I'm back (to my blog) :)

It's been a while since my last post :P

(sorry, folks, for not being updated)

The reasons why I disappeared from my blog are:

1. While I was in Thailand, I really had no time updating my blog. 

2. I was preparing for Mathematics (Numerical Analysis + Partial Differential Equations) and Computer Science qualifying exams. Preparing for three of them at once was quite a pain in the ass, taking almost all of my available time.

3. After the qualifying exams, I was busying with the research. Both coordinating with Monn and doing mine (trying to make some good progress).

However, here I am .... WOO HOO!!!

I finally managed sometime for my blog again.

Here are some of my updates:

I. I just received an e-mail stating that I passed both Math and CS qualifying exams :)

(Warning: too details contents. If you don't want to pay attention to the details, please skip)

I'm glad I passed both of them, since I really don't want to waste a lot of my time memorizing Numerical Analysis formulas and methods, practicing PDE and memorizing almost all of the well-known algorithms ever again!!! That's so harsh to me forcing my brain to record all these stuffs. In my opinion, even all PhD students need to be an expert (or something similar) in their fields, they need not to memorize a lot of stuffs. In reality, what they use are their aptitude, and their skills (analysis skills, creativity skills, etc.). So, qualifying exams should aim for evaluating those kind of stuffs. Oral qualifying exams would be a great option, as I think students will have more chances to communicate with the committee, convincing them that they really do know their stuffs. Open-book test would be another good choice, too, as students won't have to put much efforts in "memorizing" but "braining" stuffs. 

The tests I took were not so hard. First of all, the PDE, most of the problems were quite straight-forwarded. If I know, and understand, the method of solving various forms of PDEs, I can solve it :) Luckily, I knew them (credited to Monn, who show the light of understanding to me, while the freaking teacher cannot). The hardest part of the PDEs would be the integral. Imagine that you have to do integrate something like ∫x^2 sin(nπx) dx or ∫ cos(x) sin(nπx) dx in almost all of the problems, you may (or may not) go crazy. Lucky for me (again) that advance calculators are allowed in the exams in Louisiana Tech University. Students just have to show the proctor that the calculator memory was cleared. I used TI-89 titanium for this PDE exam, and I can easily passed :D One of my committee told me that I got 90+ from the PDEs. :D

The Numerical Analysis was not hard, too. Memorization is the most hardest part in this exams. What funny about this exam of mine is that I did not use the "programmable" capability of this calculator for solving numerical methods in the test :)

For Computer Science exam, it was too easy, so that I could easily do a lot of stupid mistakes. For example, one of the problems was "What is the notion of stack overflow and stack underflow". The problem before this one was something about programming language stuffs. So I was thinking too much in this problem, and then tried to describe the stack overflow error in programming. :P How dump I am!!! Luckily, in overall, I passed the test.

II. I was accepted as a student volunteer in Super Computing 2008 conference at Austin :D This time I will bring more free stuffs home.

III. One of the new professor offer the Parallel Algorithm class next quarter. Yeeee ha!!!! I am really glad to participate in this class.

IV. I am so sleepy right now -_- 

I will be busy as usual. Hopefully, I'll be able to update my blog more often.

Fug