a great Lunar New Year + meeting some famous people!

We had a good weekend as our family friends Jeff and Sheila invited us to a Lunar New Year lunch on Sunday at their house. Our last time celebrating the Lunar New Year with others was six years ago, so this was nice for a change. Another highlight is I got to meet a few famous people this week at UCSC. :-)

I was pretty busy during the weekend as I had a homework assignment for my error control coding class. However, the good news is I managed to finish the assignment shortly before we left for Jeff and Sheila's place. It's nice to not have to worry about ECE 255 while enjoying the company of our friends. Jeff and Sheila made lots of good food like they always do. We couldn't stay long afterwards because I needed to head back to campus, but this weekend was overall enjoyable.

Of note is I got to meet two well-known people this week so far. For starters, Grant Sanderson — better known as 3Blue1Brown — came to UC Santa Cruz on the 17th to give a lecture. I admittedly had no idea who he was, but he runs a well-known YouTube channel with over eight million subscribers. I really appreciate that Prof. Eshraghian told us about this event and rescheduled the ECE 210 lecture so that they don't conflict with each other. For those curious, Grant's lecture was about deriving the surface area and volume of an n-sphere. It was pretty cool for sure.

Former actress and model Kaila Yu also gave a talk at UCSC earlier today. She mainly discussed the objectification of Asian women in today's culture, but she also talked about her book Fetishized and gave away signed copies to those in attendance. Even though I wasn't familiar with her either, this was also a neat experience. One great thing about UCSC is there are many opportunities to meet interesting people. I'm certainly looking forward to similar events in the future.

Currently listening to: "Have You Ever Seen the Rain" by Creedence Clearwater Revival