shaky start

The fall quarter at UCLA started on Thursday. That same day, I received an e-mail from John Riley saying essentially that the math boot camp exam diagnosed me as a complete failure in real analysis and recommended that I get some more practice (by staying in the math class). So in addition to taking macro, micro, and econometrics, I have a math class that meets for one hour each week. Needless to say, I was depressed by this. Moreover, I was disappointed in myself. The diagnostic quiz was really easy because it was based entirely on stuff covered during the math boot camp. I just neglected to study optimization in choice over time and lo and behold, one question amounting to 1/3 of the exam was on that. The class really isn't bad though. It has a really relaxed atmosphere and I enjoy Professor Riley's teaching methods. It's also good practice in proofs and such for the more math-intensive economics classes.

So far I've only had proper lectures in micro and macro since the Thursday class of metrics was a syllabus day, and it's cancelled for the current week. In micro we're learning about rational preference and its properties, which is the topic of our first problem set due in a week. This is actually my first graduate school problem set and I'm very excited.

In macro we talked about the history of macroeconomics and how classical economics was destroyed by the Great Depression and how Keynes came up and how his fellowship of Keynesian economists dominated macro until the oil crisis of the 70's, etc. It really impressed on me how important macroeconomics is. Also, this is my first macroeconomics class since my freshman year of college so.. we'll see where my interests lie a year from now.

Yesterday Sam, Allen, Jennie and I went to Koreatown to eat at a restaurant that specialized in tofu soup. Amazing stuff. It's too bad none of us brought a camera because there was so much food impressively served to us. We got the works: unlimited kimchi, a fried fish (which i ate whole except for the head (and including the bones) because I thought that's what you do with fried food but I guess not), a good amount of rice, pickles, some other stuff I don't remember because I'm cooking-illiterate, and a raw egg to put in our boiling tofu soup. The leftover juice from the rice was also scooped out and served to us towards the end of the meal to neutralize the spicy taste of the chili sauce-ridden tofu soup. All for $9 plus tax and tip.

Afterwards, we hit up a nearby Korean supermarket where I bought kimchi, chili sauce, tofu, noodles, and pork loins because I'm trying to learn from Sam how to make kimchi soup. I made some today for lunch, and I'm pretty sure I failed.

So there. I updated my blog. Oh, and it's been a while since I set up my room.. and I still have no pictures. I first need to clean this place up.

first day of "class"

Math boot camp started today. My friends laugh when I describe it as such.. but that's what it really is. It's a crash course in real analysis and linear algebra. Crash course in the sense that we're spending minutes on topics that would normally take half a lecture period. We were shown a proof of the existence of converging subsequences of bounded sequences by the iterative shading out of quadrants on the blackboard. Yeah.

For those of you who don't know, my laptop went out of commission apparently because of a bad chip of RAM. I talked to Dell and its contractor while on the road to LA and everything managed to work out. My parents brought it over here when they came to visit this past weekend.

I have most of my room furnished. I still need to build the dresser, a small cabinet/drawer thing, and a loveseat. Pictures of the room will come later when everything's up and I clean up the mess I've made over the last week.

So yeah, my parents came to visit over the Labor Day weekend. On Friday they flew in at 1:30 a.m. after missing their first flight from DC. I didn't go to sleep until maybe 4 a.m. that night >___<. On Saturday I had to wait around for an Ikea delivery and then we saw one of my mom's research collaborators at UCLA Neuroscience. Then we went to see my dad's old high school classmate at her house in Whittier. She had a couple other guests and family members over and yeah.. they were all about the same age. Despite the age difference, it's still good to know that my parents and, by association, I have good friends in the LA area. I got this sick shot of the LA skyline from her house up in the hills:

On Sunday we went to Pasadena to see my dad's alma mater Caltech. For dinner we ate at a really good Chinese restaurant in Arcadia. It was interesting to see so many plazas with signs all in Chinese.

So yeah, that pretty much sums up the visit from the parentals. Here's a picture of me and my mom right before I took my parents to LAX on Monday:

And thank Patrick for the awesome pic at the top. [EDIT: I removed the video and picture of my father cause he's paranoid of the interwebz.]