Divide by Null - undefined

So, I dunno what else really to say, haha. I set up this site before facebook, before twitter... maybe around the time of myspace. Social networking sites have taken over this space. Why blog when you have a tumblr, a youtube account, etc.?

I never kept this up even back when blogs were the big thang. Looking at my links on the sidebar, my friends blogs are also abandoned, the most recent post among all of them about 2 years ago.

Ok, that's a lie, my friends haven't completely stopped blogging. One of my friends Jeremy Ogul made a new blog, and he bothers to update it more often than once a year. But still... I don't take care of this site.

There's a lot of things wrong with this site that I can see. Layout problems, my custom-built blog is (I'm sure) riddled with problems, and is hard to improve.

I'm gonna make a new site. I dunno what it will contain. I will shut this one down pretty soon. Probably over summer, when I have time to. It probably won't be a new blog. It may be a site that looks kinda nice ish and holds my resume and CV or something.

I still use this web host as a personal image store, to store random things I made long ago, and as a test hub for nonsense I do. I actually don't know if I'll keep the dividebynull.net domain name. I know I'll keep rgochee.com... for obvious reasons.

So I guess this is me finally admitting that I'm not a blogger, despite how obvious it's been.

Of course, I really have no clue who reads this (especially with how I don't update). This is more for my own closure, to round up the archive of my posts.

Farewell for now!

So, I haven't made a post in a long time... basically since last summer. So I'll go ahead and summarize the year in short near-twitter-like sentences.

Marching band, fun and tiring. Fall, school starts, amazing, easy schedule. Meet new people. Australia, amazing trip. CS111 projects suck. First true all-nighter. Grades below my own standards. Winter break. Winter quarter. Start work. Fun in Irvine. Ding 80 - raid time. I suck at volleyball. I suck at tennis. I suck at waking up for 8:00 classes. Shower catastrophe. Interesting combinations at Urth Caffe. Easy quarter, but commuting hurts. Spring break. Spring Quarter. MCDB is fun. Tagiku is amazing. Still working, still doing nothing. Morning exercises weekly (or less). Camping! (Highlight was table slam). Kelton. Graduation. Sad. Amazing new computer! Full time work, and actually productive now. Learning soccer. Tennis, and I still suck. San Diego camping! (Highlight was ice cream). Learning tennis. Work gets insane. Sacramento. Home.

And that brings us back to now.

You see, I neglect this thing because I only want quality work to appear here. I also have high standards for myself, so nothing makes it past my initial filters. This is the exception to that rule. I mean, sure it's a personal blog and I could go the "u hata's dun no nething n im guna keep on bloggin w/e i want" and considering I have a readership of near 0, no one would really care... but I have standards for myself.

Anyway, I've been having thoughts on what I could do to improve this. Book/movie reviews (possible during this summer, but I foresee my interactions with those mediums dropping once school starts). Commentary on current events (which would force me to be a bit more attentive to the goings on of the world, but I generally don't like saying my opinion anyway). I'm getting a camera, so I could turn this into a photo blog possibly.

I think the other part is that (in real life) I end up talking mostly about either niche or otherwise trivial things in a completely uncollected manner. I guess I could talk about how Hidden Power works in Pokemon with respect to IVs and EVs, but you'd get better info elsewhere. Likewise, I'd go to twitter if I wanted to let the world know that I saw a praying mantis at the tennis court. As for the part about uncollected thoughts... just reread this blog and see how chaotic my train of thought is.

Well, that's enough nonsense for now. While writing this, I have come up with a few topics to dwell over. I'd say 25% will actually get written and then half will be dropped because of my QA work. We'll see how this blogging thing works out.

So this marks week two for UCLA, but I've really been here for three weeks, so it's my fourth week of living here. I've made new friends and experienced new things. It's quite exciting.

I'm not so sure what to say here; I don't want it to be a boring recount of what I've been going through.

Life in college... I'll try to sum up how it's been for me in a few phrases of a few words each: good roommates, many boring classes, skipped a (useless) discussion today, one class with great lectures, previously mentioned class requires lots of reading, band is pretty fun, trombones are crazy, made new friends, sooo many people here, lots of solicitors the first week, pretty good food (yum brownie goo), should really be doing reading right now, too much walking, too many hills, too many stairs, getting lazy, having fun.

I dunno, just some random thoughts to sum up everything.

Oh yeah, I got my Macbook Pro and it's quite amazing. I'm keeping the windows laptop too though. I got Synergy running, though, so I only need one mouse for both computers. It's more or less dual screen with different operating systems.

I feel like I should say more about my classes. In general, they're boring. Either the subject or the professor. The one that is exciting, at least the lecture, is the one that requires a lot of reading. Still, the first lecture (which happened to be my first class of the quarter), kept me interested, made me think; he's an lively, interesting professor talking about a topic he's passionate about too. So, if you ever need to satisfy a GE req. here at UCLA, take HIST 9E (Southeast Asian Crossroads) with Professor Woods.

On that note, I should get reading some of that stuff, or at least study for the map test in two days. Agh, buy your own scantrons? Anyway, I'll try not to abandon this thing as much anymore.

So I've been neglecting this thing and even when I've decided that I need to put something up, I don't because it ends up being poor quality. See? I'm looking out for you, the readers. I won't put forth anything sub par!

On the note of that last exclamation point, Jeremy linked me to a new take on these symbols. It's ok to (over)use exclamation points as long as what you're saying is trivial. Ok! Sounds good! But still don't over-do it!

Anyway, I've been in Australia the past two weeks, or really I got back from a ten day trip Monday. I liked it so much that I'm going to move there after grad school or at least after I have enough saved money to live there comfortably.

I got in trouble with some people (not my parents) for some things I did while over there. It's legal there, though, but I do understand it has a bit of a negative connotation. Drinking and gambling aren't really things that people look up to, I suppose. Really, it wouldn't have been a problem if I didn't let everyone know about it on the internet (hey what am I doing now?). With social networks, blogs, instant message, even cell phones, people seem to need to let people know about the most trivial things... may I point to Twitter, Pownce, or many of the things people use MySpace and Facebook for. Information used to be passed by word of mouth and other than that, there was generally little proof of what happened. Now people type stuff out online recklessly and it's probably forever cached on Google's servers.

As far as my holiday went, I really enjoy my cousins. Every night I spent with them was probably more exciting than all the time I spent with the older relatives. The whole trip was fun, regardless. Maybe not some of the car trips but if it made me want to move there (sometime after grad school), it had to be great. Plus, once I touched down at LAX, the pollution made me cough a lot. Sydney was so clean and green and overall nice.

So now I'm back home and more people are off on their way, while I still have a few weeks thanks to the UC system. Such a short time, yet how am I going to make use of it with everyone gone? I guess I could do something productive... or not.

As a final note, there will be a meteor shower in about 4-6 hours, peaking around 4:36 PDT. I'll be sleeping, so at least I saw the one a few weeks ago (and as another side note, the lunar eclipse a few days ago).

So this is random, but it has some good quality content at least.

Sometimes, you need to make a point, but you really have no clue what you're actually talking about. So, to circumvent this minor setback, one needs to become an actor: you're actually an expert on the topic. Everything you say is right. It doesn't even matter if you really don't know, you're just that good. This is the art of persuasion, argumentation, or in layman's terms, BS.

Just about every student who has ever had to write an essay or paper knows what BS is. The way I see it, there are two types of BS, an upper level and a lower level.

For the lower type, all one needs to succeed is a confident tone and an uneducated audience. For this sort of BS, one is effectively lying. If it sounds believable (at least to those who don't know the truth), then it works. This only goes so far. One can't answer the question "What is two plus two" with "five" and expect everyone to accept it willingly. Most people are adamant in their belief that the answer is truly "four". Lying only works when you know the audience is ignorant to the truth.

The next level of BS is more complex. Sometimes it is lying, but with evidence buried in truth, lies that elicit emotional reactions, semi-truths that only work in a certain way, or truths that are really unrelated to the original argument. Why do two and two make five? Because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Does it matter if it's four? Humans made up the number to represent this given value, one can have it represent a different value; "4" is an arbitrary symbol. Two parents and two children make 4 people and 1 family: 5 altogether. If I put more thought into this, I could probably make better arguments, but at least now, one has to put much more effort to refute the counter-examples. One has to find the fallacy in the argument.

So am I advocating the use of BS? One might say I am actually helping people avoid such arguments from others; when one has mastered its use, one is also able to see its use in others.

There are many other ways to argue in, what some may call, underhanded tactics. To learn more, pay attention to politics. Campaigns, lobbying, one can find many more ways to make one's point without actually addressing the point itself, or addressing the point from a more desirable point of view.

It might be considered evil, but if you're really good at it, that won't matter. The truth is only a minor setback.

Edit: on a somewhat related topic, ad hominem is only good when you can't really tell that it is ad hominem. Otherwise, it makes one look uneducated and unable to put forth a real argument. Now if you're in middle school (or a high schooler who seems like they should have been held back a bit), I might be able to see how calling someone a "cocksucker" would "win" you the argument. In any other situation, might as well just reverse the "argument" right back to yourself.