For Holy Name Shall Always Be!

Wow what a summer. From the abismal Sophomore year to the terrible grade mixups, nothing was going right. Trying very much to hide every extracirricular activity I did, to leaving for abroad…nothing came close to celebrating my summer with Holy Name for the 75th anniversairy. Did we get our asses smoked like 2007? Absolutely, but I never felt such a familial bond between 150 people towards the last 3 weeks of tour. Everything was just fun. Granted this was probably the worst year that we’ve had with “age-out” syndrome. I have to keep Holy Name’s spirit with me this coming fall. I just have to. The competition, the attention to details, the shear physical brutality of the program, the mental stamina to stay within the day… all of that must show up this fall during CORE.

Was I upset that I lost to Crown and the Blue Devils? Yes. Absolutely, if you were at Championships to hear us sing, “Oh Holy Name”, you’d totally understand the bitter taste of it. It really hurts. But when you think about it, we didn’t max out the program like we did in years past, it was always 1/16th step ahead of us.  However, I still think we’re going to get the last laugh when the DVDs come out. We usually do have the last laugh. 

Now… time to do triathalons and get ready for 2010. We…have to win. We just have to. In the mean while, I’ll be teaching 3D modeling and advanced website design at BU School of Management.

Whew… how am I going to pay for school.

So far, I’m a double major and a triple minor.

The Majors are:

1) Business Adminstration Concentrating in Finance, Operations Management, and Management Information Systems

2) Biochemistry with a Specialization in Cell Biology, Molecular Biology, and Genetics

The Minors are:

1) Mathematics (3 More classes out of 6)

2) Computer Engineering (2 more classes of 6)

3) French (Done of 7)

- If I just take 2 more courses, one Japanese, Chinese, I’ll have Minors in that as well. I don’t know how fair that is considering I’m pretty fluent by now. Literacy is my main focus.

Why not add 2 minors? Well I’m loaded up already with the maximum credits that I was granted! If I stay an extra semester I can already finish that up. God bless outside tests and AP Credits.

Some people ask me where I would use all these skills? I’ll repeat after and after: Pharmaceuticals and Biotechnology Management. It’s the Art, Science, and Technology of Business that I’d like to well understand by the time I’m out of college! So this is for the next year… Senior year is going to look really crowded.

• BI522 Molecular Biology
• MK323 Marketing Management
• FE323 Finance Management
• OM323 Operations Management
• IS323 Management Information Systems
• MA225 Differential Equations
• MA523 Operations Research
• MA566 Operations Stochastic Modeling
• BI407 Animal Behavior
• BI203 Cell Biology (Weird Timing But yeah)

Rape of Nanjing

So I’m here trying to practice more Chinese and Japanese and I just got a little culturally curious and started researching in more depth of the Modernization of Asia.

Youtube has been a great source of education for me. Lately, I’ve been watching Classes aired to help me study for my finals. Often times, I find my self watching the bootlegged Documentaries that are put up.

So I put the two tactics together and I ended up watching the Documentary (which is also available on Netflix). “Nanking”. Odd side note, that people still say Nanking instead of Nanjing. Beijing is commonly used instead of Peking and Nanjing should follow the phonetic pattern don’t you think? Beijing\Peking = Nanjing\Nanking… Whatever. Small pet peeve.

Anyway, so the Rape of Nanjing… For me and for many, it’s arguably the most barbaric treatment of people in the imperialist expansion time period. In 1937, Japan had attacked and bombed Shanghai. Shanghai was the protection to Nanjing, the Capital of China at the time. With Shanghai defeated, the 180 mile road to Nanjing was open. The Japanese continued to Nanjing picking off the Chinese Army. As they traveled, the army plunder, raped, and burned villages. Killing after Rape was common. Some documented stories were

• Raping of Women and Boys of all ages, including infants. Over 30,000 cases of Rape in the first period.
• Mass Execution of all males that appeared to have callouses on their hands (suspects of Chinese army members in civilian disguise)
• Mass Civilian Executions by Machine Guns and Live Burning
• Bayonet Practice on Civilians
• Forcing Civilians to kill their own family members
• Beheading and Killing Competitions for Japanese
• Skewering of Infants with bayonets, cooking their livers
• Forcing Sons to have sex with their Mothers
• Forcing Fathers to have sex with their Daughters
• Forcing civilians to have sex with corpses on the road

Here’s just a part of the Documentary.

Gang Rape Club of Waseda University, Japan

I figured I should bring this up because I’ll finish some studying again at Waseda University in August. Some kinda cultural similarity here? In this video, where embedding is disabled by request, Waseda University students carry out an underground gangrape of female students at parties.

Here’s some confusion for you kids.

In Japanese there are 2 common ways to small/baby as noun description (adjective)

They are: Ko(こ） & Chiisai （ちいさい）

A small dog would be:　こいぬ　-> “Ko inu”

A small cat would be:　こねこ “Ko neko”

These just have the character こ in common. Ko before anything makes it small. Pretty simple yeah?

Now this is just hiragana…  But when things get written in Kanji you get the chinese character 小 involved. Pronounced “xiao” or for those who don’t like x’s, it’s prounounced “shiao” . This literally means small.

Let’s get into Kanji and see how this applies.

The classic example is

小鳥　Small Bird which is just said “ko tori”

子豚   Baby Pig said “ko buta”

The importance here is to recognize Small and Baby are similar, but still different. For example, A Small Cat does not mean it is a Kitten (Baby Cat). In Japanese, this difference is not expressed orally but only in writing.

If the Kanji 子　is used, then it makes the noun “baby”. If the Kanji 小 is used, then it is just a “small” adjective; coming from the direct Chinese  小 , “xiao”, which just means small. Whether you use 子 or 小 before a noun, it is still “ko”.

Let’s apply it to the word cat, “neko”, and get our more specific meanings: Kitten and Small Cat

• Kitten or Baby Cat-> 子猫 -> Pronounced “Ko neko”
• Little Cat -> 小猫 -> Pronounced “Ko neko”

So my website www.opassa.com is having some serious trouble because the network driver literally died. The XML Framework was on there too… Comon, it was only 2 gigabytes of data, it couldn’t have died for some random reason. Well, originally I had lost access to the network drive.

Everything in the yellow failed. I shoulda kept the network drive and the xml generator separate.

Opassa Network Structure as of April 10th 2008

OH! by the way! Check out the video for the Opassa Development Project

Some fun with after effects lol

Things I think they will say at my funeral

1. He had a good heart but it was hard to tell because he was so grumpy all the time

2. Isn’t it ironic how much jello salad people brought?

3. I wonder if he’d mind if we open some of this wine.

Isn’t it beautiful?

Dementia with Lewy bodies

Dementia with Lewy bodies is characterized by abnormal deposits of a protein called alpha-synuclein that form inside the brain’s nerve cells.

These deposits are called “Lewy bodies” after the scientist who first described them. Lewy bodies have been found in several brain disorders, including dementia with Lewy bodies, Parkinson’s disease and some cases of Alzheimer’s.
Symptoms of dementia with Lewy bodies

• Memory problems, poor judgment, confusion and other cognitive symptoms that overlap with Alzheimer’s disease.
• Excessive daytime drowsiness.
• Visual hallucinations.
• Cognitive symptoms and level of alertness may get better or worse (fluctuate) during the day or from one day to another.
• Movement symptoms, including stiffness, shuffling walk, shakiness, lack of facial expression, and problems with balance and falls.
• In about 50 percent of cases, dementia with Lewy bodies is associated with a condition called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep disorder.
• REM sleep is the stage where people usually dream.
• During normal REM sleep, body movement is suppressed and people do not “act out” their experiences while dreaming.
• In REM sleep disorder, movement is not blocked and people act out their dreams, sometimes vividly and violently

Before I get into any crazy…

I bought 8 Gigs of Ram and obviously I have to go on 64-Bit Operating Systems. Now if I wanted The Windows Vista 64-Bit Edition of Home Premium for the System Builder , can I just put it in when the New Motherboard comes with it?

9-Pin Craziness

So my case had:

Single and Double Pin Reset

I had to go through nuts to find out that my 9-pin connector was operating like:

Intel Board 9-Pin Chassis

nVidia Tesla GPU Enforced Processing Unit

So I customly built my first computer with some cash on hand as well as a LOT of consultation from friends across the country. Funny how much they’d fight and contradict eachother over the smallest things . It certainly did make me worried on what motherboard I’d choose.

This is going to be a SERIOUS Rendering Beast for my Zbrush, Adobe CS4, and Autodesk Applications Mad excited….

I was talking to one of my friends from Surf from 2006 who’s a Comp Sci dude at Carnegie Mellon and there’s a possibility that I’d be able to get an nVidia Tesla

Nvidia Tesla Personal Supercomputer

What’s so cool about the Tesla?!

Heterogeneous Model for GPU Computing

GPU computing is the use of a GPU (graphics processing unit) to do general purpose scientific and engineering computing.

The model for GPU computing is to use a CPU and GPU together in a heterogeneous computing model. The sequential part of the application runs on the CPU and the computationally-intensive part runs on the GPU. From the user’s perspective, the application just runs faster because it is using the high-performance of the GPU to boost performance.

My Custom Machine: Voyager 2

Current Machine without the new case; I’m obviously calling it Voyager 2.

System Specifications

• Q9650 3.0 Ghz Intel Quad 2 Core Processor
• Motherboard nForce 790i Ultra SLI MCP (3 PCIe x16 Slots)
• 720 Gigabytes of Hard Drive Space
• Windows Vista 64-bit with SP1
• 6 gB of DDR2 SD RAM (Soon to be 8 gB)
• GeForce 9800 GTX+ (With SLi Enabled)
• GeFroce 8500 GT  (With SLi Enabled)
• Soon to come in the mail: nVidia Quadro NVS with SLi (to enable high rendering)
• DVD+-RW DL|Blu-Ray DVD-ROM/DVD+-RW DL

Interface:

Audio – Center/Bass Out (1/8″ mini)|Audio – Line In (1/8″ Mini)|Audio – Line In (RCA Phono)|Audio – Line Out (1/8″ Mini)|Audio – Microphone In (1/8″ Mini)|Audio – RCA Digital Coax (S/PDIF)|Audio – Rear Surround Out (1/8″ mini)|Audio – Side Surround Out (1/8″ mini)|Ethernet – RJ45 Twisted-Pair (XBaseT)|FireWire 400/IEEE 1394 – 6 pin|HDMI|Keyboard – 6 pin mini-DIN (PS/2)|Mouse – 6 pin mini-DIN (PS/2)|Serial – RJ11 Modular (Phone/Telco)|USB – Universal Serial Bus 2.0|Video – 15 pin High-Density D-shell (VGA)|Video – 29 pin DVI-I|Video – 4 pin mini-DIN (S-Video)|Video – Coaxial (RF)|Video – RCA Composite Video

No Full Case Yet

Check out that MASSIVE GeForce 9800 GTX+, I clearly need to get a new case for this badboy. The biggest problem revolves around that I don't have enough room to put all the PS Wirings comfortably in. It's still making me nervous that all the hardware are so close to eachother.