My tuesdays and thursdays are complete waste of time. Lecturers seem to have no sense of urgency, spend the whole lecture talking about seemingly nothing and the 8am lecture in Price theater just puts me to sleep. I shall do my hum reading next time in that class, but that will put me to sleep even faster. nvm. The problem with taking a class with all sorts of other people is that the teacher doesn't know how deep to go, had a 1.5h class the other day and the teacher spent 1h talking irrelevant stuff and cracking jokes and showing us Sound of Music, finally spent half an hour trying to teach the concept of waves AND nodes AND reflection.. wonder what am I doing in the class.

Me to classmate: How was your summer?
S: It was good. Oh I got engaged.
wow, she's my age.

Me to my supervisor: You plan to have kids?
supervisor: Yeah. Having kids at 27 is considered old for Indians.

First thing my TA said to me in hum class: I'm glad to see you on my list again. You just want to be tortured again, don't you?
yeah.. I just want an A.

"We were walking home one day from the pub and the police came over and asked what we were doing. We said we were walking because we drank too much to drive and he asked to check our IDs. We should have driven cos then we probably wouldn't be stopped by the police."
Apparently it's more suspicious-looking to walk on the streets than to drink and drive. Makes me wonder seriously what the police are thinking of..

neoprints!

Neoprints with nice real backgrounds =) Courtesy of xh's camera

evening picnic


ta-da!


hmm.. why got extra guy at the back? I don't mean hk =)


We're the royal visitors to Buckingham


The shot that's so extremely hard to get. Whoopee!! It's holidays with freakos!


white cap punks


678? I forgot the numbers haha..


London night view


This is absolutely neoprint-like. Squeeze your face into the camera and try not to look shocked.

Don't feel like studying after such a long break. But I guess I'll have to plunge back into my long reading list after tomorrow's lecture. Taking some classes that are worth worrying about this quarter.. MAE9 is worth taking, but not now. Shall focus on 4 classes this quarter, the least no. of units I've taken since my first quarter.

Life has been boring, not getting hit by any extremely inspiring comments anywhere worth recording about.

Singapore is a small place. My circle is even smaller. Met this woman in my current lab who did her phD in singapore, in a certain institute in nus. And guess what? She knows my housemate's supervisor really well. Guess what else? She lived right opposite my current apartment. But she moved a week before I arrived. What a small world.

Plasma is a form of matter? What is plasma? Fire is a form of plasma? Fire is matter? Fire can transmit sound?

"There's nothing remarkable about [making music]. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself." ~ JS Bach
If only music is that simple..

I am dumb enough to bring the wrong camera cable.. Sian.. cannot upload photos until I get my hands on another cable.

Sian-ness, so much crap to settle. Suddenly my degree audit decides not to count any of the classes that I transferred from A-levels, crazy. Shuttle stop is pretty far away, but at least I can get to sch fast.. House is always empty, but I don't mind that much.. Unpacking has been hell, trying to put everything somewhere neatly. Too bad no pictures to show cos I'm too stupid to check the cable I brought, now I guess mummy has a wrong camera cable too. Lab, well, it's not the nice bright lab with a fantastic view over the prison any more. It's not with ct any more too.. Time to be ultra-sociable..

Ok I wanted to upload photos from my computer to here, but the server keeps dying on me.. Forget it.


I'm absolutely bored.

This is the end of holidays. End of year 1, start of year 2.

Holidays have been fantastic. Spent 2 wonderful weeks FF-ing with Assers in London and Spain. That was the freako-est bunch of people that I've gone on holiday with. Totally crazy but very fun. =) Thanks assers!

Then spent 2 months on attachment. The best part of this attachment is that I got to meet all these people, people in my group, people in the office. They are an amazingly varied group of people. If I were to quote everything I think that's worth quoting from these people, I could last a whole conversation. Got many opinions on whether to do science or not, quite amusing responses, probably wouldn't be that amusing when it's my turn. Watching the pros work shows how fresh and inexperience I am. As someone from my lab said, I have to "waste a few more years of taxpayers' money before (I) can contribute". Was preparing for my final presentation and felt that if this was a class that I'm taking, and the final presentation is my final exam, I'm totally unprepared for it. There's no way I can smoke an A for this class. Not surprisingly, Dr wang talked more than I did during the presentation, glad he was there. Quote from Dave: you can say "I don't know" when you're an RA but you have to know everything when you're a postdoc. I was reading through my notes for my last attachment and realised that Dave was teaching me with much more guidance, he tells me every step, how he gets every figure, why we're doing what.. This time round, much less details, well I really need to learn to not assume so much, and push for what I want, and ask ask ask. Definitely has to do that with my next mentor. I can't be the kid any more. Still it has been a good 2 months, learnt quite a bit (although can definitely be more)..

Went Cambodia with my parents. Cambodia is different from anywhere else I've been to. Siem Reap and Angkor is not like Bangkok or any parts of China that I've been to. The town lives on tourism. Quite an amazing place, how often would you find majestic ruins in the jungle and attract the whole world to come and see them?

In this last week, played a whole lot. As if trying to play enough for the whole year. The class is good. xm has improved so much, she's the one now and she's still so young. Go xm, you'll make it big one day. Played all that I wanted, recorded some potential tunes for my phone, but found that my midi editing softwares are all not working, shall resort to some primitive software when I get back to SD. I've decided to buy a keyboard, no matter what happens to my electone. i figure I can spare that thousand bucks or two for my emotional well-being. =) Sponsors for my keyboard are highly welcome.

I don't want to go back to SD. But I don't have a choice, do I? And I guess I'll enjoy SD once again when I'm there. I figured the most impt thing nowadays is to enjoy and treasure what I have right now, since the clock will keep ticking, this moment will pass, the next moment will come. I will miss this holiday.

Lifting from a friend's blog..

The Diffusion Theory
Came up by a friend trying to get us to do something useful with our time.. amazed at the amount of bs.. Check it out.



Click the graph to get to the original post and how the figures were generated. In short, start to work as early as possible to earn the most money.

But is money the most important thing? As have been said a million and one times, money is not the most important thing in life, but you can't live without money. Or if I were to quote someone whom I'm quoting a bit too often, "when you get to my age, you'll see the importance of money, (and recognition, for that matter)". Whatever happened to happiness, satisfaction? Are money and recognition all there is to happiness in this field? But well, I guess the people I'm quoting from are not lacking in the other aspects leading to happiness..