Expressivo

2012

2012-01-25T23:33:00.000-08:00

In this year, I will

Drink at least 500ml of fluids a day
Know more about ribosomes than my PI
Not sacrifice time with friends and family for work

Happy new year

如果

2011-12-03T19:11:00.000-08:00

Can you keep a secret?

2011-12-02T00:35:00.000-08:00

Too many goings on. Too many secrets. I just want to be in my little scientific bubble and struggle with my own microcosm of experiments.. I need to be constantly reminded that I should stay as far away as possible, that I do care about my own future and what people think of me

People, open your ears and listen to what others are saying. Listen.

Everyone needs a 4 leaf clover, and a little luck. Good luck to my ou xiangs and my benchmate, good luck to my car.

ELdata

2011-11-28T00:11:00.000-08:00

Got a score/ data request from someone in an electone forum.. felt like it's something from a previous life.. Don't even remember where I got the data from, how meticulous I was in compressing the data, uploading them, unprotecting things, archiving others. Those were the days..

Looked through the recent forums, and there are actually new stuff for EL recycled down from STAGEA.. wow. Now I really want to play again. Especially after watching the guy at Castro Theatre, Alan, play an organ. The first instrument is like a first language. It's the instrument that I'm most at home with, that I can do the most things with.. I miss it

Alison Gopnik: What do babies think?

2011-10-17T22:47:00.000-07:00

This is a really informative and entertaining talk.

So what's it like to be a baby? It's like being in love in Paris for the first time after you've had three double-espressos. That's a fantastic way to be, but it does tend to leave you waking up crying at three o'clock in the morning.

Heidelberg pact

2011-09-22T23:12:00.000-07:00

It's interesting to know what others think of me, and of my choices. I know that Tim my postdoc thinks that I'm a joke, messing around in the lab, experiments always failing. Also interesting to know what people think of life.. I'm really glad I got to go to the meeting. Was a rookie, but at least I was a happy one. It was surprisingly easy to make friends when everyone is there alone.

Here are some quotes:
"When I'm old and can't move, he'll be in his prime. All these papers, it doesn't matter. What matters is my son." (Really that's what you think?)
"Women PIs are all career women, they don't understand your need to spend time with your family." (Don't think this is true)
"You'll do well in the lab because she'll make sure you do well" (doing well 可以被逼出来吗？)
"I didn't think you'll be doing that (dancing)" (Look what peer pressure can do)
"Trust me. Drink this glass of water now and you'll thank me tmr for not getting a terrible headache." (Then he pours a glass of wine for everyone)
"He's a nice guy. He cooks, he cleans, and there's a side of him that I've never understood" (That's the definition of a nice guy?)

I love that every town has an old part that's preserved. It gives the place character. Germany is definitely worth returning. There's still so much more to see. In 2 years time maybe?

Faust-- a tragedy

2011-04-27T00:22:00.000-07:00

"I've studied now, to my regret,
Philosophy, Law, Medicine,
and, what is worst, Theology
from end to end with diligence.
Yet here I am, a wretched fool
and still no wiser than before"
"I well may know more than all those dullards,
those doctors, teachers, officials, and priests,
be unbothered by scruples or doubts,
and fear neither hell nor its devils
but I get no joy from anything, either,
know nothing that I think worthwhile"
~ Faust Part I (Goethe)

What brings happiness in life? Striving towards an unattainable ideal. Making progress towards that ideal. Slowly attaining god-like status, but never reaching it because once it's reached, life cease to have a meaning. Faust is miserable even though he knows much more than everyone else. You would think that knowledge will make him happy since he is a scholar. But he stopped making progress getting towards the god-like status. And more drastic measures must be taken to resume that..

I think one of the saddest things is to watch relationships break apart. Not just romantic relationships, but friendships as well. Friends that were once close become people you don't talk to any more. For no major reasons, just distance, time, new friends, new lifestyle etc. Some friends try harder than others to stay connected, but eventually everyone gives up and just make new friends from people around them. Too much effort otherwise. At the end of the day, what are u left with? Memories of great experiences. Strands of friendship that, maybe one day, will thicken and strengthen again. Or maybe it'll just be another name in the long list of friends on fb.

2011-04-03T13:43:00.000-07:00

I have taken a liking to bald trees. Every winter they die and in spring, they're reborned, with a stronger will to live. And even when they lose all their leaves, they still stand tall, majestic and beautiful.

Saw this little creature digging out of from the ground to look for food. Cute little fellow. Wiki says it's a vole.

It's cherry blossom season =)

Sick to the stomach

2011-03-30T22:41:00.004-07:00

That's the feeling all day. There's nothing physically wrong, just mentally, emotionally very wrong.

A weekend ago, I felt possessive. Yesterday I was angry. Slightly angry at me for being selfishly possessive, for putting hope in places where I shouldn't. Slightly angry at people for being so freely giving in their words and actions. Slightly angry at others for being, well, so different from me. And the slightlies add up to a non-slight.

Today I just feel like a failure. I think the purpose of a job, besides bringing in the money, is to feel useful, a sense of fulfillment. After all that's all you do all day. Better do a good job and be great at it. Today, I saw that the only experiment that I was doing this week failed. Think I need to re-evaluate the way I'm doing expts, to reduce failures and increase my utility. Half the time I think i'm just wasting reagents. Adding on to the list of failures, in lab and in life.

It's times like this that I re-read my blog. Visit past eras. Learn from experience. Look for inspiration. And there was this post on a ballet teacher. She was the one who made me want to dance again, who made me feel like it's ok to dance even though I suck. She made my summer in lab much more enjoyable. If I become a teacher one day, I want to be like her. Encouraging, caring, personal, inspiring, qualities that I wish to have. She was the one who said just tell yourself you can do it and you can. That's what I'm going to do now.

You know what? I'm going to repost everything i've quoted her for.
"Pretend you're confident."
"Think happy thoughts. Think of a day when things went better than expected."
"You can't always be nice and gentle in life. Sometimes you have to be strong and angry."
"If you can't remember any of those things, I have one more trick, just think of this: I am going to do it. It's simple but it works."

Humanities

2011-03-27T20:11:00.004-07:00

Hum training is actually turning useful. I can't even describe how similar this proposal writing process is to Hum paper writing. I do the same things. Scribble on pieces of papers. Get consumed by the topic. Debate with myself endlessly whether what I'm arguing is logical/ significant. Talk to professors when I have something/ get stuck. Only difference is now I have to find my own evidence and topic. Can't just take quotes from 2 books.

Just came back from a weekend getaway from cells and ribosomes. A real holiday. Little work. Go out and play, stay home and contact, laze around, even read a bit of fiction. But I'm just as lost as ever. Can I? Should I? What do I want? Getting post-holiday blues. Maybe I can sleep it off. Sleep is another of my getaways. When you're asleep, you don't have to deal with anything.

Resolution for April: Less procrastination, more work. now.

Clogged sink

2011-03-10T00:19:00.001-08:00

I feel like a clogged sink
Where people pour all their used ink
Red, purple, green and yellow
Hoping I can make a rainbow

I feel like a paper pillar
Where heavy weights are on my shoulder
Lift now, do not falter
Or you will be fed to the shredder

*I want to be free
Why won't you let me
I'm stuck in the middle
With things I want to say
With things that I can't say

I want to blast music so loud
That I can't hear myself shout
I want to leave here
Go far without fear

No more a clogged sink
No more of used ink
Escape from this boring stream
Go swim in the sea of dreams

Hear the song

Friends

2011-02-07T00:22:00.003-08:00

In the past couple of months, I've discovered the value of friends. I've seen what friends do for each other, seen what best friends for life means, also seen how needed friends are.. It's surprising but this is a new world to me. This level of friendship, this level of relationship is rather foreign. The kind of friends that can 为朋友两肋插刀。 Maybe I want to be part of it.

I have decided on that the only difference btw friendship and relationship is that friends are not exclusive. Friends are a no committment, come and go kind of thing. You don't have to choose 1 friend over another. You can have everyone as a friend as long as you have enough space to contain them. Can you feel as deeply for friends as for lovers? According to this logic, yes.

I am a copier. I mimic what others do. If you're nice to me, I'll be nice to u. If you like me, I might copy that too.

January resolution was to keep my friends and make new ones. Worked out pretty well.

February resolution shall be to spend more time every day using my brain.

Costa Rica

2011-01-09T22:48:00.004-08:00

Highlights

Animals, animals, animals. Tree frog, toucans, funnel spider, tarantula, sloths, leaf cutter ants, snakes, mamut, coatis, quetzal, owl, hummingbirds, iguanas, howler monkeys, capuchin monkins, squirrel monkeys, racoons, agouti, crabs, fish, alligator, farm animals, humans. yay
Whitewater rafting in the most front seat without falling out of the raft and without shivering from cold
Sweet fresh pineapples, and bananas, watermelons, papayas
Fresh-squeezed orange juice
View of the volcano in the tent at the 1968 Arenal lava trailhead
hitchhiking
Casados! and gallo pinto + huevos for breakfast
Guanabana juice
Agua dulce
Pizza and salad at Rancho Margot
The whole Rancho Margot concept, that one can be self-sufficient by growing trees, veggies, keeping animals, composting, generating electricity from streams, and still have all the luxuries a decent hotel/ resort have
Heiner from the lovely Monteverde Villa Lodge who didn't speak as much English as we would like but tries so hard and was so friendly
Vehicles that have no problems going over unpaved roads
The fun family on the night tour with us and the huge family on the canopy tour with us. I like how the stranger barrier breaks down after being on a tour together
Ziplining. The zipline was already long and fun and then there was the rappel aka fireman pole/ rope (super scary) and Tarzan swing (super fun) and Superman (cool experience)
Swings for chairs at Taco Bar in Jaco
Beautiful sunsets over the Pacific
Surfing.. or an attempt to
Pacific ocean
Setting off fireworks. Yippee! More fun if they were the kind that explodes in the air
Sleeping in every bus/ van ride
Friendly Ticos
Black dog that first followed us then guided us into town
A country that's so rich in life, in plants, animals, people
Escape from real life =)

Forgettable moments

Too much time in hotels watching old movies/ CSI/ 30 Rock
Spending too much on tour guides.. especially the volcano hike on a rainy day and the Manuel Antonio guide
Insect bites
Some random motel that we stayed in cos it's cheap in Fortuna that had ants on the wall and air con that's too cold and rooster at 4 in the morning
Mud, spending so much energy trying to avoid sinking
Long long bus rides, especially the one from Quepos to San Jose
Sleeping over in a cold airport

2011

2011-01-01T02:18:00.002-08:00

It's not often that I feel lonely. Much less feeling lonely in a group. New year's eve dinner was fantastic, posh French dining with friends that I miss. What am I missing? It's the feeling, feeling of someone being there.. but feelings get people into messes.

Reminder to self: none of the recent goings-on involves me. Stay as far away from mess as possible. If anything, I need to stay objective. No one really needs me, even if I know everything. I have no solution for anyone.

In the new year, I will manage time more wisely so I can accomplish more and still have time for myself. Happy 2011. Cheers.

Wishlist

2010-09-27T00:43:00.005-07:00

kite
~~a potted flower plant~~
keyboard scores, film scores will be nice, or anything that sounds impressive
~~board game, since i'm addicted now~~
~~ukelele haha~~
experiments that work
to play in an ensemble/ band

I like good surprises too =)

So long and thanks for the fish

2010-09-26T01:13:00.002-07:00

It comes in waves. There are days when I think of him way too much, and others when I can't imagine we were ever together. I guess this is it. Thanks for the fish. If only I'm a dolphin.

Addicted to board games lately. Agricola and Puerto Rico. It's fun to use brain to do something else other than thinking up good experiments. Planning strategies that last for a few turns is much less stressful than planning expts.. With board games and dance and meeting people for lunch/ dinner, who has time for reminiscing? What is there to reminisce? go away..

Gave my first lab meeting. I guess things can only go up from now. Every lab meeting will be better than the last. I will know more about my topic, have more data and answer more questions adequately. It's a strange relationship I have with my PI. I tell her about my failed expts hoping that she'll have suggestions to right them. She tells me about her failed expts hoping, well, I don't think i'm too helpful. I also need to be able to argue my point without getting emotional. And I'm on my way to losing my crappy US accent

entertainment

2010-08-29T17:50:00.002-07:00

spending a lot on shows lately.. nothing has been a waste of money yet

John Mayer concert at Shoreline
1st outdoor concert I've been to. It's quite cool, can see stars, and it's not too cold. It's not too packed and can smell people smoking pot. Owl City, sorry, sounded like karaoke. Maybe he didn't always sing into the mic, that's why. The keyboard/ backup singer has a really sweet voice and he has a violin and cello too. Cool. Fireflies song got firefly lights glowing in the background. Wish he sang Vanilla Twilight though.
John Mayer. I liked this better than the trio concert. Mainly because I know a lot more of the songs he sang this time. They were more mainstream songs, like No Such Thing, Gravity, Heartbreak Warfare, Waiting for the world to change.. The giant screen behind him helped a lot, since we were about a few hundred metres away from the stage. He's a damn good guitarist, there's no denying.. And he can sing. I want a ukelele.

Beauty and the Beast, the Disney musical
It follows the cartoon so closely I'm amazed. The sets, the conversations, it's the exact words from the show. I'm really impressed with the sets and costumes and choreo. Turning sets around to make a new set is brilliant. Mrs Potts' arms can't move much, haha, Lumiere's lights can go on and off, and Cogsworth got pendulum hanging down his belly. The beast is quite shuai. Lefou is really cute. They added a mug clanging dance in Gaston which I really really liked. Be Our Guest was really grand too, can almost match the cartoon. Of the new songs, I liked "If I can't love her" the best. Maybe it's the lyrics, maybe it's the catchy progression, she'll never love me if i can't love her. I didn't like the acoustics that much, the brasses are really loud and the singing was covered sometimes.. but maybe i got used to it after a while and it stopped bothering me =) Such a sweet story.

Sweet stories, happy endings.. too many of them. May reality be as sweet as that
2yrs.. i can't do that. plan of action: inaction.

I never thought i'll say this, but i really miss playing in a group. Considering that I never liked playing bass much, I miss playing it with others. Anyone want a bassist?

"Since when do we dislike ourselves so much that we shudder at photos of ourselves because it looks too much like us? We have to turn our face sideways to take pictures so they don't look so much like us."

songs

2010-07-29T22:16:00.004-07:00

There are as many songs about falling out of love as those about falling in love.. Here are a couple to add to the collection, 1st one's dug out from a yr ago, 2nd one's fresh. I hope these are the last of this kind i'm writing.

To listen, click the links below
Locked out
Let it go

Locked out
Sitting right next to you in the car
driving to the shores to look at the stars
I made a joke, you said uh-huh
your mind was somewhere far

On Saturday, I gave you a call
wanted to go with you to the mall
had a good lunch but you were grouchy
Why aren't you happy

What makes you laugh
What makes you cry
How can I read your mind
What can I do
to please you
how can I ever know
I am locked out
I am locked out locked out
locked out of your heart

Let it go

曾经在屋顶唱歌
曾经在雨中散布
曾经在海边看日落
曾经在你怀里看烟火

* 但火花从没擦起
甜美时光总不完美
也许我不是你的唯一
也许我们彼此不够疼爱

Let it go
Let it go
我们只是普通朋友
这条路太多障碍物
这不是属于我们的路
Let it go
I’ll let you go
当朋友会比情人快乐
梦醒了你走了
雨停了天晴了

喜欢陪你弹吉他
喜欢和你一起去K歌
喜欢约你上MSN
喜欢见到你的美一天
*

眼泪已经干了
祝你找到快乐

两滴眼泪

2010-07-16T08:59:00.001-07:00

It was the perfect day yesterday. I jammed (it was decent jamming, i was surprised at how good it was), I danced (horrible dancing but whatever) and I drank lemon tea the whole day. Lovely. The only prob was that I couldn't sleep. It's been a while since I was so jittery that I can't sleep, maybe there was a night or 2 in this year, maybe not. Last time when i had a jittery period was a year back. Was it the tea? Or was it spidey?

Making music has always made me happy, though my ability to make music has diminished throughout the year. I need to get it back.

Quote of the day: You need to like yourself

Why am I so bothered?

I'm ready to go back to lab.

Things I've forgotten about singapore

2010-07-04T20:38:00.002-07:00

It's so green! It's a different shade of green, very new, very fresh. Don't get much of it in SF
The green man to cross road is green! not white
We use so many plastic bags, especially compared to SF where plastic bags are banned from grocery stores
No one says hi to u at the checkout counter
It's so hot
People wear very nice clothes, go out here cannot anyhow dress like going to haight
No one is obese
Can't use credit for everything, in fact can't use credit for most things. I've only used it once so far
People get super high on world cup. Can hear people shouting through my window every time the ball gets close to the goal

The list will go on.. as i discover more

Academic salaries and satisfaction

2010-07-02T23:40:00.002-07:00

Read the Nature article here
Asians earn peanuts.. about half of what Americans earn at full professor level. And there are fewer full profs in Asia too. Industrial positions also pays about twice as well as academic positions.
If money's what you're after, be a guy, be in US and go into industry.

Alcohol under the Microscope

2010-06-29T19:48:00.002-07:00

That's Pina Colada, dried out, and viewed under microscope. Very peacock-ish.

More pictures here. I can almost see some sort of character associated with different alcohols. Tequila is angular. Champagne looks softer and classier. Sake is warm and bold.

Mission in the Mix

2010-06-22T23:32:00.003-07:00

Never thought i'll say this, but I'm learning quite a bit from America's Next Top Model. How to make yourself look tall, how to shoot daggers with your eyes, what to do with your mouth etc. Comes in handy during dance

Talking about dance, Soul Force is amazing. They can use their bodies and faces.. in so many styles. And none of them esoteric. I've watched them 3 times and want to watch them more.

Mission in the mix has been a good experience. To go through it with people as clueless as I am is great. It was great to learn a dance that well and show it and not just do it. The teacher's fantastic and her assistants are so much fun. Now i'm gushing positive words.

Can't wait to go home

cell bio problem set question- sums up my last 2 weeks and next 2 weeks

2010-03-10T21:47:00.003-08:00

Two pathways exist in a Tetrad 1st year winter quarter cell. The first one starts with a Cell Biology input that leads to the activation of Super Cool Biology (SCB). This recruits cell bio prof (DM) and the Cell Bio Crew (CBC). DM and CBC catalyze the formation of Memorable Quotes (MQ) which goes to the nucleus to turn on the transcription of Happy TAs (HTAs). HTAs promote Yummy Baked Goods (YBG) and Relatively Nice Grading (RNG) production, which all eventually lead to the outputs of Fun Times in Cell Biology and a awesome Cell Bio Proposal (CBP). The other pathway starts with a Bioreg input that also leads to the activation of SCB. However, this recruits bioreg prof (JL) and the Bioreg Crew (BRC). JL and BRC promote Central Dogma Overload (CDO), which leads to activation of Massive Memorization (MM). MM phosphorylates Freaking Out Over Proposal Ideas (FOOPI), which causes a conformational change that allows it to enter the nucleus and promote the transcription of CBP and Bioreg Specific Proposal (BSP). BSP goes on to activate Dread of Unknown Duo of Examiners (DUDE) and then Stressful Orals (SO). SO is a protein kinase that phosphorylates PASS or FAIL depending on inputs from other players that are not yet understood. Once phosphorylated, PASS catalyzes Sh!t-load of Drinking and Celebration (SLDC), while phosphorylated FAIL feeds back to Bioreg.

As mentioned above, the PASS or FAIL outcome is determined by unknown regulators. In vitro, SO phosphorylates both PASS and FAIL at equal rates. However, in vivo, SO activity is strongly biased towards PASS. A screen recently revealed a factor, Extreme Work (EW), the overexpression of which results in 100% PASS phosphorylation and 0% FAIL phosphorylation. Describe one possible mechanism for how EW could be providing PASS specificity to SO and how you would experimentally test this hypothesis.

-koping this from the problem set (Anna) without permission

Top 10 perks of being an academic scientist

2010-01-17T17:17:00.003-08:00

It's a Wonderful Life: A Career as an Academic Scientist
Mol Biol Cell. 2010 Jan;21(1):11-4.

Freedom to Choose Your Directions
Reinvent oneself through one's career
Participating in the great era of discovery
Being part of an international community joined by common interests
Pleasant travels
A social and youthful job
Many measures of success
Flexible daily schedule
Doing some good
Scholarship

I like 3, 4, 5, 9 and 10.
What do you think are the perks of your job?

Recent wisdoms

2010-01-14T23:14:00.002-08:00

I love talking to smart people. Or having wise people talk to us. Here are some random pieces that I don't want to forget.

From Sandy:
How much proof do you need before you believe something is real? You can always disprove something with an example of a case that doesn't fit the theory. But how much evidence would you need before a theory becomes a fact? Evolution by natural selection is a theory but we all believe in it. If it's just a belief, what makes it different from intelligent design? We believe in our evidence, they believe in theirs.. How's one more right than another?

From Ron:
Ron was just inspiring. He's right. I got to do something other than science. Help the community, help lab, make friends, spend time with friends and family. It's not about karma, it's about being human. Whatever happened to my humanities training?
My New year's resolution: be generous with my time and not hog it all for myself.

On a separate note, check this out. if you want to learn some biology, the lectures here are pretty good. Not too long, not too difficult.
www.ibioseminars.org

From me:
Watched this Jap postdoc come ask another Jap postdoc questions. Think they bowed to each other 5 times before started talking.. What would they think of american culture? where you call your PI by his first name, joke, curse, swear with ur superiors..

Back to life

2010-01-03T17:52:00.004-08:00

I love holidays. Don't have to worry about work, school, deadlines.. But holidays have to end. And it's back to life. Let me bask in my last hours of holidays..

The older i get, the more emotional i get. Thought people get hardened by life. I never used to cry in movies.. but now i'm getting teary at albatross stories. Not to mention the tears shed for stolen clothes. Perhaps i'm just not used to having attention when bad things happen.. and crying is not an expression of sadness but an expression of thanks for all the concern? weirdo

Highlights of the holidays

hiding out in cafes in cold drizzly weather (if anything, i'm not against Starbucks any more
Pike's clam chowder
Avatar
train ride to Vancouver
bus ride in the rainy night back to Seattle (feeling warm and protected in the bus, playing Spikey and talking abt life)
Koi palace dim sum
quaint downtowns (Napa, SB)
Monterey Bay Aquarium (the bkgd music + the sea creatures never fail to attract me)
beautiful coastline, fierce waves, foamy seas (Monterey, 17-mile dr, Big Sur, I would go there any time)
different photo ideas from different people at the same spots
John Mayer trio (extremely talented 3 people, 5 rows away from me)
warm comfy beds
Guitar Hero
CS's sour apple pie
nice guitar
Balboa Park on a sunny Sat afternoon watching planes land and people take wedding photos
being around friends, all the time

Forgettable moments

discovering that the car's missing
hotel room getting broken into and luggage rummaged through
Hearst castle
LA jams

Wish list

2009-09-26T00:30:00.006-07:00

I'm going to draw up a wish list, just in case u want to give me a present for any reason. Will try to update this as I get myself the things on the list. In no particular order..

something to make my room colourful
how about a flower? a live growing flower.. inspired by Ro's orchid.. must be able to fit on my window sill though
~~a good keyboard.. I'm eyeing Yamaha DGX530. I'll gladly accept any model above that too~~
~~IPod touch.. I don't really need one, my mp3 player works fine, it's just all these people fiddling with their iphones and ipods around me..~~
want to get me a car? I have a garage space all ready for it
or a bike so i can bike through GG park to ocean beach
something more realistic.. a comfy swivel chair with wheels that actually work
a container for hot drinks.. need to keep my drinks hot

Haha. Not like anybody who reads this will give me a gift.. u're probably not even in my neighbourhood.

2009-08-22T07:59:00.002-07:00

i feel like i've left a life behind, a really good life, and building up a new one from scratch.. it's not fun.
sunlight somehow gives me hope, and strength.. maybe i'm just being emo, but i become sad when the sun's gone.. doesn't help that my body thinks i'm taking a nap at midnight and wakes me up every 2-3h.

why am i doing this? would i have enough motivation to push me through? who knows..

too many things to do.. things that i don't know how to do.
i'll hold on to every little glimmer of hope.

Journey

2009-08-06T23:02:00.002-07:00

our MV.. my 2secs of airtime.. the song's awesome

Music appreciation

2009-08-04T20:41:00.002-07:00

I like songs for 3 reasons

The melody/ chord progression attracts me
It has an interesting arrangement
It's technically interesting

and maybe a fourth, the lyrics are cool.. but it's rare that i pick up the lyrics at all

Most songs fall into cat 1, Jay Chou songs are usually in cat 2, and cat 3 is reserved for songs that i really look into, meaning they have to belong to cat 1 or 2 already. Sometimes when songs drop into cat 3, they become purely technical and i stop paying attention to the musical aspects any more.. and that's sad.

逃亡 is now in cat 3. 11/8
我要的幸福 as well. 5/4 + 6/4
The Moment. Maybe one day i'll get it.

Questions.. from a professor

2009-07-20T22:12:00.001-07:00

I WENT TO A BOOKSTORE AND ASKED THE SALESWOMAN, "WHERE'S THE SELF- HELP SECTION?" SHE SAID IF SHE TOLD ME, IT WOULD DEFEAT THE PURPOSE.

WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOU SEE AN ENDANGERED ANIMAL EATING AN ENDANGERED PLANT?

WHAT IF THERE WERE NO HYPOTHETICAL QUESTIONS?

IF YOU ATE BOTH PASTA AND ANTIPASTO, WOULD YOU STILL BE HUNGRY?

IF YOU TRY TO FAIL, AND SUCCEED, WHICH HAVE YOU DONE?

CAN AN ATHEIST GET INSURANCE AGAINST ACTS OF GOD?

Quote of the day:

2009-07-16T08:14:00.001-07:00

We do have hearts. =)

maybe not

2009-07-14T08:27:00.004-07:00

when i read werther, i didn't understand how anyone could be so emotional.. it's over a girl that he obviously can't get. and it's love at first sight. i thought he was stupid. and the whole ending was just beyond me.

the other day i was shopping and overheard this conversation. this girl said to this guy, i'm willing to bet that i've put in more for u than u've put in for anyone..
wow, now that's a strong statement.

must there be ladders? i'm greedy, if i fall off one ladder, can i hop over to the next?

Privacy

2009-06-12T09:17:00.002-07:00

I like my privacy. I don't like when living things get into my private space. That's probably why I don't have particular liking for pets. I'm a fish person cos fish live in their own space and not in mine. But went snorkeling and swam with fishes and decided that maybe I don't like fish so much. Cos they have no respect for my space. Things are ok though.

Saw this guy yesterday that looked really familiar, familiar but not as cute as I remembered him to be. Wondered who he was. I want his job, except that I think he doesn't get paid. And I don't qualify any more. Seek opportunities while you can, otherwise you won't qualify any more.

就放肆愛放肆追放肆去闖
放肆是我的信仰
再不去闖夢想永遠只會是一個夢想
~ 五月天 - 放肆

闖!!

一滴眼泪

2009-04-25T07:13:00.004-07:00

Apr 15
Applied: 9
Accepted: 4
Rejected: 3
Gave up: 2

It's the day where u know for sure u didn't get in. Where an impt decision that affects ur career is made. When u have a clearer inkling of what life's like for the next 5++ years.

I hate how everything's so transient in our life. It's 3 years somewhere, a year somewhere else, another 5 years somewhere different, and back. The only good thing is prob that if you get tired of a place, u can see an end to it.

Peiling claims that there's sadness in my laughs. Is that possible? I'm an inherently sad person?

Instincts were right. The female spidey sense picked it up. Either I didn't want to listen to spidey or I was genuinely confused. Irritatingly confusing. A phrase that's catchy enough to make a song.
2 days to get over it.
Not fighting it.
Then life goes on and i can continue being idiotic/ moronic.

2009-04-11T08:36:00.002-07:00

xh thinks i'm "happy, cool and weird"
same to u xh, especially the weird part

I nv knew that andrea's a quarter indian.. cool

leukocyte

2009-03-27T17:10:00.005-07:00

Had some really good conversations this week with friends. Maybe i'm not so hopeless at 2 people convos after all.

feelings or logic? present or future? yes or no?

Being as escapist as I am, I'd rather live in a good dream than wake up and face the reality. Even though the reality could be as good or even better than the dream. I'm not too satisfied with how things are, but am I ready to shape it? Nietzsche wouldn't approve of my inactions, nor would Schopenhauer. This makes me realize that I've pretty much forgotten everything about them. I should stick categorical imperatives on my wallpaper or sth.

I can live with categorical imperatives. In fact, I want to. They're logical. Well, logic was everything to these philosophers. There are reasons these guys cite for coming to such conclusions. They're not the result of some myth where something did sth wrong and was condemned by higher beings forever. I pick philosophy any day.

I'll probably go UCSF. It's not Apr 15 yet but I'm pretty sure of it.

Earth hour tonight. Get off electricity for a while.

Musicophilia

2009-03-21T01:52:00.002-07:00

Bought Musicophilia to read on long transcontinental flights.. It's rather entertaining, got me interested in musical perception again.

I've always wondered, how would you know that what you're seeing/ hearing is the same as everyone else? Is there an absolute colour? Is what I perceive as red the same colour as what you consider red? A baby doesn't know an apple is red until someone tells him that it's red. Could the apple be triggering blue light receptors instead in the baby's eyes? And if so, will the baby grow up seeing things completely different from others but not knowing so? Everything red will be blue to him, but he would call it red and believe it to be red because that's what he's been taught. Are we all seeing colours differently?

Protect ur ears. People hear all sorts of weird things when their ears are damaged/ when they go partially deaf..

Have been addicted to music lately.. addicted and affected. THere are songs that make me happy and songs that melt me.. And horrible tuneless hip hop songs. Wonder what causes these reactions. when can i write a melty song?

Hello from LA

2009-02-21T11:42:00.002-08:00

Yay for free wi-fi. I'm trying not to fall asleep by being online.

I can't help considering cancelling my UK trip. Traveling is tired, and boring. And i wonder if I'm wasting my time and energy going there. Will see how.

Sat next to this Singaporean who's a tour guide in Japan on my way to Narita. Makes me want to be a tour guide again. Also want to visit Japan. Some day.

The trick is to write the song when I'm feeling it. It helps take the feeling away, and also I'll get a good song. So far I have loads of feelings and zero songs. Let's see if the alien song materializes before the end of the trip.

Ok. going for lunch.

science

2009-02-19T01:40:00.002-08:00

It’s always at periods like this when I have to prepare for an interview or write a personal statement that I think of why it is that I’m doing science. Science shouldn’t be about gathering enough data to publish. Publishing should be a by-product of the bigger aim to do good and save the world. We put that in our presentations, papers, oh my work is going to cure cancer and save the world. How many of us really believe that what we’re doing is significant, in the grand view of things? I know that I’ve forgotten that my goal is more than getting a paper out.

Of course I’m just being idealistic. Science, like every other thing in this capitalist world, is about convincing people to give you money for something you have. And to get money, you have to rush for papers. The world’s going to end soon. Save it while we can.

2009-02-17T07:14:00.003-08:00

So I've been using the word 'so' too much. It appeared in almost every sentence in my presentation. I've been in a very tensed state for the past, let's see, a week or so. No idea why. Just uptight, highstrung, ready to explode. Bunny was going to diagnose me with anorexia cos I'm not eating much, though it's not like she eats much more than I do. I was thinking that if this goes on, I'll probably die of hypertension before 3 weeks are over.. But it stopped, thankfully. I still have no idea what the cause of stress is. Whatever, I'm tired.

song that's stuck in my head.. among others:
"love love love love love, love love, makes the world go round"
it's from powerpuff. i should watch powerpuff again some time. kindergarten kids are cute.

deja vu

2009-02-13T07:10:00.001-08:00

2008-12-21T02:59:00.002-08:00

All the highs of the recent weeks/ months have been musical. Others have been talking of their scientific epiphanies, intellectual highs. Nope, none for me. The only resemblence might be my realization that my drug plate was screwed up in a simpler way, and hence my project isn't as hopeless as it seems.

Anyway, music. 2 concerts in Dec, our band with no name and Coda. Practices are many, took up 4 days out of 7 for the past 2 weeks. And I actually look forward to them after a day of unproductive work. How wonderful. The band with no name gave its inaugural concert this week. The music was good, we had 2 original songs, the audience was a lot of fun and we still badly need a name. I'm already waiting for the next show to happen. Coda, they've agreed to mic me. Yay. Now I just need to improvise something decent, to walk a rather crooked line. Working on it.

Concert

2008-11-17T01:27:00.002-08:00

Watched my first concert since I came back. Andoh's 3rd time in Singapore, promoting Mindscape 4 and STAGEA. I want to be back in the circle. It's some amazing music that he's creating. Concerts like these are always tacky, attracting attention using flashy lights, lively drumbeats, even catchy tunes. But there's no doubt that his composition and playing are good. And I like his playing style better now than before. It looks much less EF-like and more professional.
Many many thanks to the Internet, I managed to find some tracks from his CDs, and they melt me. I'm a liquid now.

Digital zebrafish embryo

2008-10-15T01:42:00.002-07:00

This is way too cool. It's like what people did with the worm, but with colours and cool graphics.

2008-09-17T23:02:00.002-07:00

Was called "a parrot on the keyboard". Don't know to take it as a compliment or no. Come to think of it, parrots and pirates are very alike. Parrots copy others. Modern pirates copy other people's work. Pirate, parrot, parrot, pirate. I wonder if they have the same etymology...

"Being in a relationship is not about finding a match but working through the differences." That came from the least likely of people. It made me wonder why I didn't think of that before.

Human electricity

2008-09-10T20:25:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking seriously about generating electricity using student
(and faculty) muscle power. Our kids spend hours in the exercise rooms pushing,
pulling, pedaling, lifting, running on a belt, etc. Why shouldn't all of these
machines generate electricity for the University? I bet it would be substantial.
They could start by powering the gym, and then see what's left over for other
purposes. It might also be useful to teach them the value of the electricity we
waste!
Along these lines, I've hired two UG students to make stationary bike
electric generators from old used broken bikes. They will be starting soon. It
can be done with a battery, or better still, without one, so people at home can
just connect their generator-bike to an appliance they want to use. Then there's
no pollution from batteries!
I think there's great promise: everyone will want to BENEFIT (besides making muscle) from all the exercise they do! And no one will mind being used to generate energy if they are building their muscle AND helping the world solve its second most important problem!!!
What do you think?

~ From a certain professor of mine

You are a _____ biologist!

2008-08-29T07:33:00.003-07:00

"In the pages that follow you will meet 3 kinds of scientist. The first is a molecular biologist, muttering about enzymes and exonucleolytic degradation. He wants to know what happens to th eDNA of which genes are made. His conviction is that sex is all about repairing DNA or some such molecular engineering. He does not understand equations, but he loves long words, usually ones he and his colleagues have invented.

The second is a geneticist, all mutations and Mendelism. He will be obsessed with describing what happens to genes during sex. He will demand experiments, such as depriving organisms of sex for many generations to see what happens. Unless you stop him he will start writing equations and talking of 'linkage disequilibria'.

The third is an ecologist, all parasites and polyploidy. He loves comparative evidence: which species has sex and which does not. He knows a plethora of extraneous facts about the arctic and the tropics. His thinking is a little less rigorous than others', his language a little more colorful. His natural habitat is the graph, his occupation the computer simulation."
~ "The Red Queen - Sex & the Evolution of Human Nature" Matt Ridley

What kind of biologist are you? This could be one of those personality tests you find on websites. Evolution doesn't seem such a dull and unimportant topic after reading this book. Thanks to sy who's now probably having fun in some lovely part of the world.

On another note, life's best when there are constant little goals that takes effort to achieve but are totally do-able. The little goals can all lead to a big huge goal or they can be just little goals in all kinds of directions. It's when there are no goals or unattainable goals when life gets boring and hopeless. The big low after the high of a difficult mission accomplished is the low of hopelessness and despondency. You'll have to find a new Personal Legend when you've attained one to stay happy.

2008-07-30T00:18:00.002-07:00

Went for a 3f class outing which had a fantastic turnout. More than half the class + 2 teachers.. wow. Yup RJ was the anomaly. It's a conglomeration of many many intelligent people in a school, in a class. It's where I was wow-ed by classmates and teachers' zai-ness. That was harder to find in uni, maybe cos there was less interaction with classmates than there was in JC, we definitely don't borrow each other's tutorials or essays in uni.. But maybe it's really because the inspiring people are not concentrated in a class any more, you have to look to find them. No one takes the exact same classes with you any more and there really isn't anyone who can say something amazing to link your chem class to that genetics class..

Anyway, had a farewell "party" just now for a RA. Gosh, it was more of a meeting than a party. In the meeting room, there's food, but everyone just keeps quiet and eats. The problems of having too many chinese people. Once the PI leaves, the noise level goes up immediately. It's ridiculous.

The style of this lab is so different. It's supported by RAs, not postdocs. It's like a company, when 1 product is doing well, everyone invests energy into that product to speed its improvement and production. It's supposed to promote group work and speed and reduce fighting within the lab for projects. Does it work? I don't know.

Taking GRE tomorrow. I read through my GP notebook. There are actually some substance in there. We actually talked about Engels and John Mill and stuff like existentialism. I have no recollections of those. Probably just took them to be names of old famous guys whom I don't know the significance of. And I looked at my Hum summaries. There are names of people that I have no clue what they did. Who was Schlegel? Or Novalis? Seriously, what was I doing when I read those people's works?

2008-07-11T07:10:00.000-07:00

Went out with the UCSD people yesterday. A friend at work was surprised to hear that there are actually 10 people from UCSD here in singapore.. Saw a really sweet couple, I really didn't expect that. =)

Had great dinner conversations again. It's been a while since I've heard these people put up passionate statements against each other's statements. And it's surprising how A knows B's friend who knows that their mutual friend Z is getting married and other mutual friend omega is already married. There really isn't that many people that we come into contact with in Singapore. Everyone knows everyone.

I'm afraid of commitments, afraid to put down decisions that I might not like later. I'm all for no bondage trials. If things don't work out.. well, free return, exchange, refund. But life's not like that, is it? Most stores aren't willing to give returns or refunds. It's an American concept. The freedom and willingness to try. There is a problem with the word attached. It's a trial. It's not an attachment. There shouldn't be an obligation to be magnetically bound.

Heard loads of stories about my work place since I've started. Saw this secret manual on what kind of place to choose to work. Hahaha. I should stop going wherever people reply emails the fastest.

I think I'll live.

My weird music

2008-07-02T02:12:00.000-07:00

Away from noise
-- a sound narrative
http://www.box.net/shared/oqk9ip4n44

Ballie
-- a cute sonic creature
http://www.box.net/shared/t836s9okks

Amoeba song
-- this is just weird.. It's made mainly from sounds recorded in my lab (as in bio lab), and water sounds
http://www.box.net/shared/79cifk4cg0

Back in sunny Singapore

2008-07-02T01:34:00.000-07:00

I've been back and learning how to live in this country again. Learn to remember to bring umbrella and water and tissue around, learn to say 'queue' and 'petrol' again, learn to type messages with 2 fingers again, I even have to relearn crossing roads. Went kbox the other day and the guy asked us if we were local. I didn't know how to answer that. Do we look that foreign?
We've been taking different paths for 3 yrs.. to get the roads to converge again is not easy. There's this cute phd comic about being a foreign student. Here it is:

We didn't have to go through 2 and 3 and i'm no where near the over qualified part but the rest is pretty accurate.

Well life is never easy. Beneath every gracefully swimming swan/ duck/ goose, there are feet madly pedalling away to keep the bird moving. Start kicking.

End of Spring

2008-06-13T23:32:00.000-07:00

Woosh...

Great classes this quarter. Though my attention in classes has been dropping steadily since freshman year. Cancer's enlightening, though I'm not sure I want to study it. In any case, I just accepted a cancer lab, with a Chinese boss.. we'll see how it goes.
Neuro-immunology. It's been a better class than I thought. Some papers were pretty interesting. And I definitely know more about the brain or immunology than before.
Lab. Got most of my little data in a week. Everything else is either cloning or waiting or frustrating over what went wrong. Poster's pretty.

Logic. Skipped most of the classes but it's been fun translating English into symbols and proving things and looking for fallacies. It's like math without the numbers.
Dance. Learnt to appreciate yoga a bit. Visited the museum of contemporary arts. Should have gone there more often. Again, wasn't totally into it this quarter. Senioritis. Maybe I would have appreciated ballet better. I guess I'm too concerned over techniques and too unconcerned with performance. Show.

Psychoacoustics. Read a bunch of crap. Learnt stuff that are of little interest to any non-musician/ non-psychologist. But I am interested. Conducted an experiment on chord perception and concluded that people distinguish chords by listening to the chord colour. A major chord sounds different from a minor chord. A chord not in the scale of C sounds different from C but chord F kind of sound like chord C. Maybe it's because of the relations of chords in the 5ths space, otherwise known as the circle of fifths. Musical training helps a bit in distinguishing chord changes, just a bit.
Mixing & Editing. How interesting. Made 3 pieces. They don't sound fantastic but I've got good grades on them. Once again shows how little they value artistic value and how much they value fairness and meeting the requirements. My pieces always use some sleight of hand trick to trigger laughter. Really shouldn't. First piece had a comical content, 2nd had an unexpected dance, 3rd was just plain lame. I'll post my pieces some time some where when I find a place to host music.

If there are any classes that I wish I took in UCSD, they're music classes. I want to learn recording techniques and maybe actually learn enough math to understand waves and FFTs.

To do: Make real amoeba music.. with music, not water
Arrange Cascada

There.. I've put them on my list. I'd better do them.

I still don't know if my decision was right. The grass is ALwaYs, without fail, greener, where you are not standing on. I feel like I'm just avoiding myself. What an idiot. If it were someone else, I would think that she's chalking up statistics. But it's me and I don't know what I'm doing. We'll see what happens in a year..

2008-06-05T23:26:00.000-07:00

Poster presentation went fine. I did a better job than I thought I could. People visiting my poster seemed like they weren't bored and they were following what I said. My data is ugly, nothing to say about that, but I seemed to manage to draw some crappy conclusion and not get stones thrown on me too much. Only Colin and this lady seriously questioned my data. People were generally supportive.. Alessia is worth quoting. She said "after it's all over, you forget how hard you worked." (and all the other crap that happened in between). It's been fun. I'm surprised at how few people do a 196: 17 out of the hundreds of graduating bio majors? And I'm surprised at how many of them I know. Rick was right about the grapes analogy, you grab one, you grab the whole bunch. A pic of the poster is up on my logblog. Link's on the sidebar.

Terry gave a strange speech yesterday about graduating into the world. I don't know why she gave that speech but it was insightful. It was basically about finding your own style in dealing with uncertainties. There're always going to be uncertainties, and when they come, would you sit and cry? She's a real hippie, so she says we should go sit somewhere in the mountains, by the river or at the beach, somewhere away from noise, and listen to ourselves. What do I want? And write, journal everything.. It's supposed to help find a style to deal with uncertainties. So I'm blogging.

It's no time to get sentimental but I'm surprised at how much I'm affected. Maybe I'm not such a cold heartless idiot. I'm sorry, I'm sad, I'm glad, I'm unsure, I'm confused. Most of all, I don't know what I want. I need that place to go talk to myself. I want to be a Dicty, life's easy, just follow the crowd..

Mixing and Editing final project proposal

2008-05-22T20:27:00.000-07:00

"I want to make a piece describing the process of making a genetically engineered amoeba. The general narrative will be something like this. Scientists work in labs, create copies of DNA, mutate them, and zap them into amoeba with electricity. The amoeba gets the DNA, becomes weird and starts making strange noises in an amoeba dance.
My narrative is not scientifically correct. "

I actually submitted that as my music project proposal.

Men like destructive things, Women like cute things

2008-05-20T22:11:00.000-07:00

Evil. Heartless. Idiotic. Jerk.

We played our sonic creatures today. All the guys had big destructive monsters. Heavy, metallic creatures that kill or destroy. Like this guy had this robot giant spider thing that decides to attack the audience. And another guy had an alien monster that kills people with swords for a living. Or this other guy whose robot got possessed by an evil drum machine and shot up to space and back in 2s.

And then the girls had cute little things. This girl made a fuzzy little thing that moves around and sings cute tunes. This other girl made this creature that lives in the water and swims around and creates bubbles. My creature was a little ball that bounces around in a dance. How different from the guys' creatures.

Recent reflections.. and observations

2008-05-14T21:56:00.000-07:00

Honors banquet tonight. It's inspiring every year. These people are amazing. It makes me wonder what on earth have I been doing in my 3 yrs of undergrad life. Literally nothing, sitting on my butt doing nothing. And it's especially inspiring this year many of the people who were mentioned are my year and I know them. The Norris prize went to a classmate, haha a Hum classmate. I've always enjoyed the company of the really smart people but I don't seem to be meeting a lot of them, well, maybe I just don't interact with them. Classmates-wise, at least.. This yr's Norris prize winner really deserves it. He is smart, inspiring and very nice. 3 people that I took Hum with that I thought were deserving of the prize, Susan, Dan and Allen. And well, he got it.

Then we heard Allen's story. I'm absolutely amazed. We were all amazed in class at his quick thinking, great speech skills. And if anything, he taught me to not sit back and wait. To get anything done, you'll have to get up and do it. Double major, start an international community service organization, get published, all in 3 years. Beat that.

So what if a GPA is 3.8? It's the attitude towards everything that counts. And mine stinks. I gotta look up Kant's categorical imperatives. They come up every year at Revelle talks. And it kinda makes me miss Hum classes..

Been going to science talks, geared towards undergrads, how nice of them. Figured out some of my own goals to work on..
1. Do good science
2. Mix with the intelligent people (I need that intellectual stimulation, I'm not saying people around me are not smart, it's just that it's really rare to find someone who's really inspiring in classes.. I have plenty of friends who throw out intellectual ideas each time we talk)
3. Be able to explain things well (I was explaining the cloning process to this new undergrad in lab and I think I did a terrible job. He'd better ask me questions or he really won't get it)
4. Network.

It seems to me that people are not looking for what you've learnt, they're looking for the unique experience that you have, they're looking for the personality. It's not possible to hide behind skills and grades and stuff on paper. They're looking for a smart nice person who just happened to fill the need that they have.

Anyway, the expo helped me decide to do get a phd.

Dr Luft was saying how his engineer brother has finally figured out that his passion is in religion, psychology, family.. I wonder where my real passion is. I was supposed to have found it in college. Again I wonder what I've been doing. He was also saying that Humanities is not a knowledge that one can pass on to another like science, it's about discovering for yourself what life is all about, what makes us human. That's the meaning of humanities anyway. Maybe it's precisely because of that, because we don't know/ don't dare to discover for ourselves, about ourselves that we choose science and try to do humanities the scientific way. Cold, objective. It's why I don't enjoy the humanities so much. It's hard work, all this exploring and discovering.

In psychoacoustics we read about musicians conducting scientific experiments on sound and music and how we perceive them. First I've always thought Biology was not scientific enough because there's too much of oh-I-saw-this-in-this-cell-&-I think-it's-the-norm-from-how-I-eyeballed-it. It's not quantitative enough (though of course, it's getting more quantitative every day). Then came psychology and yeah they do numbers and stats, but they just seem to be telling you really obvious things that you already know like Japanese people feel more like part of a group but Americans feel more like individuals. Then we get to psychoacoustics. They're experiments that have interesting questions, but are really hard to answer. This guy thinks that each composer has his own internal rhythm that's different from others and if you play a piece by Beethoven using Mozart's internal rhythm, you'll sound terrible. And he tested it by tweaking rhythmic variables on MIDI files until they sound somewhat musical and overlaid different composers' rhythms on other composers' works and getting people to decide which overlay sounded the best. This is not even eyeballing, this is cochlea-ing.. You arbitrarily decide that this variation sounds good on Brahms so you call it the Brahms rhythm. (if you want more info on this expt, ask me)

Second (gosh this is getting long), I have my cancer class before the psychoacoustics class. So we talk about increasing survival rates and getting better diagnosis and treatment methods in that class. And then I go to my acoustics class and looking at those expts and reading those papers makes me marvel at how unimportant the questions are. Do we really care if a 240c interval sounds like a maj 2nd but a 260c interval sound like a min 3rd? It's fun to know. But in a world that is in the self-destruction mode, should we care about such trivial differences?

I guess arts can only fluorish in stable times, where survival is not a problem. And at least I'm interested in knowing how people perceive music, though the expts are really hard to do. It's almost impossible to find controls or to tweak only 1 variable at a time. Went to RFBF concert last night. They played Stockhausen's Mikrophonie I on the world's largest gong. It was quite a piece of art. Sonically and visually. I thought the piece was about making sounds on the gong using different objects but it's really about using the gong to resonate sounds made by the different objects. And objects included things like bicycle wheel and giant comb and brush that made really neat sounds. I'm glad I got to hear such a masterpiece live. And then they played this pulsars piece that I just didn't get. The surround sound was cool with 6 percussionists in 6 different parts of the hall surround the audience. And it's really fun when they do the surround sound thing where this snare roll was passed from one station to the other. But I don't get how the piece connected with pulsars at all. It was random.

All right, that was a long spiel. Get things which I've wanted to blog for a long time out finally. Time to stop procrastinating and start working. Oh yeah, it was great talking to all my fave profs tonight.

Urinetown revisited

2008-05-04T00:37:00.001-07:00

So I've had a smashing day. Haven't used that word in a while. It's P's birthday and I went over. Some of them are going to be counsellors at a church camp and it's fun to hear from their perspectives about such camps and how to deal with naughty kids and so on.. When I was a kid, those camp group leaders all seemed like such old adults.. they're all poly/ uni students, that's old. And now we're that age and it's our turn to be those leaders. Played DDR for a while.. These guys practised man.. They're good. I haven't touched DDR since sec sch.. There's actually different styles in DDR, there's this Haiwaiian move dance, and this hip hop dance, and this galloping cowboy dance.. Nv knew that

Then because we love Urinetown so so much, the orchestra went to watch SDSU's version of Urinetown. Just so happen that they're playing the same show as us. It's so obvious that they have much more money than we do. Their set is elaborate, they have huge light bulbs like those in high school musical that says URINETOWN THE MUSICAL. Their costumes are actual rags, their set is much more elaborate than ours. But in our very biased view, our show was much better. We were so much funnier and more energetic. We made sure our jokes were delivered well, they practically glissed over the jokes, wrong pause, wrong tone... And it didn't help that the narrator didn't have a very good voice. Their orchestra was professional though, 5 people band, sounded fantastic, and coordinated very well with the cast. Not like ours where there's a part when they run for an awkwardly long time wiating for us to get to the right cue. They're cool enough to use a elec bass, makes things much easier. They had better set design, techie stuff like sound and light design and orchestra. But overall I liked our show better. It was low budget, but it was funny, enthusiastic, we had nice voices, more mo4 qi4, more dirty jokes, much much better choreography.

We're such an orchestra. We were among the few people who stayed till the band played their last note and clapped and cheered for the band. Haha. And I bet we were the only people in the audience who can sing/ hum to After Bows and Exit Music. This is our show.

2008-04-26T00:08:00.000-07:00

Wow my parents know me so well. While I'm here pondering over stuff, they already know what my problems are and have discussed it without me. I'm impressed. And I think what they said is right.. hmm.. kinda.. Cos if they're right, then I'm not the only person with this pondering to do..

We've had those around-the-fire/ pot/ table/ alcohol talks before and we all had our lists. Is it just that the criteria on the list is not fulfilled? Are those things that important to me? What should I be treasuring? I guess I should stop blogging. This is getting nowhere. //

So my next project is to create a sonic creature, meaning make a creature out of sound. It should have a character, a distinguishable size and sounds for rest, movement and communication. Fun. Any ideas are welcome. I'm a dabbler this quarter. Dabble in all sorts of fields, collect samples from all sorts of things. I like moving from a rookie to an amateur. It's fun. It's not so fun moving from an amateur to an intermediate. And I don't know how much fun it is to get to the advanced/ professional level cos I haven't been there.

Earth Day

2008-04-17T20:46:00.000-07:00

PROTECT THE EARTH, DON'T GIVE BIRTH, MAYBE NO BABY,
CREATE DONT PROCREATE,
BE A LEADER,NOT A BREEDER,
BE RESOLUTE, DON'T POLLUTE, AND MORE CO2?
YIKE, LETS BIKE AND HIKE !!

~ Dr Saier in advance of Earth Day

2008-04-15T22:31:00.000-07:00

Peter Elbow wrote a book about playing the "believing game", meaning you should try to believe everything you hear first, think about why the speaker/ writer came to such conclusions and then you can debunk it as much as you like. He thinks that you shouldn't attack a theory until you can justify the theory. He says that you have to play this game in order to take in new ideas. I think believing is much easier than doubting.. and I believe way too much.

Heard a talk by the director of Torrey Pines therapeutics today. He said that most people talk too much and listen too little. I agree. That's why people don't get along, they don't listen to others enough. And I still think that research is all about luck and opportunities. Having great skills and brains definitely help, but luck is so so important. You have to hit on the right target to research on, pick the right strategies.. So it's best if you have the resources to try 10 things at the same time.

So Urinetown is over. Sad. It's been fun working hard and being so involved in something because we really want it to be good. And it's always a bummer when it just ends. The bubble of excitement just bursts. Pop. Back to life.

People keep saying, do what you're passionate about, listen to your heart, follow your heart.
I don't know how to listen to my heart.
You have to listen carefully.... See, even your heart knows that you should listen to your heart..

Household DNA extraction

2008-04-04T22:57:00.000-07:00

Extract a long thread of DNA! All you need is a blender, cells, detergent, salt and alcohol. Cool eh?
http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/units/activities/extraction/

Laughter brings out a red nose

2008-04-01T15:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080401/full/news.2008.715.html

A hearty laugh was associated with "both a reddening of the nose and a white
area directly around the mouth", says Wiseman. "These features form a key part
of the make-up traditionally associated with clowning, and could explain why
this unusual type of face-painting is associated with humour."

2008-03-28T18:17:00.000-07:00

http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=0QaNm7FqxcMXLA&notag=1
My pictures to Joshua Tree National Park and Disneyland

2008-03-22T10:13:00.000-07:00

As part of the psyc class, I had to participate in psyc expts. And on one of them I discovered that I really don't like to be treated as a thing. And that is probably one of the most fundamental causes of me getting irritated or angry.

What have I learnt this quarter? A little bit about bacteria, a little bit about politics and environment and population issues, a little bit about how people interact, a little bit about new music, a little bit about how to move, a little bit about how drugs work. Scratching the surface of everything. Every class was so survey-ish, yet they're enough to drive us crazy. So much to know, so little drive.

Last quarter. What to do? Lie back and relax? Charge to the end? Dance? Surf? Play? Work? Socialise?

I cannot be a bureaucrat. Lately suddenly have to do a lot of PR work, have to write these nice-sounding emails. It's too hard. I cannot imagine myself doing the dress nice nice, sit down with people and talk non-stop. Or the kind of dress nice nice, follow boss around. Had lunch with big boss, not bad, he gave out hope.

I've got to

stop being a control freak
start taking responsibility
listen to others
be nice
think

yes girl, do these please.. right the lefts

Went PB Bar & Grill yesterday. Barhopping might be fun. =)

Isra-el, Inshah Allah, and Shit Happens: The implications of belief systems

2008-03-02T22:38:00.000-08:00

http://scientificgospel.com/cgi-bin/redBlogReader.pl?action=readArticle&article=IsraelInshahAllahandShitHappensTheimplicationsofbeliefsystems&section=blog

Check out the article. I'll summarise. It says that the Judeo-Christian culture promotes challenging the authority and struggling because Isra-el literally means "he has struggled with God". Islam culture promotes submission because Muslim means "he who submits to the will of God". Buddhist culture promotes passivism, a "shit happens" mentality, just accept the shit and live with it. So the author's argument was that the Judeo-Christian culture of the Western world promotes the scientific method, questioning and doubting everything that you see, leading to the fluorishing of scientific and technological development in the Western world. And the future is the techno advance of the Western world.

I think this is an interesting viewpoint, explaining tech advance using religious cultures. Let's just assume that his portrayal of the different religious thoughts is right. That Christian = struggle, Islam= submission, Buddism= acceptance. That alone cannot determine how good one's scientific skills are. Science is not religion, you don't necessarily apply religious thinkings to doing science, you don't go oh um, this paper must tell the truth since it's been published, even though its reasoning sounds kind of fishy. You'll apply a different set of logics in science.

Also, technological advancements depend not just on how willing the society is in accepting them, on how well the society can produce such advancements, but also on the state of the society. A larger proportion of the Islamic and Asian world is in poverty than Europe or the US. How to support this non-profitable business of science if you have to worry about the millions of starving people in the country?

What about the other Christian countries that are not in Europe/ US? We don't hear much about research from Central/ South America even though many of the countries there are very Catholic. What about Japan or India or China or for that matter, Singapore, who are up and rising in science and research? They are not predominantly Christian.

Lastly, it also depends on how much power the country has in the world, politically, economically. They determine how much scientific power a country has. A strong country has the resources to fund science, has more people doing science, has more money to hire good people, has journals that reach more people and will consequently have higher impact factors.

I don't think religion is a good explanation for the apparent discrepancies in science and technology in different parts of the world. "Shit happens" is a catchy phrase though.

On another note, Jessica sent me this link. You can go look up California State employee's pays. Go see how much ur UC profs earn. =)
http://www.sacbee.com/1098/story/738462.html

2008-02-24T22:22:00.000-08:00

I've been getting a lot of cryptic questions. So here's the official response from me. Ask me directly, if not I don't know how to answer. Danwei's questions were the best man, they were so cryptic that i really don't know what he's asking.

So I tried shutting up this weekend and doing more listening. And people think i'm sad and AS.

People tend to generate counterfactual thinking when something bad happens, if only i had done that, I would have accomplished this, this and that. The more easily imagined the event, the more emotional response (regret) is generated (Kahneman and Miller, 1986). The closer you are to getting to the counterfactual thought, the more upset you'll be. It's been shown that Olympic silver medalists are more likely than bronze medalists to voice the opinion that they could have done just a bit better. Also, the more control you have in the event, the more regret you'll have. When attempting to undo the outcome of a game, people are more likely to undo aspects of the game where they had control.

I calculated my projected gpa and ouch, it misses my target by 0.01. Ouch. If only....

2008-02-18T00:59:00.000-08:00

Facebook is disgusting. It publishes ur life for the whole world around u to see..

So it's a long weekend. And I haven't studied much at all. Went to my bacteria prof's "farm" on Sat. That's the 3rd prof's house that I've been. Each has its own unique characteristic. This one is wow natural. He keeps chickens and walks around in the garden barefoot. And he gives each visitor a big warm hug, regardless of if he knows u. Er.

Then watched Cirque du Soleil in Del Mar. I think I should stop talking. I talk way too much with these people, I need to listen more. Anyway, I want to go Vegas to watch other Cirque shows. Their acrobatics are pretty amazing and they have nice music and costumes. I want to be strapped to helium balloons and fly too. Or be an angel who only needs to pose and look pretty and hand performers their hula hoops. Angels probably get to fly too.

Supposed to be studying today, but we went to brunch in Hillcrest which took 3h cos the line was an hour long. And we saw 好姨 from 真情 at the restaurant. How qiao is that? So we went to her after giggling forever and took picture with her. She really got a huge mole on the forehead. But she looked glam. and she's nice. =) Then had an utterly Singaporean afternoon where we went to a bubble tea shop, sat down and talked for the whole afternoon, then went some shop to shop shop forever, then went for dinner and sat down to talk again. Loved it all. Haven't had these Singapore talk/ future talk/ past talk/ funny talk for so long. Last time was probably when sy and fm and xy were still around.. I should talk less and listen more. Then came home and played scrabble where tanya won with a 68pt word. Gosh.
Laughed so much today.. hahahahaha..

I do need to study. I wish life is simple.

V-day

2008-02-15T00:02:00.000-08:00

It feels like a Friday today. Half my pharm class didn't show up. The lab was pretty empty. Did my blot, got some results and left early. Went to Black's Beach for class, cos there's a concert there today, Alison Knowles was there performing "Shoreline", the main part of it is that she sews a whole bunch of old clothes into a long line along the shore. And there are other parts involving us. Some people were doing the "draw a straight line and follow it", some were doing "vocalists sing together at conductor's cue, but sing anything", people were singing italian, spanish, english.. everything. I should have joined and sang "when stamford raffles held the torch..." haha. Then this guy did the "walking intently" into the ocean in a suit. He got a lot of applause. THe things we do for art. And I was the score holder for my prof's cello playing where he destroys his bows by bowing every single part of the cello, from the tail (that stick thing) all the way up to the head (above tuning pegs), so it's the wood parts, plastic parts, strings... everything. Screechy. Might post my official response to the sounds of fluxes later.

Then went out, on a thursday. No wonder it felt like a friday. Too bad it was pouring, but in any case I bought a score. Yay. Overpriced definitely, but whatever, I'm happy today. And then went to this super nice place on Harbor Island. The view was fantastic. San Diego's pretty spectacular at night. Had a lobster. I should seriously consider eating food that's easy to manipulate next time.. wasn't easy digging through the lobster. Then went walk walk at Seaport Village. The kite shop uncle was so adorable. Love his flying gadgets. I want some to play with. Had a great day.. Feel like tmr's not a school day.

Happy V-Day.

Winter quarter happenings

2008-02-11T22:50:00.000-08:00

Sending lao da off. Farewell dinner at Kemo Sabe. The presentation is wow.

That's a whole fish. And it really sticks up like that.

POW truck at Big bear. Skiiers and snowboarders cramp themselves onto the open-air truck. No seats. Hold on to the railings, we're going to camp.

Steamboat CNY dinner with still thoughts. That's my table. We're a super lucky table.. all got good stuff in lucky draw =). Mine was the lousiest, it's 1 slice of meat.

2008-02-11T22:18:00.000-08:00

This is weird.. what am i doing?

Craig Venter's talks

2008-02-05T23:43:00.000-08:00

Went to listen to Craig Venter today. I can't help but be impressed by what he's accomplished and what he's doing. He's a very ambitious person and a very confident one. He claims that his sequencing of Mycoplasma genitalium is completely accurate. That is a very bold claim. Anyway he wants to start synthesising thousands of genomes every day. Note that's synthesizing, making, creating chemically from scratch... and not just sequencing.

He's either a very smart man or he has some very smart people working for him.. It could be both. Cos every thing that he does is lucrative hot topics. Human genome in 9 months. Personal human diploid genome. Transformation of one bacteria species to other by whole genome transplant. Making a synthetic genome. Doubling the number of bacteria genomes sequenced to date in a single Sorcerer trip. Designing organisms to produce fuels. Makes me want to be a scientist again. Even though my expt techniques absolutely suck.

I should go back to studying my sympatholytics and mimetics... like clonidine and propranolol and prazosin and physostigmine and carbacol and.....

2008-02-01T23:03:00.000-08:00

Went for a seminar today about circadian rhythms in bacteria. They wanted to mutate every single gene in the bacteria to see the effects on the rhythm. Every single gene. That's 2700. You know how much cloning that is? And I can't even do a single cloning right. And the speaker flashed a whole long list of undergrads who helped them clone, it was a pretty long list. Bacteria people are fun. They draw all kinds of things with bacteria on plates. So this group drew a sun in one plate and a moon in another and fixed a promoter that is under circadian control to a fluorescent protein. And the sun lit up for 12h and the moon lit up for 12h. How cool!

Singapore Complaints Choir

2008-01-27T22:42:00.000-08:00

http://www.mrbrown.com/blog/2008/01/complaints-choi.html for lyrics and the story.

It's quite funny even though it doesn't always rhyme and there's this part where they imitated the anthem.

"All the bus stops have tilted benches" yeah, what's up with that?
"We don't recycle any plastic bags, But we purify our pee"
Pretty weird huh...

And is it just me or do I some people in the choir look familiar?

2008-01-25T23:00:00.000-08:00

I'm taking weird classes, as in classes that are very different from the prev classes that I've taken. First, dance class, we actually dance. Then psyc class, the professor does experiments to try to trick our minds every class. Music, the musician tells us weird stuff about composers. You think I'm weird? Go listen to these people, people like Satie who only eats white-coloured food and has 7 sets of the same suit to wear every day. Go listen to their music, like Schoenberg's Colours where a chord is passed subtlely from one instrument to the next. Surprisingly, I'm having fun in the class. And microbial genetics class, the professor thinks he's more prokaryotic than eukaryotic. That's fine, so I have a microbe for a professor. And he's super environmentally active and political. Probably the most environmental activist I've met so far.. which is why I have all these links on the environment and why I've been going for seminars on environment..

Went snowboarding last weekend. Wow that was fun... and tiring... and lots of falling. And I have to say I'm surprised at how fast Jason recovered from his "illness". Snowboarding looks so easy. The kids do it perfectly and we big kids just go fall every few steps. haha.

Links

2008-01-25T22:41:00.000-08:00

Some links to share..

Story of Stuff
interesting animation on the amount of pollution we create just by having stuff. Love how they said that America is run by consumerism.. Yup that's what make economists happy, more people spending money, more people getting money, everybody feels rich. Everyone except the environment.. Use less stuff!!

And this...
Global over-population is the real issue

I've always thought the world wars were a way to control population and I thought I was way too heartless. But population is a big problem and every country just want to increase its own population so it could take over the world. Countries need to stop being selfish and control population now, it's not just countries with huge populations like China and India, but other countries as well. Yes aging population in a country causes economic and social problems, but if the human population is going to stress the earth any more than we are doing already, there will be bigger problems to worry about. I totally agree that the president of this country is wrong to not supporting abortion.

Crazy music

2008-01-15T21:41:00.000-08:00

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/music/reserves/lp000/text/pierrot.html
The music sounds absolutely insane... Especially part 2. Click on the ear+ music to listen. Crazy 20th century music.. Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire

http://www.oppi.uku.fi/opk/video/ujbb/mp3.htm
Blues band on Pharmacology

Singapore at night

2008-01-13T23:19:00.000-08:00

Got pretty pictures must show off..

This is an example of over exposure, look like the sun came out already.

It's Christmas

Orchard

This is my best fireworks pic. Too bad my lens cover didn't open completely. =(

2008-01-09T22:46:00.000-08:00

Back in San Diego. Back to Singapore over the holidays, I don't feel that I've done much but was pretty busy every day. Meeting friends, running lots of errands and being a tourist. Found some amazing places, Clarke Quay is very pretty at night or maybe pretty's not the word, it's classy.
Chek Jawa is a nice place to see one-armed crabs, I didn't remember their names.. Ok, I think it's fiddler crab. And it's cool that we saw a horseshoe crab too, really ancient creature. Old enough to 摆在那里给大家.
The new park connectors that connect east coast park to the other parks in the east are nice routes to cycle on.. Might do that some day when I feel like biking. And I found out how flat Singapore is.. no wonder I have so much trouble biking in SD.
Underwater World. There are so many more exhibits. All the different crabs, some huge ones (the Japanese spider crab can have a leg span of over 3m), some hairy ones, some ancient-looking ones. It was really cool, wish I spent more time in there. And apparently there was some fish reflexology thingy where the fish bites off the dead skin from your feet. Jessica was very interested in it. I was disgusted.
Check it out

Was reading my autograph book.. Nv did have an autograph book in JC. Should have asked for one cos it's really fun reading them. Found this super funny poem. Here it is..
I'm a fish
You're a duck
I swim to you
To wish you luck.
=)
Ah... I have some funny friends

2007-12-08T22:03:00.000-08:00

Getting inertia again.. suddenly don't feel like leaving san diego and go home. 3 weeks might not be that short after all

Al was introducing Gateway cloning the other day.. and i felt that we're quite suaku for not knowing about this earlier. Basically you clone using homologous recombination instead of ligation. No more worrying about low efficiency ligations, just PCR and recombine.

P was presenting about the complex. Looking at where she's going, she's really going to get a Cell paper. Now she thinks that my protein is a substrate for hers.. why didn't you tell me any of these before? Whatever.. Now you can go KO ur own gene and work it out.. maybe after the phosphatase gets KO-ed. I believe that my new gene does something too.
1 thing I have to admit about this woman. She's capable. She wants to be a PI and is definitely working towards it. I can imagine her being a PI and she would be quite good at it, though she might be a micromanager. Already, she's presenting her work as if it's the most impt thing in the world..

I can't make up my mind. Every time I hear a new thing, or someone speaks enthusiastically about something, I get interested. The other day I heard about an interesting mechanism how G proteins get turned on and affect their effectors. Suddenly biochem sounds appealing again, imagining how things work at the molecular level was very fun. But I'm pretty sure I don't want to be a biochemist. I guess the only good thing is that I'm allowing the many options to stay open..

More bio talk. Had the symposium for Embryology lab. It's absolutely a party, with all kinds of exotic snacks from Trader Joe's, lots of Cuties and champaigne! Champaigne in class, can you believe it? Anyway many people did very amazing experiments and got very fantastic results. RA and ethanol produced some pretty screwed up tadpoles. But the most impressive results are the transplants and ablations. This group chopped off the tail of a young tadpole and transplanted into the belly of another. The host grew to have 2 tails and the donor lived without a tail. Another group did something even more amazing. They chopped a young tadpole into 2 (anterior and posterior), rotated the 2nd part of the embryo 180 degrees and allowed the tadpole to heal. Guess what? The tadpole managed to heal and the 2 body parts stuck to each other and formed a complete tadpole! And what's more fantastic was that the spinal cord moved from the top of the embryo in the front to the bottom of the embryo at the back cos the tail region was rotated 180 degrees. The heart was displaced to the side and the anus was on top of the tadpole instead of the bottom. I thought that was the most amazing result of the day. Very creative experiment.

Of course our results were way too cool too. We produced 2 headed tadpoles by transplanting the organizer of an early frog gastrula to the ventral region of another gastrula. And our 100% survival rate was way too impressive. I don't know how we got such successful results but we did. The other organizer transplant groups had pretty sad results. Maybe it's really because my side of the lab is warmer.

Controls. The one on top is a normal tadpole. The round ball is the donor of an Organizer (organizer sends out signals to pattern the embryo). The one at the bottom is a negative control where we stuffed a piece of non-organizer tissue into the spot where we normally put the organizer.

2 headed tadpoles!! And a 2-tailed one. We were escatatic when we saw these.
Yay! Felicia and I with our prof.

Bomb!

2007-12-07T16:01:00.000-08:00

December 7, 2007
SAN DIEGO: The FBI is asking for the public's help in identifying who planted a fake bomb that led to the evacuation of University of California San Diego medical school buildings at the La Jolla campus Wednesday.

Authorities made public yesterday a letter left by the Animal Liberation Front, an animal rights group that claimed responsibility for planting the fake bomb. Authorities also released a recording of a bomb threat phoned to the university.

“We are asking the public to look at the font, word usage and misspelled words that could help identify the author,” Special Agent Darrell Foxworth said. “Listen to the words used, the pace of speech and background noise to identify . . . who made the phone call.”

The first call, received Tuesday night, threatened the university's animal research program.
On Wednesday morning, a letter was delivered to UCSD, along with two telephone calls that claimed the group would detonate explosive devices at campus research buildings.

About 10:30 a.m., a UCSD employee found a suspicious package in the Leichtag Family Foundation Biomedical Research Building that authorities later determined was a fake device made to look like a bomb.

Medical school buildings were evacuated but reopened that evening.

Anyone with information is asked to call the Joint Terrorism Task Force at (858) 565-1255 or Crime Stoppers at (888) 580-TIPS (8477). –J.L.J.
~ San Diego Union Tribune

2007-12-01T22:55:00.000-08:00

Friday was a phenomenal day. Firstly it rained. 50.3mm of rain in one day. Where did all the water come from? There were threats of mudslides in those places which were burnt a month back.

Secondly and most importantly. Friday was the day when I confirmed that I've got knockouts. Woohoo! Finally managed to knock a gene out of Dicty. I could almost forget that Susan practically did the whole thing for me.. So the expts and learnings finally start. A was doing Southerns and developed right after me and we couldn't help peeking at his film and gloating over how much cleaner our film looked. It's absolutely terrible of us, terrible ethics..

Then went to look at my transplants. There's a slight chance of a head developing. But there are many other good transplants. I was rather efficient on Thurs.. Now I just have to worry about how to explain all the strange developments.. I think I've got a tadpole with 3 tails. Bizarre.

And then went for a TA party organised by my Metabolic prof. So nice of him. He has a very nice house. It would be such a shame if it was eaten up by the fire. The walls are filled with paintings that he collected all over the world, he has a huge garden of different plants, including a full-grown macademia tree. We had some wonderful fresh macademia nuts. His collection of orchids is amazing, so is his collection of books and pictures on Indian history. I have decided that I need a hobby. If a professor who has to teach and manage a lab and has a family can find time to do gardening every weekend and take care of the orchids and collect all kinds of art pieces, I think I can manage a hobby. Talked to all the TAs and the significant others. These people love being TAs, they teach over and over and over again. Wow, we need these dedicated people to teach. And I realised that even though the department is huge, at the end of the day, I've kind of met each person at some place or other. Took the same class together or they were my TA or something.. Everyone kind of knew each other. Had a good time socializing. Of course it helps that the prof is someone who talks non-stop.

Went to judge for high school speech and debates today. Can't help feeling that I might have screwed some kid up badly by not being a good judge. The preliminary rounds were pretty easy to judge. It was quite obvious who would win.. But I tried judging for the octa-finals, and oh wow, they were good. Hope I made the right decisions. These kids are very good. This girl had an impromptu speech topic of "Cheese". What would you say? Talk about cows and milk and calcium? She talked about smiling during photos and how Americans don't smile enough. And when the timer counted down "3, 2, 1", she said "Cheese!" and smiled. How much more creative and appropriate could you get?

2007-11-24T23:09:00.000-08:00

Yihui was saying that we should be glad that our campus is so huge. I never thought that the campus was big until yesterday where I went biking into the eucalyptus forest. OMG there are multiple trails in there, complete with trail markings on trees and dust flying everywhere.. Nature trails on campus. Wow. How many schools have that? Pretty cool. Great view of the canyon and of the campus in the distance at some parts. Anyway I suck, had to stop many times cos couldn't make it up the slope.. But it was fun chionging down the slopes =) and to have a homecooked dinner =)

Thanksgiving. Totally just slacked through the 4 days. Mostly played old grandmother's games online. Had a thanksgiving dinner at my place. Wasn't a total flop but let's face it, I'm not a good entertainer. On those personality quizzes that ask where are you usually found in parties, I always answer at the side talking to a small grp of friends. Food was plenty and good. No turkey but no loss. Pictionary saved the day.. Next gathering, hopefully more people show up, hope the better entertainers show up

Then psychoed Yihui to take us to Las Americas at midnight. The traffic was crazy, everyone is flooding there. Finally got there, finally found a parking spot. Bought my shoes and jeans and tshirt and sweater.. Haha. Not bad for ~$100. Got tired and didn't want to go anywhere with huge queues so I probably missed the best sales, like the 50% off at Puma. Next time, go at 4am. There's much less people.. But that means you'll have to wake up at 3am. Or don't sleep.
The things we do to get a good deal.

I'm getting excited over embryo lab. Planning my expt and hoping to get presentable results. Our plan is very ambitious and hopefully we're technically up to it.
Doing Southerns next week. Hopefully I have a correct clone and finally successfully knocked the gene out. And doing even more wishing, hopefully my clone has some phenotype.

Reading Watson's Double Helix. It's so much speculation and theorizing and not much expts.. It seemed like as long as they have the time to sit down and think, they could get groundbreaking theories in a week. They go for conferences, see other people's data, and get excited and start theorizing. Then they try to scoop and publish before others.. Science.

Pictures

2007-11-16T22:51:00.000-08:00

Flash Mob! Bang! You're dead.

Yes you're dead.

Very amusing to watch. But I must say that the pillow fight was a lot more exciting.

Halloween! Our cute pumpkin with 2 teeth =)

The artists

Pumpkin after a week.. and no it's not burnt by the fires.. just providing a home for microbes..

My orchids

Chick-in-a-cup.. They're so cool.. Watch the chick develop in a cup during the time when it's usually in the shell.

Closer look at the baby chick. About 6 days old. Huge eyes. Wings and legs are developing. In fact, digits are developing. Heart is happily beating away. It's so cute.

After manipulations with hue and saturation and crop, an alien looking creature.

2007-11-08T23:35:00.000-08:00

Instead of spending my time playing some online crossword puzzle, I'll blog.

Things to do:

Get that gene into the plasmid and into the bacteria.. Why so hard??
Find cute crafts to make to give to old people
Chase after people to approve of my crafts and chase after other people to get me materials to make those crafts
Read the 5 papers needed for me to start my lab report
Read more papers to decide what final project to do
Pray and hope that my tadpoles are still alive and relatively normal after its head is partially detached from the body
Do something fun this weekend
Plan something fun for Thanksgiving
Stop feeling angry at myself for throwing my distinction in biology away
Churn out some rudimentary personal statement
Practise
Stop feeling impatient with slower-witted people

Grr... #9. How dumb am I to make such a big mistake and not realise it until now.. Grr.. What to do?

Was the MC for senior house. Went pretty well. Actually went very well. The old people were high even though not many of them came. The song was a big hit. I'm pretty sure they felt that it was too short and it was over before they felt shiok. And I love my turtle movement. Pretty surprised that PP agreed to such cute actions. Games were exciting. My pingpong ball game went quite well. As usual all of them tried to cheat and I had to physically block them to prevent them from throwing more balls. They were nice and didn't throw balls at me. Jenga was veto-ed but the other game with the bottle air gun thing was cool. It was so exciting and the pictures came out good too. So even though we started out kind of slow.. didn't know what to say.. quite stoney, depended a lot on Alice for cues.. it was a good show..

I'm quite amused at what the sta people are trying to do. I wonder if PP noticed. Highly amusing. Sneakily taking pictures of people, suggesting people to work with each other.. hmm..

2007-11-01T22:40:00.000-07:00

If you haven't heard already, there was a huge fire in Southern California last week. Actually, it's many big wildfires. Burnt many homes, blackened lots of trees, evacuated hundreds of thousands of people. It's quite an experience to live through a disaster, there's a lack of those in singapore, not that I'm complaining. It was a little smokey on Sunday but we thought it was because of fires from LA and didn't think much about it, went to labs, checked my sea urchins, picked my colonies.. Monday morning, my aunt called me and told me UCSD was closed because of fires near San Diego and that she's evacuating. Wow, this thing's serious.

Well, ok, classes cancelled, no midterms. Good. The air stinks. It's much worse than Singapore during the Sumatra fires. much much worse. It's like people burning incense paper everywhere + the indonesian fires. The air smells like smoke, ash particles are everywhere. Our window was opened throughout the night and there was a black layer of soot over everything next to the window. I could see soot particles flying in. It was freaking hot and we couldn't open window. Evacuation orders were being given all day, half a million people were evacuating.. friends were freaking out and packing.. got us a bit worried too. What happens if we were asked to evacuate? I never thought that the fire would ever reach La Jolla, but since Carmel Valley (2 highway exits away) was asked to evacuate, I don't see why the evacuation order wouldn't reach us. Stayed tuned to the news all day. Loved my radio.

And then, Tuesday classes cancelled. Fires were spreading, somehow it crossed the I15. Del Mar had to evacuate, Rancho Bernado was burned.. Air's terrible. It's getting scarier. Then UCSD sent an announcement, classes cancelled all week. Hahaha. After hearing this, many many many people started leaving san diego, going back to LA, flying back to Nor Cal. Guess what I did? I hunted down a ticket to Chicago and flew there. Hahaha. Got holiday, might as well make good use of it right? More about it some other time.

Anyway, a lot of people evacuated to Qualcomm Stadium, which is the main stadium in San Diego, and the aids that were going to that stadium and other evacuation centers were just amazing. Starbucks sent coffee, Costco sent food and water, volunteers donated burgers and sandwiches and offered massages.. Donations were so much that they had to stop accepting. Thanks to all the warm-hearted Californians. People who went to Qualcomm said that it was like a festival there. Kind of like Quidditch world cup, everyone pitching tents, big screen TV, plenty of food and water.. Evacuation in luxury. How many people get coffee and massages while evacuating?

It is San Diego after all, where the rich live. Or at least the middle class. Families with comfortable lives, owning at least 1 car.. When they're asked to evacuate, most just grabbed their important stuff and sped off in their cars. The house is probably covered under extensive insurance. It'll be a lot of inconvenience if houses really burn down, but we'll all live. After all, the money's not going to burn. Furthermore, even though the air's terrible, even though it's pretty hot in the day, at least people were not wet and cold and hungry and miserable. And the later evacuation orders were sent with plenty of time for people to get ready.. People were ready.

You need friends. you need to be prepared for emergencies. You need to not panic.. San Diegans did a pretty good job at all these.

2007-10-18T22:09:00.000-07:00

Thank you all who remembered my birthday. Thank you all who made it special. Thanks to ooi who wished me really early, you're the 2nd one to wish me happy birthday, 1st one was the scholarship officers. Haha. Thanks to jac who stayed up late to be the first to wish me when it's 11 Oct PDT. Thanks to lao pei who remembered. Thanks to Carol who was the first one to call, thanks to her again for suddenly hushing everyone and giving me peanut soup with imaginery candle. Thanks to Sunny who called and pretended to not remember that it's my birthday. Thanks to housemates who gave me the orchid, sorry that 2 buds died.. thanks to stephen for coming over and to all for the tres latte cake. It was very interesting.. very ethnic. Thanks to the whole gang for bringing me to Corvette. That was an experience. Thanks Jason and Clinton for the wine. Thanks Jane for bringing the beach to me and for Islands. =) Thank you Assers and CBs. Thanks Kok Lim for the amazing cheesecakes, lao da's too nice. Did I miss anyone? Thanks to facebook for keeping everyone in touch.

Corvette's Diner was an experience. After waiting forever to get in, we got a table. And then straws came flying over our heads and landed on the table. Ok. So I guess food's going to be thrown at us as well. The waitresses had huge hairdos and loud screechy voices. The place was noisy, and there's a DJ playing 50s music. So every time a waitress sees someone on the phone, she'll announce to the whole world and tell everyone to keep quiet. And of course, everyone will start making as much noise as possible. Our table is very quiet in comparison. So food came, drinks came, weird stuff.. and I ordered a magarita. Just to use my ID. The waitress took my ID, studied it, did some calculations, and started shouting "Ladies and gentleman, there's someone here turning 21!". That was embarrassing.. There was a balloon man who made all sorts of huge structures and another lady who made humongous hairdos for girls using straws. When it was time for dessert, 5 of those waitresses came over and sang me a song that none of us could figure out what exactly they were singing.. even after we've heard it for a gazillion times that night, seems that every table had someone with a birthday.. It's just a place with its own special character.

2007-10-18T21:57:00.000-07:00

Can't believe this guy. The things that he says are just appalling.
'In 1997, Britain's Sunday Telegraph quoted Watson as saying that if a gene for homosexuality were isolated, women who find that their unborn child has the gene should be allowed to have an abortion.
During a lecture tour in 2000, he suggested there might be links between a person's weight and their level of ambition and between skin color and sexual prowess.
"That's why you have Latin lovers," he said, according to The Associated Press, which cited people who attended the lecture. "You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient."
And in a British TV documentary that aired in 2003, Watson suggested stupidity was a genetic disease that should be treated.'
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/10/18/nobel.apology/index.html

That's taking unconfirmed scientific data too far.. They might be your hypothesis, but with all the social impacts they could potentially have, you should at least say them in a nice way, or if you can't, don't say it, since it's unconfirmed anyway.

Anyway, Watson just published another autobiography. It's on manners. Reviews are pretty positive. I wonder how much of manners you can learn from this guy. On another note, Craig Venter just published his first autobiography. Yet another controversial biologist. He's a very eloquent guy, so his book might be rather fun to read..

2007-10-06T22:55:00.000-07:00

Think I've been taking many things for granted. I've been very lucky since I got to San Diego, having very helpful seniors, very helpful friends. Not everyone has friends who are willing to drive them to places every time he asks, not everyone has friends that they feel comfortable enough to ask for rides to the airport at 8 in the morning.. I don't know what I would have done without people like Desmond in my first year. Since my entry a week ago, many people have asked if i'm ok. Thank you everyone, I'm fine. Thanks for all the suggestions, thanks for all the analysis, thanks for trying to cheer me up. I still think it's very funny that I received a fan. Haha, it would have been very useful in the freakingly hot summer.

Talking to freshmen, and friends on exchange.. I realised that many times I don't have the power to help them. Many things which I experienced don't apply to them.. All I can tell Jac is, cook your own food, but then i also don't know how I could make my own food if, 1. I use a communal kitchen shared by the whole building, 2. there's no Ranch around, 3. there's no car to get groceries.. How do you survive in the middle of nowhere where you get everything you need from Walmart? Suddenly I love California for its huge Asian population, I love my apt, I love my housemates and friends..

2007-10-03T23:09:00.000-07:00

Pictures from Canada
share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=0QaNm7FqxcMXHw

2007-09-28T08:36:00.000-07:00

Life in this lab is way too dramatic. I wish I can think faster and come up with more things to say that will put me in a better position, but whatever, let's hope that this is actually a good change. I was pissed off, and I wouldn't accept her apology. You don't just tell people I'm giving you away without any hints of doing that before. But maybe in a year's time, I'll thank her for dumping me..

So I've decided to take embryology lab.. figured that I'll never get a chance to do comparative embryology ever again, must grab the chance now. Opportunity cost is Colin's class which will teach me how to do expts and which I can work less and get a better grade and get a decent rec. Hope it's a right choice.

Feeling too sian to settle anything. Feel like just giving up on this music minor. Too much trouble getting an instru, finding a place to keep it, going for auditions..

2007-09-25T21:39:00.000-07:00

Back from Canada. Tired. I don't have the stamina for a 2 weeks trip. My trips should be no longer than a week.

Highlights:

Free Montreal symphony concert ticket just from being in line for tix, and free hershey's dark choc too =)
Contemporary stuff in the Musee de Beaux Arts in Montreal, I want them in my home.
Concordia orientation, free concert, free beer on the street.. people were quite high.
Schwartz smoked meat sandwich
Hiked a bit of Mont Tremblant
kayaked in a peaceful lake and was caught in the rain
campfire with smores
Weirdo pervertic old Australian man
All the British dudes and Pauline, the German design student
Parc Omega and elks
Beavertail
staying in a hostel that used to be a Jail
Major Hill Park at night with drum circle
Being in English-speaking Ottawa with French-speaking Quebec just across the river
Parliament tour in Ottawa, beautiful library
Byward Market with beautiful fruits. Bought $3 worth of strawberries, blackberries, raspberries and blueberries. Happy
Fort Coulonge, beautiful lake, chill, BBQ, great dessert, ice cream with berries, the place was so in the middle of nowhere that the rooms have no locks.
Whitewater rafting!! down the Ottawa river. 1 whole day. Fun fun fun. Fell out of the raft while surfing the big butterfly, apparently everyone who sits at that position in the raft gets thrown out. Whitewater rafting looks more exciting than it feels. But it's fun.
Didn't jump off the cliff. Didn't drink beer.
Colourful maple trees in Algonquin Provincial Park. Imagine a forest filled with maple trees. Well, that's Eastern Canada.
Chilling and bumming around in the beautiful Madawaska
Watched this play called Prince Hamlet near Little India in Toronto
Met Jacinth at Stratford and watched the Ideal Husband, which is very very funnny
Travelling around with JacJac
Pretty candy apples at Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory
Niagara Falls was impressive. That's a lot of water flowing down. and it's gorgeous at night with the lights.
Toronto Chinatown. OMG the fruits are so beautiful, and cheap. Had dim sum =)
Susan calling me 1h after I landed in San Diego asking me if I have decided to quit the lab cos I haven't appeared for so long.. haha

2007-09-25T20:38:00.000-07:00

Brief outline of what happened.. Well, I mean to be brief, but might get carried away and ramble on....

Day 1: Flew to Toronto on 9/11. Plane was empty, wonder if it's because of the date. Raining in Toronto.. super sian.. skipped dinner and went to sleep instead. GVB toilet arrangements suck.

Day 2: Big East trip with Moose Network. Cool driver with cool name: Homer. Didn't know people really have names like this. Bus was pretty empty, met this Australian girl Estrelle who talks non-stop. I need to hang around people like that, cos I don't need to think what to say, just listen to her talk. There's this elderly couple on the trip, the wife is from Brazil, the husband is from Denmark and they spend their time now travelling around. The guy knows many many languages, including some Chinese.

Went to the 1000 Islands, some pretty houses around, but whoever lives on them must be really rich. First you need to afford the real estate, second you need a boat to get you anything.

Reached Montreal. Skipped Homer's Old Montreal tour and went for Montreal Symphony concert instead. Checked out the Museum of Contemporary Arts as well, they were having tours, and so I managed to appreciate some of the artwork. I think after I entered UCSD and listened to their very contemporary music, I'm starting to like contemporary arts more.

Watched the symphony for free. Cos some guy had extra tickets and was gave one to me for free. And it was a really good ticket. I'll never buy such a good ticket. Thanks random guy! Concert was good. I was very impressed with the soloists. Mahler was ok. They also played this Ravel piece that was very fun. It's a story about a naughty kid who destroyed everything because he doesn't want to do homework, and it's cool cos the furniture that were destroyed sings, and it helps a lot when they subtitled the French lyrics in Anglais. Very interesting.

Day 3: Old Montreal, the Notre Dame is very beautiful. Went into a few churches, they are all pretty impressive, why doesn't singapore build churches that look impressive? Wandered into Chinatown and had found some Chinese food. I love the bakery. =) Went to the Musee de Beau Arts. Again I found myself gravitating towards the contemporary stuff. There was a collection of chairs that were so pretty that I want to bring it home for myself. Then climbed up Mont Royal and looked at the city of Montreal. Great view. Not like Bukit Timah, cannot see any view. Oh yeah, McGill uni was having orientation on the hill. Cool. And then at night Concordia University had an orientation in downtown where they blocked off a street and had a concert there. If you have a McGill mug, you get free beer. Man.. beer in orientation, how funky.

Even though the whole Montreal seems to speak French usually, whenever I wander into some University area, I hear English instead of French.

Day 4: Wanted to go to the Biodome, then backed out cos it looks like a cheat of money. So went Marche Atwater instead, which is a huge farmers market. Beautiful fruits and veggies. Tried poutine, this Quebec fries with cheese and gravy thingy. I didn't find it exceptionally nice. Then went to the Plateau area, tried to shop but didn't find many shops that sell things that I like, so went to Schwartz for dinner instead. The smoked meat is really good. =)

Day 5: Raining again. Had a bagel for breakfast while watching people run in the rain. People watching is fun. I like chilling. Then hopped onto the tour again with driver Heather and half a bus of Brits. Went Mont Tremblant which is a ski resort in the winter and pretty cold even now. Wish I had more clothes on. Pretty little touristy resort. Cos I was cold, I did a little hike that started out nice but turned out to be really boring, so boring that I left the trail halfway and took a shortcut down the hill. Went to the hostel at Tremblant. It's a cool place to stay in winter for skiing, it's much cheaper than the resorts and still pretty close to the mountain. Anyway there was a lake next to the hostel and we went kayaking in it, watching sunset. Peaceful. But then it started raining and I had to try to aim my boat accurately so we could dock. Had to cook own dinner, so I bought Chunky soup and heated it. Food for lazy people. Campfire at night. In an Indian tent (don't know what it's called). Even though it's really cold outside, it's boiling in the tent with the fire burning. Had smores =) Yummy. And the old Australian man suggested we play some cross/ uncross fork and knife game that was rather exasperating. And he told jokes that were so lame that only Heather laughed out of courtesy. But more about the old dude later.

Day 6: Parc Omega. It's this nature park where they introduced animals in there and built enclosures to keep the bears and wolves from eating everything around. So it's kind of like a safari, but it's not all that natural cos the animals are introduced in there. And we could feed the animals carrots, so we fed many elks through the bus windows and tried to get some of them to come onto the bus. Bus ended up with quite a bit of elk saliva. Reached Ottawa and we checked into this hostel that used to be a jail. Some people get to stay in a cell. Did a Ottawa city walk, saw the castle-like parliament and wandered by the river at night. There was this group of people banging on drums. Looks kind of cultic. Had a beavertail for dessert. It's this flat donut-tasting thingy that's shaped like a beaver tail. High sugar content. Great for skaters in the winter after they skate down the world's longest natural skating rink, the Ottawa canal. Heather says that college students will skate downtown to the pubs and check their skates in at the pubs and if they dare, they'll skate back home

Day 7: Went for a tour of the Canadian Parliament house. Supposedly the best gothic structure outside of Europe, and it's pretty impressive. The library is the most beautiful place, it looks warm and cosy, just that the books look very dull. Apparently you can watch the parliamental debates when they are in session, but they're taking a break till oct. Went Byward Market and bought berries. $3 for a box of strawberries, blackberries, raspberries and blueberries. I'm happy.

Visited the place that they train the Canadian Mounties.

Reached Fort Coulonge. It's a beautiful place by the lake. It's so ulu that we don't have locks or keys for the rooms. I went for a little walk around the region, but it was too far to even get to the main road, so I went back to the lake and chilled. Lovely place to bum. Had a good bbq dinner with fantastic vanilla ice cream and berries dessert.

Day 8: Whitewater rafting! Went in a yellow schoolbus with the rafts tied on top. 4 guides, 2 Canadians, a South African and a guy from Costa Rica. A wide range of accents. Sounded kinda complex and scary and like we might fall into the cold river any time. Wore swimsuit, wetsuit, jacket, windbreaker and lifejacket. Haha. Went to Big Butterfly for some river surfing. It was fine the first time when I was a mermaid in the middle of the boat. Then we switched places and I was in front. And I was ok the 2nd time we went in, drank a whole bunch of water but was fine. But I fell out the 3rd time and felt myself drifting away and choking. Doesn't seem to be able to swim very well against the current, but they managed to pull me in. Then we switched places again cos I refused to be in front. And this time everyone in the first part of the boat fell out. Haha. Glad I wasn't there. Falling out isn't so scary after all.

Even though I was wearing so many layers, I was freezing, shivering. Brr.. It doesn't feel very exciting sitting at the back cos all the people in front blocks all the water. But it's fun to watch how the boat rocks. After going through a few rapids, we break for lunch. Lunch felt good after the freezing water and all the paddling. Then it was another channel of water in the afternoon, that Ottawa River contains as much water as the whole of UK. Amazing right? The rapids have cool names like Bus Eater and Garbarator. It was a nice serene trip down the river when we have the river just to ourselves, 2 rafts and a kayak. Then we got to a place where we could do a cliff jump, 6ft. I wouldn't do it. I wasn't scared but I just can't take the step off the cliff, I couldn't jump. There's a mental block saying that no you can't do this. I'll never jump off a building I guess. Whitewater rafting is fun, watching the video was even more fun, I could see how the wave came in and when the boat emerge, I was drifting away from the boat.. 1 advice: sit in front. It's much more exciting =)

Day 8: Algonquin Provincial Park. It's a huge park and most of the trees are maples and pines. And the maples are changing colours. Beautiful. Had a hike. Chilled, read Zarathustra. Went back to hostel and chilled more and got bitten by bugs.

Day 9: Back to Toronto. Glad to be back, kind of tired from the trip already. Checked into Canadiana, and guess what? They screwed up my reservation and I didn't have a bed. So they took out their emergency bed and put me in a guy's room. 8 guys, and me. Damn. Anyway I went to watch a play "Prince Hamlet", in this neighbourhood that is quite off the tourist area. I've been quite safe and cautious during this whole trip and I didn't feel very good in that neighbourhood. So wandering around there to find the theatre and realised that it's actually a Little India there, it's filled with indian restaurants and mama shops. Prince Hamlet was a pretty good play. The uncle looks really evil. Haha. I've never read Hamlet but I'm liking Shakespeare more as I read/ watch more of his works.

Day 10: Went on a very expensive Stratford trip with Jacinth. Finally met Jacinth. Yay! Stratford is made for old people with cars. Not for kids who Greyhound around. Took forever to find the motel that we were staying in cos the motel owners (an Indian family) didn't know where their motel is and how to give directions.. It took 5min and 3 people to tell me which direction on the main road should I travel. Gosh, how do they do business? After a good rest, we walked along the river, filled with swans and ducks and friendly people on the sides, to downtown Stratford, while Jac tells me the sad life in Waterloo. Downtown is a pretty boring place as well, kinda like downtown La Jolla, but more boring. Saw this Rocky Mountain Chocolate shop and went in. Got ourselves a huge candy apple, Rocky Road. Ate that for dinner. It's huge and sugary and very very chio. Cos there wasn't anything to do, we sat at this table by the road and played dumb, the chess game. Felt quite dumb cos we don't know the rules and we any how move around and eat. Then we did what we went Stratford to do, we watched "An Ideal Husband". It's such a funny play, people laugh at almost every sentence and costumes are absolutely gorgeous. Moral of play: don't expect anyone to be perfect. No one is ideal. Don't pressurize people to be perfect. As we were leaving the theatre, there's this lady giving out free samples of what we thought were chocolates. And then we realised (after she gave us a bunch), that it's anti-ageing cream. erps

Day 11: Back to Toronto. I was tired, so I didn't push to do anything. Met Jac's friends doing exchange at Waterloo as well. Strolled along the waterfront, saw a magician busking, quite entertaining. Went to Toronto Music Garden, designed by YoyoMa based on Bach's cello suite no. 1. I thought it would be bigger, but oh well, it's quite an interesting design, lots of swirls. Walked in the city a bit, caught whiffs of lovely hot dog smells. Was chilling outside city hall when I saw the old Aussie dude from the Moose trip again. That old dude is quite harmless, but he's rather pervertic. He asked a Brit girl from the trip if he could take nude pics of her. And even more atrociously, he asked another Brit girl if he could have some of her breast milk when she has a baby. Absolute eww.. Anyway, back to the trip, we went to Yoke khee's empty apartment in York Uni at night. Lovely apartment, 1 bedrm but I'll feel very sad living alone in a 1br, no housemates at all. Anyway, thing is, we had no blankets, so we put on a lot of clothes and snuggled ourselves to sleep.

Day 12: Niagara Falls. Back with Moose. Went to a winery and tasted wines. Ice wine is fantastic. Too bad it's freakingly expensive. And I actually liked the white wine that I tasted, much better than Jason's whites. Haha. For once I'm not a minor. Went to see the falls and it was spectacular. So much water, and as usual, with these huge things, you won't suspect that there's such a spectacular thing until you get right next to it. The river looks very normal, just like the Ottawa River, and then, wow, huge falls. Saw many many rainbows. I'm going to stop making wishes, cos every time I make a wish, bad things happen. Stop. Next to Niagara is this Vegas like place, with casinos, hotels, restaurants, shops, absolutely touristy area. Saw Niagara at night, with the lights all turned on. Oh yeah, I was very happy at the falls cos it's right across NY state and I got Cingular signal. And I called many many people. Finally, no more roaming.

Day 13: Chinatown dim sum! Then Chinatown. We went into almost every bakery we saw to look for good mooncakes. Haha, I'm happy cos I love bakeries. Got my bo luo bao =). The fruits at chinatown are so beautiful.. I just wish to live there. Toronto feels like HK, lots of people, lots of traffic, lots of tall buildings. Sent Jacinth to Greyhound where she left in a hurry, and I went on roaming the streets of Toronto. Eaton is a huge shopping mall. I haven't been in indoor shopping malls since Singapore. Toronto and Montreal have great shopping.

Day 14: Back to San Diego. Flew over the Grand Canyon. It looks huge even from the sky.

2007-09-08T22:15:00.000-07:00

Been having MSN chats with this distant relative in China. I don't know what our exact relationship is, but I never figure out such things. Something about my grandma's sister's granddaughter or something like that. Anyway, point is, I type in English and she types in Chinese. And we have a perfectly functional conversation this way. Amazing.

2007-09-08T00:02:00.000-07:00

Pavarotti died. Didn't think he was that old.

Watched Chicago the musical. Better than the movie definitely. More exciting, funnier, more dancing, better stage effects. I thought the choreography was great, there were some fantastic picture moments. The dance was fun to watch, the ad was right, it's meant for mature audiences. It's way too seductive for kids. The songs and music were, well I never thought the music from the movie was great anyway. The conductor was cute though. She's not only a conductor, but an announcer and an actress. The most amazing thing was that there was this lady reporter in the show who sings soprano. About 3/4 through the show, they sang something about things are not always what they seem, and woosh, they took off the lady reporter's wig, and guess what? She's a guy. The soprano was a guy.

Was talking to Fei today. I was bored waiting for my failed experiments to run. She was bored waiting for her book to be printed. She said she's almost 10 years older than me. The other day, Sheng was saying that when he was in Singapore, I was still in primary school. So I did some counting that I haven't done in a while, and I realised that by the time I'm in their position, about to graduate, I'll be almost 30 too. Wow that's old. I'm glad I'm still a minor. I want to stay young. And since no one have kids during postdoc, if these people ever have kids, it'll be in their 30s.

P said today, let's just focus on getting the kos and characterising them, I don't think you need those constructs for your honours thesis.
Expectations are dropping. Students are disappointing creatures, they can't do anything right, can they? Not the masters student, nor the undergrad. At the end of the day, they'll just screw your thing up, you'll still have to be the superwoman, to work for your own paper..

2007-09-06T20:56:00.000-07:00

Seems like I don't blog much nowadays unless something major happens. What's a blog for anyway? For me? For you? Maybe it doesn't have a purpose.

Summer's almost over. I've accomplished nothing. Didn't surf, didn't get a KO cell line, didn't write anything, didn't research much into schools/ programs/ labs, didn't watch Spreckels organ play, didn't read many books, didn't practise any instru.. The good thing about having classes is that there's someone forcing me to accomplish something, at the end of 10 weeks, no matter what happens, I'll have known more about a subject than I did at the beginning. There's someone flooding me with information, and something would surely have diffused in, and with some energy used, more can be taken up. No classes, learning stops.

On the other hand, I have got some stuff done. Went paragliding. Visited LA, Pasadena, Caltech, SF. Went boogie-boarding and rode the waves. Went to the huge outlets at San Ysidro. Going to watch Chicago the musical tomorrow. Learned quite a bit on how to exist sandwiched between 2 people who don't like each other. Heard many stories of the things people do to get what they want. Watched dicty crawl. Studied a bit for GRE. Acquired the skill of repeating myself over and over again so I have enough stuff to talk for 2h. Danced and had a great time. Watched a meteor shower and made a bunch of wishes.

Going Canada for 2 weeks. Travelling mainly alone. Hopefully will meet some nice people in the group to tag along at some places. I'm excited over the trip. Itinery sounds fun, even though it's going to cost me quite a bit of money, and I'm going to miss the LJSO audition and probably not be able to take it for the quarter. But what the heck, I want the break. I want to be out of lab, away from the failed experiments. Maybe my luck will change when I get back.

2007-08-28T22:08:00.000-07:00

Aiyah, missed the lunar eclipse. Even after Jane reminded me.

Oh wow. Blogger supports video uploading. How cool.

Lab dynamics are way too dramatic. My goal in this lab has changed. I'm pretty sure that publishing is out of the question, I'm not even sure how good my rec can be at the end. So the goal now is to learn troubleshooting techniques and people skills. Make friends. Do well in GRE, make sure I make good enough impressions on my teaching professors to get fantastic recs. If expts don't work, why should I stress over them? It's not like I'm going to get any amazing results anyway. Take things easy and focus more on life.

"You can't always be nice and gentle in life. Sometimes you have to be strong and angry." ~ Vanetta on making strong strikes in frappes. She's really amazing. I can't believe I can quote so much from a dance class.

It's this thing about attitude. Zhen zhen said some time ago that we have all been conditioned to be workaholics. Once we're free, we feel weird, awkward, want to look for something to do. Right now, lab's filling that space. And I enjoy my rec class so much cos it's somewhere else to focus my energy and attention on, something else that I can work on. People work hard in that class, I think a lot of it is because we're all used to working hard, of trying to be perfect. I'm never good at dance and I'll never be a dancer, but it's great fun now to work at it and feel the improvements. Same with lab, a lot of us are working even though conditions are terrible because of this belief that if we work hard enough, things will go fine. Brute force. K's student should never have stayed for an extra yr, M should leave now, TJ should have left a long time ago, maybe I should have found a way to wriggle into some other lab. But we didn't. Fear of change. Hope that things will get better. Believing that working hard helps. Stumbling blocks that a free soul wouldn't have. What to do?
Check other blog for details.

2007-08-18T22:20:00.000-07:00

Photos from LA/ Pasadena trip
http://www.imagestation.com/6127277/3895557167

Harry Potter pictures
http://www.imagestation.com/6127277/3893582438

pictures from Del Mar
http://www.imagestation.com/6127277/3893576975

2007-08-16T21:58:00.000-07:00

"Pretend you're confident."
"Think happy thoughts. Think of a day when things went better than expected."
That was so aimed at me. Haha.

We were talking about how americans are brought up to think that they are the best in the world, not completely wrong i guess, in many aspects, they are better than the rest. But we were saying how this attitude of we're the best and we don't need any help isn't exactly the best attitude to take. You get arrogant, close-minded, and stick to your own silly ways. And when you do need help, no one's going to give you any cos you think you're the biggest and mightiest. But then again, when Bush wanted to fight Afghan or Iraq, many countries were supporting him.. including this tiny island in SEA. So, moral of story, don't ever claim that you're the best, or that you know everything, cos you might just find yourself out of friends and out of help when you need it. Just know that you're good, don't have to tell everyone =)

This has nothing to do with pretending to be confident.