So I decided to take some time, and while re-reading, to make commentaries on all this output that I've produced over the years and see how the Mark Wang of 2002 views them.
Believe it or not, there's actually some gems I unearthed reading my past entries that find their expression in the form of my entires -- the slow and gradual kindling of my desire for missions. My first slam and being slammed for the first time. A foreshadowing of JBB and jack.html. Passion and energy. Bitterness and hatred. Seeing how my view, my emotions and my attitudes have changed over the years -- even the limited glimpse that these pages provide -- I find quite interesting. I don't know -- it really made me think a lot of where I've come from. I must admit, some of those early thoughts of mine do look pretty dumb in today's context, and yet there are some gems that I wrote that I think I still totally agree with today.
It took quite some time for me to write all of this up, but I'd like to see at least a few other jack.html members do something similar to this and see what they come up with.
So, be forewarned -- there's a lot to digest here. And now, in the spirit of the commentaries present on DVD movies, the RSG entries and Keith Lee slams, I present -- my meta thoughts of 1995-2001!
Who will finish their travelogues first, Dave or myself? Anyone want to
place bets? =)
One of my regrets as far as my Stanford academic career goes is not having
been more proactively a participant in
the affairs of the CS department, because I really do think that there's
some room for improvement, as partially described in this thought, even if
we are Stanford. =)
Also, no matter how we Stanfordites might think, the fact is that a lot of
Berkeley people are as bright -- if not brighter -- than Stanford folk,
and attended Berkeley simply because by choice, or due to the fact that
the Stanford admissions office screwed up in their assessments.
People like Ben, Andy, Eric Mao, Brian Lee (and those are just the
Berkeley CS folks I know) prove it and have sort of
shattered the elitist view that us Stanford students sometimes
like to have about our brethren across the Bay.
Also, I don't think I emphasized this enough when I originally wrote
that thought, even more thankful for friends that slam me to do good, eg,
Dave Hong slamming me personally for my thoughts and actions during my
"bitterness/hatred/pissed off" episode last year. I think I've always
been "tender" in that I've displayed a sensitivity and aversion to
critiscism, but now
that I think about it, I'm sure that it's because of my own "inertia" to
change things, out of a prideful and selfish heart. I've certainly
learned many lessons about that recently, so yeah, thanks to those who
care about me to correct me.
One final thing: For some reason, I wrote this in Wordpad on my computer,
and quotation
marks and apostrophes didn't get included when I pasted the text into pico
on UNIX. So that was a bit irritating. Darn Microsoft.
Oh well, Napster is dead anyways. Happy, Danny? =) Long live Gnutella!
I guess Danny and I just differ
on where that line lies that divides rational prudence from
irrational paranoia, and I'm cool with that -- there are
probably more important
things in the world to debate about anyways.
Seriously though, I was and still am a believer in the tentmaking model,
and I think what
(probably misleadingly) drew me to the consulting world was the chance to
TRAVEL! Nevermind that all the seasoned consultants HATE travel, and you
might just as well get sent to Cleveland Ohio, as you might get sent to
Hong Kong or London. But I was kind of starry-eyed delusional about the
whole consulting thing.
Oh well, I learned a lot about what consultants really do, especially
since in my current work, I'm responsible for building the products that
consultants recommend to their clients, so I guess I should understand the
other parts of the foodchain that my company sits in.
The main purpose of the latter part of this thought was to respond
to Danny's thoughts about me
mentioning my China trip in my resume, though (see above).
Of note is that this is the first of my thoughts pages that my pastor,
Sam Shin, read. He emailed me about it, and I was actually
quite surprised.
Of course, as described above, I did find out the reality of the
consulting life, and so I'm glad at least I took the initiative of finding
out what they actually do.
I was kind of in a anti-US phase as well, having experienced Singapore in
all its splendor. Well, I guess that's the wrong way to
put it, since after all, I was born in America and I love the country for
all its shortcomings. But I really do admire people like Keith, etc
who've lived abroad for extended periods of time, just for their sometimes
interesting perspective.
It really does give you an extra frame or frames of reference having lived
abroad, as I discovered, having spend a scant six weeks in Asia, and I
would like to raise a family at least partially abroad, whether serving as
a "real" missionary or not, just so we all gain a better appreciation of
and more holistic view of
the world.
Well since then, jack.html and JBB have
pretty much taken on that role, so this project is indefinitely on hold...
Ahhh... the lives of us losers. =)
The Sony Praystation was just something I dreamt up. Worship in churches,
etc. do seem to be getting more visually stimulating. Whehter that's a
good thing or bad thing -- I'm not sure.
Also, on re-reading this thought, I think that the juxatposition of the
relatively earnest/serious thought about missions and the silly one about
the "PrayStation" sort of made fo an emotional discontinuity, and it
probably should have gone into a thought of its own. Oh well, that's why
we have short thought pages, I guess.
However, this was also the first thought in which I explicitly expressed a
desire to go on missions that summer, so it's significant to me personally
in that regard.
I also tried to get a new term going, "Suburban" that would hopefully
sweep jack.html thought pages. I didn't actually coin
it, I think Dave Chu did. Basically, if you don't get it, it's a take on
"ghetto". Ghetto -- suburban, get it? =) Oh well, that seems to have
fizzled too.
BTW, the N64 emulator that I was referring to is UltraHLE. It's sadly
been discontinued by the authors, but Google will easily bring you to
sites to download it.
Oh yeah, I should also explain the "Justin Chang == Rich Mullins" bit. In
our discipleship group, Justin talked a lot about Rich Mullins. We were
going over Richard Foster's book, Celebrations of Discipline, one time,
which Rich Mullins read (or at least much of the ideas on simplicity
etc. were the same as those espoused by Mullins in his own lifestyle).
We listened to the Rich Mullins interview/tribute that some Christian
radio
station played shortly after his death. Then, we all made the observation
that
Justin was a lot
like Rich Mullins, both in his spiritual perspectives on worldly success,
etc, but also his voice! Man, if you heard Justin talk, there's no way
you could disagree! =)
Also, quite significantly. this was where I first espoused the idea of a
web community directed
primarily towards
Asian-American Christians long before there was a JBB, and I daresay,
before Henry had even thought of the idea (but I do welcome any
corrections to the contrary).
I guess it was kind of like Vannevar Bush in 1949 who wrote a paper
describing the modern concept of hypertext, and the web. Heh. =)
It was sort of
like those
assignments you sometimes got in elementary/junior high English class
where you're given a list of random things/words and asked to write a
coherent story incorporating all of them.
Not surprisingly, this page gets
quite
a lot of random hits by people searching for themselves or their
friends. Heh heh.
SN: the craziest VB 1999 rumor that I heard was that Ohms was going to go
to the dance with
Pastor Harold. Oh my!
Well, of course, the condition, I set to myself, if Paul Lee goes, I'll go
didn't pan out, at least not in 1999. Of course, 2000 saw Paul making his
VB debut, but then, everyone knew the "new and improved" Paul was going to
go anyways, so it wasn't the watershed event it would have been had he it
a few years earlier. =) I love you Paul! Hee hee.
As for the blind date idea, well, I'd still like to see it tried out. =)
Well, I did end up going to VB that year (1999) with a (non-blind)
date, and I
really did enjoy it.
And yeah, there was nothing interesting, let alone "juicy" or
"scandalous" discussed at all.
To set the issue straight, I did indeed have a specific person in mind
when I wrote the response. So, if you want to find out this tidbit...
you'll just have to drop me an email! I'm pretty open on this page
compared to others --
but not that open... hee hee. =)
Anyways, there was a lot of P&E. So much that I think I got "drunk" on
that P&E and did some stupid things. Well, it was pretty fun
nevertheless, and Desiree enjoyed it the most, so it was still something
to remember.
Besides that, this is a hodgepodge of thoughts involving things as
disparate as starting one's own company, data mining, Calvinist theology,
Catholicism, unity on campus, etc. Yikes, talk about thought page bloat.
I wonder if anyone has actually read this thought page all the way
through.
Yeah, I was definitely having bitterness, hatred, and being pissed
off when I wrote this email. It seems my temper can be a problem,
even if I don't usually express it externally. Oh well. SN mainly for
John
Yoon: This was the only time that I've cussed in a thoughts page of mine
as well.
It also reads as if I'm dissing HRAACF -- which I'm not. Right now, I'm
personal friends with Jimmy Quach, one of the current staffers, and Tom
Lin, who basically got the whole thing off the ground, and I have nothing
but the highest respect for them, their fellowship and the many Harvard
people that I know who are/were members of it. So yeah, don't get me
wrong.
Well, anyways, the core issue of people falling away from the faith in
college is
something that still I think about a lot. And indeed, FiCS is by no means
devoid of this problem. Again won't mention any names, but I'm sure
you can figure some out.
Why is this? I have no idea really, since I experienced (in an overall
sense) nothing but closer growth and a renewed understanding of my God
and faith in my college fellowships. I would find it fascinating to
talk with someone and see what their motivations are for growing apart.
I think that a sense of God's reality in my life was finally starting to
creep into me then, especially after the relative dryness and dullness of
the first two quarters of my junior year, in which I never even saw the
rest of my draw group, let along my other brothers and sisters in Christ,
and so I was writing pretty heartfelt stuff like "Won't you change us,
Lord?"
Also, I wrote my first thought re: missions in this thought. Really
interesting, in a good way, how much my thoughts and attitudes have
changed, eh? Of course, that was what I really felt at the time, and
indeed, I would probably not have liked the missions field overseas had I
been placed there then. But yeah, God really changes people!
As far as the ASSU elections go, there was nothing really spectacularly
insightful in my opinions, as they are probably shared by many other
people on campus.
Also, I made my first bold claim that my IV frosh group was the equivalent
of
the infamous Donner party. It of course wasn't the last that I
would make such a claim. Apparently, no one slammed me the first time
though.
=)
Anwywas, I was a big
poser then (and sort of still am now =P) just copying what people said and
did, I guess.
So anyways, I decided to think about that issue a bit, and see how our
"buzzwords" defined our identity on the individual and on the fellowship
level. Anyways, re-reading this thought, it was basically a whole lot of
nothing: a lot of observations on our FiCS lingo, but no real conclusions
as to whether or not they detracted from FiCS and overall interfellowship
unity. A lot of it was motivated by my observation that FiCS doesn't
participate in this kind of stuff like say, CCC or Harvest. But the
language probably isn't the reason, since every fellowship it seems has
its own subculture.
I still believe though that in leading worship at "interfellowship"
events, that INDIVIDUAL fellowships should lead, rather than having one
big composite worship team. It's kind of like taking the Berlin
Philharmonic, Metallica, and Celine Dion, putting them together, and
asking them to perform Beatles songs. By the way, you can
still quote me on
that. =)
The link is to a video of Cat doing just that, although the actual
video got deleted when the FiCS server got hacked into. It's
probably for the better that it did. =)
I've always wondered what would happen if people started doing that move
at Viennese Ball, or just busting out into ghetto dancing in general.
Hmmm. =)
The one notable thing was my commentary on computer games. In those days,
3D cards were just starting to hit the consumer market. The really only
viable option if you wanted robust, capable 3-D performance was to get an
SGI workstation or something of that class. So, I thought to myself --
hey, wouldn't the SGI just make a killer platform for 3D games (which at
the time were just starting to appear on PC, and were by today's
standards, crude to say the least. Remember, this is before 3D cards were
big). So, basically my hope was that SGI would adopt and court computer
game makers to develop for their platform, and perhaps SGI could make a
move into the home. Well, we all know that 3Dfx and NVidia instead bought
the 3D over to the PC, and SGI is now hating it. Well, I must say, the
SGI boxes still beat out any PC case even today. Oh well.
Andrew Wong was actually pressuring me to finish this thought so he could
read it. I'm glad you liked it. =)
The dream I can still remember vividly. I'm still waiting for David Tay's
debut album to take the world by storm.
I usually never ever revise a thoughts page after I "publish"
it, but for some reason, I couldn't resist doing a doctored
photo of Henry and the Singaporean guys. Why Henry though? I have no
idea -- I think it was because I found a picture of Henry with the
other guys (Dave Tay, Alvin Chan, Joseph Gan) and it was convenient for
cutting and pasting heads.
So it's probably no surprise that other people might have had trouble
browsing my page as well...
So as you might have surmised, I had wanted to go with Joan to my senior
prom. She ended up
going with someone else (yes, that picture of "me" and her together in
formal dress was doctored) but yeah, she's incredibly smart and
independent, in a good way, so I wouldn't be surprised if she'd actually
do what she did in my dream. =)
Anyone? Anyone?
I think it really addresses the issue of the importance and the purpose of
interfellowship
unity than why I specifically decided to go with FiCS vs. IV. The latter
I don't think I've ever addressed in a thoughts page, but basically, I
felt that the more social structure of FiCS fulfilled more what I was
looking for personally and spiritually, so yeah, nothing against IV or its
members -- just a personal/personality thing, I guess. Rhapsody, of
course, eventaully became Mac OS X.
Sadly, the finger daemons themselves nowadays seem to be turned off on
many
Stanford servers, including cs and leland. Goodbye .plan files, we'll
miss ya!
Well, I think my first travelogue stalled because after the flight, for
the first two days in Singapore, I really didn't do anything that
interesting other than shopping around Orchard Road and vicinity and
spending time wiht my aunt and uncle. Maybe I'll skip to Friday when I
first ventured to Malaysia, or Sunday when I met up with David Tay and a
bunch of his friends.
I sadly don't think anyone in my high school reads this page anymore. But
still, it pains me to see that in a lot of ways, we're just another high
school now. We're definitely not a "travesty" as Danny might claim, but
still, in terms of where we excelled, such as technology integration into
the curriculum and our trailblazing work on the Internet have seem to
fallen by the wayside. I kind of just wrote this entry for myself to
let
off some steam, and to reminesce about those old, halycon days =)
These were thoughts that I had wanted to express publically one way or the
other, but I just couldn't find a time or place to do so. In any case,
Brian's entry gave me the reference point I needed to write about some of
my thoughts concerning CS education at Stanford.
This is sort of a personal introspection thought, sort of like
what Eric Yang might write about on his page. Anyways, as I said, even
though I'm a flaky friend at times, my friends have been the most visible
factor that led me to (re) discover Christ during my college years, and
I'm truly thankful for the people who saw someone beyond a goofy, dorky
freshman interested in CS. =)
This is my longest thoughts page so far, but I also think it's my most
sincere one where I kind of took a look back on how I got a
heart for missions up to now. Re-reading it, I do sound kind of
conceited though, like when I compare myself with Rich Mullins and
talk about my freshman IV small group, which I guess goes to show that
even missionaries
can and do suffer from the sin of pride. But yeah, I really thank God for
the people He placed and continues to place in my life (I'll probably
write a follow-up to this, possibly integrated with my upcoming
travelogues) that have given me
a heart to, God willing, eventually take the plunge and serve overseas,
hopefully somewhere in Asia.
I've really come to like the South for its unique charm and personality
-- certainly a break from the usual Silicon Valley lifestyle.
All the ACCC folks seem to be pretty cool as well.
Re-reading
this one, I think I sound too materialistic here, bragging about my digital
toys though. Oh well, I'm glad I got to put them to good use for my friends,
and I'm glad that Tim and Joyce enjoyed their little gift from me. Next
video project: Gloria and Ed, June 2001 -- and then, Danny
and Jieun Chai perhaps?!? Onward!
Danny's reply to this didn't agitate me as much as his last slam did, but
it still annoyed me, because for someone into technology and
Internet-related things as Danny is,
I'm surprised that he had old-school thoughts about music distribution and
fair use rights, because it seemed that he was just regurgitating record
company/RIAA propaganda without adding his own insight.
After Danny wrote his reply, I was going to write a rebuttal, but
was too lazy to (the story of my life). And anyways, like the China
resume issue, I'm cool with Danny's disagreement. I still wonder though,
if Danny has ever read Slashdot,
news.com, or any other technology-focused (not big
business/corporate focused) web site that tries to give a balanced picture
of the Napster debate (and the larger question about the rights of copyright
holders, of which Napster is only a small part of the larger
debate)
Nothing much to comment on here. This thought is just crying out
for a short thoughts page to inhabit.
Another thought that would have best gone on a short thoughts page.
This would have been a good candidate for a short thoughts page -- I wonder
why I never started one beore.
Well, as the name says, it was just another one of those surveys. The
most interesting thing I mention in that thought is the number which
continues to be my favorite to this day, Graham's
number! Move over small integers, and puny rationals. In fact, all
those
irrationals and even the mighty transcendentals out there don't
hold a
candle to Graham's Number!! (play majestic evoking music here...)
What was I on when I wrote that page? If anyone can answer
this for me, I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks.
I wrote this BEFORE the dot-bomb era, when working for a dot-com was the
ultimate status symbol, and was trying to see why God had led me to my
present company and not a pre-IPO dot-com, or McKinsey for that matter.
Seriously, when thinking of
the
companies that rejected me and feeling like crap, only to see those same
companys on the pages of f---edcompany.com later -- I
guess
that's sort of the same feeling you get when you miss a flight at the
airport, only to later find out that it crashed. Man, God is faithful.
This was certainly a unique thoughts "page". In fact, it wasn't
a static page at all, but a program that would randomly generate text
based on a regular (context-free, for the CS nerds out there) grammar
given it.
This was adapted from an assignment for CS107, the second or third programming
course in the CS sequence. Basically all I had to do was to tweak it slightly
to output the proper HTTP and HTML headers and stick it in my cgi-bin
directory.
It's currently down because I moved to another server, which runs a different
OS than the server I used at Stanford, and I'm just too lazy to recompile.
=)
I think this remains the most heated argument conducted via the
medium of web pages that I've engaged in with another jack.html member.
Fortunately, I think Danny and I have agreed to disagree on this one.
There is a difference between being concscious of security, and being
paranoid to the point of counterproductivity.
For instance, does
anyone really
think that the Chinese government dumb enough that they won't assume China
when they see the
phrase "East Asia"?
Believe it or not, I actually did seriously think about throwing my CS
education away and joining a consulting firm. What the heck was I
smoking? I think it was because Paul Lee did it, and was all gung-ho
about having the company send him to Korea where he could start the North
Korean McKinsey office or something and use that as an "inroad" for
missions. Yeah, typical Paul Lee. =)
How the heck does someone forget to put a patty in the burger?
We're not talking about something ancillary like pickles or
something, we are talking about the meat, something which defines
the essence of the object. Anger.
The consulting bug was starting to bite me, so I tried to play the
"expanding my horizons" card to rationalize it. I don't know -- at that
time, having just come back from missions, I felt like I just didn't want
to be another engineer, that's all.
When people say you can't live in California without a car, they're mostly
right.
So, when I had no car, I would often go to absurd extremes
to get
myself from
place to place. There are plenty more stories where this came from...
=)
And so I return after a four-month hiatus to the thoughts page scene.
Missions was truly awesome, and it was clearly where God wanted me that
summer. The trip afterwards wasn't all that bad either, especially
Singapore. And I must say,
Lt. David Tay's wedding reception still remains the most spectacular that
I've
been to. Not spectacular in the sense of having pure youthful FUN like
Gloria's, or elegant/classy
like Henry's -- I mean just technically spectacular with the ice
sculptures, fog action, Jurassic park theme, colored lighting -- as if you
were in Disneyland or something. Those crazy Singaporeans. =)
Originally, I had a Paul Lee-like vision of setting up sort of an
online
community where nerdy thought-page reading/writing Asian Christians could
hang out and associate. The term NaN derives from Gwen's
section of her
old page by the title of Nerdy Asian Network.
I was pretty psyched to find out that I was going to China that summer,
and so even I didn't know what would be in store for me, I was hoping
that my world would be rocked, and I wouldn't just come back having just
been in China without anything to show for it.
As I've said before, I truly believe that Danny writing about missions at
the exact time that I was sort of thinking about whether to go that summer
or not, was one of the final things that DID eventually lead me to choose
that
path. Sort of uncanny -- but praise God.
This thought contained my not-so-successful attempt to equate video games,
and specifically, video game aesthetics, with theology. Oh well, that's
why I'm not yearning to go to seminary just yet. =)
I admit that if someone read this page,
they might think of me as a "stalker". Anyhow, I forgot how
I stumbled onto the aforementioned gentleman's page in the first
place, but it was probably through Gwen, whom I followed from Keith's
page of course.
This one was pretty random and pointless. I think I simply wanted
to cram as many names
of random Asian-American Christians that I knew into a single page and
somehow connect them in some way. I could have quite
seriously incorporated many, many more names, but the connections
would be trivial (ie, I know them from fellowship X), and I just
wanted to focus on the more "interesting" links in this graph.
I was debating whether or not to go to Viennese ball. I had never seen
myself as the dance type, but I WAS also open to the time of spending a
fun time with friends, should a lot of friends end up going (which they
did of course -- FiCVB, baby!).
Paul's really a great brother to me. Who else would spend a whole night
with me in the basement of Sweet Hall during Winter Break, no less,
dubbing MD recordings of sermons?
(The reason why
we did this was because the SGI machines there had optical digital inputs
and Paul and I, being the gadget freaks we were and are, had to use the
digital path. This was before digital inputs became commonplace on PC
"consumer" sound cards).
This was just one of those survey thingies. Nothing really too scandalous
about the answers... except perhaps for my response to "What do you look
for in the opposite sex?"
What was MWS thinking when he wrote the lyrics "Love me good?"
'Cause in FiCS, there's several different kinds o' love. =)
I wrote this almost immediately after Desiree's "Gospel Show" dinner
thing. Pretty much the
entire FiCS and FiCB class of 1999 were there, as well as Pastor Harold,
Eugenie and Kenny, and a bunch of Desiree's drawmates and THEIR friends
like Joyce & Tim, Mimi & Tilden, etc... So yeah, it was a rather
random crowd to say the least.
This massive thought page holds some significance for me because I
think it was in this thoughts page that I expressed my first faint
glimmer of interest in the missions field and specifically,
China (scroll down to the section entitled "Enter the Dragon).
This is definitely one of the most (probably the MOST)
controversial thoughts pages I've written.
Even at the time, I was debating about whether to write this as an email
to the person, just as a journal entry to myself only, or post it on the
web. Anyways, if you know the person I'm writing about, it's pretty obvious
whom he or she is, even though I didn't mention his/her name.
I wrote this after the ACR while I was still quite blessed by it. To the
class of 98ers -- OK, you win this one. The 1998 ACR was really a blast
compared to the one that followed.
Henry, in his first ever slam to me, slammed my incessant usage of tense,
spice, etc. which I had "borrowed" from Chancellor Dave Hong. So I
slammed him back! Specifically, I slammed his claiming that his
thoughts page was NOT a thoughts page. =)
Of significance was that this was the first thought that I got
slammed on another thoughts
page ( Henry Hsu) on, at least explicitly. He claimed that I
had a distorted view of reality, which after re-reading this thought
page, I am sort of inclined to agree. =) I engage in a lot of
stereotypical generalizations about LA people, Atlanta people, and
FiCS itself without having too much argument to back it up. Anyways, I
knew nothing about relationships with the opposite gender back then
(not that I know much about it now =) ) so I was just spewing out
garbage, but at the time, that was what I was thinking, so it's
interesting to see how things have changed.
SN: I'm pretty sure that I started the trend of people checking their
web logs with Part I of this thought. Before this, no one was nerdy enough
to do so. So maybe I should be legitimately be credited with "stalking"
people... =P
Well, this was inspired by a FiCS large group we had, where Cat Chen gave
her testimony. At the end, we had a Q&A session, and someone asked
Cat if she could do the "Keith Lee thing"
Fall quarter junior year was probably THE toughest quarter in terms of
academic workload for me at Stanford. This pretty much explains my
absence of any thought page activity during that period of time, and also
why I just really talked about the classes that I took and what I learned
in them.
I did a lot of hard thinking and personal introspection in this thought
and a lot of it was from the heart. I consider this to be one of the best
written ones on this page. The skillful use of Macross Plus, the
flashbacks to high school, and my spring
("harmonic oscillator" -- hey, gotta embellish the thought page title
somehow!)
analogy I think is still pretty good -- compared to some of my thoughts in
1998 when I was just spewing out random crap.
Another random jumble of unrelated thoughts. I was one of the first
people to jump on the DVD bandwagon. Long before
Danny or any of the 420 James Road people started their DVD collection,
the Bob folks and myself
were enjoying those crystal clear movies (unfortunately, no surround sound
system to go with it) back in 1997.
I think Lorraine and I were having a friendly debate about which of our
majors was better. I basically just put up this thoughts page in response
to that. Actually, it was more or less just a cut and paste from some
other site on the web, with the majors changed of course. =) No real
original content here.
This page has generated by far the most random email to me. Perhaps it's
because I explicitly solicited feedback at the end, but in any case, it's
sort of encouraging to me.
Anyhow, yeah, I'm still waiting for this to happen. So -- anyone
interested in joining? =)
Back then, my web page went overboard with bells and whistles to the point
of absurdity. I had background music, Java applets, and a funky
Java-based graphical menubar that would light up when you moved the mouse
cursor over it. It was abosolutely insane. Danny actually stopped
reading my page until I took off the music, since he would often browse in
libraries and get a rude surprise.
So is it OK to fall asleep in Sleep and Dreams? I still don't know --
any hum bio people out there want to comment? =)
Nothing
really much here, just wanted to be annoying. =)
I basically attempted to write a Andrew Wong-esque page describing one of
my crazy dreams that I had. The main protagonist in that dream, Joan
Hwang (now Joan Hwang
Dunlop!!!) is one of the few high school friends that I still keep in
touch with, and whose friendship I think has actually gotten stronger in
college and even after her very recent marriage.
I must admit
that during my high school days, my relationship with her at times wasn't
motivated by the purest of
intentions, if you get my drift, but I'm
really thankful for what
a great thing God has done in both our lives, and I wish her all the best
in her new life. But enough about Joan for
now.
This was pretty lame and pointless. Nothing deep here either.
Nothing interesting here, except to say that Gus Hernandez came
across this thought and was pleased to find his email address
mentioned.
Well, hey, you gotta admit they did bear SOME resemblence during
sophomore year (when Keith
and Jimmy had pretty short shaved sides), if you looked at both of them from the side.
This was probably my first substantiative thoughts page,
basically written
out of a desire to give a sense of perspective to the question of differing
fellowships on campus, and why I personally had decided to go with FiCS
when I had been involved in IV before. At the time, I was pretty much
committed to FiCS (I had pretty much made the decision by Spring quarter
of freshman year, and officially "joined" FiCS/KCPC at the beginning
of sophomore year)
I actually adapted it from an email that I wrote to some of my friends.
I think most of the conclusions I drew are still pretty valid, judging
from the smiley-using habits of people I know.
Just a pretty random thought that came to me. This would have been an
excellent candidate for a short thoughts page.
Ah, my first thought. I actually wrote this in my .plan file in high school,
during August of 1995. Indeed, on the bottom, it even still has my old
high school email address on it. I was on both staffs during high school,
and I was frequently asked which group I liked better. By the beginning
of second semester of my senior year, I had pretty much formed my opinion,
but I kept it a secret to all those who asked, since I didn't want to
alienate anyone on the "less-favored" staff. So, after graduation,
I finally revealed my answer to a waiting world, which you can read above.
SN: In this web-based era, it looks like .plan files are pretty much dead
as a forum for online expression, at least among Stanford folks. I've
noticed that people from Harvard generally write more in their .plans
than in their thoughts pages. And of course, game authors seem to be upholding
the .plan file tradition very nicely as well.
Mark
Wang <mwang@cs.stanford.edu>
Last modified:
2002.1.20