invasion of the fruit flies

two or three weeks ago, one of my roommates had enjoyed a bottle of wine at our house. afterwards, she (or he!) left the finished bottle of wine on our kitchen counter. after a while, our kitchen was infested with a horde of fruit flies crowding around the empty wine bottle. at first, i chose to ignore them. can't all of us creatures live in peace? i thought we could. that is, until they decided to move into my last loaf of zingerman's bread.

my initial strategy was the simple hand clapping tactic. killing them by hand was a fairly simple affair for a shanghai-trained mosquito killer such as myself. the timing was a bit different since they are slower moving than mosquitoes, but i quickly racked up a total of 20+ kills. unfortunately, it was apparent that i had hardly made a dent in the fruit fly population.

strategy #2 was my roommate's idea of putting aluminum foil over a container filled with alcohol. then holes were punched into the foil with the idea that they would be able to go in, but would be unable to get out. unfortunately, this strategy proved futile as they were able to get both in and out of the holes.

finally, i did a bit of research on the matter of fruit flies and learned to add some soap into the liquid bait (juice and kahlua worked well). the soap will decrease the surface tension of the liquid and then the little flies fall right in and drown. so that's the trap i'm currently using and it seems to have done the trick. now you too know what to do with an infestation of fruit flies.

in other news... i have a new friend! her name is sippycup and she's a cutie. only she kinda looks like a dog.

a juicy thanksgiving

today i went to my roommates' home (gayle and marie's) for thanksgiving dinner. we had some good food and somehow i ended up with the crouching dragon, tiger dvd as a present. anyway, i had a good time, but the somewhat unexpected part of my day came during the car trip. i rode with marie up to her place in the morning while gayle brought me back in the evening. in both cases, through no effort from me, each girl had brought up strange, interesting, and juicy topics of gossip. only i was so out of the gossip loop that they didn't want to bother explaining everything to me. maybe i should spend more time with my roommates...

smelling roses

today was the 100th michigan-ohio state game. this year is particularly important because of it and the fact that the winner is the outright champion of the big ten. of course, i was in attendance. during the game, a smoker was assaulted for smoking, cops came out to stop students from prematurely rushing the field, and finally, i rushed the field. a fitting ending to my last season here at michigan. rushing the field and a rose bowl. being on the field today was sweet. the game was great, but very tiring. i lost my voice for parts of the day and my roommate has the sexy voice thing going on.

so, i'm going to the rose bowl in pasadena, california on january 1, 2004. who's up for joining me?

a "sexy" model

today i was in my weekly meeting with a professor and several other students working on our research project when we came up with a breakthrough. one of our solutions to the model we had created was a non-intuitive one. this is good because thus far, all previous solutions were either counter-intuitive (and we would have to revise the model) or they were obvious (which is just plain boring). so after we (the professor) came up with this interesting case and solution, his eyes lit up and he declared the solution "sexy". i believe his exact words were: "this is a sexy model with a sexy solution! we'll have to really sex up the paper when we write it!" not that i object to studying sexy things... but i'm not sure "sexy" is the proper adjective to describe a game theoretic model.

so after this breakthrough, the professor asked us if we would be able to solve the model for the other seventeen possible cases. only, when he asked us, he directed the question to only me. of course i replied to the affirmative, but i'm a little puzzled as to why me specifically. granted, i am the only student with (extremely limited) background in game theory and i have graduate standing, but i thought this was supposed to be a team effort. anyway, he wanted the solutions by friday, one week from today--during thanksgiving break. great.

will you be my (focus) girl?

during lecture today, person 'H' mentioned that i was staring at the girl in the front rather than paying attention to the lecture. i had not noticed this and thought i was being quite the studious listener during lecture. regardless, i had been caught looking at this girl rather than learning how use the same random number stream for alternative simulations.

i normally don't like articles from the michigan daily. the main reason i read them is for the articles on the football team. however, this is one article/column i liked and i think anyone who has gone to college can relate. please check it out here so you'll know what i'm talking about.

i must admit that i have had my fair share of focus girls throughout my years at michigan. i guess one of whom would be the girl who was sitting in front of me, in spite of the fact that person 'H' made a face when i said i thought she was cute. unfortunately, i have noticed that the pickings have gotten slimmer once i started once i started taking graduate level OR and MBA classes. graduate school girls aren't the way to go. except kate! kate can be my focus girl any day!

so, while person 'H' and i were writing notes to each other during lecture like middle-schoolers, the topic at hand turned to middle school topics. specifically, it was about how, during english class, a certain group of girls would converse over who they thought i had a crush on. apparently it had been whittled down to sushigirl and linda (from new york). who could possibly choose between two such delectable dames? for the answers, you'll have to ask person 'H'.

okay, so now i want to know the truth. do girls have 'focus guys'?

quite a weekend.

this weekend has been quite an adventure. first, it began with whirlyball friday evening. it was my first whirlyball experience and a real blast. whirlyball is basically bumper cars meets lacrosse. everyone drives around bumping into everyone like crazy while trying to scoop up a wiffle ball to hurl at a goal.

after whirlyball, i had a quick case read through for my b-school class on saturday morn. after receiving a message from a bewildered (and perhaps upset?) keuynish, i set off to mr fu's birthday bash. we had a rousing game of cranium while drinking (an interesting combination!) and i was stuck into the "old person" group. i guess that's what happens when you are in school for your post senior semester.

after going home, i got a few hours of sleep before waking up early to work on the case that i had chosen to neglect in order to participate in previously mentioned activities. during my class i was able to convince the professor to start class early next week so we could be done by 11am rather than 1pm. this way, i would be able to go to the ohio state game on time (very important to me). right after class, i went to an all night affair.

details on this event can be found here and the results (including my team!) are here. basically this was a puzzle competition. it started at noon, and we had 24 hours to get points for solving puzzles from the 21 given. sound easy? not so fast. my group took 10 hours before we were able to solve our first puzzle. and we were definitely one of the better groups. others were unable to even complete one. so i spent 24 hours doing that, with a quick 2 hour nap taken in the media union at dawn. my team didn't win, but we did fairly well and i was able to walk away with a PC edition of the game halo.

so, puzzle time! which team was yao's team??
title: leaders of the losers
puzzle: "I am so __________." - HJS

there is a list of teams and how they finished at: http://www.allnightaffair.com/Stats.aspx

msft

today i got a sneak peek at the next build of windows code-named longhorn. it looks like there is some pretty cool stuff and of course, some stuff that i'm sure i will hate. there's a new bar on the right side of the screen in addition to the normal taskbar on the bottom. and it's larger and more intrusive than the normal taskbar. this new sidebar is for "cool" (or annoying) stuff like an analog clock, newsfeeds, and a slideshow of your own images. the microsoft guy claimed that "once you turn it on, you'll never turn it off". yea. i'm sure i want random pictures in a slideshow going on throughout my entire computing experience. the sad thing is, i'm sure the majority of users will either love this feature or be unable to figure out how to turn it off.

another big thing with this new OS is that ¿everything? is vector drawn, allowing for the scaling of pretty much everything. kinda interesting concept. the idea behind this is that high DPI monitors will be able to display things without the pixelation resulting from simply magnifying icons, images, and even text! the OS is also inherently able to do a lot of other cool graphics stuff too. no crappy graphics cards allowed. there is more integration between media and text type of documents and you can insert playing movies into your (formerly) text documents. and they came up with some special new markup language XAML or something.

all of this will require quite a computer. current boxes are probably going to be at the middle to low end of the spectrum for being able to take advantage of all these newly integrated graphical interfaces. certainly not something my computer would be able to handle.

the verdict: i think longhorn will appeal to the masses and refute the notion that computers are already powerful enough (what craig barrett giveth, bill gates taketh away), but with each new windows incarnation, i feel like i'm losing more and more control over my computer (anyone care to clean out my registry?). perhaps it's time for me to take a look at linux. no games, but it won't highlight text that it thinks i'm trying to highlight or otherwise take over my computer when it feels like it can do a better job than me.

on jeans

at what point does one know that it is time to get rid of a pair of jeans?

the current pair of jeans i am wearing has a hole in my crotch area. but as some of you probably know, that has never stopped me from wearing a pair of pants. at least laura isn't here to throw objects at the hole/my crotch. however, today i was absentmindedly scratching my leg when i found that my scratching had caused a rip in my jeans. i always thought denim to be a reasonably durable material, but i guess it was no match for my dull fingernails. so now i have a pair of jeans with a rip that i'll call a fashion statement. now i don't mind if my jeans are rife with fashion statements, but if a mere scratch is enough to cause one, who's to say when these jeans will just go and disintegrate on me? perhaps the answer to my question is: when a mere scratch causes them to rip?

yao = traitor.

no question mark this time. today i was in the 'bend' and went to the bookstore. it was pretty classy, much nicer than michigan's. similar to penn's, but bigger. i was with person 'A' who demanded that i buy something. so i bought a cap that said "ND" on it. i felt like a traitor, especially with the all-time winning percentage on the line this season.

yet, having walked around south bend these past few days, i am starting to regret going to michigan rather than a proper private school. i've always wanted to go a private school, but was never able to get into a good one (actually, i only got into one and it was for grad school, though i guess michigan does a good job of simulating the private school tuition experience). i like the nicer buildings here and of course, the ladies of impeccable breeding. though i do feel like i'm in whitesville. perhaps that's not such a bad thing given my current friendster status.

so i wore the dreaded "ND" cap only to find myself starting to enjoy the experience. i'm finding my view of the irish to be changing from one of hatred to one of respect. who knew i could be so easily swayed? perhaps this diversity thing really works. or maybe i just like cool, old looking buildings.

yao = racist?

so when i added kate to my elite group of friends on friendster, i noticed that she was the only white person i had as a friend. in fact, she was the only person on my list of friends who wasn't of chinese decent of some sort. this is kinda strange as i don't think i tend to hang around asians any more than people of other backgrounds; at least not to the extent of those people on the diag who only hand out party postcards/invitations to asians. don't people of other races like to party?

well, i'm glad i have at least one white friend. kate can be my token white friendster. seeing as my friendster group distributions do not match that of my actual group of friends, perhaps i should institute an affirmative action process for the purposes of diversity. as an engineer, one might think it logical to institute a point system whereby under-represented minorities received bonus points for their race. but i would want to have a narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the benefits that flow from a diverse friendster body. don't want to mess with direct orders from the supreme court.

a call to arms.

i have just recently been overtaken in friendster by the evil forces of BbUlZiBaR. we are competing to see who has more friends. before, i had a fairly comfortable lead with 21 friends on friendster. however, by using conniving strategies such as stealing my friends, BbUlZiBaR has increased his 'friend' count to 22 and taking over my lead.

so if you have a friendster account, i urge you to add me as your friend. my email address is nihaoyao@yahoo.com. together, we can beat the forces of BbUlZiBaR.

if you want to learn more about the evil forces of BbUlZiBaR, go to www.bruceyyang.com where he schemes and plots his nefarious plans.