Monday 28 February 2005

Scared 1 Scary.. Just had a surprised test. Pop quiz by the boss. "Why don't you go to the board and show us what you have done? Just give us a flow diagram." Luckily I was updating my logbook this morning and can pretty much remember everything I did. Didn't think I explained well though.. Anyway, Dave saved me by explaining for all the loopholes I appeared to have said, and also correcting me when I was wrong. Scary.. No warning at all.

Next presentation is by me and I don't even understand what I'm reading about.

Sunday 27 February 2005

About science..
Politics in science is terrible. In business, politics = fighting for money and power. In science, politics = fighting for funding, which you need to keep yourself working, power, and prove that I am smarter than you.
Had sth else to say, but can't remember..

Cool things i saw during fermentation at NUS lab last week..
Liquid nitrogen.. We asked the guy to refill our liquid N2 tank, so he drove this van of liquid N2 here, and while the tank was filling up, the pipe was smoking cos the N2 was so cold. When we poured some N2 into the sink, the water in the sink froze, imagine what will happen if you dunk ur hand in, your fingers will drop off or sth.
Frozen

Pink solution. There's this pink foamy solution that's used to kill bacteria. When we poured it into the media containing bacteria, the orange media turned yellow and things started coagulating inside. Then when more media is added, the yellow thing turned brown. eew. Sick

Bottle caps. Bottles of all sizes have the same size bottle caps.

Cuvettes and Eppendorf tubes. It's really difficult to spill liquid from them, especially cuvettes, cos the meniscus of water and cohesion, adhesion prevents the liquid from dropping out. So must turn the entire thing 180 degrees upside down to pour out the liquid.

Bioreactor. The tiny 2l bioreactor that we used looked exactly like the one in Soper, or Mr Chan's lecture notes, except that all the probes go in from the top. In the real world, not like in Physics design questions, you can't just poke a hole in the middle of nowhere and stick a probe in..
I have quite a lot of things to blog and I did before my computer hanged and my 5 para entry was gone..

Friday night. AS outing. I haven't laughed so much in the entire week. It's true that you only need 1 crazy person to make the place fun, but it sure helps to have so many more crazy people Crazy , and of course with some juicy gossips, it was a really fun dinner. xh was right, our working lives are too sad..

Saturday. 2nd driving lesson, so coincidental to get the same instructor as my 1st lesson. That crappy instructor let me drive myself home cos my house is so near =) Afternoon went for the STAGEA performance at Tampines, quite disappointing because the best performances were by the elec. guitars, darn cool.

Sunday. nvm..

'O's coming out today. I'm back at Biopolis, early in the morning, doing nothing.. need to update logbook, read another paper, finish up my pub essay.. boring week ahead.

Wednesday 23 February 2005

Computer freaked me out the other day, suddenly counted down and restarted. Then windows couldn't start. Virus right? But when I switched it on today, it was fine, scanned for virus and found none.. Strange

Waiting for 'A's results is freaking me out.. I know there's no point freaking but I'm still freaking, maybe it's because everyone my age I meet is talking about it. Sometimes working sucks cos people around you won't understand why you're so freaked over something like this. Work this week is really like holiday, started at almost 3 today and finished at 5. A bit guo4 fen4 I know but there really isn't much to do today and I was already doing redundant stuff before I left.

Quite disturbed by some things Dave said.. About me and science (not passionate), about me and my attachment and the 'research' I'm doing (no thinking). Had lunch with sunny, she's thinking and learning and being sociable, even if her work doesn't help the people there much.. I'm learning, but it's from a spoon.. so convenient, just ask a question and the answer will present itself nicely to me.. not good.. Shucks.. but I'm glad he said it though, maybe I will be more proactive. I feel like I can't just go back to Biopolis and stone, at least in NUS I'm always doing something. I wonder what a Libran would do..

Advice from the pro to his 'fans', wonder if he has any so far, haha, thinking of that video makes me laugh =): Be yourself and enjoy what you're doing. Yeah, be myself, I need to find out what is myself first, which is myself, how many myselfs are there, which myself am I supposed to be or is there only one?

A freaked, disturbed, confused girl now.. maybe I should take a week off and join Sunny, and beef too.. but that's equally freaky..

Sunday 20 February 2005

My views.. If some things a friend does irritates you, you should tell him/her or just bear with it. You don't go around telling people that your friend is irritating, or that you have an irritating friend, unless your that friend curses you during CNY, that's a different story. I think it's a terrible habit to complain to your friends A &B about your friend C.. especially when C is a great friend to you.. Unfortunately it's a habit that a lot of people have..

Mr Tan was right, the VCD was so entertaining.. I shall hurry up pirate them and watch.. Talking about Mr Tan, he was wearing a ring.. haha.

It was good to share and play and fool around, but it was kind of scary cos my piece nearly got stolen, luckily it was not exactly.. O levels results coming out this week.

I think I would be ponning alumni prac this week and badminton as well.

Friday 18 February 2005

Went for Play05. One word for it: loud. The hall doesn't absorb sound at all so there were echoes everywhere. But still can hear that RJ band is very very expressive. And hey, Ling Zi and Chen Chung recognised me. =)

I asked Shen Ye why my photo keep appearing on Outlook. She said it's cos my instrument very nice =) and because the background is empty, not many xian2 za2 ren2 deng3.. Of course my instru's nice, look at its figure.. haha.

Clearing away some stuff that's been lying around my computer, saw those stuff that we wrote when we were editing the class video.. looks super fun, got drawings of all the cool cool stuff that we wanted to add in, the photos flying in in the beginning, then got all the ideas for beginning and ending.. Then there're the captions and names we gave to the clips, like bena chou4 face, qq qian4 bian3.. So fun eh?

Information on Biochemistry
http://www.biochemsoc.org.uk/education/career.htm

Thursday 17 February 2005

Harry Potter and witchcraft

http://www.lasttrumpetministries.org/tracts/tract7.html
luck's running out..

All I'm asking for is to let me collect my A's results on the day that it's released.. yes, it doesn't really matter to my universities or scholarship boards if I collect it 2 days later but I want my results, it's my own selfish wish.. Can't I have it granted? nvm, I'll have it sorted out soon, but somehow I have a feeling that I won't be in sch to collect results when they come out.. Feeling Blue

Guess what? I just got cheated by the flower shop aunty, she overcharged me so I'm now really poor Empty Pockets , luckily alex is nice enough to share the cost.. And thanks to those flowers, now there are ants crawling all over my table

Nice smileys though.. Hopefully the concert tonight can cheer me up and there's a nice free weekend to look forward to, and next week I can wake up later every day. Shall see if I can go for the NTU chem engine talks, actually quite stupid, cos I'll be working in this chem engine lab with all the chem eng people around me next week, then I go NTU to listen to some more chem eng talks..

Monday 14 February 2005

I'm supposed to be preparing agar, but, heck, I need a rest. That fortune cookie from Christine was so accurate. How did it know that my "work will get busier"?

The other day I was in Parkway and there was this shoe shop advertising for sales assistants. The benefits for working with them included a free pair of shoes every month. So let's say you work for half a year, you'll get 6 pairs of shoes.. Hope your shoe rack is big enough.

I can understand how some people are so good that every school want them. Finally knew someone from our batch who got into Yale. If I'm the admission officer, I'll accept her too.

Sunday 6 February 2005

I wish Sunday afternoons will never end, then it'll never reach Sunday night, the sun will not set, it won't need to rise the next day, Monday will never come and I won't need to wake up early to go to work. Every sunday, I'll have some evil thoughts running in my head on how sundays don't have to end..

Had a good lunch on Friday. Found out that Hong Guan is an electone player! So I now know an electone player from Penang. How rare. He was fanatic once upon a time.. Haha, actually I can't imagine him playing, but I'll nv know. He had a fantastic teacher. Maybe he's a real pro.

New year wishes: cannot say or they won't come true. haha, superstitious eh? Talking about superstition, some fortune teller said that the coming Year of the Chicken will be a fantastic year for people born in the Year of the Tiger and those Monkey babies. Everything we do will be successful.
And there's another Chinese myth that whatever ur luck is on li chun, not very sure if that's the word for it, basically whatever ur luck is on 4th Feb this year will be ur luck for the new year. Hope you had a good day last friday.

New year resolutions:
Be more likeable. (How to? I don't know)
Grab opportunities, find opportunities. (That senior was right, opportunities don't just drop from the sky, I wish they do though)

Wednesday 2 February 2005

My views on religion

Warning: Don't be offended. Don't read this if you think you might be offended and "disfriend" me.

Mysterious is the first word that comes into my head. I don't understand how and why people believe in someone up there. Is religion a type of superstition? People who claim that their prayers are heard, could those be just coincidences? The few countable times that I went to church, I went there skeptical, hence I didn't feel the spiritual elevation/ relief that people claim to have found. I find it extremely strange why people go to church every week, listen to the same person on the stage talking mainly about the same book for a few hours.. Maybe you really have to truly believe in a higher being before those activities become meaningful.

It's easy to get kids to believe. When I was a kid, I used to think that if you give up your chance of being a prince and sit under a Bodhi tree, you'll be enlightened. But there are quite a few such trees in my school and I never saw anyone sitting under them. And then if you examine the story again, all the prince did was to be sick of birth, age, illness, death.. Well, who isn't? Why is it that no one else has become Buddhas?

Some people say that religion ensures that everyone has morals and won't start killing each other. After thousands of years of human evolution, are we so immature that we need to fear punishment by someone more powerful than us to not commit crimes? Can't we keep ourselves in check? And obvious questions will be why should the Gods have the power to punish, why shouldn't we? Why can they be perfect and not us? In Christianity, why put a snake in the garden in the first place and make us all suffer? And what right do they have to punish people who don't believe in them? I believe I ought to have the freedom of belief, it's a basic human right, isn't it?Are the gods sadistic?

And then there's the question of what if everything's really true? What if there's really someone up there who can hear and understand everyone's every thought in every language? Will the someone be angry to see my blog entry? Will I be struck by lightning when I'm going home?

Steve said that religion helps u through parts of life. Is that the function of religion? I don't think religious people will agree to that. I think the only real function of religious gatherings, as it seems to me, is that you get to socialise with people who have the same belief that you have. Because of this same belief thing, everyone will be friendly to each other. So you'll get the support of a lot of friends. My conclusion about how religion works is that religion gives you friends, and it's the friends that do all the wonders.

All right, that's all. This whole thing started because Stephen has just decided to go to church with his girlfriend, and he's been talking about it with everyone, and with Stephen, everyone is really everyone and that's how I realise that there are so many church-going people around. OK, enough blogging, I've been blogging for nearly an hour now, and my supervisor has still not appeared. Guess he wouldn't get his transformed bacteria tmr either.
Everything has been going wrong since I started this attachment. The fishes died. Dave started feeling sick, expts that I do go wrong, getting results that are not conclusive enough, have to redo stuff because screwed up the first time.. Now Cornell is threatening to withdraw my application if they don't receive my sch report and rec in 2 weeks..

Anyway, being totally AS just now. Dave went home to eat and I have no intention of following those 2 other people to lunch cos i know they want to talk about Melinda, if that's the way to spell her name.. So I was conveniently on the phone with Christine when the 2 of them went out for lunch and I get to go lunch alone. Bao's AS idea. So I AS-ed to a really AS place, which is Ghim Moh, to the coffee shop that I used to go when I need to eat lunch and there's no one to eat with me, like before afternoon papers.. AS-ness. =) So much for trying to be less AS. Oh yeah, Christelle, I said hi to the bacteria, my supervisor was so amused. =)

Tuesday 1 February 2005

The Disney Movie Trivia Test

Disney Ruler!Congratulations! You scored 77%!
Wow! You know about as much about Disney movies as me! You rock!

When I'll die

Hee hee, quite fun, try it.. Don't trust it too much though..

According to our research, you'll be dead by
December 2071
at age 85

- probable cause -
old age
YOU DIE: 85.2 years
AVERAGE FEMALE LIFE SPAN: 77.1 years (is this value for now? or for 2071?)
As you can plainly see, you have more health & vitality than the average woman.
WHY YOU DIE?
56% old age
24% car accident
13% loneliness
5% drowning of the lungs
2% wounds

You have 24415.7 days left on this earth.
You've already lived 22% of your life.

This test is always available at:www.okcupid.com/death