Things that work and don't work - Update

Ok. So I've continued experimenting (read: trying) things out, and I thought I'll do a little update about the things I've tried.

1) Podcasts.
Oh no. I'm a little addicted now. Well, sometimes. Sometimes I get the urge to listen to podcasts and not do anything else. Which isn't very good. But at least I'm enjoying myself listening.

I'm using Overcast on my phone to listen to the podcasts... Because the stock Apple podcast app irritated me when I couldn't find the 'download' podcasts button. The internet at my workplace is so ridiculously slow it can't even stream a podcast. My favourites are still the TWI-series by Vincent Racaniello, no thanks to *somebody* for getting me addicted. But I like Vincent's voice, really nice and soothing. And of course, the content is interesting too. I've not listened to any of his parasitism episodes yet, but I'm liking the microbio, virology, and his latest in the series - evolution. Love that a lot, because it's the subject matter that I'm most familiar with. Heck, I never even knew that people did such cool stuff with evolution. When I heard about the kind of interdisciplinary stuff they were doing, combining molecular biology with field work with this and that I'm like. Shit, I want to do that. Well. That's the trouble now. The more fields I learn about, the more choices I'm aware of... The harder it is to narrow things down. But it's good I guess. Never too late to go on a journey of self discovery. Ha.

Some other science, but much easier listening podcast I've tried.

The Story Collider. Now that's a good one. People share about their own encounters with science, and for the most part the story is more about people's lives than it is science. The speakers I've heard so far are good though. Humorous and charismatic. And of course, the best part. Each podcast is only about 10-15 mins long. A short bite sized podcast for when you need some cheering up. Unlike the TWI-series which are usually 1 - 1.5 hours long and full of hard science (they usually discuss a paper or two, which is great because I've never had a journal paper discussion before), this one is purely for casual listening.

Stuff to Blow Your Minds by howstuffworks.com is also another great podcast. Also on the casual listening side, though the topics vary greatly and can range in terms of their seriousness and difficulty. I listened to 3 podcasts from them so far, one was on the organic food debate, another introducing Akademgorodok, a science town in Siberia, and the last podcast was on the use of acids in video games and Hollywood VS the real acids that we have in science.

Inquiring Minds is also an interesting podcast to listen to, presenting topics where science, society, and politics intersect.

Yeah. That's all the podcasts I've listened to so far... Not that many, since I'm mostly listening to the TWI series... And this brings me to my next point...

2) Ingress.
I've hit level 8, and I'm pretty much giving it  up. I still bother to log at least once a day when I'm out to hack a portal or two. Or three. But with podcasts to listen to, Elevate and Peak apps to practise, fics to write, and news to read... There are too many things to do on the train ride. And Ingress is not on the top of my list anymore. Level 8 reached, goal attained. I guess I can say goodbye again. (Plus, getting level 8 resonators and bursters is hard!)

3) Fics/writing.
Definitely writing a lot more now, and started writing fics again... Taking my inspiration from dreams and real life this time, since I'm still not watching any Arashi shows. Let's see if I can finish the other two dream series fics... So that I can release all four at once.

4) Studying.
Still coming along way too slowly. Esp for JLPT. No good. No good at all. And N1 is way beyond my abilities... No good, no good...

5) Crafts.
Doing some random crafts here and there, when I feel like it. Just last night, I made a washi tape box, and a blog post about it.

6) Going out...
Meh. Well. Last week J was in Sg, so I bought her around a little. But otherwise... Even for lunch I'm eating alone quite a lot. If I don't run into someone, esp my China colleagues, on my way out. I've been having lunch with them a lot. A little too much maybe. Too much Chinese. I message them in Chinese on WeChat. Talk to them in Mandarin. Have discussions in Mandarin. And somehow when the PhD student GJ messaged me a while back he suddenly used Chinese. And so I replied in Chinese too. Yes even when talking to the 'big boss' it's mostly in Chinese. Someone talk to me in English please? (Of course, I speak to my parents mostly in Mandarin too). I need some intelligent discussion in English. Talk to me. Someone! Ok. I do go for lunch with English speaking colleagues sometimes, but the discussion hardly leaves me satisfied... *Gets bricked*

Hmm I wonder who reads this stuff... Does anyone even read this? Though it's linked to my FB through IFTTT... I miss you unsup! (You should go read my LJ too...) *runs away and hide*

7) Catching up with Arashi stuff.
Nope, not happening yet. But I'm excited about my iMac that's stated to arrive on Tuesday! Hurrah! With 1TB of hard disk space... And at least a USB port that works... I can start downloading Arashi shows again. Well, the USB ports on my own lappy still works, but it takes super duper long to recognise anything. It's old. Sigh. Looking forward to being able to mass download stuff again. I don't want to do it on dad's lappy because I'm killing it already... :P

I guess that's all for this post?

Things that work, and things that don't work

This year has been a year of trying out new things...

And as per the title... I've been trying to find out more about what works for me and what doesn't.

Things that don't work:
1) Keeping a paper planner.
Nope. Just doesn't work. I hardly used planners in the past, and now, it's still the same. I don't keep track of time that way anymore. If I need to remind myself about some important event... Either I make a mental note of it (usually enough for meetings with friends, I'll remember), or I note it down in my phone calendar (for chores that I need to remind myself to do, and for work related stuff that I would otherwise forget, e.g. attending a seminar. Also for important things like attending a meeting or appointment, that I won't forget, but is too important and therefore I prefer the extra reminder.)

2) Using desktop/wall calendars
Unless it's at work... Then maybe the calendar can be useful. Like I used to jot down when I needed to feed my 'babies'... Or collect samples... Or the dates and times of meetings and seminars. But I don't do that anymore now so the calendar at work is pretty much useless. At home? Months can pass before I even notice that it's no longer February... Heck, it was two weeks into April before I noticed that the calendar in my office desk is still showing 'March'.

The downside is basically that... I hardly take note of the passage of time and therefore I often get surprise when public holidays roll around. And then I get frustrated and stressed because I'd planned a ton of experiments to be done on that day.... :X

3) Keeping my desk organised.
Gosh yes. This has been the struggle of the ages for me. Granted, my desk in the office is pretty neat... Kinda... Well more and more pieces of paper has been piling up and I've yet to bin them... But really... It's still pretty neat. Compared to my desk at home... There's barely enough space to put my books. Yeah. I'll just keep clearing till there's enough space to do whatever stuff when I want to get stuff done but that's it. The rest of it is a mess. An organised mess. I know where everything is and I can locate them within a minute mostly. But when I try packing... I couldn't find my item even after searching for a whole freaking hour. No seriously! I kept it away in some drawer and yes it took me like a freaking hour and a half to find it. Granted I wasn't looking for it all the time... But still! Talk about frustrating!

I'll keep things decently organised but that's it. It's not going to be very neat and stuff... Not with the HUGE amount of stuff I have compared to the space. I'm definitely not one for living a minimalist lifestyle, I know. I love my stationery... You can call me materialistic. Whatever.

It's been said that a more messy desk encourages creativity, whereas a clean desk encourages productivity... In which case it's consistent with how neat I keep my office desk and home desk...

I really do wish I had a bigger desk and home so I could have my mess and still have enough space to comfortably do work though... :X

4) Scheduling.
Well... This one... I can hardly even bring myself to schedule anything. Unlike work when I can say that I'll do X experiment when, or I'll run how many qPCRs today... and at what time... I can't do that outside of work. At all. Has always been the case for me. I'm not the type to have a study plan. Then again, I hardly ever even study so...

No. Even if I draw out some sort of a plan, I won't stick to it. Plans are just not for me... When it comes to me personal life, I can't plan anything. I can't even plan a holiday properly. It's too stressful for me. I'm more of the... Spontaneous, it depends on my mood kind of person.

5) Waking up early
Ok. The verdict is still yet to be out on this one... But after being a night owl for so long and never having been a morning person... It's hard for me to get anything done in the early morning. Like, at 4 or 5 am in the morning when my sleeping pattern was messed up. My brain just can't wake up you know? And then I'll be trying to fall back asleep... And before I know it, all the time would have passed by. Or even if I do pull myself out of bed, I can't do anything intense like studying... I only feel like doing simple things like reading the news. And then again, all my time would be wasted. Ok, reading the news isn't a waste of time. But after the news, I'll find more stuff to read. Like Quora. And once I get on there... I'll read. And read. And read. And read. You get the idea. And then all the time just flies by. I console myself by saying that at least what I'm reading isn't trashy stuff. Some are actually pretty useful and intelligent answers. But too much reading ends up being a waste of time. Unproductive. Too much consumption and no production. A screwed C/P ratio as they call it. Bear in mind that while I occasionally go on answering sprees, I usually don't write anything on Quora. So I mostly just consume things there and don't produce.

Alas I'm going off topic. Yeah. I tend to be a lot more productive at night than in the mornings. So sleeping late works better for me. Like today... I basically wasted the whole morning and napped half the afternoon. And only started writing near the evening. It's like... The day only started after my nap or something. It would certainly do me good to get rid of the habit of wasting my mornings away... But I do prefer a good night's sleep at waking up after the sun rises rather than at some unearthly hour in the middle of the night. Well I wasn't even trying to wake up early though. I didn't even change the timing on my alarm clock. It was just the stress that was screwing up my sleep. First making me wake up earlier and earlier... Than changing my whole sleeping pattern completely. I mean, who collapses on the bed at 10 pm, only to wake up at 4 or 5 pm? And that's on good days. On bad days, I wake up at 1 or 2 am. And I can't sleep the rest of the night.... Nope, I'd very much rather sleep at 3 or 4am and wake up at 8:30. At least I feel like I've slept. I sleep better if I go to bed late than if I sleep early... I can survive perfectly fine on 4 hours of good quality sleep... But of course I'll need more sleep that night. I've done 3 days of 4 hours sleep before and I really felt like a zombie on day 3. Had to nap a little in the office. Nah. I try to get at least 5 hours of sleep for the most part. 6 hours is luxury. Anything more... Well generally I can't even sleep that much. I just wake up. Let's hope I get back to that sort of sleep schedule soon. Think I'm almost there...

Things that do work:
1) Switching hard copies for soft copies. I love my kindle. It's thin, has a ton of books... And I can just bring it out and read during lunch without being judged by the kind of books this weirdo is reading. Well mostly science books I guess... But then I do love Rick Riodan's Percy Jackson series too, and I'm still looking for fantasy books as good as Harry Potter. Nope. No journal papers on my kindle. At least... Not yet. Lol. I'll like to keep journal papers to the computer. Or the phone. Yeah.

It's not that I don't love physical books. I do. But they are heavy... So I tend not to bring them out... And most of the time when I'm at home... I'm on the computer, on the phone, or sleeping. And so... I end up not reading anything... And returning the books to the library unread... :X Opps.

The same goes for writing too. I prefer doing things on the computer. And preferably somewhere in the cloud. Like Evernote, Google docs... dropbox... Things that I can do at work, then continue from where I left off at home (or even on the phone) is good for me. Google docs is more for collaborations with other though... Though if I try doing some sort of game calculator again I might do it on gdocs instead of excel. Previously with my own lappy, I was using gdocs because my lappy can't take opening another program. Takes ages to open up excel. Lol. But if I were to do it again... Yeah, maybe I'll do it on gdocs instead just so that I can work on it anywhere. Sure, you can do the same with dropbox too but... If it's going to be in the cloud, and it's not something that needs to be sent out to others in excel/msoft word format... Might as well just do it in gdocs in the first place.

That said... I do love writing though. Like, actually picking up a physical pen to write on physical paper. Even though my handwriting sucks but that's another issue. There's something nice about scribbling on paper. I've come to really enjoy 'scrapbooking'. By that, I mean recording on my lab notebook....

Writing physically is something that I don't do enough of for sure. I started a physical diary in addition to all my electronic ones... But naturally I hardly write on that physical diary. It's a good thing that I have multiple blogs though... Together with my private, electronic but unpublished diary (well, I use the app day one for that), I have a pretty complete record of my thoughts and things happening in my life. For my own reading pleasure (and others too) now and in the future... Recently I'll make a grab for that physical diary once in a while... Every few weeks or so... But often times months can pass between entries. So it's a good thing that I type a lot more than that.

I do want to write more though... As in pen and paper write. Because I've bought a few really lovely pens recently. And it's such a pleasure to write with those tools. I'm definitely going to get diaries with thick paper though... Because the inky pen refills in those lovely pens bleed all over and seep through the thin paper. Tsk. Alas it's been a year and a half since I started that diary and I'm just over 1/10 of the way through. I really need to start writing more often so I can finish up that book and get rid of it huh...?

2) Doing random crafts
Ok. Admittedly I don't get enough of this done recently. But that's fine I guess. Once in a while... When I get in the mood... It's been months since I did some eraser craving but yeah... I'm way, way better at crafts than say... Design or painting or drawing. I'd love to be able to do those at a passable level someday... But that'll probably take a decade or something. *shrugs*

I'm good with my hands... But not when it comes to holding a writing/drawing instrument. I can even carve things out just fine. Sis says that I can only do the '3D stuff'. Whatever that means. I wonder what will happen when I get my 3D simi 3D doodler. It'll probably come in June? Oh wells. We'll find out then. Been really excited about that ever since I pledge it on kickstarter last year... It's been quite a long few months and I sure can't wait to try it out!

Things that I need to work on/try out
1) Going out once in a while.
Have not been out on the weekends since... Since the last time I met up with my colleagues. Ok. That wasn't that long ago I guess. Just two weeks? But nope, I've not met up with anyone outside of work in that two weeks. At least I have a meeting with my jc friends scheduled this coming Friday. If it comes to fruition. And then after that... Nothing again? Oh... Probably a trip with a former colleague to JB next week. But that's about it... But no... I feel a lot less social already. As in, my motivation levels for going out to meet with people has decreased. A lot. I don't even feel like stepping out of the house. Yeah, I'm an indoors person... A little too much I guess.

2) All my random side projects
Still need to work on getting everything done. My crafts blog... The gaming blog that got abandoned again... Well, none of those will become anything... So I'm not enforcing my weekly post rule on them. But weekly posting on Nihongo Manabu is a must, and it'll be nice if I could make more than a post a week. Managing my time and motivation levels is a huge challenge though. Motivation levels especially...? How to manage my time with all the things that I want to do... Things that I have to do... Things that I need to learn... That's definitely a challenge. I'm a procrastinator for sure. Doing things last minute is my speciality. And heck, I actually get good quality work done in that short amount of time. But last minute work doesn't work for learning something. For that you need a continuous effort over a period of time. But how I'd work that out with my lack of ability to follow schedules and plans remains to be seen. Currently I'm aiming to learn about 1 chapter of my Japanese grammar book each week. And it seems like it'll be left till the very last minute for this week's requirements... Lol. We'll see if I can actually keep this up.

3) Listening to podcast/videos.
No, I actually don't like watching things... I prefer to read things. Like books VS movies. Or even just reading the wiki page about the movie is enough for me. Or anime VS manga. I prefer to read. Takes less time IMO. Though there are things like Arashi shows, varieties where there is no substitute for watching... (Then again, remember I've not watched anything Arashi in a whole year!) But otherwise... I find that watching takes up too much time, and the amount of satisfaction, the gain I get is too little. If you talk about CP ratio, yup, watching too much videos is a surefire, easy way to screw that up. All watching and no doing. I've not tried listening to podcast in place of music for when I'm in the lab etc though. I'm not sure how that would work out. If I need to concentrate on the experiment, I don't pay attention to the music, and I'd prefer to listen to a set playlist of songs that I like and am familiar with, because I'm already familiar with the music and it doesn't take any addition brain power to process the tune, lyrics etc. Of course, not having to spend time putting down the micropipette and hitting the play button twice on my earphone remote is a huge plus (For that reason, my earphones must have remotes). A lot of people trump audio books as a way to be more productive... But I really.... Doubt it... I tried listening to audio books once, and boy, they talk so slowly that I felt like strangling the narrator throughout. Like. Just give me the damn book and I can read myself way faster than that. Even though I'm not a speed reader.... But I bet I can still read faster than they read. Sure it's supposed to be for when you're doing something. Like, exercising, or cooking... Or doing something else. But I can't... Unless I'm paying full attention to something, my mind will just drift off. It's different for songs. I don't actually listen closely or carefully to songs. Often times I find that many songs passed by without me even noticing it. My mind is thinking about other stuff. And I like my thinking time....

(Case in point, I can barely concentrate on my writing now cos I'm paying attention to the song that's playing now... A song that I've never heard of before. But just before that, I can concentrate perfectly fine because it's a song I'm familiar with.)

4) Ingress.
Still wondering if I really should play Ingress again. It's fun and all, and I only stopped because my phone died last time... But... Using the time spent on commute to play Ingress instead of doing other stuff...? Maybe I'll play it less after I hit level 8... Or only play it part of the commute... Or only on the way there or on the way back. But yeah... I actually get quite a lot of things done on the commute otherwise. Especially on the way to work. Like firing a short status update in Chinese or Japanese to weibo... Post something on instagram... Read my favourite tech news.... Clear my emails if I've not already done so after I crawl out of bed in the morning. Daily training on elevate... Maybe even make a blog post on LJ.... I'll probably play it less often once I hit level 8... Or limit it to just the commute home... Since the commute back is usually not productive anyway... Or maybe I'll get bored of the game again and drop it completely... We'll see.

Other games... Not been playing vainglory again... Maybe I'll pick it up again in a few months when I'm more free. Would definitely like to play some sort of games on the 'puter occasionally as well... Would also love it if I could cure myself of motion sickness... But I guess those will be year long projects... As with all the electronics that I got... Gotta learn enough about programming to play with them so... That'll take years too... Though hopefully by the end of the year I would be able to start doing something with them already... We'll see. Too many things that I want to try out, that often times I'm just lost in myself and have no idea where to start.

5) Writing.
I'm definitely writing a lot more now... But as for writing something more than random blog entries? Now that's something I need to do more of. Like more posts for NM, and get back to writing fanfiction again. You know, something more than just unstructured, random blog entries. I was keeping up with my 1 fic a week thing for quite a while last year... Before fatigue set in and I ran out of inspiration... And well experiments swept the rest of my writing ability away.

It's a balance. Two sides of the same coin. If I'm doing tons of science, I can't write. The science and the creativity seems to be on opposite ends of the seesaw. (I'm guessing scientific writing is not included here, but then the last time I did scientific writing proper... Like really properly... Was during my FYP thesis. Granted, I wrote some stuff in my previous job, but that was also more than two years ago. So it's really a good thing that I'm writing online. At least some writing practice is better than none.... Scientific writing is something that I need to work on for sure.) Keeping things balanced... Yeah I have to work on that so that I can keep on writing. And not have the case of having no posts appear on NM for months repeat. The lack of updates really did a huge number of the site rating... *Sigh*

6) Taking notes and making notes
*Sigh*
This is something that I'm *still* working on now. Well, I can take notes in class just fine and all. But now that I'm self studying... I'm the type who loathes writing in books. I'm trying to make myself highlight things and all in the books... Or at least my notes... I mean... I bought so many notebooks and fooscape pads and pens... I gotta use them all up right?

Well at least for Japanese I think notebooks are good because it's troublesome for me to type in Japanese. Switching languages is troublesome. Well. It's not troublesome, just slow. Really slow. Thanks to all the crap that I do on dad's lappy... It's slowing down too. I mean... But... I don't even know what I do...! I mean, there's only chrome open right now, though it has about 20 tabs open, but hey, just 1 window. And then Line is open... But that's all... Stupid ram guzzling web browsers. I'm not even running any pages with flash or games sheesh. Sure there's a bunch of stuff in the background, but it's mostly just chrome gobbling up all 8 gb of space. Somehow I've also managed to used up tons of hard disk space on my dad's lappy too... I think the photo backups from my phone to dropbox is currently eating up a lot. My Arashi songs also take up like... 10 GB at least... And I might have some videos that I downloaded years ago still sitting in the downloads folder... *shrugs* But in my defence... This lappy is old too! It's late 2011! Sure, it's 1 year younger than my mid 2010 lappy, but it's almost 5 years old already too! Yeah. I really need a new lappy. Or should I get a desktop...? Dad wants his lappy back later this year anyway... And I really need to give him the lappy back in decent working condition... :X

7) Catch up with Arashi shows
Definitely this... Have to catch up with their shows... And do a few bangumi reviews too I guess. I can put the reviews on NM so that'll be killing at least 3 birds with 1 stone. Still takes me way, way too long to do bangumi reviews though... But it's good because I'm preparing for JLPT now and watching Arashi shows and doing reviews especially is in line with my Japanese learning efforts. As for subs... They still take way too long. I think I'll leave it for now and start watching shows instead... Would be nice if I can watch at least 1 show before collapsing dead on my bed every weekday... We'll see...

8) Miscellaneous stuff that I should figure out
How to export my LJ entries... and automatically have them imported into day one. Similarly for blogger. So that if LJ ever dies one day... I'll still have my entries elsewhere to read. I still regret not having a copy of all my entries from that moblog thing that MOE did last time in collaboration with whoever. All my science loving craziness and love proclamations for chemistry... That was my first blog... I wrote all that in sec sch. This one only came in JC... By then my enthusiasm was already dying out....

Either way, it's nice to have all my entries together in the same place. And I tend to write way longer entries on these blogs than the personal diary that I keep so... A lot of the events and happenings can be traced on my online blogs, but not in that personal one. It's like, after typing a long entry on my blog... Why would I want to write the same thing again on my Day One entry? Plus Day One is a a daily thing (I try anyway), so I usually just type like... One or two sentences entries about what I'm doing at the moment. And not because I genuinely have something to write about...

It's funny how when I was putting together that video last month... I was using my blog as a tool to trace back when things occured and to remind myself of what happened. On the other hand, my personal diary only contained fairly useless information like 'I'm so bored today.' or 'Tiring day.' Lol. Pretty useless indeed... That's why I've been linking my instagram and fb statuses to it... It says a lot more than my daily entries... But my blog entries says a lot more so... :P

Yeah, time to get working on it. Automating the process is the part that's more challenging... Especially for LJ with their outdated tools...


That's all I can think of now I guess. This is a really long entry eh? Definitely something I'll like to save in Day One for sure. I wonder how much of this will remain the same 10 years on. Or even just 5 years. Would be interesting to look back and compare eh? That's the good thing about keeping things electronic. It's there, in the cloud. I can search it anything. Plus, I can use the search function. You can't 'search' in a physical diary... And there's labels/tags too. :P

The Three Critters

Once upon a time,

In the Land of Critters.

There lived three bacilus.

Their cell walls was white as snow,

And pili black as coal.

They were as close as bacteria to dirt.

When they slept, they slept together.

Everywhere they went, they went together.

There were no lonely nights, for they had each other.

They had many a

crazy adventures

and exhilarating rides

Saved in the nick of time!

and close calls together.

But alas.

One day, they were not so lucky.

The first was killed, in a giant landslide.

And the second was buried, alive.

And the third got caught in the jaws of death.

The rest of Critter Land lived happily ever after.

~The End~

Revival!

It's been a long time.

I've finally done it.

Wrote a post on my other gaming blog...

And now I'm writing here.

It's high time I revive my blogs, even as I have new ones to deal with. So far so good!

Listen

Listen.
The silence of the night
Listen.
The fan whirling
Listen.
The cars in the distance
Listen.
A child's cry
Listen,
To the sounds of the night.

Of internets and routers

So. The internet cabling in my house is a little complicated. No idea why my house is like this… but between rooms the wifi signal drops drastically! Just literally 10 metres away from the router, blocked only by 1 wall and 1 cabinet, and I can really poor, or just no signal! 

Previously the router was in my room, and using the phone cable point… then when fibre broadband came, the fibre optics point was installed in the living room and we ran a really long cable all the way from the living room to my room. Then my dad brought TV boxes and stuff, and we signed up for a new Internet brand and they gave a new router - the exact same one as what we already had at home actually… but together with the TV boxes and co, my dad set up the router in the living room… well actually the corridor, that’s RIGHT OUTSIDE my room, and then things just went terribly from there. Internet was really  slow, and I can’t even receive any signal on my bed when using my phone. More often than not it was using 4G. Finally, pissed off, and with that super long ethernet cable still running to my room, I plugged that ethernet cable to my lappy and enjoyed really zippy internet. And since my lappy was on cabled internet, I turned the wifi into a wifi hotspot so that I can connect my phone to it.

Great, right? Except that I had to keep my computer on if I wanted to play on my phone after lights out… and keeping my lappy on and charging the whole night wasn’t the best battery care. And then the problems with the wifi printer started. The printer is situated right at the end of my room, furthest away from the router… and it just won’t print many a times. And dad was getting extremely pissed… cursing the printer and what not every time he wanted to print something. In the end everyone just went back to using the USB port. Even my lappy was unable to connect to the wifi printer. And it’s just like… 3 meters away? I told my dad it was the wifi signal problem but he didn’t believe me. 

So that was till CNY came and while spring cleaning I found the old router that I had kept earlier. I’ve been wanting to set up a second router for a while now but was just too lazy. (Plus, I already had fast internet :P ) So it was only till like… last week? Or the week before that I finally set it up. Everyone was rejoicing because the printer finally works now, when connected to that second wifi network that is. Esp my sis since she has loads of school notes to print. Previously it would like stop in the middle of printer her notes! And that really sucks. 

But of course… it’s not that good a news for me because I have to go back to using wifi. And suddenly my internet download speed dropped by a TON! Episodes that would finish downloading in less than 10 minutes suddenly took forever. From at least 1 MB download speed in mega, I was getting what? 100 kbps? 

So I finally went to buy an ethernet cable the day before, and set it up a while ago. Best 15 bucks I’ve spent! Did some speed tests and you can see the results.

This was using the wifi from router 1 (aka the router in the corridor). Very normal internet speeds… which should NOT be the case because we are paying for a fibre broadband plan! Also, the wifi signal from router 1 is weak. 

Router 2 wifi. Aka the router in my room. I was using this to download stuff from mega… because the signal from this wifi is much better. BUT GOSH IT’S SO SLOW! No wonder my downloads were taking FOREVER to finish! 

Now, the internet speed when using the ethernet cable from router 2. That’s much better. 

I ran a test with the ethernet cable from router 1 too just to see if there’s any difference. Not much it seems. In fact what the upload speed is slower?

I ran the test with cable from router 2 again… the ping is much higher this time, but the download and upload speeds are still as decent. Yay! I guess there’s not much deterioration with the addition of a second router when using ethernet cable. The wifi though performs a lot worst. Wifi 2 is more for the printer though… but my mobile phones will be on wifi 2 too. It’s been alright so fast though. My game (Heroes of Order and Chaos) runs just fine, and much better on wifi 2 than wifi 1. With wifi 1 the signal often gets cut off halfway. My sis’s room though… it’s quite bad… the signal is bad too, and the speed is really slow. And her room is further and not as convenient to  cable too… since the cable either has to go across the main corridor - bad bad bad! or go past the master bedroom door - also bad! Unless you go from the top/ceiling of course, in which case is really troublesome too, and you need even longer length of cable. At least in my case the cables just stick to the side of the walls and stuff, and didn’t have to go across any corridors (except when I was using it for my lappy, and I totally destroy the cable casing… recently just taped it up >< ). But at least that was the corridor in my room, not the house! (and already the damage to the cable was that bad… it’ll be worst if it’s the outside corridor… and people might trip!) 

For that short distance between where I put my lappy, and the router… it’s just a distance of like… 2m or something? No less! I can touch them both if i stretch my hands out! I bought a freaking 10m long cable for it. 10m?!?!??! Are you kidding? 

Nope. Not at all. I decided to do it nicely this time. Running the cable along the walls, behind my desk and all, so that I won’t trip over the cable and/or destroy the casing again. End result? I’m left with less than 0.5m of excess wire… and it’s always good to have just a little excess in case I need to shift things around in the future. Not bad at all. My lappy desk is a mess of wires though. Have to like… pack my table and sort out the mess of wires some day. There’s like the ethernet cable, the lappy power cable, the USB wire for the portable hard disk… and a USB wire for the non-portable hard disk… and with that non-portable hard disk, it needs a power source, so that’s another long cable. and then the lappy is connected to a USB hub, which is connect to my mouse, my cooler fan (for laptop), my USB fan (for my, but I hardly use it cos it’s so noisy, plus there already is a big fan blowing the lappy), charging wires for the bluetooth keyboard and speaker… Gosh what a mouthful.

As if that’s not enough, I also have a USB cable to my iPhone lying on my table, and of course, my earphones. Passed all my lightning cables to my sis already or there’ll be more!

And on the other desk with the router + printer, I have a microUSB cable for my portable charger… and also I have my iPhone and xiaomi chargers plugged in. Decided to throw out the lightning cable that died. If anything I can just buy a new cable in the future since I can claim that from my work place benefits… well it won’t even be enough to buy me a new iPhone though. Oh wells. 

All the complicated set up… and mess of wires. But at least i have fast internet again now! Wahahaha!

 

Stickers!

Just love these stickers. So cute!

Cycling! Gosh! It’s been so long since I last got to cycle. I bought this for my dad actually. He loves cycling… not sure what he can possibly use this sticker for though? ><

Most people are just normal. Then there are those blazing successes. And incredulous failures. Sometimes, it’s just a small line between success and failure. Other times… the difference is so great I can’t even comprehend. 

Try me… Really. It’s not being egoistic as much as it is just striving to be the best. Because that’s what we have to do. To give it our all, put in all the best efforts. 

It’s a matter of beliefs and values. Work ethics maybe? If something matters to me then I’ll give it the very best I got. 

Clean up!

It's that time of the year again. Time for spring cleaning. Chinese New Year is coming round the corner. 19th of Feb this year. Spent some time this afternoon cleaning a small portion of my room. The place where all the computer stuff are kept. Threw out whole boxes of stuff. Old routers - actually there was one brand new ethernet router, a free gift from the telco... but it's years old by now, and completely useless. So too bad, that just went out with the trash. An old keyboard too. Really old. It's not even USB. But that weird round shaped plug... And loads of really old warranties. Where the items have probably long spoiled and been tossed away already. All gone! I still have got a bunch of printer ink left. And it's like, brand new printer ink refills. And feels so wasted to throw them away. Keep thinking that I should use them in some sort of artistic endeavor but... oh wells. They'll stay for another year...? ><

One small, small part of the room cleared. Still got loads more to go sigh. But I'll leave them for another day. Next weekend I guess. Finally cleaned my fan too. The standing fan. It gets dirty so fast cos I on it all night, and all the time when I'm at home. This time I took apart the whole damn thing - the front grill, blades and back grill (ok, whatever that metal thing is called), and threw it in the shower to rinse. It was so easy to take apart. Just some knobs to unscrew. No need to dig in the storeroom for a screwdriver whatsoever. Gonna do that from now on, previously I only rinse the front grill in the shower. It beats looking for those disposable paper cloth, and then walking to and fro to wipe the blades/back grill and rinse the cloth. A lot of parts can't be reached properly and I absolutely hate the smell of wet dust on my hands. *shudders*. You know that unique smell of wet dust? It's so revolting... I always get nauseous from it! Good thing the new vacuum cleaner has a handy brush... I'm just gonna vacuum up all the dust instead of wiping. Alrights. So part 1 of spring cleaning done. Who knows how many parts there are to go lol!

squeaky clean

Its been a while since i came on marsedit to erm… blog!

been moving more and more to else where to post...

anyway… i feel accomplished. just cleaned my mouse, keyboard and screen.

 

preferred cleaning agents: 

Denatured alcohol aka 95% ethanol for cleaning mouse and keyboard.

some monitor cleaner fluid from Daiso aka 2 dollars shop aka 100 yen shop for cleaning the screen.

Just use tissue paper and cotton swabs… no need for fancy micro fiber cloth (actually, i bought one from Daiso but… idk where it went… :X bought a spectacles cleaning cloth too but i just end up using my shirt/tissue. opps. still my specs is in a million times better condition than my mums!)

 

oh take note when buying the alcohol… its available in pharmacies, together with all the other medical use…erm… fluids? make sure you read the ingredients… some have castor oil and stuff added to the thing… so that its more gentle to the skin and what not… good for the skin maybe, but bad for your electronics. You'll end up dirtying the thing you were trying to clean :X

yes… just feeling really random today :X

The past and the future of famous logos | StockLogos.com

The past and the future of famous logos | StockLogos.com

very hilarious!

Nokia logo just disappearing... and the MS office logo was indeed pretty similar to what they eventually came up with...

the meteorite hitting the earth in the firefox logo was a nice little touch :P

You know its time when...

You know its time to sharpen the knife when the knife slips when you try and cut eggplants, lands on your finger with a HUGE force, and all you got was a barely noticeable nick…i  didn’t even notice the 'cut' till hours later o.o

Recently… i've taken a liking to buying lip balm. Somehow have a really soft spot for all the nice and weird flavours...

Without even realising it i've gotten so many tubes of lip balm already :X bleah :X

Here's some random photos since i had a pretty background to take pics with...

The exercise made me wish digicams were on iCloud though. I took out and put in the memory card like 5 times in an hour lol…!

Google - Background images are going away on November 16, 2012

Google

Background images are going away on November 16, 2012
Thank you for using background images. As we build a more streamlined Google Search page for everyone, we’ll no longer be able to support customization with background images. So you will no longer be able to see your background pictures starting November 16, 2012.
Click Remove to stop using a background image now. Your current background image and Picasa web albums will still be available to you.

Sigh. Just when i was thinking of changing the background image that i put together sometime back…

i was still debating whether to put the kagi heya enomoto pic that i've been trying to put somewhere in my comp ><

Oh wells… in other news… my desktop picture needs a change too...

Its currently a nice patterned background… BUT with a huge list of the 20 amino acids stuck in it for quick reference during my FYP (which is long over).

Yeah… a very cluttered desktop that I'm not done with clearing yet… and i've not gotten around to look into the issue of the missing weather pic with the geek tools widget too… *goes off to re-arrange some files so that the date and time is not blocked.*

Me thinks the iTunes geek tool widget thingy has stopped working too… its been showing eyes with delight since like forever even though i've been listening to other songs… bleah :( The upgrade to ML broke quite a lot of things… I'm still wondering if its possible to change my dock like i could last time… pfttttt! 

My favourite pencil...

So I got bored and tried doing some drawing...

Not too shabby i guess?

Do you have a favourite (mechanical) pencil?

I do… and its this rather old pilot shaker.

 

Been using it since… Was it sec sch or JC? Either way I'm sure i've been using it for at least 5 or 6 years. So it was of no surprise when i dug it out today to find the metal clip getting rusty :(. After all its 1) old. 2) been neglected for quite a long time (since I'm using my comp like all the time and not writing ANYTHING).

What do you do with a rusty metal clip? You varnish it. and it just so happened that i have this bottle of pink nail polish with plenty of glitter in it that I bought like a year ago for some art project that i never got started on… so...

Tada! glittery metal clip. Lousy finish (shows my inexperience with applying fingernail polish) but it still beats that rusted medal feel any day...

New Microsoft Keyboard Splits Space Bar, Left Side Used as Backspace Key | Techland | TIME.com

New Microsoft Keyboard Splits Space Bar, Left Side Used as Backspace Key | Techland | TIME.com

haha... for me... well... its quite true... i pretty much always use my right thumb to hit the space bar too. and yeah... the delete/backspace button is a little far away... though for me i always use my 4th finger to hit it. in fact, my right pinkie is completely useless... it just pops right up n i don't use it to hit a single key. My left pinkie tho, is in charge of A, the shift button, capslock etc... basically all the buttons it should be hitting. Except when say I'm trying to hit type A. Or Z. Or Q. Then my left pinkie goes out to hit the shift key while my 4th finger hits the alphabet. While my right pinkie just dances around in midair doing absolutely nothing. Heck even the 4th finger of my right hand is pretty slack... most of the thing all it does it to hit the delete button. Even when typing letters like P i just my middle finger :X

bad typing habits/skills indeed :X

things.....

to do tmr:

1. upload photos to facebook
2. download 搜狗拼音输入器for mac. i nvr knew they have a mac version too! <3
i wonder if i can find a good 3rd party japautnese language input software for mac too - cos there's always problem with the original input software from mac somehow for me... it takes like a million years to switch between languages, and sometimes even hangs up my comp! read before that you have to like repair permissions or something - did that, was ok for a while,  but then it came back again zzzzzzzz. meh. the sougou thing is sooooo cute... dont they have a japanese add on for it too? T.T its really convenient too... and there's like a million skins they made for you to pick... really love it......

3. lvl up my soul seed as much as possible on trickster
4. download and install bloons td 5 deluxe on mac, and install it on xp as well.
yeah! i paid for deluxe, but i think it'll be worth the money... been enjoying every single bloons td release so far... td 5 has been a delight to play everyday (or almost everyday), loads of new content... new towers, new agents, new maps, daily challenges... now even those tower boosting upgrades/buildings thing that you can buy with monkey money... really makes the game so very enjoyable. cant wait to play it! just that bleah i've got trickster events and stuff to do too... and i still haven found a job. :X

5. what else is there? :X

also been playing back swords and potions recently. its a nice buying/selling rpg game... friendly ppl there too :)

went to botanic gardens with jlf today... shall try and upload some pics tmr. heck, i've not yet uploads the gardens by the bay pics from...... idk how long ago :X opps :X

k, that's all for now.

Explore the world...

Stumbled upon an article on techland about live webcams of animals. Explore.org lets you view videos of animals all around the world live from your browser...!



There's like... a gazillion more videos on the site so do check it out!

London Olympics!

Ah so sleepy... but i had a great time watching the olympics today... well bits here and there, but i watched most of the men's gymnastic sub div 2 qualifications!

Japan came off to quite a shaky start... meh... excited abt the team finals XD

Lab

So i finally started on lab work stuff last week. Like last Tuesday? Started off with extracting DNA with another fyp student, so that we can sort of get to know the procedures and know where everything is in the lab. prior to that i've not even SEEN the labs bravo.

Following the other fyp student around totally reminded me of my time at ibn when i followed fan around. heck, maybe i reminiscent about the past a bit too much for my own good… but i can't help it, that's just the way i am :X

The way this lab works is totally different from the individual research group style in ibn. There its one group one lab, and in my previous lab our relations between group members was pretty good so… there wasn’t any hard and fast rule like exactly which part of the bench belongs to who… pipettes i just use whatever's on the rack - most of the time there's no name written on it anyway…

Here, its more like an individual thing? like you use your own pipettes and stick strictly to your own space. fyp students in sbs were each rented a set of pipettes… but somehow there was communication disparities… when we emailed the prof to ask, we were told that ppl working in that lab didn’t have to attend the safety briefing (and hence no pipettes)… but other fyp students from my course DID go for the briefings and were given pipettes -.-''' zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz a little zzzzz up to me but yeah… at least we aren't gonna do much lab work… and we're just using my mentor's stuff. and work space. things are kinda weird in here… like the lab ppl were asking why are there suddenly 2 more students in the lab when our mentors did inform them long ago that we will be in the labs. admin stuff tsk. always so troublesome...

working in the lab made me feel… alive though… like i finally have a motive, an end in mind… what to do etc. made me realize that as much as i love doing stuff (games, surfing the web, writing blog entries etc etc etc) on my comp, working wise, i prefer lab work to… bioinfo stuff. granted when u do lab work u still have loads of reading and writing to do, but at least… somehow… the lab work in an anchor? keeps me more focused or something… my place is in the lab… not the office… i feel more at home in the labs.

So we spent the better part of last Friday preparing the reagents… and after that we discussed about the intro.

And yesterday… ah.. my mentor has a habit of coming really late. We were supposed to meet at like 10am, but he turns up after 30mins or so later, and than checks his emails and other stuff on his comp… and we headed off for the labs like… maybe at 11 or so? i actually don't mind the time i have in the morning to use my comp and stuff… its just that starting at 11am? we worked all the way till 4pm. Lunch at 4pm… bravo… my stomach died a bit halfway through :X

So we'll be continuing with the 2nd part of the experiment today. At 2pm he says… i think we'll take till… 7-8pm? since we'll probably start closer to 3 than 2pm. Not the 1st time we ended at 8 though, just last Friday our report discussion took us all the way till 8pm.

ABout the intro that i showed my mentor last Friday… blah… it wasn’t the best piece of work i've ever written… its all broken up in bits of disjointed text… quite a horrible piece of work really. in contrast, my friend has got the intro nicely written up already. Only that i kind of fainted when i saw the 1st part of her intro. It was a totally non-scientific way of writing… in my mind i was like what the hell are you doing? delete that whole 1st para kind of thing :S sighs… the differences between the two of us. i think i kind of over reacted at 1st tho and i was glad i didn’t say anything else i would have been totally rude. my mentor did ask her to change away that part tho so all's well.

I shd care more about my own pathetic piece of writing than criticizing the work of other's. At least they have a proper, flowing introduction already, which is a lot more than what i can say for myself :X

sighz, I'm still the same as before. unable to find the mood to write and only able to do last minute work. no pressure, no work. sighs. At least i don't play games or watch videos in the office, but i do end up spending time to blog instead :X

managed to get mendeley to cite stuff the way my sch wants for my report… sighs. really feeling like a zombie today… and i already slept 7 hours last night… some how its still not enough? sighz.

kk, back to my pathetic intro.

sch and such

hmm so i haven posted here in a while...

in truth tons of things i want to blog about...

but no time...

so this shall just be a short post...

 

schools the same, 51 days till my report is due… and still getting no where with nothing. no good...

 

going out cycling with my friends tmr morning! roots, finally get to see ash after EONS. can't wait!

 

WX invited us to go dinner + clubbing next wed… nor been clubbing before, not sure if i'll go… cos its ladies night so yeah… meh…

Days long forgotten

That's the water bottle I'm using now… yes, the water bottle they gave us during JC1 orientation… that's like 6 years ago… seems so far and so distant. My sis sent me a youtube video of the RI(JC) IHC opening video for last year yesterday… and i started watching the rest of the related videos… amazingly i found the ultra lame video they showed us during orientation… the one about the different houses being greek mythology gods/goddesses and being banished to Z'kardia… got tons of dislikes and flames on youtube though… LOL.

But its kind of nostalgic… watching the orientation dance of the other batches and all (couldn’t find any for my batch tho, sad). Seems like in the recent years they started making really nice MVs of the orientation dances. And than there's the sun dance that's passed from one batch of OGLs to the next… i really liked watching that dance during my orientation… the dance is cute, hilarious… and really simple to follow - i did it once during the orientation… when the whole OG stayed in sch till like midnight to dance and have fun. I told myself during the orientation - when we just started doing the batch dance - that i was gonna do it properly and enjoy myself… and i did have a good time. Don't regret it, cos that was like the last time I'm ever gonna do something like that again… mass dance and all… didn’t go for uni orientation… and don't think i'll ever do something like this next time… Yeah… the batch dance… its really hard! Rather lengthy and all different moves… different moves for the girls and the boys… and they don't constantly repeat moves that kind of thing… I was talking to someone from another JC that time (when i was in J1 and we just finished orientation, it during during CNY when we were visiting my parent's sec sch friends)… and she was like 'what? you all only have one dance? so lousy! and how come you all can't remember the dance? we have like 4 or 5 (i can't remember how many) dances and everyone can remember all the moves!' Than she showed me her orientation booklet and i understood why… One dance consist of just 10 (or so) short moves (things like box step = 1 move) and the 10 moves are repeated over and over again throughout the duration of the music/song. Of course everyone can remember them. Ours? Some ridiculously hard dance (really, a dance!) with all sorts of different moves for the entire duration of the 4min? song that's impossible for normal people like myself to remember the steps to… without having my OGL there to demonstrate that is. Its like i absolutely can't remember what's coming next kind of thing. But still, the dance was really fun… I really enjoyed myself during the orientation...

Perhaps you can say that it's really stupid of my sch… to have such a difficult dance that like no one can remember… and that its better to have just a very simple dance that everyone can groove to… perhaps…? Well its not that my batch dance was difficult or anything… its just that we can't remember the steps and need someone to show/remind us - something which my lovely OGL did most of the time. We CAN do the steps, but we CAN'T remember when to do what step :X does that even mean anything? haha… still… we had fun and that was what mattered most. Granted, there were many ppl who absolutely hated it, but its really how you want to look at things… doesn’t matter whether the dance is easy or hard or stupid… as long as you tell yourself 'I'm going to enjoy this', you will.

 

Anyway back to my water bottle… started using it either last year or last last year after all my previous water bottles ended up in failure… either they got moldy or they leaked etc etc… Really like the aluminum water bottles… especially this one that's in my favorite shade of blue… XD Especially when you fill it up with cold water from the water coolers… The whole bottle will frost up almost instantly and ah… the nice cool 'ice pack'! And after leaving the bottle in the cold lecture theater (or anywhere cold) for a while, the water instead is nice and cold too XD Love it! Only thing is that every time it falls… Its gets dents… and with the stupid lose side pocket of my bag, that happens quite a lot… :X So much so that i've just taken to securing the bottle with a carabiner to my bag strap… o.o

 

Okays… I should get back to work now!