After returning to Boston this evening, a bunch of my friends took me out to dinner for my birthday at East Ocean City, one of my favorite Chinese restaurants in the city. Though it was a belated celebration since some people were busy last week, today was coincidentally my lunar calendar birthday! After our fully-loaded course of lobster, fish, duck, and spare-ribs, some of us headed to Christina’s for ice-cream and then to a pre-med meeting at Dunster House in Cambridge. Jeff and Melody actually got me a new BMW M3 body for the RC car I recently bought! Ain’t it purdy? 😀

Happy Chinese New Year! After a very satisfying New Year’s Eve dinner with my family last night, we woke up early to visit a couple of Buddhist temples around the city to pray to various buddhas and bodhisattvas, and pay honor to my ancestors. It’s often said that the “religion” of Hong Kong is more accurately described as a hodgepodge of East Asian Buddhism, Confucianism, ancestor worship, and good old superstition 🙂 My family and I also visited a few relatives to wish them a happy new year, and of course, exchange red envelopes! This will be the year of the ram, which also happens to be my zodiac symbol. Unfortunately, this is actually considered unlucky (more superstition) so I’ll have to be careful this year…

As of 4am this morning, I am officially 24 years old! Most of my friends here were actually busy or on-call this evening so we had to postpone my birthday celebration until the weekend. However, almost like a gift from above, I won a free screening to the movie “The Recruit” starring Al Pacino and Colin Farrell. So I decided to take off a bit early from work and just chilled out with Lea for dinner and a movie. Overall, the film was very entertaining. Some parts of the plot didn’t make much sense, but the movie does have its fair share of plot twists and mind games that make films of this genre so much fun to watch. It was rather unfortunate that we arrived a bit late so we had to see the movie from the second row of seats in the theater. I didn’t mind at all, luckily, as I just got a much better view of Bridget Moynahan! =P

Had lunch with and attended a talk by Thomas Jessell today. My fellow neuroscience enthusiasts may know him as one of the authors, along with Eric Kandel and James Schwartz, of the bible of our field, “Principles of Neural Science”. He was quite an eloquent speaker and his research is pretty interesting. He’s currently at Columbia Med, using simple monosynaptic motor circuits as a model to study axon guidance and specificity. Unfortunately, the lecture hall was so full that I had to stand in the AV booth of the med school amphitheater through the entire lecture!

My lab work’s been pretty busy for the past two weeks. In fact, I don’t quite remember even having a weekend last week! Unfortunately, it was to no avail as I generated no useful data =( I did, however, get a chance to unwind a bit this weekend. Yesterday night, some friends and I went out for a steaming bowl of Vietnamese Pho in Chinatown followed by desserts at the North End and a round of Mai Tai’s at a Jazz bar in Cambridge called The Good Life. This morning, I started off with a hearty Sunday brunch at Dunster House, with Chicken Cordon Bleu and my very favorite: fresh waffle with ice-cream and chocolate syrup (Yummy!). Afterwards, a few of us decided to go play b-ball for a few hours, which was a really bad idea ’cause I felt the waffle come back up a bit and it didn’t taste so good the second time around. I also got to see the new movie “Chicago” this evening. The film was pretty good, though as I expected, it felt more like watching an on-stage show than a movie. The cinematography and dance numbers were pretty amazing though, and it certainly deserves its Oscar hype! Right now, I just hope that I can drag my sore body into lab tomorrow…

Very uneventful weekend though I did spend the afternoon participating in an fMRI study! This was the first time I’ve been scanned, and though I wasn’t too claustrophic or bothered by the loud noises of the magnet, I did find it intensely monotonous. I found it amusing that the person doing the study told me that my ONLY task was to stay awake. It’s amusing ’cause knowing me and the fact that I only had 4 hrs of sleep, this was probably the toughest task they could’ve given me. I essentially had to lie still for these 8-9 minute scans while they played various combinations of the phonemes ‘ba’ and ‘da’ into my ears. I walked away with $50 and more importantly, the first MRI of my head!

WELCOME TO XEPHALON.NET! After some minor changes, my new and improved homepage is finally online! The site itself is pretty much complete. I don’t intend to add much else to it, though I will try to keep this front page updated with interesting events or stories that I may come across. But as my audience is probably quite small and my time is very much limited, any future updates will not nearly be as frequent as in the last couple of days. I am very opened to suggestions concerning the format or content of my page, so feel free to check out all my links above and contact me if you have any ideas! Also, if you’re a friend of mine and have a homepage as well, let me know so I can add you to my links page. Happy New Year!!!

Phew! Finally finished up the thumbnails… I’ll be heading up to Boston on Tuesday, so I’m gonna take a break for now and finish up with the links page in Boston. This way, I can have the website ready for launch on January 1st!

Just spent yesterday and today working on the individual pages. All of them were pretty straight forward with the exception of the photo page. I wanted to put a lot of pics up, so I decided to divide them into categories. Unfortunately, the design scheme worked best with 4 categories, and I was only able to come up with 3 good ones, which explains why I ended up with the cheesy ‘science’ category as the fourth. I also spent some time deciding between an all-blue motif or a colorful combo of red, yellow, green, and blue to delineate the four categories. For now, I think I’ll stick with the blue theme. I’ll also need to spend a lot more time tomorrow generating a subpage and thumbnail for each individual photo.

Project Xephalon.Net commences on this Christmas Day here at my home in NYC… After checking out Macromedia Dreamweaver and Flash as well as MS Word HTML editor, I decided to make this website as simple as possible and using good old notepad.exe to edit the code directly. Both Word and Flash slip in tons of extraneous codes that boggled my feeble little mind. I figured I’d be too busy to have the whole site rely on flash animations (though they are extrememly cool…). I came up with the concept design and color scheme this morning, and spent the afternoon working on the graphics for the buttons. I’m working on the javascript for the combination mouse-over/display-bar-loader (sorry I couldn’t come up with a more concise description). Hopefully will get to work on the other pages later tonight…