I finally understand WJ's frustration with his research. I remember him complaining to me once about a paper from Michigan which was so sketchy that it took him forever to understand and replicate what it suggested. In addition he even found some errors and emailed the authors. The reply that came was they were going to correct the errors in a future paper.

So this paper that I am supposed to read for a homework sounds really good, until I start doing the math which turns out to be extremely confusing and hardly as easy as the paper made it to be. Oh well, I suppose I should not be surprised. Otherwise everyone will be designing circuits based on just one paper =p

ST Main Page

I know this comment will reflect really badly of me. But this picture of a foreign beauty in a tube + old man + giggling schoolgirls really tickled me...

Short Update

School has been going pretty well. If I do drop that infuriatingly-incomprehensible lithography class and just audit it, this quarter will become even better. My week effectively ends on Friday, since the Friday sections can either be watched or are infrequent. In addition, there is only one class on Mon and no class on Wed!

Now, if only I have the means to do something more fun with the time than bum around in Stanford. Oh well, I shall go take comfort in reading a totally brainless fantasy storybook now.

Case of the Disappearing Article

So the following article was on STI for a while, and promptly disappeared a few hours later. Thought that I will post it here for record sake. The actual link is here.

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Singapore PM's salary stuns White House Official

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A senior White House official on Tuesday admitted he was floored by the news that Singapore's prime minister earned five times more than US President George W. Bush.

"I'm going to emigrate and run for office in Singapore," the official said on condition he be identified only as "a senior administration official who sits in disbelief after reading that story."

On Monday, the Singapore government had announced a fresh 25.5 percent pay hike for Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, boosting his salary to 2.05 million dollars per year.

Bush gets paid 400,000 dollars per year for doing his job, according to the White House.

Combined with personal investment income, he and his wife Laura reported 618,694 dollars in taxable income in the 2005 fiscal year. They had to pay 187,768 dollars in federal taxes.

But maybe Bush shouldn't feel so bad. The Singaporean's paycheck is eight times fatter than Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's.

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I wonder if Bush feels consoled by the last fact.

ST News

Media paints a bad image of S'pore, but people here know better

THE Western media paints Singapore as a place where individual freedoms are restricted, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew said in Sydney on Wednesday, but businessmen and talented people working in the country know better, he told the Singapore media.....

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Unfortunately my EDB account seems to have expired.... damn. I sure would have loved to hear what and how people in Singapore know better.

Glorious Weather & Floating Abominations

The weather has been great the past few days; lots of sun and yet cool enough to walk without much sweating. Late yesterday afternoon, we decided to pay the Dish a visit. The Stanford Dish is a large satellite at the top of a hill. The area surrounding it is supposedly a Mountain Lion habitat area, and is also open to the public as a recreational area. Many people hike/jog up the hill. Some random pictures...

Strange Straw Figures at the Dish

One of the many squirrels

We wanted to walk all the way to the Dish until we realized that it was a 3.5 miles trek. We gave up and made our way to this other place called Vista Point. The drive was only 12 miles but took almost 30 minutes because it was an extremely winding road. It would have been perfect for some Initial D racing at night....

Anyway, Vista Point had a fantastic view of the Bay area. If only the drive was more pleasant...

Nice Clouds at the Horizon

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The glorious weather also brings with it new life in the form of floating caterpillars (eeeek!). I started noticing them towards the end of last quarter, and now they are everywhere! They float down from trees in the dozens on little spidery threads and drift in the wind. If I didn't know, I might even mistake them for spiderwebs. Absolutely disgusting... I ended up walking off the shaded pavement most of the time because I did not want to walk into the caterpillars.

I hope they turn into butterflies soon and disappear from the paths. Or maybe when school starts, the human traffic will help clear them. Muahahaha.

Random Chatter

One thing about Stanford that really impresses me is its efficiency (or perhaps inhumanely tight academic schedule). Final exams can be graded and final grades decided within a week. Typical mid-terms only have a turnover of one weekend. Perhaps Cornell was just inefficient?

Grades for this quarter ended up better than expected. In some sense I am happy that all the work paid off. Interestingly, the first A+ I got in an EE class comes from my CS architecture class. Maybe this is a sign that I should take the next class in the series. Maybe it is a sign that I am more suited for architecture than circuits.

Anyway, I am not as happy as I thought I will be, nor as happy as I might have been in the past. Maybe expectations are changing eh? I remember TT telling me that after winter break, he realized that grades aren't that important. I cannot remember what he said was important though.

Been trying to plan my parents' trip this June. We should be visiting Vancouver and the Rocky Mountains. I was looking at some online tour package which looked quite promising. But I just noticed that it departs on Friday. Darn.. we were going to arrive on Mon or Tue. Maybe we will end up driving ourselves.

Let's see what I have been doing the past few days. Vacuumed the house. Placed a fix-it request to fix the living room lights. Played with the new MacBook Pro and sent it in for repairs today (the trackpad seems a tad strange so I decided to get it replaced). Cooked kong ba for last night's potluck dinner. Watched American Idol last night for the first time; it was pretty entertaining. Filled up the tax forms (should be getting a few hundred dollars back.. yeah!). Ah finally hopped onto the Facebook bandwagon.

Things left to do: settle next quarter's classes, buy textbooks, write a few postcards/cards, check up on IEEE membership, order cap+gown for graduation, apply for graduation, and confirm my air ticket back to Sg.

Is this for Real?!

56-year-old Mabel Ong held up as example during Budget Statement

56-year-old Mabel Ong stepped into the limelight in Singapore's Budget on Thursday.

She was held up as an example of how many Singaporeans have a positive attitude when it comes to work and skills upgrading.

And she is one of those who will benefit from the help the government is providing to low income workers.

The mini-bar supervisor earns $800 monthly and lives with her elderly mother in a three-room flat.

Even though grateful for the extra money, Mabel said she would rather not receive any hand-outs.

"I am happy... but I think I better upgrade myself, so that my salary increment will be bigger and I'll get more pay, then I can spend more happily. Don't wait for others to help you, but earn it yourself," said Mabel, a mini-bar supervisor at Oriental Hotel.

Source: CNA

My Birth Date

After this week ends, there will only be four weeks of classes left, which will then be followed by the finals. Time sure flies by here... I just had a (semi-disastrous) midterm last night, keeping my fingers crossed on that one. Tomorrow morning will be my last midterm. Yeah! Then it will be time to continue working on my parallel BTree code...

Anyway, I was reading the ST this morning and noticed that we are going to get the full GST hike at one go. Of all dates, it has to fall on my birthday. Come to think of it, July 1st seems like a pretty popular date. Let me try to recall what else happened on that date...

1. Hong Kong becoming part of China
2. SAF day.
3. hmm.. can't remember anymore haha.. I thought that was more.

Wikipedia has a full list anyway... Interesting read..

Intel Announces 45nm Transistors! + other news

The biggest news the past week, in my opinion at least, was Intel's announcement of the next generation 45nm transistors (hurrah!). It was quickly followed by a similar announcement from the IBM alliance, which includes Intel's arch-rival AMD, and I believe Toshiba as well.

I am not sure if it's just me, but I felt that there was a lot of 'fanfare' surrounding the whole thing; I mean, I hardly noticed the advent of the 65nm node. So I thought I noticed the news because I had grown more geeky and started reading eetimes. Then my professor came into class one day and commented about the huge media coverage.

Anyway, I thought it was all very exciting, but I shan't bore the non-EEs with the details.

On another note, I found the absurdity of certain media reports (including our very own ST) very entertaining and hilarious at times. But first, here's a good one which is largely correct:

"...Each company said it has devised a way to replace problematic but vital materials in the transistors of computer chips that have begun leaking too much electric current as the circuitry on those chips gets smaller...

Technology experts said it is the most dramatic overhaul of transistor technology for computer chips since the 1960s and is crucial in allowing semiconductor companies to continue making ever-smaller devices that are also energy-efficient."

And here is a hilarious one:

"...However, past the 65nm barrier, the silicon used to manufacture critical elements of the switches known as gate dielectrics no longer performs as it does at larger scales.As a result, currents passing through the transistors leak and reduce the effectiveness of the chip.To prevent this, researchers have had to develop new materials to contain the current at such small scales. The class of silicon substitutes are known as high-k metals... (emphasis mine)"

Now I found that absolutely hilarious; there is no such thing as high-k metals, just high-k dielectrics. Some other reports I read claimed that the new transistors replaced silicon dioxide with metal! That is replacing an insulator with a conductor, which doesn't make any sense.

Anyway, from what I have read so far, it seems like the new innovation is to replace the polysilicon gate with a metal gate, and replace the silicon dioxide with a high-k dielectric (hafnium oxide). So there, if that was confusing, it must have confused the poor journalist writing the article...

Alright, enough whining about inaccurate reporting. Now for a quick update..

I have been really busy the past few weeks (as evident from the dearth of posts). Classes have been heavy, but mostly enjoyable so far. This past week has been particularly rough, I think my sleep cycle has been shifted permanently from sleeping at 12-ish to sleeping at 1-ish or 2. I just completed a programming assignment due Mon, three homeworks due Wed, and one homework due Thu. I still got one more assignment due Thu that shouldn't take too long.

But, there is no time to relax... Two midterms next week, another two the week after (also CNY week). That's excluding all the weekly homeworks... sigh. Thinking about it makes me tired. I shall get to bed now. Hope that I will update again soon. =)

First Post (again)

Deleted the blog a few weeks back, and now it is revived. It is largely due to the new blogger interface; you just can't keep an engineer away from trying out a new interface.

So far, the new interface has been really intuitive and easy to use. Most of the features from wordpress that I really like are available and much easier to use on blogger. Kudos to the google team!

More entries to come (hopefully on a regular basis).