What's my age now? o.o

got my fb wall spammed with bday wishes yesterday... the amazing things abt social media lol... ppl whom i'm not meet in ages... ppl whom i've not talked to in ages... its nice to have a reminder like this saying that they hopefully do remember you. than there are also those ppl who just saw the notification that XXX bday is today and they just join in the fun and wishh you happy bday too. thks, even tho i dont know who you are... i was quite surprised that even my jc teacher wished me haha. guess she's quite a fb addict, happily sharing pics of her newborn on fb all the time :)

lunch yest = crab, as expected :) but ah the crab was fantastic yesterday... my dad will buy from the stall at tiong bahru... nvr haggle price... heck, he dont even ask stuff like how much per kg etc... its like just a mutual understanding btw stall holder and customer - he knows that we know about crabs, and we want the good ones. we dont care abt the price, just give us the good ones. the uncle will always dig out the crabs from the boxes hidden at the back of his stall for us... other ppl just get the lousier ones on display at the front of the stall. my parents always say those he's hiding are probably for sale to restaurants and all. *shrugs* i'm just happy we get the nice crabs XD. steamed... that's how crabs ought to be eaten XD not butter or chilli or pepper crabs....

ah.... bday present... my sis obviously didnt get my anything. she just pulled an all nighter last thurs over PW... and her promos are starting tmr. my parents got me... they got me two shirts, and a mouse. i was really quite surprised that my dad bought me a mouse... i guess it cos he just got one at the IT show, and found the logitech wireless mouse to be very good, so he got me one as well DESPITE me constantly saying that i do not like wireless mouse (and mouse with at least an additional back and forward button). so he did get me a mouse with back and forward buttons... but its wireless.... logitech + the battery life is supposed to last 3 years... quite pricey too... i'll take their word for it when they say the batteries will last... but i'm not too keen to use the mouse cos... its freaking heavy! the wired mouse that i just bought a few months back is super light, so i'm kind of used to the light weight already... plus the logitech mouse is SUPER heavy, esp with two AA batteries stuffed in. previously all the wireless mouse i came across uses two AAA, smaller, lighter batteries... this logitech mouse uses the big ones... -.-''' no wonder its so heavy!

response is also a bit jerky at times, doesnt feel as good... i wish there was an option to change the dpi too... still, the main issue is the weight. my dad loves heavy stuff so yeah... he wont quite understand... but my wrist started aching after a few hours of using the new mouse last night T.T so much so that i switched back to the old mouse. bah. i really dont like finding fault about gifts from others, esp when it costs so much (like i could have bought 3 of the wired mouse i'm using now!)... but i really wont be using the new mouse much cos of the supreme weight! T.T haiz. wat to do?

1 week recess break starts today... muscles test coming up on monday haiz...

What's my age again?

i'm seriously living in the past. last night at 12midnight my sis talked to me on msn and wished me happy bday. i was like seriously wth? she blur blur and talk to the wrong person isit? cos previously my mum keep complaining that my sis very blur these days and send smses to my mum's friend instead of whoever my sis wanted to sms to. than it slowly dawned upon me that it's probably the 25th of sept already. wth! time pass by so fast! i nvr really look at the dates these day cos there's barely any written assignments so i dont have to like, look at my watch and write down the date on my worksheets... i remember the last time i took note of the date was at the start of the week and i was looking at the SBS time table... but i only remember it say from 19th sept to XXX week. so yeah... guess i was still thinking its 1X of sept or smthing. totally... didnt realise time passed by so fast.

did i say this before? i think i did blog abt it sometime earlier. i totally fail at keeping track of bdays. even my own apparently. its just another day to me... just that i know my parents would go buy crab since its the crab season during my bday + my whole family loves crabs. crabs on my/my dad's bday is kind of a tradition i guess. <3 crabs :)

went lunch with my friend on fri, and my parents were like asking if its for somebody's bday or wat... and i was thinking 'heh, tbh i dont even know when's my friend's bday!' i dont think she knows mine either tho, she nvr asked and why would i mention it? you dont really go ard announcing ur bday do u? embarrassing but true... tho we went on a trip to world expo together last year... i nvr bothered to ask her bday haha. i'll forget abt it anyway, so it makes my less guilty if i just dont know abt it. i dont even know when's the bday of any of my (uni) classmates. ><

hmm... since its my bday today, that means ash's is coming next sun! me n ash are really cool, our bdays are exactly a week apart... and her IC no. if just right after mine! haha, wat a coincidence! unlike me tho, ash always remembers my bday and she'd sms me right after midnight and is almost always the 1st to wish me! she got beaten to by my sis last night tho... not cos she forgot, but cos her relatives stayed in her house till super late! so she only sms me when they left... still  i <3 u gal! when are you ever omg free to meet up???? YOU ARE FOREVER BUSY! ITS BEEN HALF A SEMESTER AND I ONLY GOT TO CATCH A GLIMPSE OF YOU YESTERDAY! MY SIS WANTS AN OUTING AFTER HER PROMOS ON THE 3RD OCT OK! WE DEMAND TO SEE YOU! WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME WE EVEN TALKED????

went to disturb ash in sch yest and got the biz law tb from her... cmi lah... presentation after recess week so need the tb to find the case laws and stuff... i would have gone to raid her hse if she wasnt in sch yest haha. i totally didnt recognise her cos she plaited her hair... -.- was so extra + embarressing for me to walk in an out of the LT so many times ><.

hmm... on the other hand... my writing wise... its really pathetic, very limited sentence structures... always writing/saying the same thing over and over. plus i think i'm too long winded.... and too many details and kinks in the story that i need to work out. my sis drew a nice picture for my story last night... the drawing is still incomplete though, cos my story is incomplete! still have not introduced all my characters yet... and totally clueless abt how to bring in the last character... than i still need to formulate the background for each of them before i can proceed on properly with my main story.... i think now its 10+ pages long and i've still not actually STARTED the action. just character background, and intro to the whole story. gosh, at this rate it'll really become a book... IF i can get enough ideas to continue writing. the thing about it is that there's too much stuff that i have to fabricate... too much details to take care of for this novice writer to handle properly. i need a lot more time and inspiration to come up with ideas...

i came up with another story that's modified from my long time bed-time dream/story... that one has the skeleton completed from start to finish, but when i attempt to start writing that 1st the other day, i was stumped at how to began. having a skeleton/outline =/= having a story... still have quite some bit of details that i need to firm up... than there's the choice of scenario, the chose of style and words (tho its quite limited by my lack of writing prowess in my case)... loads of things to consider when you having start typing...

ok, time for lunch. till next time.

Holidays are never long enough, exams always comes too fast

As per title... Next week is recess week already gosh! And then I've got a test coming up the week after! Too fast too furious! Doesn't help that I'm feeling totally lost in class gosh.

This sem is just whizzing by without me even noticing. I still have 3 more presentations coming up. One is just a casual presentation in tut, but the other two are more formal lecture presentations. Got more group work coming up for cell bio, as well as an individual report for mol evo due on 4th Nov. Dateline s are still far for now, but before I realise everything would be due already.

oh wells, I've not been very good at updating this blog of mine... But its not to bad right? At least I didn't leave the blog to rot for months haha.

tried my hand at writing some fanfiction. My lack of vocab and poor sentence construction skills really sticks out like a sore thumb. Doesn't help that the last time I wrote fiction was like when I was in pri sch or lower sec. I always prefer to write argumentative, and my sch stopped giving us fiction for English essays really soon. Then in the recent years I've sort of changed my writing style to something more like scientific writing(except say when I'm blogging, than I'll just write watever that comes to mind). especially after the class on scientific writing, I prefer to keep my sentences short and sweet, something that doesn't go really well when you can writing fiction... In either case, I'm writing the story really slowly... It'll be going through tons of edits before I can finally call it decent. Right now it's still in bits and pieces, and I guess not even 5% of the final story has been written so far. Talk abt procrastination haha.

Ok, can't think of anything else to type now so I'll just end here.

lol..and it drags on

wanted to make on post on mon abt the mooncake festival, but got tired and didn’t finish my post... and now its wedn!

haven celebrated mooncake festival since we shifted house when i was ine like pri 5. last time i used to go through TONS of candles, like 10-20 packs still aren't enough during mooncake festival. all i do the whole night is light and set up the candles on rocks in the park in front of my old house. contributing to environmental pollution yeah... but of cos i didn’t know better than.

having a cool class on pheromones now. the module is supposed to be on clinical applications of omics... but the guest lecturer seems to have gone a bit off track with all the talk abt pheromones and insect behaviour... but im really enjoying the lect anyway, who cares if its off topic? wonder what our lecturer who's sitting right in front of me right now thinks abt it tho... is it thinking abt how it's kinda going off track too or? idk... but i do like the topic.

she showed us this cool video earlier on the bolas spider. COOL. didn’t think of looking for these kind of videos on youtube. it’s the same guy who narrated in all the plant videos that i've seen in class in like sec, jc, and uni... didn’t know he did other documentaries too... all the stuff he did is really interesting/cool IMO. pardon my severe lack of vocab....

i hate it when the video adding and photo adding keeps malfunctioning in firefox! forces me to open up the site in chrome just to add the photo/vid! zzzzzzzz

didn’t really celebrate my dad's bday last fri, tho we had a nice family day together. my dad took leave and he fetched me to sch, and cos my class on fri ends before lunch, he fetch me and we went to orchard where my sis had been having a sept hol 1 week math crash course... had lunch at hot tomato at somerset 313. good food, and at a great price too. the sirlion steak was super good, very jucy. we asked for it cooked medium rare and we GOT medium rare. many of the restaurants give u like medium well or smthing when you ask for medium rare -.-''' like hey dude, why bother asking when you're gonna over cook it anyway -.-'''. the last time i had nice medium rare beef outside was at some restaurant in vivo city really long ago. can't rem the name of the shop already... but the beef was very juicy too. i ordered whipped potatoe side (i think you can pick like rice also) to go with it and the combi was just great... you can use the whip potatoe to mop up the juice that's oozing out from the beef.

gave my dad the pen me n my sis got from bugis after dinner... he likes the color... which is good. he got all excited and brought out the pens he bought over the years... and we had fun writing with the pens. after a while it turned onto a 'guess the tradition chinese character' game... like my dad n mum would write some traditional chineses character and than become absolutely amazed when me or my sis (actually most of the time its my sis, i don't watch as much taiwanese programs/read taiwan stuff as much as her, and my chinese has always been poorer than her, plus i got slow reaction) knows the word. some words are actually quite natural to me, probably cos i've been watching too much japanese stuff (and i completely don't read the chinese newspapers or anything else in chinese). like i'd recognise the word in trad chinese straight away, w/o realising that its actually NOT the simplified chinese... like some words i erm.. forgot what it looks like in simplified chinese even. bravo... >< haiz.

dad got an ipad loan from his sch cos they wanted him to develop some method to use the device for teaching... will be an experimental thing next sem but man... the sch sure is stingy. they'll only get to use the device for 1 month, after which the same few devices will be taken from the lecturers and put in the classrooms for the students to use. so when they are teaching, they wont have an ipad to show the students with. o.o. than 3-4 students will have to share 1 cos the sch bought very few of the devices... very stingy even for a trial teaching method. still, i had to spend a few days teaching my dad how to use stuff like the app store, how to check his mail etc... setting up some apps... how to sync with itunes etc... yeah... was quite lengthy and he always manages to ask qns which i nvr cross my mind when i used my itoy... his way of thinking is just quite diff from mine at time.

oh... i went daiso the other day and managed to find a sleek looking and slim ALUMINUM casing mechanical pencil. immediately grabbed two of it to use as casing to make my idevice stylus... been searching for writing utensils with metal casing in popular (in various locations) for quite a long time to no avail. they all come in plastic these days... totally didn’t expect to find it in Daiso... (^.^)V

here's the finished product...

Opps. Wanted to post this on wedn, but didn't have the pic. Now I'm posting it with the pic from the iPhone blogger app...

hmmm

its my dad's bday tmr! went out with my sis yest and we got him a pen... that's like the 1st time i got my dad anything in... years... its like the bdays would  just roll ard and i wouldn’t even notice it till... the day itself. i just suck at keeping track of bdays. be if my sis's, my dad's, my mum's or my friends... i happily remembered abt mich's bday a few days before the actual date... but the next time i remembered abt it was erm... a few days AFTER her bday... sighz. i know i suck. its like... all these little things will just slip my mind. just like how my mum would call and ask me to buy newspaper or something on my way back. i'd forget more than half the time...

Installing XP on Lion and more...

hmmm... quite a lot of things happened over the past... 2 weeks?

last weekend we had a nice long 4 day weekend break... i took the opportunity to reinstall XP on my mac and allocated more space this time round. It took me a freaking 1 and a half days to get things right... party because i forgot that to install the bootcamp drivers on XP you have to basically insert the snow leopard disk into the disk drive when erm... you are logged in to windows -.-''' stupidest thing ever of me to forget that... and i spent a long time trying to figure that out. also... it turns out that to get the entire bootcamp driver to work, you just have to keep reinstalling the drivers from the disk. so i've managed to get ALL the bootcamp drivers to work... like i can use all the function keys, i can see my files on the mac drive, i can use 2 finger scrolling, 2 finger tapping as double click etc.... previously it worked only for a day or so, before the bootcamp drivers just went burst... now its been a week and still working fine *nods*

another thing which wasted a lot of my time was the realisation that Lion no longer supports XP. i.e. bootcamp 4.0 only supports Win 7 now. I tried to find ways to downgrade bootcamp... to no avail. well you still can use bootcamp to partition a space for windows, and you still can use bootcamp to delete the partition. the thing is that to actually INSTALL XP, you have to reboot, hold down the option key at startup, and select the disk and do the installation from there. the side effect to using this walkabout is that when you start up to windows, it asks you which OS you want to use... the XP, or an unknown. I Guess the unknown is for the Win 7 which they expect you to install... anyway... the XP is working fine for me, so i don't really care about the screen asking you to pick the OS each time. I'm NOT gonna fork out $$$ for an OS just to erm.... play my games.... until the day those games no longer support XP... but maybe i'll stop playing by then. However, if you DO NOT have the Snow Leopard disk, than its.... not quite possible to get XP working, since you need the bootcamp drivers... else you can't even use the wifi...


went IT show today... yest dad went during his lunch break and got a new router. The downside is that... our home doesn’t yet have optic fiber cables, so we still need a modem -.-'''... and the router my dad got is erm... w/o modem. sighz. so now the router is hooked up to our old router + modem. Already the internet speed is much better, and the wifi signal is no longer intermittent. Went and got a new lappy for my sis today. Her old acer is gonna die any day now, so my dad decided to get her the asus lappy on offer... less than 800bucks. A super good deal really. We got it from the digital arts ASUS store on lvl 4... from my dad's 'research' on fri, that store gives the best offer. Dad also got himself a wireless logitech mouse... his colleague claims that he used his for more than half a year w/o needing to change the battery so... yeah... my dad decided to give it a go too. For me... i still prefer wired mouse... plus i require my mouse to have 'back' and 'forward' buttons - i.e. they must have at least 5 buttons. My mouse all seems to spoil rather fast tho, each one lasting about a year... so i just get a decent priced, 5 button mouse and be done with it... apart from the 5 buttons... yeah... the shape is impt... its gonna fit my hand snugly and be comfortable to hold. Other than that... i'm not toooo picky. i don't need a super good mouse like those Razors mouse for gaming... since i get a bad headache from playing those 3D games ><

My dad's been talking abt getting a macbook/iMac for ages already... in the end he decided to hold (once more)... oh wells... that's how he is. It'll take him forever to buy smthing for himself, but an instant to buy smthing for us. <3 u dad! speaking of which... his bday is next fri, and i still have no idea wat to do for him... maybe try n cook smthing nice? hmm but wat... ><

drawings...

recently went to dig out the freestyle (by ohno satoshi) book from the boxes at the top of my sis's book shelves.. there's this seahorse drawing that i really really like... but sadly the small pic in the book isnt very clear. felt they could have done a better job with the photo but oh wells.




instead... the pic on the following page is very nice and clear...


using that as my phone lock screen wall paper now and absolutely loving it!

Get moving...

wahaha... i have finally got my lazy butt/fingers moving and plotted out my sch time table nicely in excel. and printed it out. and emailed it out yo my friend/sis... and pasted it into the default mac aurora desktop pic so that my time table appears in the middle... my desktop was soooo cluttered, all the icons were completely blocking my time table! its alright now that i've cleared up everything tho! previously when i was mass downloading PVs and stuff... just dumped them randomly on the desktop... now they've got their own little folder tho XD

also bought this new app for my mac... dragzone... its really cool, i can just drag a pic on my desktop to upload it etc... very convenient. best thing is you can write your own scripts for the program too.... (tho i fail at scripting... or more like, i've nvr learned scripting b4 T.T) there are quite a few user written scripts available for download... lets you say twit pictures, shorten urls etc.

downloaded pymol for students. feel so stupid... been searching for molecular visualiser downloads but i didn’t try the education thingy on their website cos i tot you'll needa pay... turns out that they kindly let ppl download an old but free version. which is exactly wat i need to finish up my assignment for mol evo... which is due tmr as usual. wanted to finish it off fast but ended up getting distracted with dragzone (attempted to make a script, got things wrong and it didn’t work out...) and other stuffs and now its... 30mins to midnight and i still haven finished the assignments... whee! no dragon nest or maple today... oh wells... doesn’t matter.

okays, i've gotta go finish up that evernote hw. got this particularly... tough/philosophical qn on whether half human cyborgs of the future will be a stable species or will they be taken over by machines... and got more qns that require the use of pymol. quite tough/killer qns...

i wonder if anyone is regretting their decision to take mol evo now. like if there are any ppl that joined cos they heard the 1st lesson was very slack. well... the 2nd lecture was really tough. well actually tho i said we were given a total of 3 breaks in the 1st lecture, i pretty much used all the breaks to complete the assignments given... and in the 2nd lecture... he didn’t give us any breaks at all. unless you were stoning in class during the times when we were supposed to work on the assignments. no breaks at all for the whole 3 hours! i took a self declared toilet break but IMO that was one of the most intensive 3 hours i had in a long time... cos those assignments aren't very easy, and most of the time i couldn’t finish even finish half of the assignment within the time given >< so its like you've gotta listen to him, than you've gotta read up, maybe do some googling... than you've gotta do the assignments given.

BUT in spite of it all i really loved it. yeah sometimes you feel lazy to do the assignments, but you have to do it anyway so ya might as well try hard to finish it in class... this class is a challenge and i love it. its been a while since i got challenges like this and its really fun...! ok, i must be off to do my challenge. cya!

another week goes by...

indeed... there wasnt any biz law tut today... oh wells... kinda wasted my time waiting in sch. early class tmr... mol evo heh. wonder how much he'll cover tmr. like those lect 1 stuff that we didnt manage to cover last lesson. will he cover them tmr (or rather, today)... or? since he said we dont need to do those exercises that he didnt go thru in class, in a way it kinda means that he doesnt expect us to read the rest of the lect parts... well some of the exercises cant be done out of class anyway. like the one that needs pymol. i had a iMol program that opens up those pdb file on mac, but it doesnt work anymore after updating to lion zzzzzzz. not sure what other programs (free ones) there are for mac... hmphs. -.-'''

gonna meet my friend for lunch tmr. she's got stuff on so we'll only have like 1+ hour to chat + eat :(

meeting ash next fri since her class ends really late tmr/today... might still end up gng out with my sis + her friend tho... oh wells... we'll see how tmr...

sch buzzzzzzzz

waiting for biz law tut now and wondering if there IS tut at all.

biz law sure got off to a rocky start...

1st the lecturer insisted on having lect on national day, only to be forced to cancel it cos of sch policies.

then on the 2nd week, the lect had to be canceled due to unforeseen circumstances... and unfortunately for us students he didn’t manage to find the time to put up an announcement/email ahead of time to tell us (even tho he managed to sent out like 3 messages in the 1st week)...

then a friend taking the module but in a diff tut class said that they waiting for the tut to start for over 30mins... and most of the class left after the tutor failed to turn up... so yeah, i'm wondering if there's tut today. schedules say's there's supposed to have class today, but the schedule didn’t say that the lect this week would be canceled -.-'''

either way, i'm stuck with taking this class since i NEED to clear that biz module. and yeah, i'm counting my lucky stars that i wasn’t as unfortunate as my friend. she signed up for an AHSS module... but the lecturer didn’t turn up on the 1st lecture. the following day, they got an email saying that the module is canceled as the lecturer has left the school. o.o guess stuff like this would happen from time to time, but still... its rare to see such drama going on.

on some unrelated note... the sch is increasing their intake drastically... and the effect is that the canteens are super crowded. it used to be that the canteens are only really crowded around 12noon... nowadays, even at 11:30 its super crowded -.-''' sighz.

mrt train frequency seems to be decreasing despite the opening of the new track at jurong east interchange. was waiting for the train at 8:30 yest... 1st train came 4/5mins later, packed to the brim. next train was another 4/5mins later... thankfully not as packed as before. i thought they were trying to increase the train frequency... 8:30am is past the peak hour already? :S i'm not sure... but i do know that the new platform at jurong east is in operation till 9:30am... ah and the new platform... more trouble for me who's heading to the boon lay side. either i wait for the next train (instead of taking the one that goes to platform D), or i have to run down the stairs and back up to the platform that heads to boon lay.

oh wells, its abt time to head to biz law class. i wonder if there's even class at all ><

Fyp

Had a totally 'wonderful' time in sch yest wasting time. Only had a two hr lect till 11:30 but had to stay till 5:45 for a briefing on fyp. Kinda looking forward to see wat kind of topics there will be. Im fine with doing a projevt at sch or anywhere else (in sg that is, not that i mind gng overseas, but its kida troublesome yeah). Hoping i can get a project at some outside lab so i get a diff experience. Decided not to go back to the same group... Wanna experience more stuff + new stuff.

I'm certainly excited abt doing fyp. A bit worried on whether I can meet expectations and whether I will slack off and all, but I sure am looking forward to it. Still, gotta get thru this sem 1st. It'll be quite a hectic period when selecting the projects tho, since I gotta go visit all the profs/PI and all... That'll be ard sept if I haven rem wrongly. Well either sept or oct. Coming real soon yeah

K, gonna turn in now. Nite nite.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Bukit Batok East Avenue 5,,Singapore

Cooling Off

The weather is super hot recently... tho it means extra nice durians... the heat is really too much to bear.

 

my parents bought this water sprayer thing from the patrol station... its quite cute, you pump air into the device so when you press the button to release the water, you can get a long, continuous spray of mist as opposed to short sprays of mist/water like in the traditional spray cans (like those you use for gardening for e.g.)

Got these USA strawberries from NTUC... looks red and nice don't they? looks are deceiving tho... these guys are really sour and boy i hate sour strawberries...

I put the berries in the freezer in an attempt to remedy the situation... it tasted better when the berries where frozen hard tho... kinda like sherbet... but once it starts de-frosting, its just as bad as before >< the sour taste is back once more and... the berries become soft and weird textured as freezing destroys the cell integrity. sighz. i still managed forced myself to finish them in the end tho...

School whee... an update!

Yeah.... so 1st week of sch is over. yes... an update... maybe i WILL be able to keep my promise of blogging even during the term (and not just during hols) after all.

No more 4 day week for me, i switched on of my wednesday class on virology and microbiology for a monday class on muscles. decided to make the switch after finding out that there's 3 assignments for viro/microbio (and there's group project too) + falling asleep epicly in the 1st class + not finding the lecture material very interesting.... well the pull factor was the many reassurances of my friends that muscles is very factual and easy to understand... and the exams are really straightforward, and there aren't any of the assignments or presentations like in other courses. i think there'll be quite a lot of stuff to remember in that course tho, as with cell bio... but viro didn’t feel any much better either... plus the assignments... i've already got assignments and presentations a plenty in ALL the other core electives i'm taking... a course w/o any of those for a change is certainly welcomed. With that change i think my time table is more of less set... though it’s a 5 day week now, the good thing is that i've mostly 1 class/lecture a day with the exception of 2 lects on tuesday and 3 tuts on thurs. 1 lect a day means that i'm less likely to sleep in class... which certainly is a good thing. (bad thing of course, is that i have to pay more for my bus/mrt fare and waste more time on traveling. Esp wedn when i will be spending 2 hours on transport [2 ways] for a 2 hour lect -.-''')

So here's my current and hopefully final course combination:
BS 3016 Molecular Evolution
BS 4008 Clinical Application of Omics
BS 405 Current Topics in Muscular Biology and Neuromuscular Diseases
BS 406 Current Topics in Cell Biology
BS 3016 Molecular Evolution
BU 8301 Fundamentals of Business Law

Need to take 1 biz module for clear my electives... that's also the LAST thing elective that i'll need to clear. Haven had a single class of cell bio and muscles yet... well at least my friends said muscles is ok.. wonder how cell bio will be.

So far, the one sub i like best is Mol evo. really really fun. We have our lectures in the comp lab... all the lectures... how's that for a start? pretty cool eh? no? i really love the lecturer's style of teaching... his style really fits my way of learning things... really got me all excited abt the class, smthing that i've not felt in a long time. very very long time... since the time in rgs perhaps? now that's like 6 or so years ago... he's set up a site for the course... this guy prefers to use the website as a teaching tool rather than powerpoint... he's got all the links on the site so we can go read up on our own... and than there's on mini assignments/exercises on the site that we have to work on in class (hence the venue). He's really cool, made us use Evernote to write the mini exercises answers and share the notebook with him so he can see our progress. Which means that we are also free to work on those exercises anytime outside of class when we are free. He also puts up the course material about 1 week ahead of time, so if you're interested you can go read up and do those stuff as you wish... I find it quite cool that he picked Evernote, since i've already installed that program on my mac and iphone quite some times ago and tried playing around with it a bit. I'm not really used to using notes and stuff tho, hence i didn’t use Evernote much than... now i WILL have to use it a lot though lol. That means that i can browse any course notes with ease on my phone too, either on the website or my own notes. COOL. he's got me sooo pumped up about the class.

The lecturer is really a sucker for new technologies... he's also making use of this new SMS feedback system that the sch installed. We can SMS in comments and it'll show up in a program on his comp screen... so that gives us another avenue to ask qns... polls can be done with the system too... now is this cool or not? haha. yup, really glad that i took this class... not only do i already love the lecture material to began with (took a somewat similar class in... erm... sec 4), his style of teaching is really fun and exciting. The whole thing about putting the lect in the comp lab also makes things feel more casual, and it makes me a lot more inclined to ask qns... something which i erm... never ever did in lects before. till friday. record breaking eh...

Gonna visit my jc teacher tmr with my classmates... wonder how it'll turn out. pretty much stopped coming in contact with all my jc classmates except for my troopers...  been so long since we last meet... hmm... i wonder how it'll be there...

ok, high time to sleep, nite nite all.

School's Back!

Sighz... school's starting tmr (or rather, today)... i dont have any classes tmr, but i decided to drop by a lect in the afternoon just to see if its interesting, just in case i decide to change any of my modules i signed up for later on...

The biz law elective i signed up for (no choice, gotta clear a biz module -.-''') starts the 1st lecture on national day. Yes, NATIONAL DAY. 2:30 to 4pm... -.-''' the course coordinator wrote us an extremely long welcome message, with an extremely long winded explanation of why lect on tues goes on as usual... smthing abt sch schedule packed, darn hard to book LTs and all... oh wells... not that it really matters to me. Haven been finding the national day parades an extremely interesting affair for quite some time already... still remember when i'd be enthusiastically singing the songs while watching tv when i was in kindergarten... that was such a long time ago... hmm when did i stop being enthusiastic? it was probably the time when i got into a quarrel with my mum and she disallowed me to watch the tv till quite some time after the parade starts. of cos i was in no mood to watch it anymore... think i wasnt very keen on watching the NDP from than on. that was probably when i want pri 3 or pri 4? cos i rem it happening at my old house. wow, that's even before pri 5 when i got the watch the NDP rehearsals with the sch... (which was my 1st and last time so far seeing the NDP, rehearsals or otherwise, live). I wonder if jlf is still up for dinner outing on NDP... really hope she's willing+free to have dinner with me :P

still have no met up with ash darling after SOOOOO long. current i've got an 'appointment' with her on the 19th. please tell me you are free on that day ash!

my j2 form teacher just got a little baby... my class peeps are planning to visit her on sat... i'm not really close to my jc classmates in general but well... i guess i shd go. at least mich says she's gng too so i wont be alone. i need someone to remind me tho... else i'll  end up like last time, only realising that the event was on that day when my friend smsed me asking if i was gng... ><

okays, that's all for now, tata!

Cakes

Hmm... finally decided to upload some pics... here's the fruit tarts i ate with my sis at somerset 313 some time back... ok, that was really a ways back... oh wells. that just goes to show how lazy i am. well actually its cos that time i was still mapling and didn’t on mac much...

erm, the half eaten strawberry tart... we didn’t remember to take a pic till when the banana one came much later. the waiter didn’t hear/left out our 2nd pie order... -.-''''

been going out for deserts quite a lot recently. last sat i went out with jlf and we had dinner at sakae, followed by deserts at bakerzin... sadly didn’t take any pics. the cakes were really good, expensive but good... got too sweet in the end but still... my friend had the mango one with i got some... chocolate one... it was the look that attracted me towards the cake tho,  it had layers of chocolate, cream, and biscuits... too bad no pics.

went out with my sis for lunch + dinner yest at imm... ate at long johns than went secret recipe for cake... the cheese cake was really good, but the chocolate fudge i got was just soso... that one got really too sweet in the end when i was eating the sides where there was chocolate bits stuck to the cream... i think it’s the chocobits that were too sweet...

the chocolate fudge cake...

and here's the classic cheese cake:

i still have YET to go out with ash, the super super busy and impossible to find women! even tho its been like... a whole month (or more?) since she came back from korea... tsh! got so much to talk abt with her lah! Paging for ash........!

FB friends sorting...

Just kinda finished sorting my fb gigantic friends list. added a lot of friends for games (which i have stopped playing almost all of it) last time, so added all those peeps to a list with lesser access to wat i post. well the thing is that i hardly post stuff on FB, and those stuff that i do post, were already posted with the intention of letting ppl see... so privacy isnt THAT much of an issue for me on fb (fb stands for facebook in case u haven figured)... probably missed out a few peeps here and there etc... but from the way i'm using facebook so far, i think its not too much of an issue... i think... i feel... for now anyway.

hmm, not sure what kind of direction i shd bring this blog to be.... not sure if i'll even keep up with the blogging when sch starts. oh wells. only time will tell... watever will be will be...

Random stuff

Last few days of slack... before sch starts. the time time still aint out yet... and i still don't know which elective i'm taking... gah...

presidential electives date set for the 27th aug. i still barely know a single thing abt the candidates -.-''' man i don't even know how many have submitted the forms so far... gah... guess i've got some reading up to do before i head to the polls.

recently there's a couple of english songs i'm kinda addicted to. considering how i've been listening to arashi songs (japanese) for the longest time... its been a really long time since i last added any new englis songs to my list. well there was grenade by bruno mars a while back, but recently Airplanes by B.o.B. and price tag by Jessie J really caught my attention. came across airplanes when i went shopping with my family in msia (yes the one with the roast duck and all i blogged abt a while back)... finally got round to downloading the song a while back and been listening to it a lot since than. i normally try and caught a few phrases/sentences of the song, write it down in my phone, than go find the song when i remember later on...

well i don't think the PV is really nice... doesn’t really get me into the mood of the song... but well that's the nice thing abt western world VS JE... they happily post their official PVs on youtube for everyone to watch, share, and spread... whereas JE takes down videos from youtube as soon as they can find them :(

i heard price tag when my sis showed me a cute arashi fan vid... found the song addicting and when to dl it. the fanvid is really good tho (except the poor quality i'd prefer it not to be in b/w)... as in, the scenes fitted nicely with the song lyrics, and made the whole song look and sound fun... fits the mood of the song really well IMO. so yeah... here's the vid that i really liked. the best part is probably the 'everybody look to the left/right' part... really amusing lol.

yesterday i went on a crazy rampage of dl-ing high quality arashi song PVs and music station performances. maybe i'm spoiled by JE's type of PVs... maybe cos i've been a fan of arashi for a while... didn’t really like many of the US made PVs... grenade pv was really quite... meaning less to me... the storyline was really weird and it just didn’t... entice me to listen to the song. maybe its just a total different mindset... like from my friends who prefer western pop to me who erm... prefer arashi songs (i wont even say jpop, since i pretty much only listen to arashi songs... for now). its like after watching those PVs i wish i'd just listen to the song on its own, w/o ever looking for its PV. meh... but since i generally don't like those PVs, i didn’t watch many of them so maybe it just so happened that i'm unlucky...?

meh... i wonder wat my friends (i've got some to absolutely love musicals, glee etc) would think if they see arashi's PVs... some of the dance (they didn’t dance in all PVs, depends on the song etc...), outfits, and settings are just so darn freaking cool. truth and monster is cool, troublemaker had a cute and fun PV... very much like the song's title... now i'm in love with mada minu sekai e dance in music station. they jumped around a lot and yes they sang live. maybe i shd try n get my friends into arashi... than at least i wont feel so left out when they discuss on and on abt all the western music scene...

heh. nothing else to say... or rather, too many things to say, but not sure how to put it out in words. that's all for now.

lol

Differences Between You and Your Boss

When you take a long time, you're slow.
When your boss takes a long time, he's thorough.
When you don't do it, you're lazy. .
When your boss doesn't do it, he's too busy.

When you make a mistake, you're an idiot. .
When your boss makes a mistake, he's only human.

When doing something without being told, you're overstepping your authority..
When your boss does the same thing, that's initiative.

When you take a stand, you're being bull-headed..
When your boss does it, he's being firm.

When you overlooked a rule of etiquette, you're being rude. .
When your boss skips a few rules, he's being original.

When you please your boss, you're apple polishing..
When your boss pleases his boss, he's being co-operative.

When you're out of the office, you're wandering around..
When your boss is out of the office, he's on business.

When you're on a day off sick, you're always sick..
When your boss is a day off sick, he must be very ill.

When you apply for leave, you must be going for an interview. .
When your boss applies for leave, it's because he's overworked.

Morale: Be a Boss!

hmm... just found this in my draft... this must be from (literally!) years ago when i purposely surfed the web for jokes/randomfunnystuff and quotes...

On the topic of funny stuff, i thought i'd just share the video my friend sent me just now...

The Lion Rawrs

Ok, so i've updated to Lion OS X for a few days now... There are indeed some things abt lion which irks me... i turned off the natural scroll feature right away for one, but realised it still exists in some places like scrolling ard launch pad and in the google map of iphoto... i can get used to the naturally scrolling alright... but it feels extremely weird when i'm using the mouse... and since i switch btw xp and mac for games, i figured i could use 1 less item to get used to during the frequent switches.

here's some info on how to make lion act like snow leopard... http://www.macrumors.com/2011/07/25/making-lion-act-more-like-snow-leopard/

granted, there are some nice features introduced in lion, but there are some i'd rather not have.

read some of the comments abt launchpad and other changes introduced. i can't help but agree that the current launchpad is quite a failure. with some changes it could become a lot better and more useful... but right now i'm not using launchpad... at all. You cannot remove unwanted icons from launchpad... removing = uninstalling, like in the iPhone, only that this feature in the mac seems just... weird to me. Somehow my parallels didn’t uninstall properly and i've not gone around to properly correcting that problem, so i have PAGES of useless parallels windows program icons on the launchpad which i cannot remove. I end up dumping them into two folders to make the pad neater... however i still find scrolling ard the pad troublesome. arranging the icons and folders in launchpad is just abt as troublesome as on the iPhone... so much so that i just arranged those programs that i would use, but a lot less often (such that i tend to forget to program name and cannot call it up with alfred) in folder and put them on the 1st page... i had hoped for launchpad to be something like an icon palette for us to arrange and customise... but sadly it offers a lot less flexibility than than. Considering that launchpad was one of the highlights in Lion, i was quite disappointed. You can't even change the background shown in launchpad... can only hope that they give us more freedom with it in later changes... right now i'm not liking/using it at all. oh yes, in installing lion, somehow some of the basic programs like chess got duplicated/reinstalled, and i ended up with two Chess icons, and unable to delete them. If i have the patience next time, i might arrange those more useful programs nicely on the 1st page... but i think i'll pretty much stick to using the dock and alfred ><

Mission control is another highlight in Lion (ask me wat's new in Lion before it came out, and mission control + launchpad is the 1st thing i'll remember, so i was really quite disappointed with launchpad). The comment from heavy uses of spaces is that mission control makes things overly complicated/troublesome... like it takes a lot more steps than previously to change a window/program from one desktop to another. Personally, i don't use spaces at all, so this isnt a problem for me. I do appreciate the more organised look of mission control. at least i know which window is in which browser/app. HOWEVER, if you open several windows in the same app, the 2nd and subsequent windows will be partially blocked by the 1st window. (ok, i just look at my mission control, i can barely see the 3rd window, and since it blends with my white timetable desktop pic, i didn’t even see the 3rd window at the beginning and was wondering why it showed i have two windows when i shd have 3... this is bad ><) 

There are some much appreciated changes tho, for one you can finally resize windows from every corner. And there's the useful resizing options that lets you pick exactly how and where you want that window to be. For eg. you can get a webpage to take up the left 1/3 of the screen, and get a pdf file/another window to show on the right 2/3 of the screen. Bad thing tho, when resizing stuff like browsers is that your tool bars etc are just CUT OFF and become UNACCESSIBLE unless you resize the window. Scrolling only changes the view of the page, not the toolbar (like if i make my firefox 1/3 on the left, i can't even access the address bar!) yet another brilliant idea made dumb due to some overlooked detail.

somehow the small things they left felt like the new OS was done in a rush... in a totally 'un-apple' fashion (from my short experience and impression of using a mac)...

hmmm... shortcuts... while the spreading of fingers to show desktop, pinching to show launchpad thing is a great idea, its not very effective.... somehow the success rate is maybe 50-70%? the OS fails to recognise those motions properly... or maybe the action isnt as easy to execute as just swiping up/down with four fingers, so the variety of finger actions that occur makes the shortcut inaccurate.


heh. seems like all i have is bad new abt Lion... i guess its partly because i've not really start WORK on my mac, so those stuff like auto save, versions etc have not been tested. there's only 1 mac in the household so i've not tried airplay (nothing to send over too!)... i don't use facetime, i don't use their mail since i mostly check my emails from my itoy (maybe i shd try the mail function tho).... there's probably loads of stuff working nicely in the background, and loads more that i've not tried so all i notice are the stuff that sticks out like a sore thumb (hence the less than cheerful post).

so that's all i have for now... to end off, i'll link you this video of how friendly and carefree the Apple store service staff in the US are. Its really hilarious, go watch it :)

Lion at last!

After a RIDICULOUSLY long wait for OS X to download, i'm finally running Lion. The new OS installed w/o a hitch, tho both the download and installation took much longer that wat others reported in the app store. played with the new OS for barely 10 mins... needless to say the 1st thing i did was to change my dock and program icons back to the custom ones i had last time... esp the dock. after getting so used to my wavy lined dock, the white one looked outright ugly.

still have not settled the issue of the finder icon on the dock... liteicon doesn’t work this time round even after i restarted... darn! well its not THAT impt tho, so i'm gonna explore the other aspects of the system 1st. the finder sidebar icons for one looks really really plain. i miss having my miniature maple characters in the sidebar etc... gotta see if there's a way for me to get them back. seen some not so good comments abt lauchpad already.... have gotten round to using it yet, but since i had to try sooo hard to find the liteicon app just now since i forgot the app name, and looking through the whole list of apps in finder didn’t really help (in the end i had to open up my blog, look for the blog post i made abt all the mac apps, find the app name, and type it in alfred, how pathetic!), i'm really looking forward to grouping my apps together in folders. we'll see how it goes when i get round to using it more.

oh yeah, the new gestures... they have the natural scrolling thing that basically reverses the direction of scroll... i don't really see the benefit/difference (quite ok with both directions) on the trackpad... but once i use the mouse wheel to scroll its... arghs! the difference becomes so hellya obvious.. and irritating. can't take the scroll wheel moving in the wrong direction issue and switch the natural scrolling option off within 5mins of trying it out. kinda sad but oh wells.

guess the rest of the features like auto save + version history etc will take a while before i get to try them out... gonna try out lauchpad now than head to bed. sch's starting in a week so i guess the timing of lion release is just nice for me...

k, till next time.