No time, no time!

And just when you think you have time to breathe... the sky comes crashing down on you and the ground beneath begins to shake.

I have many many delayed posts with many many photos of Lourdes, Florence, Rome, Geneva, Paris and graduation day (no, not mine! I graduate NEXT year, yes with a Masters, no I do not get a ceremony for my Bachelors, yes they think its a waste of time to make me wear the gown twice, and no I do not get a mortar board)... but that's what Facebook is for and I shall spare this blog.

Just to fill the void. Lionel was back for graduation and so I followed his happy family entourage on holiday to Geneva and Paris and came back with a cold. Graduation was quite a long and draggy affair and I'm not looking forward to my own, despite the fact that it will coincide with Imperial's centenary celebrations. 100 years of living science. That's what they're promoting. It's lovely to be back in a sciency environment and soak in all the natural goodness of being a science geek.

Today marks the start of week 5 and to my horror I've discovered an accounting exam 2 weeks from now. My final year project readings have begun - Brain Sonification for Computer Interface. So so cool!!! To harness the power of the brain in the form of music through signal analysis and estimation! It's frightening but oh so cool! Did I not say it's cool? It's COOL!

Besides that, EESoc, OSC and re-apping are just turning my life upside down. Meetings, meetings, and more meetings. Money to handle, lists to compile, events to sort out. Given its a lot easier than juggling all of MSoc and M-Nite, but I think I need to cut myself some slack.

So that's all I have to say. This onion bagel smells too good to eat! But I think I will have to.

Lionel just flew off 20 minutes ago.

Sometimes life seems like a dream, I'd hate to wake up from.

This is for the original bloggers...

Remember when we were this young? When boarding school life was the bane of our existence and the only things that made it worthwhile were the friendships, the dinner chats...
There were the birthdays, the dressing up and down, the jokes and the singing...


There were the late nights and snacking and discoveries and romance battle-plans...






















And boy did we wish (or at least I did) we had better looking hair back then...





Then we left TCHBS, took our results and moved on with our lives... and all that kept us together was a promise to update a blog

March 2003

We obviously didn't move on with our cameras...

August 2003

And some of us had to go to far away places... and not meet up for months on end... 2005

But hey, at least we're better looking now! August 2006

I miss you guys!!!

Pardon the sentimental crap... hehe,
but I couldn't resist posting this

Asian Film Fest

So one of the wardens has decided that he will film a foreign film every week. It must be of high artistic quality (a Cannes candidate if possible) and original and powerful in its mastery of cinematography. In other words there probably will not be a single Asian movie on the list, unless it's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (I never got the ending, just like I didn't get House of Flying Daggers, but don't get me wrong - I loved watching it!).

Being the protector of all things Asian in my hall, I'm coming up with my own list of movies.

So far my list includes:

1. Raise the Red Lantern
2. Hero (I liked it, ok!!!)
3. The Road Home
4. Devdas
5. Swades
6. Asoka
7. The Soong Sisters
8. Children of Heaven
9. Farewell my Concubine
10. The Wedding Banquet
11. Monsoon Wedding
12. Zatoichi
13. The Way Home
14. Salaam Bombay


And of course we have to have the all-too-popular Kungfu Hustle. I'm not too sure of its artistic quality, but it's one hell of a good laugh!

Any other suggestions? I know there aren't any Malaysian selections in the list, but how well received will Sepet or Puteri Gunung Ledang be here? I'm just asking.

Charlotte is a happy yellow ducky

Did I mention that regardless of my many nights of prayer for a puke-free landing, one of my freshers still had the audacity to vomit on my landing? Thankfully it was in his room and not the corridor, but still the stench of regurgitated salmon lingers on.

I'm cooking again and that makes me happy. (There are also only 4 days more before Lionel gets here, and that makes me even happier, but lets focus on the little things for now). I persuaded my freshers to let me cook claypot chicken rice for them because it's damn hard to cook something nice for just one person. I, hands-in-the-air, white-flag-raised, cannot do it! It seems a strange concept to persuade people to let me cook for them. It's usually the other way around.

I'll be off to Geneva on Thursday with Lionel and family. We're fearing the worst of the weather. Anyone who's been to Geneva has any tips? Nic Osman said I should go see the longest bench in the world. They're apparently big on bench construction in Geneva. Then I'll be off to Paris on Sunday where the Parisien ISE bunch (Hugo, Adam, Hai and Kunal) are. See, I kept my promise when I said I'd come visit you. I didn't think it'd be this soon either!

And then it'll be graduation day and everyone will be back and we'll sit on queens lawn, some in gowns, some not, and wonder how time rushed by us so fast. wonder if we'd have made it this far without each other. wonder where all of us will go from here.

Just in case you're wondering, the title to this post has absolutely no meaning at all. In the mean time, I'm going to get back to my cooking in the kitchen. Wheeee!!

Elegantly wasted

It's 5 in the morning.

There's a screaming in my head, possibly from the copious amount of wine I was made to down last night at the coming up dinner, an annual ritual we put freshers through that involves forcing them to dress up to the nines and party at a swanky hotel. Re-app pressure is not a good excuse to drink, but you do it anyway. You'd do anything to be a part of the team.

But strangely enough the alcohol has woken me up and I just can't go back to sleep. My mind and body are not synchronising and definitely pretty pissed off with each other. One's dead beat but the other is just refusing to give in to fatigue. Bah!

And my mother is probably not going to be very happy to find out that I partied in my newly tailored baju kebaya. Getting a tailored kebaya is like a rite of passage. It means I'm old enough to be trusted with dry-cleaning my own clothes and not spilling wine on the sari cloth my dad bought from India for me to make it. I didn't get any wine on it, and thanks to my mother's ingenious plans to make it a size too small for me, I also couldn't eat as much as I wanted to. My mother has crafty ways of keeping me slim. It's not fair, but it works.

It's about time I tried to get some sleep before daybreak. Damn the pounding in my head!

Let me grow old in peace...

I cannot keep up with this! What on earth possessed me to supervise barely 19 year olds who are testing their limits with every vice on earth? (God, if there is anything I want more - except for my aunty to be cured of cancer, and maybe for Lionel's PhD to be approved, oh and maybe for peace on earth... it would be for not a single fresher to empty his or her stomach contents onto any space of floor on my landing while I'm still the re-app in charge).

I was working behind the bar tonight, with Alex, and totally winning at Dai Dee. Sorry, Jason, if you ever read this - you so totally got owned! And really that's all I was doing, but I'm completely beat! Back in the glorious days of my first year, being on duty at the bar was soooo much fun. True there was actual alcohol in the bar back then and there was a lot more work to be done and not a moment to stand still and watch the world go by, but I never felt this tired and drained.

Now I'm conceding to the fact that I'm old, 4 years older than most of these kids. And I just want to get my subscription for a pair of new tortoise shell glasses and shuffle into my carpet slippers and grow old in peace...

(expect whiny, ranty posts from now on...)

Aku rindu...

Do you know what I miss?

Waking up in the morning and smelling nutella on onion bagels
or the sound of you tip-toeing out the door for lectures

Dancing on cold kitchen tiles as the kettle gently bubbles and becomes my morning cup of Milo

Dashing red-faced and breathless into the lecture theatre to find a seat waiting for me in a crowded room.

Gossiping in the labs and laughing till tears come streaming down and talking about love, life and dreams; some gone, some real, some floating in the stratosphere.

Sauntering into the JCR to find a ready table laid with Bridge and good company.

Shopping at Sainsbury's with an experimental recipe in my head.

Cooking.

Snuggling under a fleece blanket while CSI flickers on the telly.

Singing in the shower.

Climbing up to the attic in search of warmer duvets and better music (Buona Vista Social Club? why yes, please!) and falling asleep in the mean time.



the starkness of difference is hollow and silently screaming. but life changes and I chose to change it. why stop now?

Oversensitivities

I think (and I'd agree with you that I usually don't) that the world is becoming much too sensitive. I was on my way to Rome when the Pope came under fire from the Muslim world. I came back to London to find Badawi demanding an apology from Lee Kwan Yew on the marginalised Chinese community (not true meh?). And today the first thing I see on BBC.com is a heated debate on Jack Straw's views on the tudung.

We should all just bite our tongues from now on. Opinions are not welcome. It's enough to spark off another casual Monday morning bomb attack.

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The world and its affairs aside, I'm feeling particularly lazy. I really should be getting dressed and going to see the bank about not being able to change my address online. But these Thai fisherman pants my brother bought me are reeeeally comfortable, and I don't feel like changing out of the just yet.

My room is a big big mess. I have a pile of stuff. Just stuff. Because I have yet to find out what's in that pile. But no time to sort that out now. Final year projects to sort out first.

It's been meeting after meeting. Lecturer after lecturer. And a list of 180 projects. I've scaled mine down to just signal processing and control theory projects, and I'm refusing to even look at the computing selections because it'll just make it worse. I'm adamant about doing a proper engineering project this year. It may be my last chance to play with wifi's and visual imaging and 3G networks and sensors, before being sent home to deal with roadworks and water plants in my sponsor company. God forbid I end up in the IT helpdesk.

It's a boring life these days. Freshers are distracting when they only have to worry about having fun...