[BC] Be a man, do the right thing.

lol the title is not related to the post
Tell us about a personal quality, talent, accomplishment, contribution or experience that is important to you. What about this quality or accomplishment makes you proud and how does it relate to the person you are?


In the few yet enduring years that I have played tennis, I have learned that tennis can change a person. It helped me build character as simple as hitting a green ball with a metal racket. I learned that as long as we have a goal that is somewhat realistic, we try our best to accomplish it. We do not stay ignorant but we improve as long as we want to. My ambitious goal was to win in a match against the very person that passed down his skills to me, Wu. This was not an easy task because he started a year before me. I had to defeat time itself. Due to my want to defeat him, I became stronger, faster, and taller than ever before.

As a beginner, I struggled to make contact with the ball. By looking at the ball and advancing my hand-eye coordination, hitting the ball did not seem that hard. Strokes such as the backhand and the serve seemed quite unnatural to me at first but through practice it wasn’t that bad. Soon, I learned how to stroke the ball without much effort. As I play more and more, I become more familiar with this game. Footwork seemed like a foreign language to me. The idea of running with small steps and not large leaps frustrated me. The problems that I encounter are different each time but I tend to always overcome them.

One day the previous summer, I finally beat Terrence 7-5 in a practice match that we had. I began with winning my service game, and then he kept his service game. This lasted for five consecutive times until the score was 5-5. At times, rallies lasted 10 or more strokes in this game where the momentum seemed to go from side to side. I held my serve with an epic 9 point deuce. After my hold, surprisingly Wu was down 30-40, this was the perfect opportunity for me. I ripped a massive forehand against his slow yet safe spinny kick serve. Game, set, and match. This experience was like finishing first in an Olympic race. After finally winning, my sights have changed to another more skilled player. I will have to constantly work hard until I reach that goal.

From these struggles that I have had in the game of tennis, I have changed to a different person. If you want to master something, then you have to practice, practice, and practice. Just doing nothing about something you want will lead to no change. It is important that you yourself work toward your particular goal. It might have not been the win that has made me so proud but the experience toward the win. This journey was something that was physical and yet mainly mental. I had to keep telling myself to believe that i can do it. Even if i acquired losses in the journey, i was able to reflect what i did wrong and improve myself from that. Tennis is a sport that i am proud about because i can see my accomplishments.


any suggestions so i can make it better
i feel like i am talking about the same thing over and over again ….

[CE] A picture is worth 500billion words

I learned about this new interesting tool from the following video:

We can access this tool here.

So this TED video explains to us this new google application that allows you to search up a word. This isn’t just any normal search though, it searches through 5 million of the booked that google has scanned and analyzed. Google has scanned a total of 15 million books, woah maybe I can be a professional book scanner for my career. Google sure is helping the world and it's history become more modernized. By searching this word it will tell you how often it is seen in a particular time period and how popular it is or was. Unfortunately, I searched my name and I'm not very known.

The two demonstrators poke fun of this device by saying people didn’t start talking about a particular year until it was the year. They said that people didn’t know that would actually come. I think these people are very using weird examples. I don’t know what this device would be used for except for the curiosity of a bored factual person. It would be interesting when certain trends were started but they have no actual use to my life currently.

When I looked up tennis, I saw a peak in the year 1940. Then I thought to myself, is this actually really accurate to measure trends. If tennis is 1% of the words in 1940 and tennis becomes 1% in 2020, then it is not the same. The population of the world has increased maybe by double. So the times this word was used would be a lot more in 2020 than 1940. Maybe I am wrong about something but that is my thought about this tool.

[Free] EatReal

haha, well you mightve been tricked by the title. I am not telling you to eat real food and not junk food but something else. i love junk food xD

To add some community service hours to my resume and to help out people, i decided to participate in the EatReal fest in Jack London. It is always likes these little activities that leads to fun memorable times. Today i woke up at 9 on a saturday morning, boy is that early. When i got to oakland i was pretty lost at where to go. Luckily there are other people on this planet, so i asked a randomly person who looked like staff for directions.

On the way there i saw two friends of mine, Richard and Alex. It turns out that they followed us to the place where Charlene and i volunteered and we collaborated on doing business. Our job at this event was to help sell these EatReal tshirts that had labels “ made it, eat it, grow it.” They were sold for a hefty 15 dollars and with tax it became 16.5 dollars. I bet i had to get change for a 20 dollar bill at least 100 times. At times not having 50 cents led to the customer profiting or the owner of the booth pocketing the change. This Nicole and her husband (the owners of this booth) were quite grateful for our work. I wonder what they will do with all that money.

Us four worked a greuling 7 hours with minimal break but it was a fun experience. In addition to having a nice time, the staff gave us a schwag bag with random coupons and miscellaneous things, drinks, and chipotle burritos. I guess this is one of example of good intention leads to good things.

[CE]Obama proposes $1.5tn tax hike to cut deficit

This week for my ce post, I decided to write a few of my thoughts about our debt crisis from this article.

Barack Obama, the US president, has proposed $1.5 trillion in new tax revenue as part of his long-term deficit- reduction plan.

"Middle class families should not have to pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires," he said.

Yes, it is right to tax the rich proportionally as the middle or lower classes but will that really help the problem? In America, people spend money they don’t have, or won’t ever have. For example, the debt is 14.3 x 000,000,000,000; it must take forever for us to make that much debt. A problem the government has is the way they spend money. This 1.5 trillion that Obama wants to get from taxes could have been prevented easily. The stimulus plans a few years back were around this number. So it is simple math if you think about it, don’t spend 1.5 so you don’t have to save 1.5trillion from elsewhere. This stimulus plan didn’t actually help the economy because not everyone reused the money given and they might had saved it. I remember reading somewhere as a comment on yahoo about the government’s debt crisis, “If the government doesn’t have to pay their taxes, why should we?” Currently the government is providing a very bad example to us citizens.

House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner rejected President Obama's $3 trillion plan to cut the deficits, saying it would fail to tackle long-term problems and would raise taxes.

Raising taxes in an economic depression or at any time period is not exactly a good thing. People will decide to spend less money on consumer goods if they are taxed more on income or housing. Businesses and retailer stores will be affected by this and they will lose business, workers will lose jobs. Although Boehner might be helping the long run, he isn’t exactly compromising. He just rejected the bill and that did not leave any room for Obama and him to find the best solution.

With more proposed taxes means a bigger burden for the next generation. College prices will rise, with fewer grants. i hope social security will still be here to help us when we are 67, but that will be in 2061. sighh. . . there goes Obama again, talk talk talk . Good luck to us, who will remain poor forever!

[RE]System.out.println("Angela's Wrong Decision");

I am currently in the class AP Comp Science, too, and I might’ve made a wrong decision, also. This class is quite hard because Computer Science does not come naturally to me. On my first test in this class I already got a depressing B-. Joo told us that this test would be the easiest of the year and it will progressively get harder and harder. A sentiment that I immediately get is fear. I am scared that my grade will only get lower and lower.

so here is angela's blog

Although this class is extremely difficult, it is interesting. We learned how to loop programs, destroy C-drives, print lines and do math using programming. The title of this blog already proves that i learned some stuff. System.out.println(" ") basically prints whatever is inside the parenthesis. The more we learn, the more we have to memorize in our little computer brains. That means that the longer we are in the course, the longer i will struggle. I will try to battle this monster and master the ways of defeating it.

One day, one of my friends had trouble on the project. I am pretty sure that she did not understand what the project wanted her to show.

Mr.Joo warned us about cheating in the beginning of the year and that made me weary. Would i be considered cheating if i have the same work as someone else but we didnt work together? That would be quite an unfortunate coincidence. Hopefully that doesnt happen to me in the foreseeable future. I guess thats one of the things about tutoring or helping a friend on homework, its hard to do. If someone asks me to help them on math, i tend to just give them the answer or tell them how to do it and why it is like that. I should ask them questions so they can sorta figure it out themselves. Only experience will help you with helping other people.

[free] The plague of school . dun dun dun.

I actually thought about this disease when school started but I did not have time to write about it. School has many affects on you mentally and physically except for those that make you a less ignorant person. First I will talk about the physical illnesses that we as students acquire. After 3 days of school, i realized that my weight started decreasing at a unexpected rate. This can be because of the lack of food or lack of sleep. We no longer have the freedom to eat whenever we want in any class, we might not even have time to eat breakfast. Lack of sleep ends up giving us panda eyes, which makes us look like sleep walking zombies.

The mental illnesses are not ones that are like ADD or OCD but something else, something that could be worse in my opinion. Our ability of pursuit of happiness is somewhat taken away because of homework. We no longer have the time to do stuff we enjoyed during the summer. Since the summer gave us a surge of happiness and now we have very little happiness, this is a fast transition. I believe that the first week of school should start on a Wednesday or something so we can get used to school life. Well, we should try to slowly change the way we view of homework and one day math homework will be a source of happiness. haha just kidding

I made this post for fun and it is also expressing how much I miss the summer of 2011. Time sure flies.

[RE] nancy's draft of horror

On this post I won’t really be talking about Nancy’s draft of her college application but something from it. Here I stole the following quote

Throughout my childhood, I constantly earned praises from my mother for every little accomplishment, from reading a difficult chapter book to award certificates from good behavior in school. Her warm smile and joyful eyes were always worthwhile whenever I worked hard on accomplishing my goal.

This few lines makes it seem like her life was so great with someone to support her, and that’s good, but I had the opposite of that. Grades in a true Chinese family are expected of you because that is why they came to America for. There is no point of praising you because that’s the way they think. If you show them straight As, they will even ask you where is the 4.8, 5.0 or A plus. In the event that a B finds its way to your report card, you better buy some earplugs. You will never hear the end of this small indent in your transcript. Soon, your whole family and your families’ friends will know about this B or B+. One thing curious about an Asian family is that they talk about the mistake you have and not the achievements that you acquire. That is a one very sad thing that will probably mentally destroy some people, but oh wells, I’m used to it. .. . . . oh yeah this parent I’m talking about is not my dad because I do not live with him.. .

I sometimes feel that I could’ve done a lot more important things and had more skills if my parents hadn’t divorced and if I had gone to Chinese school. If there wasn’t such divorce, it is possible that I would have this warm smile that Nancy talks about. My mum was too busy worrying about herself and post-divorce craziness to worry about my brother and I. If I had gone to Chinese school, I would’ve been done by the time I was in 6^th grade. The ability to speak, write, and read Cantonese would be a great asset to my language skills but that didn’t happen. IF . . . if only is all we can think about. Well my childhood passed with a lot of time wasted, that’s just very unfortunate for me. One day I will find someone who can give me constant warmth to my life.

[BC] The dreaded UC app

1) Describe the world you come from — for example, your family, community or school — and tell us how your world has shaped your dreams and aspirations.

I come from a small world yet I have very big challenges. People around me say that it is best that I try my best in everything I do, especially school. That can be hard sometimes especially when I have to care for myself and a brother. Having divorced parents in a Chinese family is a part of my life that will affect me forever. To this day, I am still not accustomed to constantly seeing new strangers visit my house. Although I have this unfortunate aspect of my life, I still found something to gain from it, independence. I learned that to be successful I cannot rely on people but I have to do things myself. Homework has never been something I can ask my mom for help on so I had to do it without help.

School is a place where I can escape home and be able to joke around with my friends. Here I do not have to act special in front of strangers because there is freedom of speech around with people I know. Our high school is quite competitive because it is the better of the two that are on my island of Alameda. I take this as a challenge because I would need to take AP and HP classes in order to stand out in our lively crowd of two thousand. AP Computer Science is a class that I am struggling with but I am using all of my abilities to become skilled at it.

My dad is a one of the most influential person to me although I do not get opportunity to see him everyday. He tells me that I need to focus on studies because in the long run it is the most important. He really regrets not going to a four year college. Since my father works at a car garage valet, he gets to help doctors park their expensive and fancy cars. That is the difference education can do, either you drive the car or you park the car. My father tells me that life is what you want to be, you need to work hard early in order to have a good future. These simple life lessons that he gives my brother and I on our ride to his house slowly ponder about what I want.

My family has shaped my dreams and aspirations because I do not wish to repeat the past in my future. I will not get divorced with my future spouse that I have children with due to the fact that I do not want to ruin sweet innocent lives. It is very important for a teenager who is growing up to have both their father and mother to support them in tough times. Being more educated is another very important dream that I would like to accomplish. Education does not only help with salary but it makes you a better person. More knowledge can make you seem like an intelligent person even if you are talking to a complete stranger. When I have children, I want to be able to help them out with homework even in high school.

Note: haha this draft isn’t very good. I should probably use bigger vocab and develop some of my ideas better.

[CE] Djokovic beats Nadal to win US Open

I was looking at the Al Jazeera news feed and I found about my obsession , tennis. This article talks about the 4 set matchs between Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic in the US Open final. I remember watching this match on Monday right after school. Fortunately I have a 0-4 schedule so I was able to watch the entire 4 hours and 9 minutes. I wanted Nadal to crush Novak so there would be more reality in the tennis world. Novak has an amazing streak of 64-2 but it might only be a one season thing.

After the first set, I felt worrisome for Nadal, he was up 2-0 but he got reverse bageled. (In tennis, to bagel is to win 6-0.) One problem that Nadal had was that he was not aggressive enough at the baseline. It seemed that Nadal hit balls back over but there was a gravitational pull on the ball toward Novak. At least on the longer rallies Nadal was able to win most of them. Nadal’s serve was not quite aggressive enough also, but he blames he wind for that. Everyone has their special someone that they have weaknesses against, I guess it is Novak for Nadal and Nadal for Federer.

One reason why I didn’t want Novak to win was probably because he defeated Federer in the semifinals. The constant loss that Federer gets nowadays could mean a new era with Nadal and Djokovic. But since Nadal lost the last 6 matches with Novak, maybe it could be the era of Djokovic-Djokovic-Djokovic. If that happens, then tennis won’t be the same. Federer was able to do moves that are near impossible and make it look simple and clean, like the tweener. Age is a factor that is affecting him unfortunately

Well congrats to Novak anyways. I liked him more when he did those impersonations of Roddick, Sharapova, Federer, and Nadal.

[RE] to " about nick wong"

Since I had to think of someone to write a response post to, who better than someone I live with. I decided to read my brother’s interesting column and I found a story I can relate to:

Throughout my life Ive had some adventures...dumb adventures...When I was the age of 7(?) I was walking from my house to Loards Ice Cream in south shore with my cousins who rarely came. I was talking to one of my cousins without looking forward, bad idea ._. . So, as I was walking, suddenly, my cousins yell, "NICK WATCH OUT" as I walk into the pole. HOWEVER..I didnt simply just walk into the pole, I turned my head (as anyone would if your name was yelled right..?), and just at the right moment, as I turned my head, I scraped it on the edge of the pole and walked into it afterwards. My forehead began to bleed and I had to go to the hospital to get skin glue.

I remember this incident as well too, not crystal clear but I remember the important parts. Unfortunately, my aunt ended up having to cover my brothers bloody and wet forehead with her hand. I guess random occurrences do happen, at least it was not a bowling ball falling from the sky. It was possible that I sprinted home and called the cops or maybe not. When nick was 7, cell phones was not as an everyday thing like the current iphones. It became a pretty big event with the flashing lights and people staring. Good thing bumping your head on a pole cannot kill you.

Nick told me that they gave him orange juice. Silly hospital and their plans to take every penny from you, they charged 50 dollars for an ambulance ride from south shore to the hospital and orange juice. Either the orange juice is expensive or the gas was not gas but nitro. Insurance does not really help with even though they have monthly fees.

So, in the end, we did not get ice cream but nick did acquire a scar that will be with him for the rest of his asian life. The scar is nothing special, not even Harry Potter’s thunder bolt shape, but a plain straight line. From time to time, I would look at it and reminisce of childhood that is slowly fading away. . .

[CE] A decade after 9/11

This is my first Current Events post so my experience with this is none. I decided to write about this video about 9/11 because it is coming up soon. 9/11 is one of those events where people say you know where you were back then because it was so important like the assassination of JFK but unfortunately I do not know where I was. Here is the video:

This video says that although it has been an entire decade since this disastrous event, New Yorkers are still worried about another attack. This feeling can be easily related to especially because we are Californians. Although I was not alive during the 1906 or 1989 earthquakes, even minor earthquakes scare me.

Professor John Mueller states,

” Americans only have a one in 80,000 chance of being killed in a 9/11-type attack in an 80 year period.”

This statistic is probably based on the amount of people killed during 9/11 and divided by the total population. I don’t really side with this professor because another 9/11 could be of equal or potentially deadlier damage. It all really depends on where the terrorists are aiming at. Also, if they use a nuclear weapon, thousands of people will not be immediately killed but they will have plenty of aftereffects.

It is said that 75 billion is used for airport security and is that all really needed? Some procedures at the airport make citizens feel uncomfortable, especially when there is full body touching. Maybe the countries of terrorists should pay some reparations for damages done. When we were little kids and we broke something at a store, didn’t our parents have to pay fines?

This 9/11 is in four days. We should be alert about our surroundings but being paranoid would not be good. Don't worry. . . USA is strong

[free]Senior Schedule

Wow, I cannot believe that it is senior year already. I never knew high school would go by so fast. Homework could be an important factor that helps time go by faster because you are more preoccupied. Well since it IS senior year ( woot 2012!!!), I decided to reward myself of what I would call a dream schedule. I currently am taking Ap computer science and Ap Calculus along with a 0-4^th period schedule and I TA one period. Last but not least, I also have pretty chill teachers for almost all my classes. One of the counselors but not my own counselor warned me about this schedule because colleges might not like the fact that I only have 4 real classes while other schools like O’Dowd have 6 or 7. With great power comes great responsibility, right? I will try to bump up my average SAT score about 100 more points and hopefully that will balance out the fact that I only have 4 periods. GPA and SAT are a lot more important in college applications most likely because they seem very biased.

This year will be the last year I get to be with my dear Charlene (she is a Junior) so I should use some of this extra-time to be with her. I need to balance out girlfriend and school at the same time, also mixing some tennis in so I don’t go mentally insane. I hope myself good luck! I will defeat you! Mock Congress, Portfolio, College Applications, SAT, financial aid will just be only minor obstacles, it just depends on how you view it.