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Thursday, August 21, 2003 Interview game: The Rules 1. Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed. 2. I will respond and ask you five questions. 3. You'll update your website with my five questions, and your five answers. 4. You'll include this explanation. 5. You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed. My questions were provided by Chad. I had read his interview here. 1. What is the significance of 'yellowrook', 'Gargouille' and 'Doomsayer'? As much detail as you'd like -- I've been curious about your machine and email names for a good long while. Yellowrook: I suppose I'll have to start all the way back when I was writing bad fantasy stories when I wasn't busy dealing with high school stuff. The Yellow Rook is actually directly from a short story I wrote titled "The Yellow Raven." My e-mail isn't yellowraven simply because somebody else had taken it. The Yellow Raven was the animal form (and nickname) of an empress-sorceress who plots to overthrow her hedonistic and kill-happy brother (the Ibis). She uses a young girl (who was on her path to becoming a priestess in an obscure cult until the Ibis slaughtered everybody at her temple) as a tool to accomplish her ends. I keep telling myself I need to buckle down and rewrite the thing if I want it to go anywhere. Doomsayer: When I plugged my old clunker into the network back at my undergraduate school, I realized I needed to give the computer a name that at first glance would identify it as mine. My friends were always telling me how disturbing I was, especially with all the rather dire messages I kept posting on my door, so I figured this was a rather fitting name. Gargouille: I'm actually rather fond of mythological names and I picked this one for my laptop because, well, it sounded nice. Also, I liked the story. Gargouille was a monster who kept flooding the area in France around the Seine until St. Romain tamed it and led it to be burned. I always wondered why they couldn't have just kept the Gargouille as a pet and made him the main attraction in a traveling circus. 2. To me, college seems like a vast waste of time except for a very few disciplines -- the area you're studying, molecular cell biology, would naturally (pun not intended) be one of them. What exactly are you studying within MCB and how did you get there? What event or series of events convinced you that you wanted to do that? I've always liked science. Part of it, I think, was my father's influence. He's an electrical engineer and it was fascinating to watch him tinkering around with random parts of computers and circuit boards and learning how to program in his spare time. Biology is a lot like these networks and programs but is many magnitudes more complicated. Engineering, in a way, is a problem already solved and the mechanics are known. I didn't want to waste time on already "known" problems. I want to study problems that are already in front of our faces and most likely will impact everyone's lives directly. Yes, that sounds grand-sweeping and idealistic, but I'm still young and I can still dream. Molecular cell biology is an incredibly diverse field, but the beauty of it is that one can learn the techniques in any subarea and apply it elsewhere if one decides to do something "entirely different" (like switching from plant genetics to neurobiology). I chose to specifically study in microbiology because 1) the research in this area is and will be increasingly relevant to our well-being and future medicine and 2) the mechanisms underlying pathogenesis is an interesting intellectual conundrum in itself. I also find it a bonus that my current project has also allowed me to delve into immunology as well. I suppose my reasons for getting into the field are a lot more intellectual than mercenary, but I figure I'm probably in the wrong field if I'm in it mainly for the money. 3. I was quite surprised to learn that you are not actually a citizen of the United States. Does that mean you hold Vietnamese or Chinese (the two other countries you mention most in your writing) citizenship? Don't answer if you don't want to, I'm merely curious. I have alluded to my nationality in a previous post (actually several posts, but I am too lazy to find them all now). I'm ethnically Vietnamese and Chinese and have been to both countries, but I actually hold Canadian citizenship. I hesitate to mention this too often because I cannot be considered the typical Canadian. The first few years of my life was spent in Quebec--that's why English is technically not my first language even though I'm most fluent in it. My family moved to the States when I was seven for job reasons and I have lived here ever since. This also explains my Americanized spelling habits. 4. Who are your three favorite obscure composers and why? Erik Satie, Gabriel Fauré, and Luigi Boccherini. I know, they're not entirely obscure, but I love their music. Satie and Fauré are both romantic French composers who have written heady and lyrical piano pieces. Actually, my favorite genre is impressionistic French classical (possibly because it appeals to my latent romantic streak) so it's no surprise that I picked those two. Boccherini, on the other hand, lived in the 18th century and was somewhat a contemporary of Haydn. He was also a virtuoso cellist and it's just too bad there are no recordings of him. However, he has written quite a few cello concertos and some beautiful guitar quintets. 5. If you found a bone or champagne-colored silk blouse that you had to absolutely have (I know this really doesn't sound like you, but bear with me), would you mate it with black slacks or some shade of red? Some other color? Why? Black. Black goes with everything for some reason. I don't really like red. The only red clothing I own is a red t-shirt. I'm curious about this question now. Is it just random or is the answer to this question supposed to be psychologically revealing? Or maybe it is you trying to find something to match a bone or champagne-colored (who thought up of those silly color names anyway?) shirt and is not so subtly attempting to pry advice out of me? Anyways, don't blame me if it turns out that black doesn't go with everything. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 7:17 PM : ]
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