Dining
I found out a couple of days ago that you can actually see what’s being served in the cafeterias daily. The site is dining.ucla.edu. You should definitely check it out….Nathan’s Hot Dogs can get a little nasty after a while.
2001 [page 3]
UCLA network status
I recently received an e-mail to my inbox that I thought was informational:
Dear Resident,
As you may be aware, during the first week of school we have experienced a significant increase in competition for bandwidth supporting your Internet connection. Anticipating the increased demand, over the summer we completed an upgrade of the residential network. While we are still fine-tuning the network, our primary issue is related to MP3 traffic and its impact on available bandwidth. As you may be aware while we have not blocked MP3 traffic, we currently use a ‘traffic shaper’ to prioritize traffic being routed to the Internet. At the present time MP3 traffic is given the lowest priority below HTTP and FTP traffic. Campus traffic for academic purposes is not “shaped”. In addition, over the past two weeks we have had an extraordinary number of virus infected computers on the network. These machines have generated an enormous amount ofnon-productive network traffic. As of today we believe we have identified amajority of the infected machines and provided the necessary patches (to client machines) which will provide additional bandwidth. As of this evening we are increasing the (pre-defined) amount of bandwidth to help alleviate some of the congestion. The campus is also in the process of implementing a second backbone connection to Internet2, which will further increase the performance of the network. It is expected that byJanuary the connection to Internet2 will be completed. In the interim we will be closely monitoring the capacity of the network and the utilization of the available bandwidth making adjustments as necessary.
Thank you.
Mike Schilling Directory of Technology UCLA Business and Financial Services
Evil Dykstra Construction
This is the second day I’ve been woken up by the work starting at 6:00AM. I’m getting really tired of it. The worst thing is that De Neve isn’t scheduled to fully open until January, which means construction will probably continue until then. Hopefully not. Note to self — buy earplugs.
First Day of Classes
I had my GE 60A History (1960-74) class today at Bunche Hall, and I really enjoyed it. We opened with the “traditional” UCLA practice of listening to the Star-Spangled Banner. The professor fired up the DVD player and on came Jimi Hendrix and his gut-wrenching version of the Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock. Right away I knew this was the class for me. The workload doesn’t seem excessively heavy (100 pages a week) and I know I’ll like the video clips they show in class.
It will be fun. Chemistry and Calculus are tomorrow.
Ethernet problem
I found out from Jeremy Schwartz, the social God of Dykstra, that the reason the network is unbearably slow right now is because of a virus that infiltrated the UCLA Internet servers. The virus struck on Sunday and destroyed many of the hubs that manage the ethernet. I’m not sure when the network will be back to normal operations but it will be a while. Some of the students that had their computers on when the virus struck got infected, including a student on the 8th floor of Dykstra (the only reported incidence I heard). The virus will completely destroy your computer if you don’t detect it.
Black Sunday
For those of you not hip to the UCLA party scene, this Sunday was the biggest party of the year, being the last weekend before school starts. I checked out the houses and was amazed at how long the lines were. Everywhere I went there were lines of at least 100 people waiting to get. I tried standing in line for one of the houses right off of campus and saw some interesting things.
While standing in line I looked inside the house and saw a group of people seated around a table. Of course they had a monstrous bong in front of them and smoked right in plain view of the police from their window. I was amazed that they weren’t arrested, honestly. Later on a guy tried to cut through the lawn to get inside and one of the frat boys knocked him down. The guy tried to retaliate, threw a punch, and ended up getting arrested by campus police. It was hilarious. He was covered in dirt, drunk as hell, and pissed off.
The place was a total mess. Beer cans were everywhere, as well as cigarette ash. I can see why the weekend gets such a reputation. It was interested but truly overwhelming. I had a good time though. If you have a story about Black Sunday, be sure to post it here.
Fast Ethernet
The name says it all. I was skeptical when I first arrived because I did a bandwidth test off of CNet and got only 137kbps. However when I downloaded a TAR file off of EFNet, I managed to get 160KB/s! That’s around 1mbit/s! I think I’ll be fine at school. Believe the hype: the network is fast, as long as there isn’t a hog on it.
Move In Day
Well I finally arrived at good old 241 Dykstra Hall today. Yesterday we loaded up the van, hit the road for about 8 hours (since we stopped so much) and finally made it to the Holiday Inn at 11:30. This morning we got ready, went over to school without eating breakfast and got me situated in my dorm.
I was lucky enough to get a double and it’s plenty of space for me. I brought my computer, stereo, and 80GB hard drive. I’m easily set for the year. My roommate, Quinn, moves in on Sunday. My textbooks were ready and waiting at the UCLA Buy-back store. I highly recommend getting your books online and having them set for pick-up. The process was really simple.
Right now I have six speakers in my room and a subwoofer. Plenty of power. I bought a microphone which I’m not totally happy with, but it was only $10. I can deal.
I saw one of my friends at Orientation, Nick, as well as Courtney. It’s still weird being at school. It doesn’t feel like home. I feel like I’m in a hotel.
That will change of course.
Getting Ready
Like a typical guy, I haven’t packed yet and I’m leaving on Friday. Maybe I’ll get everything together by Thursday night…probably not. Anyway, I’m driving down in a rented mini-van and should arrive someone Friday night. I’ll get my books on Saturday and be completely moved in by Sunday.
Attack on America
I turned on the television this morning only to see on ABC News that terrorists had hijacked four 757s and crashed them into various locations. Two hit the World Trade Center, which is now in pieces. Video footage was captured of the plane striking the second tower, which happened at about 9:03 AM ET. It is estimated that 50,000 employees can be in the two towers combined at peak hours.
Also, according to ABC News, an estimated 70,000 people visit the tours daily. They are unsure of the number of casualties, but they are high. At the time I wrote this article, I was watching a young freelance cameraman on ABC that captured footage of the wreckage. Only the lobby of the South tower remains.
The Pentagon was hit by one plane which damaged about a 300 x 200 foot area of the building. However, fire continued to blaze and burned even more of the building. The NSC and FBI were mostly out of the building and mostly military and navy men were hit in the crash. The president is in Louisiana, wait, Nebraska… Nobody knows where he really is. However he isn’t in the White House.
A fourth plane landed in a field outside Pittsburgh. It was said that its destination was Camp David.
Seeing the footage is simply amazing. If you haven’t heard anything about this story, be sure to check Google. I was amazed that San Francisco closed as many buildings as they did. Every public school in San Francisco was shut down and all government offices were closed as well.
Here in Marin nothing was really shut down, including the schools.
Sadly, it is my cousin’s 17th birthday today, now a day that will live in infamy.
The press is already calling this attack the worst America has seen since Pearl Harbor. Osama Bin Laden is the man thought to be behind the attack also Iraqi and Iranian government could be responsible as well. Minutes after the attack Israeli military aid was sent to the U.S.
All airports have been closed nationally and the entire New York area is pretty much shut down.
Today is unbelievable. Most of my local churches are holding prayer services for the victims.
Also, the Red Cross has set up a national hotline for blood donation. Visit Yahoo! for more info.
More On Perfecto
I’m having serious thoughts about not putting up a radio station. I fear that it will use too much bandwidth, be a hassle to set up, and eventually attract only a few listeners. I think it’s not worth the trouble, frankly. Currently I am unsure about UCLA’s Internet policy and I really don’t want to abuse the system. More about this later.
The Joy of Textbooks
I just ordered my books for the fall quarter. Man was the process easy. Simply go to uclaestore.com click on textbooks and enter your student information. The site then selects the books you need via XML! It’s totally awesome. Right when you login it tells you all the books you need for all your classes. Simply check out and you’re done. Takes less than five minutes. Books start shipping on the 10th so order now.
Room assignment
I got a letter in the mail from UCLA yesterday telling me about my dorm and my roommate. Luckily I have a double in Dykstra so I only have one roommate. His name is Hsin Wu and he seems like a cool guy. I don’t know much about him, but obviously that will change. I will be living in 241 Dykstra. Be sure to drop by and say hi to me sometime.
Perfecto Radio
Hopefully I will have it set up in the fall. Right now I can’t host the station because DSL has a terrible upload rate. I would only be able to host 1 listener at 128kbps. What’s the point then… In the fall, I will be on an OC-12 system and I will be able to host about 50 people no problem. UCLA doesn’t even care if I do it; I asked my orientation counselor.
As of now I am getting my hard drive all set up for the station. I just passed 70GB a couple of days ago and will have about 25GB devoted to Perfecto Radio. It will have a HUGE playlist. It will play mainly trance/house/big beat/trip-hop.
I start school near the end of September. Perfecto Radio will probably be up in early October.
UCLA orientation, day 3
This was the last day of orientation and man does it have stories to go along with it. First, we had to schedule classes at 9:00 sharp. The way we did it in our group, as I’m sure every other group is that we picked straws. On account of my tremendous fortune, I managed to draw the luckiest number of all, 1. I breathed a sigh of relief. As a result, I managed to get all the times I wanted for Chem 20A, Math 31B, and GE 60A. Now on Mondays I don’t have to go to school until 1:00PM. I think I can manage.
Chem 20A is a set up from high school chem, but I don’t think excessively difficult. The diagnostic test was a joke (sorry to those of you which didn’t pass it) but I thought it was hilarious when people started turning their tests sideways to get one of the questions on the test correct. Honestly, one question was about the positioning of letters in a compass rose and which combo would work correctly. Reminded me of preschool. However, some of the balancing equations stuff was a little hard but I still passed.
Math 31B is pretty much Calculus BC but on the college level. Thanks to my 4 on the AP test, I get to skip out of 31A. I’m looking forward to the class because I think eventually I will need Calculus in work applications.
The class I didn’t expect to be taking, GE 60A, is actually really cool. It’s a class devoted to a decade in American History over the course of an entire year. I believe the time period is 1963-1974. That should be a great class. I didn’t even know about it until my counselor encouraged me to take it.
After class scheduling, we were lucky enough to hear a lecture on Alcohol and Sexual Well-being at UCLA. Like I haven’t heard that stuff before. The videos were pretty funny, even though they were about date rape. I’m not trying to be insensitive but they were a bit hoaky. After that was discussed what we had seen in our group. Nobody had really anything deep to say. We were just passing time. No offense to my group members of course. I liked all of you guys.
I believe after the discussion we ate lunch at the Cafeteria, where I got a terrible mango smoothie. Jamba Juice puts that place to shame. Luckily I managed to down the smoothie by taking bites of a garlic pretzel…gives the mango smoothie some actual flavor.
After lunch we took the infamous UCLA Walking Tour. I had actually done the tour last spring I believe, but it was totally unlike this one. For one thing, our counselors made us play a game.
The game was called “Screw Your Neighbor.” The way it works is you write down on a piece of paper a punishment your “neighbor” has to do if he/she lags behind or does something stupid during the tour. Right after I turned my paper in, I realized the catch to the game. It came to me because our counselors gave a subtle hint. We encouraged them to make cards for each other, but Kathryn blurted out that it would be stupid to do such a thing. Right after handing my card in, I realized that it isn’t actually “Screw Your Neighbor” but “Screw Yourself“.
My punishment wasn’t too bad. I think on my card I had to hit on a girl of the group’s choice in Spanish.
I didn’t have to end up doing the punishment because we ran out of time. However, I did enjoy the lap dance one of the group members had to give Vahe. That was hilarious.
During the tour, our counselors informed us that they would tell us a number of stories about UCLA and one of them was false. Some of the stories were totally unbelievable, like Jim Morrison having a locker still on campus at UCLA. I thought initially that it was probably the fake story. However, I thought to myself that they wouldn’t be so gutsy as to tell a lie on the first story. Consequently, I bought it. Here’s a list of the stories I can remember:
- Jim Morrison has a locker at UCLA (with stickers all over it).
- One of the founders of UCLA is buried under the sixth step of one of the stairways on campus.
- The faculty of UCLA built a bomb shelter underneath the campus in the tunnel system that wasn’t large enough for the student body but large enough for themselves.
- There is a set of pillars near the Math/Science building that was statistically analyzed. Students would arrange themselves accordingly into grade categories based on how they entered the pillars. For example, “A” students would enter from the far left while “F” students would enter from the far right.
- Bunche Hall was lifted by cranes used by NASA to rotate the building 90 degrees. The school had to do this because the building was so shiny that it was causing accidents on the 405 freeway. Helicopters were used to stabilize the building during the move.
I know there are a couple more stories but I can’t think of them. If you went to orientation and can remember more, please e-mail them to me.
As it turns out, ALL of the stories are totally fake!!! I was such a sucker (silly freshman). Man oh man I thought only the pillar story was false. Boy am I a fool. Those damn counselors were pretty good at the storytelling.
After the campus tour, orientation was over. However, my adventures in LA were just beginning.
At the end of the day, my friend Courtney picked me up from UCLA out at the Sproul Hall parking lot. We went to eat dinner down in Westwood, which was pretty uneventful. I got to meet her friend Diana, who was really funny. After dinner we were supposed to go to a comedy club where Drew Carey was doing a stand-up act. However, he cancelled about a day in advance so we were supposed to see someone else. It didn’t matter though, because we never went to the show.
Why you ask? Because something else came up.
We were driving right outside of Beverely Hills when something totally unexpected happened. Courtney took her eyes off the wheel for just a second to look at the map. When she looked up, the car in front of her had totally stopped. She slammed on the brakes but it was useless. We plowed right into the back of a Mercedes SUV. For some odd reason, the tires didn’t screech and the airbags didn’t deploy. I think we probably hit the car at about 15MPH but it could have been about 10MPH. Nevertheless, her car was about two feet shorter after the wreck. The Mercedes had a scratched bumper.
Damn crumple zones.
I know that they place the impact on the car and not the driver, but the accident should not have done that much damage. The radiator was totally ruined, as it was oozing anti-freeze and gushing steam. The car wouldn’t even drive because two fans in the engine were stuck together. Consequently, we had to get all of the stuff out of the car after calling a tow truck and place it on the side of the road. The group in the Mercedes was so calm and collective about the accident that it surprised me. The man who was driving wasn’t even upset about the whole ordeal. He even helped move our car.
That was truly a blessing; you never know who’s going to step out of a Mercedes in Beverely Hills.
After we got all of our stuff on the curb in downtown LA, we had to wait about half an hour for one of Courtney’s friends to pick us up. Thankfully, he was taking a class about ten minutes away from the scene of the wreck. Otherwise we would have had to stayed out on the side of the road for a couple of hours.
So a car crash concluded my UCLA orientation. Frankly, it was both startling and funny. It didn’t really set in for me until Courtney had to call her parents. She was practically shaking. Luckily for her, her parents weren’t concerned about the car. They were just happy she wasn’t injured.
UCLA orientation, day 2
During Day 2 we got down to business. Luckily for me, I didn’t have to take the Math and Foreign Language (Spanish) diagnostic tests, so I didn’t have to get up at 8:00. Instead I got up at a leisurely 9:00 and had about an hour breakfast. Nothing too difficult. Later that day we just went to a number of lectures, heard about life at UCLA from the faculty perspective, etc. etc. Honestly, I don’t remember a whole lot from the second day. At night, the counselors put on a hilarious Cabaret show in the Krispy Kreme shop. There was a Carson Daly imitator as well as a number of Chippendale dancers. Pretty damn funny if you ask me. My counselor, Vahe, did a dance to Janet Jackson music, which was pretty entertaining.
UCLA orientation, day 1
Well I just got back from good old Session 107, my introduction to life at UCLA. I didn’t have access to the computer lab at school so I’m recapping my experience on my weblog now. First of all, I had a great time and I was very impressed with the organization and time put into the orientation program.
I arrived early on Monday and slept in the dorms overnight before the first actual day of orientation. On Tuesday, the madness began. The majority of kids arrived at 8:00 AM to get their room keys, etc. and the place was a zoo. Luckily for me I had already finished unpacking so I could just hang out for a little while. After all the kids were situated, we had to all cram into Moore 100 for a “Welcome to UCLA” lecture. The lecture was your average introduction, not over the top and not too boring.
The rest of the day was pretty ordinary. We met our counselors, and my ending up in Vahe’s group was eventually a good thing. He was a really cool counselor and he made the three days of Orientation very pleasant. Other than that I really don’t remember most of the day. We did some talking went to some more lectures and that was about it. However, at night we did go down to Westwood, which was pretty fun. I ended up at California Pizza Kitchen with about ten other people and we had a good time.
At night, I slept like a log. The night before, when I actually arrived, I got virtually no sleep, since a car alarm kept waking me up. Day 1 was a different story. I really don’t remember waking up at all that night.
Overall, it was a good introductory day.