william chen my thoughts, ramblings, rants on this ever-changing world

Movies list

Suggested movies list (by my friend).
Bolded titles denote watched

• grease 1&2
• dirty dancing
• breakfast club
• breakfast at tiffanys
• sabrina
• sound of music
• pride and prejudice
• tale of two cities
• pretty woman
• princess bride
• knotting hill
• you got mail
• sleepless in seattle
• Armageddon
• when harry meets sally
• con air (nicholas cage)
• braveheart
• overboard
• ghost
• bodyguard
• you love me, you love me not
• crash
• city of angels
• gone with the wind
• west side story
• fiddler on the roof
• american beauty
• august rush

Book list

I have two lists: one is Strand 80, the other is books suggest by my girlfriend

Strand 80 (bold is I’ve read)

1. To Kill a Mockingbird , Harper Lee
2. Pride and Prejudice , Jane Austen
3. Great Gatsby , Scott F. Fitzgerald
4. Catcher in the Rye , J.D. Salinger
5. Atlas Shrugged , Ayn Rand
6. Fountainhead , Ayn Rand
7. Lord of the Rings , J.R.R. Tolkien
8. One Hundred Years of Solitude , Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9. Jane Eyre , Charlotte Bronte
10. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone , J.K. Rowling
11. Lolita , Vladimir Nabokov
12. 1984 , George Orwell
13. On the Road , Jack Kerouac
14. Gone with the Wind , Margaret Mitchell
15. Anna Karenina , Leo Tolstoy
16. Brothers Karamazov , Fyodor Dostoevsky
17. Crime and Punishment , Fyodor Dostoevsky
18. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn , Betty Smith
19. Slaughterhouse Five , Kurt Vonnegut
20. Ulysses , James Joyce
21. Kite Runner , Khaled Hosseini
22. Catch-22 , Joseph Heller
23. Grapes of Wrath , John Steinbeck
24. East of Eden , John Steinbeck
25. Sun Also Rises , Ernest Hemingway
26. War and Peace , Leo Tolstoy
27. Hobbit , J.R.R. Tolkien
28. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows , J.K. Rowling
29. Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay , Michael Chabon
30. Wuthering Heights , Emily Bronte
31. Prayer for Owen Meany , John Irving
32. Count of Monte Cristo , Alexandre Dumas
33. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass , Lewis Carroll
34. The Stranger , Albert Camus
35. Brave New World , Aldous Huxley
36. Little Women , Louisa May Alcott
37. Middlesex , Jeffrey Eugenides
38. Moby Dick , Herman Melville
39. The Alchemist , Paulo Coelho
40. Les Miserables , Victor Hugo
41. Tale of Two Cities , Charles Dickens
42. Anthem , Ayn Rand
43. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles , Haruki Murakami
44. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , Mark Twain
45. In Cold Blood , Truman Capote
46. Cat’s Cradle , Kurt Vonnegut
47. Love in the Time of Cholera , Gabriel Garcia Marquez
48. The Little Prince , Antoine De Saint-Exupery
49. The Time Traveler’s Wife , Audrey Niffenegger
50. Invisible Man , Ralph Ellison
51. Unbearable Lightness of Being , Milan Kundera
52. Bell Jar , Sylvia Plath
53. World According to Garp , John Irving
54. Middlemarch , George Eliot
55. To the Lighthouse , Virginia Woolf
56. The Poisonwood Bible , Barbara Kingsolver
57. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban , J.K. Rowling
58. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix , J.K. Rowling
59. Old Man and the Sea , Ernest Hemingway
60. Ender’s Game , Orson Scott Card
61. Bleak House , Charles Dickens
62. Beloved , Toni Morrison
63. Great Expectations , Charles Dickens
64. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius , Dave Eggers
65. Fight Club , Chuck Palahniuk
66. Sound and the Fury , William Faulkner
67. Mrs. Dalloway ,Virginia Woolf
68. The Giver , Lois Lowry
69. The Master and Margarita , Mikhail Bulgakov
70. Blindness , Jose Saramago
71. Life of Pi , Yann Martel
72. Madam Bovary , Gustave Flaubert
73. Where the Wild Things Are , Maruice Sendak
74. Chronicles of Narnia , C.S. Lewis
75. Odyssey , Homer
76. The Da Vinci Code , Dan Brown
77. Franny and Zooey , J.D. Salinger
78. A Wrinkle in Time , Madeleine L’Engle
79. Everything is Illuminated , Jonathan Safran Foer
80. The Picture of Dorian Gray , Oscar Wilde
81. The Handmaid’s Tale , Margaret Atwood

Suggested reading list:

• The Iron Dragon’s Daughter , Michael Swanwick
• Hammered, Scardown, Worldwired, Dust , Elizabeth Bear
• Interpreter of Maladies , Jumpa Lahiri
• The Great Gatsby , F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Lady Oracle , Margaret Atwood
• Memoirs of a Geisha , Arthur Golden
• Hannibal , Thomas Harris
• Typical American , Gish Jen
• Dragons of Babel , Michael Swanwick
• Wicked , Gregory MacGuire
• His Dark Materials series , Phillip Pullman
• Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister , Gregory MacGuire
• Jane Eyre , Charlotte Bronte
• Rebecca , Daphne du Maurier
• poems , T.S. Eliot (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and The Wasteland)
• Replay , Ken Grimwood
• Scar Night , Alan Campbell
• The Invisible Man , Ralph Ellison

Summer ‘09 to do’s

There is a ton of things I’d like to try, do, and finish.

Academics

• understand UC Berkeley’s CS70 Discrete Mathematics and Probability Theory notes
• watch Stanford’s free iTunesU iPhone coding lectures

CS related

• go through Facebook puzzles, USACO challenges
• study for Microsoft’s Dreamspark free certification testing
• get comfortable with vim

Readings

• read Nanshi
• read through my book list

Misc.

• watch through my movies list
• get started with learning Japanese
• build an iPhone app
• learn how to play a guitar
• read Strobist’s Lighting 101
• play around my new 2-umbrella set

DreamHost for $10 a year

Get it while it’s hot!

With the code “777″, I switched from NearlyFreeSpeech.net to DreamHost today. You might remember my rant a few months back about running my 10 or 20 MB blog for 3 cents a day (or $10.95 a year). Now, I have unlimited storage and bandwidth for $9.24!

Woot!! Thank you, Memorial Day.

I’m a poker player

…according to Google.

You know how some people say potential employers will search your name, find out what kind of person you are? Well, I was just looking to see if Google indexed my blog, and I was surprised that, first of all, Google autocorrected my “chen” for “chan” and “william” for “bill”, and second, a ton of people are called “william chen”. From PhDs to poker player (world series!).

Haha, now I kinda wish I have some exotic name.

I have food!

When you’re in a city like College Station, there’s not a lot of things you can get excited about. Not only that, but if you want to buy something, it’s kinda a hassle. Aaand, that’s why I love Amazon.

I bought some instant noodles from Amazon, and although I looked like a weirdo riding a bicycle with a huge Amazon box in my hand (I had to pick it up from Kinko’s), I’m still happy nonetheless.
Introducing, sesame chicken flavored instant noodles (to my stomach),

And it’s the Taiwan kind too!