lawns and trees, entering the ancient palace like building with the traditional Chinese style, and then... locking ourselves inside for hours, working on the 486 machines, and trying to finish those project assignments days and nights? Yes, the fun of nerds is inside, but the romantic appearance is outside...

me and my flat-faced cat...

Day 1 or 2?

I didn't realize that it's actually day 2 for everybody. Yes, should have thought of that... I'm really curious of how the day 1 went. "Exhausting" was pretty much what I got from lots of you, but since I only got to see you at the end of the afternoon (with your parents), I had really no idea what the 1st day's experience was like... ?

I hope today is a lot more fun, and relaxed - by getting to know more new friends, taking some photos, and starting the exploration of computer science.

For me, I'm so envious of your lunch... which was commented a lot in your blogs. My lunch time, literally from 12-1:40, between the two COSMOS sessions, was spent doing a research meeting with my adviser. 8-| Yeah... Phd life :)