Alvin Sng

As you may have noticed, my blog is rarely updated. I tend to use my blog as a way to keep track of the major events of my life. So it looks like for this post I will be summing up the last twelve months of my life! I just finished my fall quarter at UC Davis and I have had a wonderful past year and I still cant believe how quickly time passes as I age. As a child, I would think that a year would be an extremely long time, but now it's common to plan events up until next year without even realizing it. Some of the major events that I will cover in this post were:

• CES 2011 in Las Vegas
• 2011 DavisDB award
• Living in San Jose
• Interning at Cisco Systems
• Mozilla Hackathon
• Flying to Seattle, twice
• 3 months of Job Hunting
• Undergraduate Research

CES 2011 in Las Vegas

Photo of me at the Motorola Booth

This was a fun and mini getaway I went with Justin on during our first weekend in Davis. We had to miss a day of classes, but as expected, the first week is okay to miss. The trip was a blast. I loved the food in Vegas as always. We flew from Sacramento Airport early morning on Friday and arrived in Vegas around 9am with no issues, got checked into our hotel, Tropicana, which was definitely a pretty hotel that is located next to MGM Grand. It had the whole Tropical beach theme with Palm tree. The color scheme for the hotel was a plus; I personally like the color white and orange.

We later met up with our other friends from the bay that was also going to CES with us. Our first day included a walk around the CES's hall, each hall would take a few hours or so to explore. We saw all the usual big companies and their mega booths, like Intel, Sony, Samsung, Motorola, etc. And there are also ultra small companies from Shenzhen, China that nobody has heard of. For dinner, we ended up getting the awesome $50 24hr Vegas buffet pass. That included 24hrs of unlimited buffet access. By the end of the 24 hours, we ate at three different buffets during that period. Which was quite nice since I always love the buffets at Vegas. If I ever go back to Vegas, I will definitely do that again. The second day included much of the same activates, but at night we went to a lounge at MGM Grand. On the last day we explored more the strip and also went to the Vegas mall. Flew back late night and go back to Davis around 2am. Overall CES was a fun experience and would go again in the future.

DavisDB Contest

The DavisDB Contest was started last year and was part of the advanced database class, ECS 165B. I would agree that the database class was the most challenging CS class that I have taken. The class included a project that was 80% of the course grade. The project itself was to implement a fully function DMBS from scratch in C++. Although the work was quite rigorous in this class, I really enjoyed it. I worked with a partner and ended up learning a lot of software engineering as well as some tricks to debug faster. It was also nice to finally learn what is “under the hood” of a DBMS. Most times, people interact with a Database through SQL, and for us, to finally build what goes on after the inputting queries was an exciting feeling. On the day before our project was due, I remember programming for 24hrs straight. I have previously pulled all nighties, but that was for Black Friday. It was definitely a good feeling to finally hand in the completed project after lacking so much sleep. At the end of the course, our professor ran everyone's DBMS and did various benchmarks to see who had the fastest running DBMS in the class. And happily, our team ended up winning first place!

Interning at Cisco Systems

With the CCIT Interns

My summer internship at Cisco was definitely my biggest event this year. It was a 12-week long internship at Cisco's Headquarters in San Jose. This was my first job at a corporation and also my job at a high-tech company. On my first day, I was definitely very nervous about the job, I didn't know what to except on the job and what I was going to be to doing on a day-to-day basis. In general, I just had a lot of questions in the back of my head. I worked as an IT Engineer in the Communication and Collaboration IT Department. So essential I was in IT at Cisco. This meant I was not working on the core products at Cisco, like their routers and switches but worked on improving Cisco's operations by developing with new technologies. Our intern group was relatively large for our department; it consisted of eight interns in San Jose and ten in RTP North Carolina. Our manager was actually located in RTP North Carolina, so we only saw him in-person for a week when he flew to visit San Jose.

The work at first felt a bit overwhelming, we attended several meetings a day and was still unsure of our role yet, we had to learn how to use all the internal tools like WebEX, Telepresense and even the printers. After a week of meetings, we were eventually given projects, some which were assigned, and some which we got to choose. Eventually, some of those projects changed due to new shifts in priorities or that the project gets dropped entirely and we would move to a new project. Overall, the work was not too stressful; Cisco has a great work-life balance. Their gym is amazing, which I got to use nearly every weekday. However, I did not enjoy the normal 9-5-morning commute. The intern dinners we got were nice treats. They included expensive meals at nice restaurants paid by the company. Overall, the workplace was definitely fun; it was helpful to meet lots of new people and got the chance to learn what it is like to be at a large high-tech corporation.

Living in San Jose

At Great America with other Cisco interns

The day after my last final, I packed up my stuff from Davis and moved to San Jose! It was definitely a scaring feeling to move to a new place. I didn't know where the best food places were at and which routes were the fastest to get around town. For me, two big changes I had to adjust to where: living in a new city and living alone. In San Jose, I did not have friends, so eventually my co-workers became my new friends. We would throw parties, go out to eat and plan weekend trips all with the other interns at Cisco. This would keep us busy on a day-to-day basis. By having the co-workers around you, it made the summer go by much faster. We would go out for lunch to taco bell, cafeterias, burger joints, Quiznos and all other the typical lunch places that one could think of. I brought lunch just twice during my twelve weeks; the rest was eating out with everyone. Weekend trips included going to Castle Rock, Great America and San Francisco.

Living alone was a different challenge. I guess living alone made me feel like I was in the real world, the workingman life. I would sometimes grab a bite at a Taco Bell or Mc Donald's by myself since I was too tired from work to cook. On the other hand, I would go grocery shopping alone; there were a lot of personal choices on managing budget, like whether to eat out and spend more or to cook and save. Living alone also meant I couldn't buy in bulk, which was hard since I was used to saving up by bulking up.

Living in San Jose allowed me to explore Silicon Valley. I never really felt so close to Silicon Valley until I actually went to the numerous tech companies. I visited the campus of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Yelp, Cloudera and more. It was a lot of fun to see the workplaces, meet other talented engineers and talk to the people who create the products that are used by millions of people in the world.

Mozilla Hackathon

Hacking away at the Hackathon

This was my first ever hackathon and I had a lot of fun. It took place at the Computer History Museum in Moutain View and was sponsored by Mozilla, Google, Dropbox, Yahoo, 5 hour energy drinks and more. I participated this during my summer at Cisco and found out about the event through another friend I met at an intern event. The event was 12 hours long, not including the before and after session, so in total it started around 6pm and ended the next day at 10am. I worked with just one other team member, Sanjeev, who works at Microsoft and studies Computer Science at Stanford. Our project was an advanced input box, that can auto-parse data as you type in a browser. So an email address, phone number, url, and even a friend's name would be recognized by our program. Also, the uploader component was a file uploader that would recognize various file types and coverts them to a popular web format, like scribd for PDFs, YouTube for video files for example. Unfortunately we did not win but had a lot of fun getting to see some of the other cool projects that was presented. The hackathon was for tech interns only; I met many people from Dropbox, Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others all at the event. The biggest perk of being there was the food of course; they kept everyone happy with the yummy goodies. Started with a Mexican dinner, I never seen such a giant bowl of guac in my life! There was also a candy bar, a energy drinks bar. Late night meal included shipments of pizza. Then breakfast came, which was Crispy Crème donuts that made everyone sugar high. Throughout the night there was a DJ playing top 40 hits non-stop. The hackathon felt more like a club than a tech event; the lighting was set like prom as well. When I got back, I was surprised that my sleep cycle was not broken. Slept from 10am to 6pm, ate dinner, then slept at 10pm.

Flying to Seattle, twice

Taking a photo with the Seattle Space Needle

This became my first and second time going to Seattle, WA. Both of the trips we all expense paid, complements of Microsoft and Amazon. They covered flight, transportation, parking, food, and hotel. Microsoft even covers entertainment. I was on an Alaska Airlines flight to Sea-Tacoma International. For Microsoft, they provided the recruits with an option for a personal rental car, which I jumped to the opportunity over a taxi ride. Got the Chevy Malibu, which was a terrible car. When arriving to the Marriot in Redmond, I met some other Microsoft recruits and became friends throughout the rest of the entire trip. Since I had $75/day to spend on food, and have not ate dinner, I tried my best to burn it all at the steakhouse. Ordered a large meal with appetizers and ended up spending almost $50 on dinner.

Next morning, I got the buffet breakfast, which was amazing. We headed out to Microsoft's campus just a short drive away. Had a day full of interviews. When I arrived, I got the chance to meet other recruits, which became important later when we all went out for dinner together. I met with one of them and explored Redmond town center, which was a nice shopping center, then we drove to Bellevue WA, which had upscale dining and shopping. It was also the location of Microsoft's other offices. We ended up going to a fancy Taiwanese restaurant. From there, everyone was trying their best to use up their $75 quota and added multiple appetizers and dishes to their meal. We had a great time and later all drove to the Seattle Space needle around 9pm. It was nice that the lines were short, but going during the day would have provided much better photos. The next day I was able to visit an old friend of mine from High School, since she goes to Seattle University, she knew Seattle pretty well. We ended up exploring Pike's place, then to the Seattle Art Museum and final to a nearby shopping mall. Later that afternoon, I met up with another Microsoft recruit and we explored the Experience Music Project Museum. Overall the trip was a blast and ended up eating lots of great food. I found Seattle to be a fun city with bad weather. I would have definitely moved to Seattle if it were “Silicon Valley”. My second trip to Seattle for Amazon was much different. I didn't get to meet other recruits so it was mostly me going places by myself. Also, since I had already explored Seattle just a week ago and finals was just a week away, I ended up doing homework in the hotel room for about 6 hours for both night. In all, my second trip felt like a chore whereas the first was more of a vacation.

Job Hunting

Interviewing with Microsoft

Job hunting was my second largest event in this year. During this past quarter at UC Davis, I applied to many companies, had many interviews and received some wonderful job offers. My first interview was with Cloudera, in September, and my last interview was with Facebook, in December. So, in all the interviews did span my entire quarter and greatly affected my course grade. I skipped at least 10 days of school from all the interviews. All my interviews pretty much had the same process:

Recruiter screening: where the recruiter gives a 15 minute conversation and asks a few questions about my resume and background.

Technical Phone Interview: usually just one but sometimes two and lasts 45min to 1 hour. This is when I would answer technical questions either over the phone or on the computer. Most of them used collabedit, where I coded the answers over a live text editor while talking on the phone with the interviewer. The interviewers in all cases were actual engineers and not dedicated interviewers.

Onsite Interview: This was the final round interview where I would spend a day at the company's office and have anywhere from 4-7 interviews, each 45min – 1 hour. Amazon had the shortest with just 3 hours and Cloudera was the longest totaling 7 hours.

After the onsite, it would either be an offer or rejection. Unfortunately there were more rejections that offers, but that is normal. I did begin to practice interviews and even bought a coding book during the middle of the quarter, which improved my interviewing skills drastically. By the end, I felt I answered so many different interview questions that I began to come across repeated questions.

Here is the list of companies I got final round interviews with:

• Cloudera
• Adobe
• Workday
• Trialpay
• Microsoft
• Amazon
• Facebook

In addition to the offer I received from Cisco, I ended up getting offers from Workday, Amazon and Facebook. I ended up accepting the offer from Facebook and will be interning there this upcoming summer. There will definitely be a blog update on that experience.

Undergrad Research

This was the quarter that I started doing research at UC Davis. The nicest part is that doing research provides units so it takes a class away from your workload. I worked with Dr. Todd Green on databases. The work involved learning how databases compare with alternatives with it comes to modeling graphs. It is based in terms of performance, scalability and usability. So I did get to write a lot of C code as well as benchmark testing on all types of software. The work is pretty fun since it is somewhat open ended. What to do next is never really an answer, and I get to decide what I think should be the next steps to take in terms of the research. I also got the ability to work with other Ph.D. students whom all were very knowledgeable in their fields. I will continue to do more database type of research next quarter and hopefully until I graduate.

Summary

At my cousin's graduation in UC Berkeley

2011 was definitely a life-changing year with a lot of learning and exploration. I lived in a new city, flew to a new state twice, had several on-site interviews with tech companies and met a countless number of new people. I am excited for what next year will bring. An internship at Facebook, College Graduation and possibly a vacation to Singapore!

It is has definitely been a while since I have last made an update to my blog. It is now 2011, and 2010 went by extremely quick. A lot has been changed since I have last blogged and I shall summarize it here.

Summer of 2010

At the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, China

During the summer of 2010 I went on a 30 day adventure to China. You see all the photos online at http://picasaweb.google.com/sng.alvin/ChinaTrip. It was definitely an amazing trip that I will never forget. I went with my best friend Justin and we traveled to over 15 cities, took 7 plane rides, a 16 hour train ride, several ferries, lots of taxi rides, subway rides and bus rides. It was surprising to look back and see all the places we traveled to and the best thing was that we spent only $2500. The food was great, the weather was hot and the culture was shocking. We finally saw how American we were compared to the real Chinese. All in all we had great time and I hope to travel back again someday.

School

Fall quarter was pretty much how I expected it to be. The year started with an easy walk in the park but once midterms started to hit, it got really stressful. I ended up taking just one Computer Science class, C++, and got an A+. My first A+ in college. Other than that I am glad that it is already the second year, I feel that before I know it I will be out of college and into the “real world”. Also, I taught at Stanford Splash again this year and I was surprised by the growing number of students attending year after year. I taught basic HTML and CSS, China, and Jquery. All the classes went well and my HTML and CSS class had over 100 students.

Work

Work at Creative Media is going well. The job itself is pretty easy for me now since I have been working there for quite a while. I am currently working on the new KDVS fundraising website as well as asucd-pay, a new payment gateway. Also, I finished CHL, the UC Davis housing link at http://chl.ucdavis.edu . That was probably the biggest website that I have done so far. I have recently applied for a few internships for the upcoming summer of 2011 and I have gotten an offer from Cisco. I have already accepted and my plan would be to work in the headquarters in San Jose this summer. I am pretty excited to get into a giant corporate tech company and see where it will take me. The interview process was quite competitive and internships these days are not easy to get. I am lucky to have actually gotten the job.

Cloud Storage

I have made some minor improvements to Cloud Storage but I am planning to take some big bold steps to upgrading the software. I have recently worked on facebook apps and I feel that Cloud Storage has the ability to be a facebook app. Essentially it should be a facebook app since with that, it can finally become a social tool for people to use and share with. Hopefully during the initial few weeks of school, the easy weeks, I will be able to devote some time into improving the site.

Winter Break

At our annual Thanksgiving family dinner

I had a blast this past winter break with catching up with a lot of my old friends. I was also able to do some remodeling work at my parents house. This is cool learning the ways of how houses are built and designed. The whole process was pretty complex but I had fun solving many minor issues that comes across. I also lived the simple working life where I simply had a blue collar job and didn't do much other than work sleep and eat. As one might guess, I ended up eating fast food every day. Although I spent a lot of time working, I did manage to do some programming and friend hangouts. For new years eve we saw the annual fireworks in the bay and it was nice being back in the city.

Intro

I have been planning to update my blog for quite a while now. It has been on my “todo” list for about 6 months and finally I have found the time to write in my blog. As you can probably guess, this entry will sum up all the events from winter break up till the end of summer session.

School

UC Davis has been a fun first year. Although I have little to no computer classes during my first year, I was able to take ECS 30 in my summer session I quarter. I managed to get my grades up during summer session as well which helped my GPA a lot. Also, I moved into a new apartment in June and finally began to live out in the real world. It amazing how much responsibility is needed in order to handle all the daily chores like cooking, trash, dishes, cleaning, bills etc. I find that in the end, it is always great to learn and adapt into a new lifestyle.

Friends

During spring break I traveled to Yosemite national park and had a nice time camping there. It is always great to take a mini vacation in between two quarters of hectic college life. I always love camping, from the day I went on NOLS, I knew I was going to be a lifelong camper/hiker. We made smores, had a fun time learning how to make a fire and finally was able to fully understand why John Muir wanted to save Yosemite: beauty. Throughout most of the spring quarter I had been pretty busy with various events as well as projects which made my first year of college amazing.

Volunteering

In May, I had taught at Stanford Splash again. This time my courses were on Web Servers, Jquery/JavaScript, and CSS Styling. The Web Server class was a unique and somewhat challenging class since the topic was quite advanced, the Jquery and JavaScript was an exploration class where I was actually quite new to the subject matter, lastly the CSS came to be fun but unfortunately stylish websites required Adobe Photoshop which is not free. Recently I decided to help AFS with their yearly events. I went to their planning meeting in July and from that point I became excited to volunteer. The new batch of Bay Area exchange students will be arriving in August and hopefully that transition will move smoothly. This was one of the organizations that amazed me when I was in Thailand and saw so many dedicated volunteers.

Creative Media

My first website from work, http://fridgerenatal.ucdavis.edu , is now finally online and live. You can see that this is the first UC Davis website I have made and there will be more to come. I am currently working on KDVS's website and have already finished the Community Housing Listing website back in March and it is currently under testing. The Zend Framework, which is used in Fridge Rental, turned out to be exactly the type of coding library I have been looking for. Although it makes the website more CPU intensive, it is easier to maintain as well as to develop after you have mastered it.

Cloud Storage

I started my first Open Source software project on Sourceforge.net and it has been pretty fun. You can check out the project at http://cloudstorage.sourceforget.net and download it if you have a web server. This open source project was originally my personal website that I used to access the files off my network drives. It became so advanced that I decided to make it open source. Currently I am working on Cloud Storage 3 which is a total overhaul of the currently available version of Cloud Storage. The main improvement is the highly organized structure used in Zend as well as Drupal and Wordpress. Also, heavy use of Ajax in Cloud Storage makes the website even more interactive.

Web Development

HTML5 and WebM are my two favorite technologies for this year. I have done some testing with the two technologies and am confident that it will replace Adobe Flash. I have now used an enormous amount of JQuery/JavaScript in all my current websites which are highly dependent on the new web technology. WebM files which are not available in stable web browser works like a charm on the development browsers and will soon be released on all browsers (except IE). It is amazing how WebM is the first open source video codec and will be seen in HTML5 web pages. Cloud Storage 3 will be using HTML5 videos as part of the file browser as well as some of the other new media browsers built in.

Intro

I finished my first quarter of college last week which felt amazing. Now I got eleven more quarters ahead of me. The great aspect of college is the true relaxations of breaks. The breaks are placed right between two quarters which gives the students a fully enjoyable break without any homework or studying to worry over. Unlike Thanksgiving break which was right before finals. With that much in mind, I was able to get some work done.

College

During the first few weeks of college, I was worried whether I was going to like the small suburban environment. Fortunately I began to enjoy it more. One weekend, I decided to go biking around Yolo country. I spent the entire Saturday traveling past farms for hours which made me think how much prettier it was than the urban places. Of course when finals came, everyone was unhappy. Cramming in college has a new definition if compared to high school. Overall I had a fun college experience. I got to know a lot of the people on my floor and was surprised to have learned more than in high school.

Old High School

I visited my old high school for the first time since graduation last week. I made my first stop to the AOIT (Academy of Information Technology) class. It was now run by a new teacher who now has that job full time. I went there during 4th period and I was told to give a little presentation about my college experience. It was nice to see that the school got more funding for their new equipment. On the other hand, it was unfortunate to see the departure of LincolnHigh.net which will be removed by the end of the school year. I had already seen that the site was bound to be gone once it lacked a dedicated web programmer to update the site. I had also made trips to visit a few of my old science teachers that all wanted to know what my Chemistry class was like. Right after lunch I went to give a long visit to my Old AOIT/film teacher. I found out about the new problems that the school is facing and also happy to know that much of old routines were still there.

New Server

I had been web programming all this time on DreamHost servers, which are not bad but I felt that I finally needed my own personal machine. I went onto Newegg with the recommendations from my roommate and purchased all the parts of the server. It came down to around $500 for a pretty decent setup. It was a quad core i5 processor with 4GB of DDR3 Ram running on Ubuntu server edition. I later added a 1.5TB Internal HD to maximize my server capacity. I installed my old web server software onto it but after a while began to re-develop the software making it better in virtually every way. With the current version, it has a mobile version, daily search indexing, multiple file permissions, image caching and some other features. I will still be keeping my DreamHost account active as long as I am hosting 3rd party websites. Even though I trust my own server, I don't trust my internet or electricity.

Work

Work has taken up most of my college life away, as said by my roommate. I got a new machine for my workplace which is absolute stunning. It was a Core i7 with two 24 inch monitors. I had finished the Fridge Rental website and completed my first draft of the new Community Housing Website. There are a lot of nice new features in the websites which all use either Zend technologies or Google APIs. I am still working over winter break with learning more Jquery as well as some new Zend tweaks. Hopefully my next project would be to re-do the current creative media website since it is currently about two years out of date.

Side Projects

I am planning on making some changes to alvinsng.com as well as design.alvinsng.com. There would be a lot more Jquery in my websites from now own since now I have taken a great deal of time mastering it. Even though it's better to use straight JavaScript, the future revolves around the development of programming libraries. Using a programming language is more pro and direct, but unfortunately writing code in standards is what makes the system readable. Along with that my server website will undergo some new versions and by the end of the next version, I would be publishing the project on Source Forge.

Intro

Just before moving into my new school. I thought about how much of a big jump I would be taking in my life's timeline. Before I know it, I will be blogging here on my College graduation day thinking back on how fast life moves. Life in college is quite different. For one thinking living in a dorm is nothing like living at home. You don't have to commute to school nor do you have to return back to home life. There is a ton of more freedom in college and for one thing, taking a normal 15 credits a quarter means a ton of free time. In college, it is designed to give you extra time so that you can focus one one extra activity that you want to do. Whether that may be being in a sport, a frat, a ta, or work. College allows you to take that opportunity. So far, since the day I moved in. I have been as busy as a bee. Dealing with time management can be tough especially when your in a new environment where you haven't figured everything out yet.

Stanford Splash

I taught for the first time at Stanford Splash this past weekend. I had 5 full classes, one on Global Warming, two on Web 2.0 and two on Web Programming. The classes were all fun to teach and the students were all eager learners. My Global warming class was from the Alliance for Climate Education organization I am in so the information were not exactly made by me. The web programing class was not as easy to teach mainly because the topic required extensive knowledge of programming as well as servers and web design. On the other hand, the web 2.0 class was much funner and enjoyable by the students since it gave a broad in-depth explanation of Internet and website technology. For the next splash, I am planning to teach double the number of classes and make them all hour long.

CreativeMedia

I now work for UC Davis's Student government as a computer programmer. I basically work on websites that are run by the student government. Currently my project is to develop a new Fridge Rental website which is pretty easy but learning the new Zend Framework can be a bit tricky. I never used a framework before and for now it seems pretty good. Obviously using it has its benefits such as how a framework keeps the website organized especially if the website is a massive project. My job is pretty fun and it seems that I will be working there my entire college years. I get a nice desktop at the studio with two monitors that sort of reminds me of my home a bit.

Side Project

Currently working on building a new server for development purposes. Looking into several linux dev to test out and see what I can possibly learn from it. I haven't gotten any hardware projects done so hopefully this should be a good place to start. Also I am planning to develop some open source apps onto sourceforge so that I can be officially known as a open source web developer. I don't think I will be filming anymore so my videos section will soon be known as my high school video's and hopefully become some sort of archive.

Intro

It is about 2 months into summer and so far it has been good. College is coming right around the corner and with that in mind, I am bound to use every day as much as possible. I had migrated my website's custom blog into a new blogger account. Now with this 3rd party tool to update my blog seems to be more web 2.0 style. I felt like keeping better track of my blogs and it looks like blogger would be the best way to do so.

Work

I currently work at the San Francisco International Airport as a High School summer intern. My job is pretty easy; I mostly do research and create documents and such. I work under the Recycling Office in which my goal is to reduce airport waste. The job itself is pretty fun, they offer free tours of different part of the airport once in a while. So far I've seen the airfield, emergency operations center, noise office, museum, engineering building and such. If I don't find a computer related internship next summer I will probably work here again.

Websites

I have been working for another internet business creating this time an e-commerce site. I have made e-business sites before but this time, I am developing the cart system as open source. By the end of the month, I should be completed with the site and I will upload the open source project under sourceforge.net. The site is pretty neat and I am trying to allow maximum flexibility so that the package can be easily configured.

Camping

So, I just came back from my camping trip to Lassen National Park. This would be my second time camping, the first time was a 30 day backpacking trip with NOLS. The trip this time was a bit different; it was more civilized I would say. Like there was a restroom, rangers, bear cages and such. It made the trip much enjoyable but at the same time took away the real experience of wilderness. We stayed at Butte lake campgrounds which were a good fit since it was near the trails. Our trip was filled with fun and every bit of it reminded me back of NOLS. I would have never thought that I would want to go back again. Now that I have a tent, it wouldn't cost much to be an active computer. Our stay was 2 nights in which the 2nd day me and my friend Justin took a 15 mile hike around the park. We swan in Juniper Lake which was a vast gorgeous freshwater lake with nobody except us. The experience in all was great. The drive back was quite scenic too and it seems that highway 36 has the best views imaginable.

Intro

Finally, the time has come for me to transition away from school to college. This means no more waking up early, taking the same classes everyday and doing homework but instead have the freedom to roam campus, look for research assignments, live minutes away from class and decide how you want to use your time. I've been waiting my entire life to enter college and now my time has finally come. I will be at UC Davis and hopefully with the goal to do research in computer technology as well as doing their website, but most of all I want to invent something.

My High School Experience

My four years at Lincoln wasn't bad, I wouldn't imagine that my high school experience would be so awarding; I got the Principal's recognition award! I went on a 30 day backing trip in the Rocky Mountains, Spent 6 weeks in Thailand with a host family and started a social networking website. Did I mention that I ended up as the school webmaster, technical director of mustangtv and produced 50+ videos! My high school experience was AMAZING!

Videos

This is the time where I made my final four videos that were all ending videos. The Noise PSA for the AOIT final project which helped our school community, the Social Enterprise for learning video which was presented at City Hall, the Drama Awards video was for the Drama seniors to say goodbye and lastly was the Senior Class of 2009 video which was for all Lincoln High School Seniors. Its time to say goodbye class of 2009 and remember all the good times we had. My ending videos were in a way sad because it was my last chance to do something for Lincoln and I think I did pull it off well. With that to say I was glad it ended well. The Graduation ceremony happened so fast I can barely remembered where all the time went.

For Hire

For those that remember my old Alvinsng.com, it had a for hire section. When I started this version it didn't have it since I was too bust for jobs. Now that summer is here, I am proud to announce that I am back for hire. If you, or someone you know needs a website done please let me know. You can check our my hire page at http://www.alvinsng.com/hire.html for more info.

Intro

So looks like my blog posts don't seem to be updated often enough even though the need to be. This is that time of year where you find out what college your going to. As of now it looks like I'll be an aggie at UCD. UCSD is nicer, high ranked and has an awesome engineering program but as far as parents go it's too far from home. Also as you can see I redesigned my website so that its more professional. I like the style of the banner since it seems to be much more stylish this way.

LincolnHigh.net

Not much as been updated other than a move to use the new bulletin system. The bugs have gone down and for a while I think the site is in its stable version.

MustangTV

Well since BSA just happened it looks like its time of the long editing process. There are 16 tapes with some extraneous tapes for behind the scenes videos. It is actually going to be tough to create the DVD since I need to mix HD with DV so that it will be compatible. Too bad we cant just force everyone to have and HD player. BSA was pretty good this year, a lot people liked my Change/Opening Video which I still think could have been greatly improved. The drama video was original and I though it was alright even though James Bond was my favorite.

Intro

So it is finally year and I am working harder than ever. Three are lots of new projects that I have been doing for the last month or so and I am still working on a few more projects. And I still have time to think about how much I miss being in thailand!

LincolnHigh.net 3G

If you didn't already know the new school website (3G) is finally published and online. The new site has gotten lots of positive feedback and I am now working and adding the lincolnhigh.net additions including getting the content to be as updated as possible. There seems to be more views on the school website thanks to more teachers using the school website. The CMS of the site has been added and it will be improved so on as time goes on. The web team has gotten a bit bigger with this year I will be distributing my work among the other website editors. Hopefully with all this great contribution our movement towards a better high tech educational system will go on.

Siemens Technology Competition

Mark and I have worked as a team into researching a Siemens scholarship competition. Our research is a computer science technology that will speed up the internet via smarter cache technology. In the next week we will publish our work online. Hopefully we will win the regional competition and get some money for the school.

Environmental Video

I will be producing a Social Documentary to tell about our world's environmental issues. Hopefully with that done it can have some impact among teens to be more informed about society and its ongoing world. We do have to take action and I have strongly been a support of the green movement. Go Obama!

Class Site

Currently under beta testing with 2 teachers, the class site is similar to the learning management software used by universities. After a few more weeks it can be published and announced for the school to use. The site will be shown later to a few more teachers and so more feedback can be added to developing it to be fully operational. This may include a focus group to discuss certain needs of the school.

Intro

Sorry for the long awaited delay in my blogging. I have been extremely busy the last few weeks and especially the next upcoming weeks up until I graduate. I am gratefully and delighted for all that said happy birthday to me! I can't thank you all enough and I cant believe I am finally 18; I still have memories when I was 8 and thought I would never become an Adult.

LincolnHigh.net

First off, our updates can now be now followed though our twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lincolnhigh. Recently our CMS has undergone a new big update; version 7 has been a huge improvement in web technology over the last version. CMS v7 is now included with the Class Site App, so its integrated right into the LincolnHigh.net system. CMS v7 is fully stable with just a few more features coming, possibly a video function as well as a completely new bulletin system. As far as the actual school website you may have seen some small changes, such as the re-designed home page that displays the complete daily bulletin. Faculty pages have also been completely remodeled to take into account of the new features in CMS v7.

MustangTV

This may seem old news but MustangTV broadcasts now runs a new live feed loop off the internet. It plays songs has been the most requested and it ranks them in that order. The environmental video “What's Happening” is now completed has been showcased to a good amount of students as well and a few other environmental organizations in the Bay Area. Also underway is a new upcoming environmental video to introduce the idea of a green academy in Lincoln. I am undertaking a few more film contests that may entertain quite a few people and then BSA will soon to come. BSA this year will hopefully be better than the last with Drama hopefully doing a new film and also two separate films will be produced. One video will be about change and possibly the other a general video.

AOIT

Lastly, AOIT held the Community Town hall meeting which came to be a huge success. That would mean that in the future we will be seeing more involvement of Lincoln students in the neighborhood. PSAs will soon be coming and that may be another project that I will be working on as well. I will be attending the SFUSD new technology plan meeting, hopefully to push the idea of having more use of technology both inside and outside the classroom.

I will be gone to Thailand from July 1 - August 22. That's just about all my summer. Feel free to send me and email at admin@alvinsng.com. I wont be checking my email as often but I will try to reply to them. Other than that I have been working with Mark on the Third Generation of Lincolnhigh.net. Its will be done hopefully within the first few weeks of school. Here is a photo with my close friends outside AMC Van Ness, after watching Wanted on opening night.

So it's been just 4 days since I left Thailand and I still can't believe I went though an entire adventure. It seemed just yesterday that I was sitting at home in San Francisco thinking what websites to be working on. Well I don't know exactly where to start on telling my story. If I did try to tell me story it would be too long to read. I will just do and FAQ since I it should get out all the basics out there.

Prologue

Well its finally Senior year! The year that I have been waiting for is finally here. It is the final chapter of my High School experience. I am pretty proud with what I have done so far, not to mention its just the beginning. During senior year I will be creating new and more crazier videos and also be boosting new levels in technology around school.

School

Junior year passed pretty quick, with my biggest memories would be the BSA Video, Drama BSA, Prom, Newhs.net, SEfL Project, First Music Video and Drama Awards! Its been a fun yet unforgettable experience that I would have never gotten if I was home schooled.... the year ended with a fun hike around the marin, below is a photo of where we hiked

Video

There has been two videos posted since the last blog, the Drama Awards video and the SEfL project video. Both were presented and both where big. The SEfL project was the video that explained to our district what we are learning from the Academy program and what has helped students, school and the community. Our video came to a big success and the student involved were all rewarded with certificates. The Drama Awards video was a sad memory that captured the fun moments during this year, from the start of the crucible to the last day on MustangTV the video has brought it all back. During the summer I will be in Thailand for the majority of the time. I hope to do a video documentary when I return from the trip. There might be a chance that I will create a video about my room design.

Computers

Well the site newhs.net is a bit more active now, the next feature will be the "howto" section. I have begun to create software packages so that anyone can learn and apply the open source codes onto their own website. Check out the software page on this website for available packages. I have been able to run a file server off Ubuntu and will begin to open up web servers off my computer. This is currently just for testing purposes. It may be available in the future for dropoff/pickup of large files. Computer Club next year for those interested!

Prologue

It is nearing the end of the school year. It is the time of year when I have to get a ton of work done before the year ends. A simple list of what I need to do by the end of the school year is, PSA video project, Drama awards video, Last Drama video, Complete Academy website, Online grade book/class site, Grease DVD and Physics Project. Whew is going to be a long and tiring stretch until I get all this done.

School

Interestingly in APUS we are on this mission to learn about history and how it affects our daily life. This new online mission is done to learn about history from us and other students. It been pretty fun. I did three missions so far with a total of 47 points! Check me out at playflashback.com, (Im Computer Dude). I have been deciding for a while now on whether to transfer to Lowell or stay at Lincoln. Not many people know about me thinking about this but it has been in my mind for a long long time. After some long thought it should just stay. Lets hope i don't go crazy and change the decision last minute eh?

Video

Its been a while now, the first music video is here! Yeah i got a lot of feedback about how its of sync. Its harder than you think. I seen the music videos online and they have similar but smaller problems. Sometimes when you think the artist is singing in a certain way, their lips move differently. This video just happened to be a bit more dramatic. It wont happen next time lets hope. It was pretty impressive how it was done is just a day. Probably the fastest video i made. The only video I havent done would be an action video... Get ready class of 09!

Computers

I am now on my final web project. Academy.lincolnhigh.net is just done. The new class site will be published by the start of the next year. Hopefully there will be a wide use of the website. It will be incorporating some of the fun features in newhs.net. I been working more on Apache web servers and I will probably have a fully running file server soon. It seems like the school computers have some security vulnerabilities that needs to be addressed.

Prologue

This is a restart to my blog (AGAIN). I haven't really been a dedicated blogger, I think it has due to me being busy and not having time to really write down what happens.

School

Well as the title has just said AP testing, I find that to be quite a pain to do, not the test but just the worry, stress and cramming. Well APUS is done and I am still not sure on whether I should even try to get a 2 on the AP Physics test. I haven't been concentration in studying for that test mainly because I am not in an AP Physics class??? Well if I was then that would be a totally different story there. Sighs that is $85 bucks gone to waste =(. On the bright side I think the AP US test went well. I am going to prom =).

Videos

There are two prom videos that have been quite popular at the school. The videos were quite simple to film and especially having Dominic giving pretty much the stupidest ideas that a video producer would want to hear. The videos were made to promote prom but I doubt that has convinced anyone to actually change their mind on going. I know that a lot of drama people wanted to be in the video but didn't know that we were filming. On all upcoming video days I send out messages on facebook to my “drama friends”, make sure that you are on my facebook drama list and also check your facebook. I am planning on a few more fun videos after the play including a music video. I have recently added the two SF cliff side videos that were shot a pretty long time ago with mark. It was made just to test around the camera and gather some good stock footage.

Computers

I have recently been moved into learning more of the server hardware and server side software management. Just a little thought is to try out the user-friendly version of Linux, Ubuntu. It is the most well known and most popular of all the Linux developments. I find that Ubuntu offers much more advanced and powerful tools in both networking and shell permissions that windows can ever achieve. Ubuntu is able to apply the pretty GUI to make the OS seem more human. The Lincoln Academies is getting a new website, the almost done website http://academy.alvinsng.com/ (will be moved) has all the info and media relating to the academies at ALHS. Starting soon, I will begin to develop and add open source coding onto this website in mainly to help others in learning PHP, MySQL plus the general web programming aspect (Sorry I don't teach hacking, please learn that on your own). It is planned that next year I will start a computer club so that people that are interested in learning more advanced topics about computers beyond the current level can do so from me and others. Let me know if you are interested in doing so.