Posts that bore everyone to tears should be made a criminal offence

Strangely enough, I'd be guilty of it most of the time.

I'm multitasking avoiding reading up more on interest rates and oil/information pricing because it's starting to confuse me and blogging instead. Hugo suggested it anyway. The blogging I mean. I am really very bored right now. There isn't a single person in the lab that I have the liberty of disturbing and annoying the hell out of. Woe is me.

Ironically, everyone (not in Imperial) seems to think I'm very free an gallivanting around London and Europe. Even my mother seems to think so. The fact that I sms her everyday saying "No, I can't call home now. I'm doing project work in college" doesn't seem to register.

I'm making a desperate attempt to revive my dying dormant blog. But I don't have anything interesting to say. Except that any Friendster testimonials written by me on Wei Kiat or Chien Liq's profiles are completely fabricated and a result of stupidly leaving my account open on Wei Kiat's terminal. There, Wei Kiat! I just increased your Friendster traffic. Happy??

Moving on to current affairs:
1) Da Vinci Code was so dissapointing and even as a Catholic there were times I wanted to strangle Tom Hanks and scream "Enough with the politically correct bullshit!!!"... aah, that was nice to get off my chest.

2) X-Men 3 is a nice watch if you're not a loyal geek comic book fan. Wolverine basked in all 100 and 5 minutes of glorious adamantium screentime! Cyclops got a measly 5 minutes to look broody and drunk. That made Lionel sulk like a 2 year old. No one said he wasn't a loyal geek comic book fan.

End of current affairs.

Did you really think I was going to discuss the Java earthquake or Sarawak elections?

I'm tired. My comment box has been spammed with articles about racial discrimination in Malaysia and reading it makes me feel even more tired. There's no question about whether it exists or not. Of course it exists. We'd be living in denial not to notice it. And you know what? It exists everywhere. In all my years of living in different countries, I've been a minority and an outcast in all of them. But you deal with it, and move on IN SPITE of it. You don't (and NEVER) bow down to it. You find a way around it, and prove how ridiculous and needless racial discrimination really is. The question now is, when is the right time for Malaysia to deal with affirmative action and bumi rights, and how are they going to do it? Most would say the answer is NOW and IMMEDIATELY. I'm not sure. I'm not the one in charge. I'm not the one who will have rights and crutches taken away from me. Nor will I be the one who'll reap any outright short term benefits.

The Malaysian Higher Education minister came to Imperial last week. He's quite a nice guy. At least more sincere and honest than Najib was. He didn't have the air of a politician which is refreshing. I wish we had more people like him who said what they really felt and not what they think needs to be said to increase their polls. I do wish he had done his research before meeting with our Rector though. It clearly looks shoddy, stepping onto Imperial grounds and saying "Oh, but Imperial College students don't do business, right?" when you're standing in the foyer of Imperial's Tanaka Business School (ranked 8th in UK by the Financial Times and 47th in the world).

Lionel's FINALLY decided to pry himself away from his lab and his infected mice. Yay! I'm going home to cook rendang. Is anyone interested in a Satay party this Sunday?

No rest for the wicked

The 'end of exams' in no way equates to 'going home'. Please stop asking. It'll be an eternity and a month before I'll even get to kiss the 30 degrees sunny air back in KL.

Oh how I miss home. I wake up in cold sweat at night from dreams where I am denied char kuay teow and assam laksa! I want to sleep without a blanket, wake up to the smell of mee yoke, run to the nearest mamak in Teva's sandals and shorts for roti canai (with garlic cheese, please), lie on my bed with the latest Cleo magazine and listen to monsoon rains, drive my sister around, flip through the pages of The Star and listen to Light & Easy on 105.7fm.

But home is so far away, when you're spending 8 hours a day in labs, and the remaining hours at home brushing up on Java and getting up to speed on things like multi agent systems and robots and virtual timestamps. They are as foreign to me as they are to you.

The mice in my house seem to be having a better time than I am. They were even so kind to leave me a note after I made them chocolate oatmeal cookies.


Note to self... have to apologise to mice for lack of time to make more cookies.

A little bit of everything

My mother called just now while I was making a strawberry cheesecake.

"Why didn't you call in? Didn't you get my sms? Were you out?"
"When did you send it?"
"10 minutes ago!"
(my mother wholeheartedly believes I have my handphone sewn onto me and the moment a text message is sent, I should read it and reply)
"I was in the kitchen"
"What are you doing in the kitchen?"
"Is there a law against standing in my own kitchen? Making a cheesecake"
"So free ah?"
"No lah. I'm trying to finish up all the stuff in the kitchen so I won't have to pack it over summer."
"You sound like you're really trying to relax after exams"
"Is there a law against relaxing after exams?? No, mum. I'm trying to stress myself out even more Uhuh."
"So when are you going to help your sister with her t-shirt design? Your father is no help. All his designs are so old fashioned. She needs something modern and cute."

All of a sudden the strawberry cheesecake does seem like the greatest crime on earth. It's obviously not as important as using my precious free time to help my sister, and then my mother unleashes the final blow.

"You're so good at these kind of things. I know you can do it."

And before she launches into a tirade about God-given talents, and using it to help other people (other people always being my brother or sister), I say "Okay, okay..." and she passes the phone to my sister.

My sister is ever so cute to talk to. Last week I told her about the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ride at Alton Towers and she asked if I could bring back some of the chocolate for her.

"Will it make me smarter?"
"Erm, you're allergic to chocolate."
"Oh!"

Isn't she so cute?

So anyway, I did go to Alton Towers and I did go on the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ride.
It was a chance to get out of the rain (and an excuse for me not to go on Oblivion). The weather pretty much required umbrellas throughout the day. And cutesy OomPah Loompas do not make up for it.


Ok, so I went overboard with the Photoshop paintbrush. I was trying to recreate the magical childish fantasy of being inside a chocolate factory (as opposed to CL's sex fantasy no. 5: to be spray covered in chocolate, thanks for letting us know). I haven't photoshopped in a while. Give me a break.

Anyway I'm getting ahead of myself in terms of my Alton Towers story. The day started out like any other. With Wei Kiat failing to check the time of the train and thus having 5 very sleepy people yell at him for making us wake up at 6am to catch a train that was only at 8am.


Nevertheless, we let bygones be bygones and tried to look happy upon entering the place where they try to make "happily ever after" work, but it doesn't last on cold, gloomy (your basic English weather) days.


Following Wei Kiat's lead, we headed first for Rita Queen of Speed. I had already psyched myself up in order to get over my roller-coaster phobia, so I was in a kind of daze. It was probably a good thing that it was rainy and the queues were short. The longer the wait, the more frazzled my nerves get.



Big surprised, I survived it! And Chien Liq screams like a girl.

Anyway it was still raining. But we were still quite happy.


By 11.30am, I had 2 rollercoaster counts to Yi Shan and Wei Kiat's one. Go me! Soha had hit her ear and it was bleeding, but being the brave trooper that Soha is, she went on all the coasters in Xtreme park, while the lazy bums (CL, Su and me), sat in KFC polishing off a 10 piece pack. After such gluttony I didn't feel ready for more head spinning, and as a result this happened:
Now you know the real reason they brought me along. It wasn't so bad really. I just stood there preparing to snap a photo of their whizzing carriage, when I heard the unmistakeable girly scream bursting through the air. Yup, that's them. SNAP! Anyway, they managed to persuade me to go on the spinning whizzing pinball machine thing a second time round. I screamed my lungs out. It was therapeutic.

Anyway, despite the gloomy weather we still managed some pretty nice group shots.

And some pretty bad ones
And some where we just had no clue at all
In search of more rides (namely Nemesis and Air) we took a stroll through the woods
And even climbed a few trees
In the end we reached the Forbidden Valley, and I became bag carrier amah again while they went on Nemesis (the words "most intense roller coaster experience in the world" wasn't very comforting, even though Wei Kiat and CL tried to block the sign). But to my credit, I went on Air which was the most superb flying experience ever!
Then just to humour me, we rushed over to the river rapids (the only ride I initially consented to go on) to get royally wet! [I'll put up the group photo later... I'm getting lazy, in case you can't tell]

Finally it was the end of the day, and with just 10 minutes before the bus was scheduled to leave, Wei Kiat led us to the wrong park entrance - on the OPPOSITE end of the park! This led to an Amazing Race - worthy dash to the park entrance upon discovering our mistake (Non elimination! Non elimination!)

And on the bus we were pretty much like this:
Stuffy busrides make me more nauseous than any ride at Alton Towers ever could.

Ok I'm done for now. It's back to Facebook absorption - or to quote the name of a Facebook group: "Facebook is eating away my life, and MSN is polishing off the remains". How true!

Brought to you by your friendly neighbourhood canine

Lets go watch the Da Vinci code, guys! Pleeeeease? I'll walk all the way to UGC at Fulham to get tickets. Exams only just ended and already I'm bored out of my mind. I'm contemplating going back to Level 5 labs to do some background reading. You've GOT to stop me!

In the meantime, this is giving me the heeby-jeebies:


If you didn't know before, I'm a BIG wolverine fan (and some friends back home just won't let me forget that).

Nerding

While I'm waiting for Alton Towers photos (I have none because I was just too lazy to take my camera out, and besides everyone else had theirs ever ready to catch the most unfortunate photos of me...), let me entertain you with some trivial nonsense.

Exams ended with Control Engineering, after which instead of going home and sleeping or going out and partying, some of us actually sat in the level 5 comp labs preparing slides for the next day's career talk organised by the ever efficient Jia Hong. He probably regretted delegating the task to tired post-examinees. We had slides saying :

Introduction
1. Listen to Jia Hong
2. ATTENTIVELY
3. Hey, you over there! I know you're not paying attention. Look THIS way!

or

Resources
1. Careers office
2. Internet
3. For more information, take Chien Liq out to dinner
email: chienliqisthebomb@gmail.com


Anyway, I'm really glad exams are really and truly over. One, because I can finally clean the kitchen and bathroom (which I did), and two, because I want to stop looking like this:


Yeah, it's shocking isn't it?

I wear glasses with no power because the laptop screen hurts my eyes. It also makes me feel smarter. I become a whole different person, like Superman when he becomes Clark Kent.

Reason number 3 to be glad about the end of exams is so I can get all this coffee out of my system. Caffeine has been my best friend, and it was good while it lasted. But now the final drop has been drunk. Till next exam...

(I drink coffee from a chinese tea mug... I find that wrong in so many ways)

Writings before a last exam

Let me immortalise this moment.

Little Fujitsu is purring like a kitten. It sounds contented and full of milk, but it's more likely to be suffering from overload. I'm thinking I need to get the processor checked, but my left brain is asking "what's the observability matrix?". The glow of my table lamp is starting to hurt my eyes. I need to see an optician soon. Everything is becoming so blurry. My thoughts included. It's been a long journey, and my room is infested with paper. Like a white locust on my bed, my desk, my floor, my clothes, with queer markings of thetas and sigmas and alphas and omegas. Yes, alphas and omegas. Is the end finally nigh? I've travelled so far and yet I feel like I'm back where I started.

Knowing nothing.

EE in a closed loop

I think
I just disconnected myself
from reality
Life exists
in ' 1's and '0's
I draw myself
closer to infinity
in a locus
And stability is just a state
where oscillating dreams fade away
Press 1 to speak to an operator
(sum or product) chosen by an observability matrix
Press 0 to close the loop

If you haven't slept in 48 hours... how do you think you'll handle a Z transform?

It's back to an erratic sleeping schedule.

We finished off what Sandip calls the devil's signal processing (DSP) this morning, and what a relief.

Since Analogue in the first year, this is the first time I've gone into an exam room where my best effort would be to try not to fail. Turning the first page and realising that I could do 2 complete questions was pure, sweet relief. Who cares if I stumbled and flopped through the rest of the paper. The prospect of being able to pass Dr. Naylor's doomsday exam is nothing short of a miracle!

2 more papers. TWO MORE!

The rings around my eyes are growing darker by the day. It's a pity that my optimal study hours are between midnight and 5am in the morning. Sacrifices have to be made. And that includes resisting the urge to clean the kitchen.

2 more days. TWO MORE!

I can't wait to get my hands on a sponge and bleach.

Gifts for Singaporeans

I think I should get one for Lionel. Click on the image to get your own.

Biology 101

I'm not sure that I really like the serious atmosphere hanging around my blog these days, so I'm going to give an update. Xiaokai can call me a scum, I'm not gonna care.


6 papers have gone. 3 more to go. I crashed after the last paper on Thursday (comms systems, which apparently was a bloody massacre... I couldn't tell, I was doing the paper in a stupor) and slept all the way until Friday morning. I had huge, HUGE, sleep debts to pay. That's what I get for not starting my revision plans earlier and only discovering lecture notes on public switching telephone networks the day before the exam. I'm a brilliant last minute mugger. Nothing enters my head unless it's done in a panic stricken, last minute moment... with a caffeine IV drip on my arm. Clearly, I've never learnt my lesson since secondary school. I'm currently getting flashbacks of Anushia and Choo staring at me in bewilderment as they are about to begin their 2nd or 3rd round of History revision while my textbook remains untouched, un-underlined and un-highlighted.


I think I've been much too relaxed this weekend. This week's papers are a slaughterhouse of DSP, Databases and Control Engineering. But instead of mugging FIR filters, I've been tuned to American Idol and CSI. Oh! Oh! Joke of the week - so we're all gathered around the TV watching CSI New York, (the housemates and Lu's older sister), and some small eggs were found inside the victim's ear (I know... ewww), so the CSI's decide to incubate it to find out what laid them. Lionel, Lu and I were guessing spiders or roaches or such, when Lu's sister very seriously says maybe they'll hatch rats. *silence in the living room* After she leaves the room, Lionel the bio-chemist bursts out at the abomination and I say maybe she never studied biology. Lu just eyes the ceiling.

And the joke just seems to live on at every opportune moment (more so since the state of the kitchen is incredibly filthy, by my standards and Lionel's FYP which deals with infected rats):

"Why's the rice pot on the floor? Feeding Kitchen God, is it?"
"No lah, feeding the rats. After they hatch from the eggs"

"Oi! Look at this mess! You want to attract rats ar?"
"Yeah, after they hatch."

"So we're going to harvest the intestines from the rats to test for the nematods"
"Oh! Can I come into the labs to see the rats?"
"No! They have to be kept in the animal house... where they are hatched from eggs"



It's almost mid morning. And it's rainy. I guess I won't be going in to the level 5 labs today then. I'll just hide under my duvet and read up on non-linear control systems.

By the way, I've agreed to go to Alton Towers after the exams. Yes, my motion sickness and I have agreed to go. Well someone's got to carry their bags and popcorn and drinks while they're on Nemesis and Ripsaw, etc.

Memang tidak masuk akal...

Perlukah artikel seperti ini disebar di ruang bulletin Friendster?
Gubra yang sesat, lagi menyesatkan

Gubra itu sepatutnya sebuah filem tentang masyarakat kita, tetapi ada pula golongan masyarakat yang tidak menyedari mereka sedang memandang wajah diri sendiri dalam cermin. Sebaliknya mereka mencemarkan aksi-aksi yang digelar tidak bermoral - ciuman, pelukan dan pegangan tangan. Begitu rabun jauh kah masyarakat kita?

Malaysia is an Islamic state! If you don't like it, get out!

This is not a post. This is a plug.

For my country which is trying to control what people wear and how they act. For my country that deems hugging to be 'Un-Malaysian' and arrests couples for kissing and holding hands. For my country that gives unwarranted priveledges to a particular race and yet is not done spoon feeding them while the minority struggle on their own, and are abused when they try and speak up by a large 'playground bullying' mentality. For my country where racial unity is slowly becoming a ridiculous joke and a cover up. For my country that is still trying to define the term 'Islam Hadhiri' and maintains that it is an Islamic state.



Full English transcript here. Thanks to Advocate, Sang Harimau and The Cicak.

On a more personal note, it really hurts when they say things like that. I don't feel a venomous hatred towards them. I feel betrayed. I am a hundred thousand km away, trying to be a little ambassador for my country. We've worked hard in bringing Malaysians together in Imperial, we've all been beaten to the ground trying to show off the colourful melting pot that is our country. Have you seen the heartfelt warmth and sincerity of Imperial Malaysians toiling together to sell our batik and teh tarik during our annual Pasar Malam sales? Have you seen the incredible togetherness a meritocratic university environment brings out? It's amazing here, when you know for certain that a particular race cannot get extra marks on their exams just because they are the majority. When everyone is on a level playing field the harmony is sincere and not a force-fed 'muhibbah-ness'. And when I've tried at every opportunity to show how wonderful our little 3rd world nation is - to be told to get out of the country if we don't like the idea of an Islamic state (i.e. if we can't follow the rules they've set to govern OUR morality as non-muslims)... it hurts. It truly does.