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.]