Well since it was the beginning of the end of the my last quarter, I been making the most out of the time I have left.  Spent spring break in Silicon Valley with a whole bunch of friends visiting engineering companies.  Spending your holiday with your friends, is the best way to spend it, especially if it is over a drink 🙂  But yeah, we visited several companies, and I think my favorite work environment was Google, since everything was so colorful and lively, my favorite place I absolutely love to work for is Microsoft (the Xbox division) in Silicon valley, but being realistic, I wouldn’t be able to make it into these companies as easily, since they love programmers better than EEs.  But realistically I enjoyed the work done at SRI International.  It used to be part of Standford University, but it broke off, and I was particularly interested in the signal processing work studying the auroras in the northern lights.  Well I loved the infrastructure of Google!  It’s so creative!!!  Especially the British-style red Google-voice telephone booth (and you can make real phone calls!)

Well, shortly after that… I had no time to even play any of my games on my new Nintendo DS I just brought, when school decided to start again, been playing Pokemon Black and Golden Sun: Dark Dawn.  I’ve gotta admit, GS:DD storyline isn’t as epic as the original GSs but I enjoy the upgraded game play enhancements on the DS (graphics and such).  I love the puzzles in the game as always…. but sometimes I’ll be stuck for an hour trying to get around a rock…can get frustrating.  Anyways I’ve been trying to get super involved since I’m leaving in June, I gotta make most out of my 10 weeks left.

Danny McBride in the Sunglasses and gray shirt

Where the premiere was

1st Friday of the quarter, UCSB won a competition to bring the 1st ever movie premier of  Your Highness at your college campus.  So they had a ‘party’ with free food, and cast appearances from the movie, and a autograph session.  I could care less about the actors…Danny McBride, and James Franco who came that day, I would have been more excited for Natalie Portman (she was pregnant at the time). Anyways I saw the movie, since I was able to get a ticket…by waking up one morning in spring break, checking the event, and watched the live interview with Danny McBride (he answered my twitter question: “Was the movie filmed in Giants Causeway”!), and the RSVP page updated.  The first showing sold out in 10 minutes within the page went online! Well here are a few pictures from the premiere.  When James Franco came out on stage all the girls were crazy about him.  Sorry about the blurry pic, I was sitting on the front row, and I didn’t want to get kicked out for taking pictures.

Front Row shot of Danny McBride (in the gray and jeans) and James Franco (in the suit)

Spent the rest of that weekend at a SHPE RLDC conference, and a dance at the end.  Did some ‘real’ dancing with a guy I met (not any of that club dirty dancing stuff).  Next day, I ended going shopping all day, and ended with a delicious Turkish dinner, that my Turkish friend made for me.  Unfortunately there wasn’t any Turkish delight to finish off the night, but a delicious dinner!

Well the first ever UCSB- College of Engineering GEEK week occurred during the week of April 4th-April 8th 2011, where all 5 engineering majors in the college battle it out in many competitions to see who’s the best major.  I have to say, we had lots of enthusiastism from the EEs before the event, but not alot of them showed up to events due to class conflict and projects and such.  I had to be the EE representative at almost every event.  Unfortunately… we just get more work than the other engineering majors.  Here are a few group pictures from all the competitions: so the EEs didn’t win, the ChEs did.

Kick ball: ME vs EEs

Egg drop event

Tug of war tournament

4-way Capture the flag (the EEs didn’t have a team 😦 )

Fencing started picking up, I decided to go to fencing club practice for once, this past Friday (since I said I wanted to go since last year).  Pretty intense, everyone was very good.  But I hope to get better too.  Starting to enjoy programming a bit more as I spent a whole Saturday writing a C++ program to solve a Sudoku puzzle. lol I’ll print out the program output later once i get the assignment done.  Ended my weekend karaoke-ing with some friends, and got me reminiscing about Ireland, since we were singing Irish drinking songs, and I think I’m gonna try out some Argentinean Tango, and Italian sword-fighting, and still want to play some guitar.  Yet, I think I’m off to Las Vegas this next weekend. I’m glad I have time to do these things now, start to have a social life, and actually experience college as it’s meant to be.  I’m glad that I didn’t overload myself this quarter with hard classes.