I feel like a zombie today. I didn't get much sleep last night for a variety of reasons. I'm pretty sure I did badly on my Poli Sci final. For some sick reason, he told us to study the questions from the quizzes and none of the questions on the final were even close to what were on the quizzes. I can't wait for tomorrow at 5pm when this will all be over and I can make my 5 hour trip back home to Rob. Mmm, Rob, the giver of backrubs and provider of good night sleeps. My laptop battery's running low so I must get going. Adios.

I woke up this morning and got an email from our Acting Chancellor informing me that "a restricted campus database containing certain personal information has been illegally accessed by a sophisticated computer hacker....The information stored on the affected database includes names and Social Security numbers, dates of birth, home addresses and contact information." He suggested placing a fraud alert on my credit file. You know, I might just do that since people are coming at me from both sides trying to steal/view my information. I'm getting my mail viewed and perhaps taken at home and my information has been compromised at school. WTF! I know that it happens more than it should on UC campuses, especially Berkeley, and that knowledge is disappointing. There's always some vulnerability in the security system and they don't prepare for it until it has been breached.

This is the Press Release of what happened in detail.

I have finally reached my first Finals Week at UCLA. I'm a little intimidated but also looking forward to it being over so that I can relax during my winter break. I'm doing well in two of my classes and if I blow them away with my finals, I'm sure I'd get at least a B+ for each of them. My third class is more up in the air. Most of our grade is based on a paper that was due yesterday and our final which is on Thursday. It's difficult to determine how I did until after I actually get our grades for the class. I am rather proud of the results of our group project for my Political Communications class. The assignment was to work on two commercials (one negative and one positive) for a fake presidential campaign between Joe Biden and Mitt Romney. Our negative ad of Mitt Romney was voted for both the "Funniest" and "Coolest" Awards category in our peer evaluations, which boosted our grades significantly. My group and I worked on that for the entire quarter and everything came together nicely. If I hear of anyone who wants to see the ad, I might put it up on Youtube later on this week.

I know it's a little late to post about this but I have a theory as to why UCLA defeated USC this year. I remember a few years ago I attended my first college football game, Stanford vs. Berkeley. It was held at Berkeley and Berkeley won after a 7 year losing streak. I was on the UCLA campus this year when UCLA won. There is only one possible conclusion to this trend of events. My presence on the campuses of the underdogs has the outworldly effect of helping them win. I should get paid for this.

I'm sure most of you have heard about this incident that happened a couple of nights ago in UCLA's Powell Library. I've heard both sides of the story and seen the video of it and here are my conclusions based on what I know.

I discovered the vast differences in water quality between regions when I moved to LA. Rob's been preaching it for months and now his words are no longer speculation. According to him, the Bay Area's water quality is much worse than the water from any other place he's been to. Since I've lived in the Bay Area almost my entire life I didn't have anything to compare it to. Until now. LA's water, I noticed has so much chorine in it that you can both taste and smell it. Every time I get out of the shower, I feel like I just got out of a pool. You know that weird dry feeling you get after being in the pool for a bit? Yeah, it's like that. I'm afraid to hand wash my nice clothes because it might take out the color. I also noticed that it had bleached my hair so that in the sunlight, it's a lot lighter than it used to be. I researched a little on LA's water supply and there were other worse and not as immediately noticable elements in it. For example, the arsenic levels are just below the maximum amount allowed and there's ongoing research to correlate that with the high percentage of miscarriages around here. Bay Area's water may not be ideal but it's a whole lot better than the sludge they serve down here. The straight tap water up there tastes much better than the filtered water down here. I can't wait to get back up there for the holidays!

There's so much drama involved in foreign relations that it's not unlike a network soap opera. So much of how a country may conduct itself on the world stage can be compared to how a person may conduct him/herself in interpersonal relations. Of course the stakes, interests, and values are different but you can easily draw parallels when studying events, behaviors, and motives.

...and already 200 pages of reading must be done by the end of the week. I've read about half of that so hopefully I'll be caught up by Friday. I swear that I have ADD because whenever I read something I have to read it at least twice for it to register. I'd "read" a paragraph and then forget what the heck it was saying so I have to go back and reread it again. It's so tedious sometimes.

Yesterday I drove up to Studio City to be filmed in one of Phil Angelides' campaign commercials. In case you don't know, he's running for governor to replace the Governator this year. I hope you guys look into him and vote accordingly. You can only see me for a second in the commerical but it was worth the free lunch. The house that it was filmed in belongs to the director and it was a pretty awesome house. It's the kind of house that's not too fancy or large but is well-designed enough to impress all of us. I can imagine owning a house like that someday. I also got to meet a few interesting people. One of them works for John Kerry right now; yup folks, he's still alive (politically speaking).