Omar Abu

So with my extra free time today, I was just messing around on the piano came up with this recording below. It's pretty rough and not that good, but that's the point :-).



boomp3.com

I'm back in town now...came back last night. Interviews went well and lasted from 10 am to 3 pm. The people were all awesome and fun. The medical school students were very interesting, especially this M4 student who was getting a master in bioethics. My interview with that student was perhaps my best since we clicked on so many things. We ended up talking about many topics including the ethics behind this wall of deformed fetuses in the gross anatomy lab (the one I had seen the night before because of my friend). It is almost meant for people to point and stare since it is in such a random place and we seemed to agree that it should be used towards educational purposes in a museum setting.

I ended up getting lunch from the Corner Bakery as well so yesterday rocked, except for the fact that I did not get a chance to visit the Apple Store and see the new Macbook Air. That's life I guess.

Now to the good stuff...I DONT HAVE SCHOOL TODAY!!! A blizzard hit last night and is still raging. How great is this? No school yesterday, no school today. This week absolutely loves me. I still have class later tonight though since my differentials class at the university is still on. W/e though, that is not until 4 and I can deal with that. So now, while all you readers go to school, I'm going to chill and possibly catch up on some work.

Bye.

Alright, so it is Tuesday morning in the beautiful windy city. My interview is not for another couple hours, meaning I am frantically preparing last minute notes while attempting to blog. Whaaat? Why preparing so hard Omar for just an interview? Wrong, it is not just an interview, it is three interviews mixed with some sort of panel interview and including a lunch interview. And apparently I have to have an engineering interview on the Evanston campus too, but we'll see about that. I just hope I can answer all the questions in an articulate manner without going all "Ummm ahhhhh ummmm...hold on...ummmm...i need a bathroom break" on the doctors.

Last night was great. I got a wonderful tour of the Chicago med campus by a good friend (and incidentally my old babysitter). She took me throughout the area and stuff. All the students live right in the heart of chicago minutes away from all the awesome places (like Michigan Ave.) in the area. They're too busy to enjoy it though!

I do have some more pics from my room window. The view is not that amazing, but we have a great view of one of the Northwestern Memorial hospitals. Now, if we had stayed in the Westin (they were booked) I would have magnificent views of michigan ave like the one below from the Summer:



Anyway, here are the window views:



I cant figure out how to turn it and I sorta don't want to waste time figuring it out so just tilt your head and walla. That is a view of the hospital. Nice, huh?




Random window view...

Ok so im heading out, so lata!


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Hey all. I just arrived in Chicago. A friend of mine is going to be arriving soon to give me a tour of Feinberg Medical Campus. I'm excited about that since I've never actually been to the Chicago campus...only to the Evanston campus. Anyway, I'm really starving. I have not eaten since lunchtime but w/e. I dont think you readers really care. I do have pics of the ride in though! Check it. On and please ignore the blurriness, I was in the car.



Nice pic of the skyline.



Michigan Ave.!!! I love this street, especially since there is an Apple Store on it!

Ok, so I will add more later, but I gotta go. Ciao!

So semester two starts tomorrow. One last semester of pain, late night cram sessions (who we kidding, i go to bed 10:30ish), random lectures, the monotony of going to school, aaaaand of course pot smoking, crazy left wing, vegan hillbilly polar bears. Ok, I may have exaggerated on the last one, but one thing is for sure, this will be a semester to remember (I hope ;-) ). There is also one thing that I will definitely not be happy about...I actually have class at 8:30 now! No fair. During the past month and a half, I've gotten used to having no class until 11:30. You know what they say though...change is good.

Now, to the main topic, only in Japan will you see a woman flip her skirt up and turn herself into a vending machine, a boy transform his backpack into a surrounding fire extinguisher case, and another woman turn her purse into a pothole cover. You think I lie?!?! Would I do that to you? Nawww...as always I have proof riiiiiight here aaaand what you may have already seen above. I urge you to check out the slideshow though. It is really entertaining. So what do you think? Would people even consider this here in the states?

So I guess I'm a richer man today! U of Michigan is offering me $8000 a year for four years! It is one of their engineering scholarships that they give out and I'm stoked. Considering that tuition is $10,000  a year for us in-state folks, that pretty much will cover me if I go. 

This blog has reached another milestone! It has finally drawn 1000 visitors and still counting. Check it out at the right. So I believe this requires a celebration. Who wants to throw a party? Just make sure there is a lot of cake and ice cream. Actually scratch that...Make sure there is a lot of ice cream cake!

2 WORDS: HPME INTERVIEW!

The day has come. I am sharing my secret with all...why I am so attractive. It is because of these pick up lines below. Beware, they are nerdy (but 100% effective!).

(The truth: I found them online...no secret...same level of attractiveness)


I just noticed you were missing a valence electron from across the room. Did I mention my name was sodium?

You know why we should let time approach infinity? Because d = v * t, and I want to go all the way with you.

Is the room shrinking? Because you're getting hotter by the second!

Looking at you made my jaw go from V(0) to V(terminal) in miliseconds.

Hey babe, I was going to measure the spring constant of my bed tonight and I could, you know, use an assistant. If you know what I mean. ;) (We could make some forced oscillations.)

Are you cos^2(x)? Because I'm sin^2(x) and together we are one.

Baby, we must be a sine wave, because we're always oscillating.

I wish I could be your derivative so I could be tangent to your curves.

My attraction to you is an inversed square law.

Could I get your signifigant digits?

You've got my mind going in circular motion!

Nice blouse. But it would look even better accelerating at 9.8 m/s^2 toward my bedroom floor.

I wish I was your integral so I could be the area under your curves.

01101001 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101

You're more special than relativity. =)

If you wanna learn about simple harmonic motion, I can always teach you...

In our circuit of love, there is no resistance, only capacitance.

You and me, that's grand unification right there.

Wow you're pretty. You must be a Mac!

We're moving pretty fast, this situation has some momentum!

Are you the square root of 2? Because my love for you is irrational!

Hey babe. What's your resonance frequency?

I think we're on the same wavelength, so who cares if we're going a little fast, as long as it's constructive.

Just looking at you turns my software into hardware.

Heisenberg was wrong. I know exactly where you'll be tonight. *stalkerish*

I've got so much pent-up potential energy. Wanna help me convert it into... kinetic energy?

It's so hot in here. Is it global warming, or is it you?

Hey babe, wanna see the exponential growth of my natural log?

I wish you were my problem set, 'cause then you'd be hard, and I'd be doing you on my desk... or on my bed... or in the library...

You're so hot you make my unit vector go from j to k and dilate all the way.

Love is a matter of Chemistry,
Sex is a matter of Physics.

If our love was of the form a + bi, b would be zero 'cause we keep it real.

Math is the basis of everything.
Applied math is physics.
Applied physics is chemistry.
Applied chemistry is biology.
Applied biology is fun. =D

Why don't we measure the coefficient of kinetic friction between you and me?

I wish I were your second derivative so that I could investigate your concavities.

If I were an enzyme, I would be DNA helicase so that I could unzip your genes.

If I was chlorophyll a, you'd be the sun, because you excite my electrons.

Are you 2x? Because I want to integrate you from 10 to 13!

My love for you is like a concave up function because it is always increasing.

How 'bout you and me go back to my place and form a covalent bond? (*with* a dipole moment =D )

You and I would add up better than a Riemann Sum.

You're sweeter than fructose.

You're hotter than a bunsen burner set to full power!

You know what they say about men with big hard drives don't you?

You can put a trojan on my hard drive anytime...

I want to see the area under YOUR curve.

If I were to say /hold hand, would I get the response /slap?

Can my substrate bind with your active site, or are you allosterically inhibited?

Wow...you're a strong nucleophile and I love your back-side attack..

I wish I were Adenine so I could be paired with U.

If i was an endoplasmic reticulum, how would you want me: smooth or rough?

You know.. it's not the length of the vector that counts... it's how you apply the force.

You compute me.

By visually measuring the wrinkles in the front of your pants, calculating your body mass based on your height and weight, and dividing that number by your waist size -- I conclude that you have absolutely nothing in your pocket and are, in fact, glad to see me.

Do you think we can make it a step more serious and disable network sharing?

Baby, you are as mysterious as the random reboot problems I'm having with my Linux server!

Would you like to share my bandwidth? I have a really fat pipeline.

I 1-sin(theta) you.

If you and I were the ideal gas law equation (PV = nRT), how would my pressure and volume affect your temperature?

Put your golgi body next to mine!

I wish we were vectors so I could put my head to your tail.

Your love is sweeter than 3.141592656...

Your chest is just like crystal: a rigid, geometrical structure.

You must be gravity, baby, because you're the only thing keeping me here.

I must be trippin' because only acid rain could show me a hallucination as gorgeous as you.

Are your pants being entropically unfavorable, or are you just happy to see me?

Hey baby, what's your activation energy? 'cause I bet I could catalyse my way across those curves ;-)

Forget Microsoft, I'm Macrohard.

How many concurrent users can you handle?

I wish I were the derivative of your natural logarithm so I could be the one over U.

If I were an enzyme, I'd be DNA integrase so I could put myself in your genes!

If *I* were making the periodic table of elements, I'd put Uranium and Iodine together.

Are the stars out tonight? 'Cause you have one heavenly body.

I wanna react to completion with you.

I'd like to look at you through a telescope so I can check out your celestial body.

Baby, I know my chemistry, and you've got one significant figure.

I wish I could be the Patriot Act so I could violate your privacy.

Let me equal awesome, and you equal awesome. Then if you go into me, we become one!

I'm so emo, because I know I'll never get to touch your asymptote.

Hi. I'm an astronaut, and my next mission is to explore Uranus.

Do you work for UPS? I could have sworn I saw you checking out my package

My love for you is like diarrhea, I just can't hold it in

I wish I was a viral vector so I could transduct my material onto you.

You must be a lanthanide because you are definitely a rare earth element.

You are an alkali metal because you are reactive to my salt-forming halogens.

I think you would like my amps divided by volts.

Can you be my other bonding pair so you can bend my molecular geometry 105 degrees?

I wish I was Columbus so I could explore your virgin island.

Can you help me prove Lamarck's theory of use and disuse? *points to pelvic region*

In chem we learn Dimensional Analysis. So can I analyze your dimensions?

So the Biot-Savart equation says to the solenoid: "That's not your Poynting vector, that's my wife!"

I hear you're an electron. Allow me to introduce myself: My name is fluorine.

Hey are you singular? 'Cause if so, together we could be plural. ;)

You can come into my proteasome, if you've got some Ubiquitone to bind to my protein lid.

I wish we were doing vector addition so we could go head-to-tail.

Forget dipole-dipole attractions; I feel we have an ionic bond!

You're so cool, I've got to measure you in Kelvin.

If I were a neurotransmitter, I would be dopamine so I could activate your reward pathway.

Hey baby, SN1 or SN2 attack? If he knows his organic chemistry, then he'll choose SN2 and release his electrons from the backside.

Hey baby, you and I should form a carbon-carbon double bond so I can oxidate your cleavage.

If you were a sterically hindered substrate, I wouldn't mind, I want to be closer to you.

WARNING! MAKE SURE YOU WATCH THE FOLLOWING VIDEO!

I stumbled across this video earlier today and found it to be worthy of these sacred pages of mine. I believe the video is produced from the makers of the 24 parody that I posted about earlier. Basically, this is a parody of ER with every urban legend coming true. My favorite is the kidney harvest legend where a person is drugged and then found in a tub of ice with a tub sticking out of their side. I had just read about it in Made to Stick and so it was exciting to see it in action! Anyway, without further ado, enjoy!

Sorry for the long hiatus...again. I've been slacking from my "blogging responsibilities" because of finals and all around because I'm lazy.

So I guess I have to start planning graduation related stuff, namely my senior recital. I did not really want a senior recital since a) I'm not a musical prodigy (sadly, I wrote my first amazing piece at the late age of 8 as opposed to those other talented musicians, like Mozart who began composing at age 4) and b) I would not have enough material for a long concert (long being an hour). I decided this in the Fall.

Zooming forward a few months, I was coming back from winter break when WHAM I was blindsided by my music teacher with the question "Do you want a senior recital?" I thought about this for a couple seconds, shrugged, and said, "Not really." After much prodding, however, I ended up walking away with the homework of finding a date and having to memorize many pieces (obnoxiously difficult pieces that make fingers bleed). Things are looking up, though, as one of my friends may combine his senior recital with mine and then we will have a decent length recital with lotsa people. It would be like a wedding where his friends come and my friends come and they don't really care for each other, only coming to see their respective friend play (this being the explanation for why lotsa people would come).

So there's your beautiful window into my life for the day. Say, anyone getting sick of 2008 already?

I just discovered this comedy group called Improv Everywhere. This group goes around doing large performance pranks on video and then shows it to the world via the internet. By performance pranks, I mean stunts where groups of 50 to 100 people go and either try to trick or confuse people during their day to day activities. Most recently, many people in Boston rode the subway with no pants on, prompting many weird looks from other passengers. A notable performance of theirs is their Best Buy prank that you can catch below:



If you want to check out more of their awesome stuff, make the leap to their website.

So the real, uncensored, and more wild than ever reason I have not posted for a while is because of a special week coming up in three days that I like to call "finals week." Even though I am only taking half as many finals than I usually do due to the glory of dual-enrolling (my university classes ended before break), I still have been fairly busy studying for finals and not studying for finals (i.e. tennis, programming, research, life).

In actuality, I have probably been doing more stuff in the "not studying for finals" category than in the "studying for finals" category, perhaps because of my affinity for being timely and thus studying for finals over break or maybe because my CS teacher told me I do not have to study for his final to do well and because I am always ready to tackle physics problems, meaning the physics final should not be difficult. Subtracting physics and CS from the mix, only Biology is left to study for. But don't worry, I have gone through the trees of packets my teacher has given me and feel fairly confident that I can do well on our multiple choice final (i mean come on, everyone knows the answer is always C). Before going on, I would just like to say that despite my biology teacher's best efforts to plant trees every year, I do not think it is good for anyone or anything (namely, the environment) when he religiously gives us packets of information each week in lieu of reading our textbook, which weighs more than me! Honestly, we have only read three chapters out of the 57 chapters it has. Anyway, I am now going to end my tangent on hurting the environment.

To add to the "not studying for finals" category and to the downside of dual enrollment, my differentials class at the university has started (before the high school semester has ended and right before finals). So far, however, it has been quite interesting. This is one of the first math classes that I have taken that has truly taught theory and applications of the theory side by side (not surprising as it is an engineering class) and so I have found it very enjoyable. In addition, even before class started I had already won some brownie points with the professor since he had come to my high school the year before to talk to my adv. calc class about fourier series. So while it usually takes weeks for a professor to find out I'm in high school, he found out the very first day and was delighted to hear that I had attended a lecture of his. Too bad I no longer need any recommendations.

This basically sums up my week of studying for finals, not studying for finals, and unfortunately not blogging. In other news, though, Intel STS results come out next week. While I expect not to become a semi-finalist because 1700 people apply and only 300 are selected, it is still nice to look forward to something in the near future. I'll post on that next week.

I hoped you enjoyed my first long post in a while and have a good weekend. Adios!

Right now, when it should be blizzarding outside, making roads impassable so I can have a snow day, it is pouring rain and thundering!!! Rain in January!! Sixty degrees in January!!!

Just last week, we had a huge blizzard that even dwarfed my own awesomeness (I know, I was surprised too!). Even though it happened to come when there was no school already, it was a blast to drive through it (I mentioned this in an earlier post). Fortunately, I now have a picture to show you just how ridiculously awesome this storm was. Now to fully understand what I treked through, imagine those roads you see with the 1 foot partitions of snow completely filled with snow. Go crazy, just imagine snow everywhere, coming down, coming up, coming from the side. Imagine that the road just blends in with the 1 foot high surrounding of snow. Now once you have that image (possibly video if you see snow coming down) floating in the dark place called your imagination, you have a good picture of what my trusty Honda CR-V and I braved and survived.



That picture was taken just a few days ago. Right now, as I look out my window and see endless rain attempting to penetrate it, there is no snow left. Yes, the weather has killed the snow. Rather than being cold outside, the weather has decided to throw a curve ball full of warm air. What's even weirder is that this happens every January here!! There is always a few days in January with sixty degree weather. The seasons should be: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, More Summer, Even More Winter. The only reason I'm ranting is because I'm pissed at the thunder that keeps distracting me and the rain that's rumbling at the window a few inches from my ear.

~Anyway, rant ends here~

Great! The storm is picking up...AGAIN!!! err sorry, moving on. So I've got finals next week, but like I said earlier, I'm still excited since my bio exam is all multiple choice (/me goes and does a victory dance). Once finals are out of the way, I'll be in my final semester, entering the final leg of this journey we call high school.

G'day everyone! Enjoy More Summer, it will be ending soon!

This is long overdue, but I have finally gotten around to importing my recital videos and posting them online. The three pieces I performed are below. The first one is "Waltz in B minor" by Chopin. The second one is "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" by Tchaikovsky. The third one is "Hungarian Dance no. 5" by Brahms. Watch them (you better) and enjoy. And yes they are rough around the edges, but hey, it's not like I'm being paid to play.

Waltz in B minor



Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy



Hungarian Dance no. 5

I just returned from Denzel Washington's new movie "The Great Debaters." It was amazing. Very amazing.

This movie chronicles the story of three African American students in the 1930s at Wiley College. They discover within themselves a talent for debating and begin racking up win after win, putting them on the map. Eventually after much coercion, Harvard College actually allows them to come and debate. Much to everyone's surprise, they come and dominate, defeating the best debate team in the country. It is truly an inspirational movie that shows that anyone can triumph with hard work and determination (sorry for sounding so cliche...I can't help it).

One of the highlights of this movie was seeing scenes of Harvard's beautiful campus. They shot in the summer there at Memorial Hall, a gorgeous auditorium (see picture above). Students at Harvard got to see Denzel and hundreds of extras that camped out in tents and sleeping bags, hoping to earn a spot in the movie.

Anyway, this movie is one of few out there that actually leaves you feeling happy and moved as you leave. I encourage all of you to see this excellent production.

On a side note, I just discovered my biology final is going to be all multiple choice and I am stoked. No fill in the blanks. No essays. NO ESSAYS!!! I'm gong to bed now so that I can wake up early and study (yes, I am still going to study even though the test is multiple choice). G'nite.

During the past two weeks (aka the vast hole of nothing in my schedule that people call winter break) I have been churning out programs on the USACO training site in a bid to stick it to the man and rack up as many extra credit points as possible. See, in my AP CS class we get extra credit for every program we do. Most people do nothing and so that is why the teacher has that rule. I, however, have taken advantage of the system and currently have 42 extra credit points. I could literally fail every exam and end up with a passing grade, if not an A.

Now, over break, I have done six programs, which will rack me up somewhere around another 12 points before the semester ends. How's that for screwing over the grade system?

As you can see from the title of this post, I'm happy, but not about a having a guaranteed A in AP CS or because I'm Omar. Rather, it is because of a little message I got when I submitted my last program for testing. Normally, it takes me a while before I pass all tests on a program. See the picture below (notice the 38 submissions...i know, it's not pretty.



For this past program though, I got it on one try and received a message that is better than my mother's love. Check it out:



Even though this message probably came from some slave robot that is being forced to test everybody's programs, it still makes me feel warm and fuzzy on the inside. It's the simple things in life people, the simple things...

Happy New Year! It's finally 2008, the year of graduation, college, voting and everything good!!! There will be some amazing stuff happening this year.

With that said, I just need to put it out there that I'm sooo tired. I got back three hours ago from a friend's house where we played rock band and Counter Strike: Source on a LAN. If you do the math, that means I only got three hours of sleep. So yeah, Im huving trubel tipin' this as I speek becuz Im so tyrd.

It was crazy though. All yesterday, it was snowing and snowing and then some. When I went out to go to my friend's house at 9 pm there had already been a foot of snow. Good thing I had AWD. I still had to go like 10 mph, but boy was I conquering the snow. It felt great (despite sliding sooo many times). While I was at his house, it kept snowing too so that when I came out my car was covered in snow and had to be dug out. It was fun trying to get out of that, going back and forward and back again over and over.

Ok, I have to get back to programming (yikes) so adios!