moral fiber

"Moral fiber. So, what is moral fiber?
It's funny, I used to think it was always telling the truth, doing good deeds, basically ... being a fucking boy scout.
But lately I've been seeing it differently.
Now I think moral fiber's about finding that one thing you really care about.
That one special thing that means more to you than anything else in the world.
And when you find her, you fight for her. You risk it all, you put her in front of everything, your future, your life, all of it.
And maybe the stuff you do to help her isn't so clean.
You know what? It doesn't matter. Because in your heart you know, that the juice is worth the squeeze.
That's what moral fiber's all about."

A speech of the main character in "The Girl Next Door", which I watched it tonight. I like it.

roommates

My roommates left LA tonight. They are going back to China and will come back after one year. I have been living with them in the same apt for more than two and half years. We were kind to each other, just like the members in a same family. I think I am lucky that I know many good friends here, especially my roommates. We never quarreled with each other and we helped each other a lot. I have a good memory with them.

Tomorrow my new roommates will move into this apt. They are also my good friends. A new life will start.

anonymous greeting

I just saw a msg on my guestbook, a greeting for my birthday. There's no name with it. I thought that it's from a friend I knew before. But the date shown is one day ahead of my b-day. It might come from my friend in China, but the time there was after midnight.

Anyway, I am happy to get the greeting, although I have no idea who sent it to me. Thanks to the friend and other friends.

candidate

It's an important day to me. I passed the ATC ("advanced to candidate", not "at the counter") exam this afternoon. It's one of the most important exams I have ever taken at UCLA. Now I have become one of the PhD candidate.

I worked on many projects before. But unfortunately I didn't make good enough performance and I didn't get good results. It came to last November that I started a new project. I got some interesting ideas with the help of my advisor and did some numerical experiments to prove it. I wrote a paper with my advisor and some other coworkers. Today I presented my work in the exam. To have a warm-up practice, I gave a talk at last week in a seminar.

The presentation is not so hard to me. But there're something unexpected happened. One committee member asked me some questions, which were not easy to explain clearly. I don't think that I gave perfect answers to him. My advisor helped me.

In the talk at last week I skipped some theoretical part in my paper. The reason I thought included: first the theoretical part was mainly done by my advisor and one coauthor, not by me, second is that it would take a long time to explain the theorems to the audiences. But today my advisor was so angry on me. He said I should not skip this part since it's very important in my work. He asked me to explain it on the blackboard.

The worst thing happened. I forgot the formulae. I should remember it since I used it many times. I don't know why I couldn't recall it during the presentation. Maybe I was too nervous. Although I found out everything eventually, my advisor was disappointed on me. After the exam he told me again: you should not skip your main contribution in the presentation, it's important to the committee.

He is right. I know. But there's no chance for me to retry. Because of this unexpected interruption, I couldn't finish all the slides. And another bad thing happened: my laptop ran out of battery! I thought the battery should be enough for the presentation, but it just ran out. What a world.

Thanks to the nice and patient committer members, who still gave me good evaluations, I passed the exam. And now I am a PhD candidate. I will be on a new stage towards my doctor degree and further career goals.

starting ...

A journal of JJ, starting from April 2004.

The domain name j-journal has already been taken by some other people. I have to choose journalj instead.