All things must come to an end

When they said university would be the best days of your life... they were pretty much spot on. The last 4 years have had their ups and downs, and thankfully the scales are tipped on the side of the ups! And this blog has been following all of it silently. Or perhaps not that silently.

This blog has narrated my journey, since I arrived home in Malaysia after those arduous years in Singapore, right up till the point of my graduation and this seems like a good place to slot in a happy ending and close this chapter.

Charlotte Sometimes has been a neat little alcove of some of my best writings and some of my worst ramblings, and I although I don't think I'll ever stop writing I do believe it's time for a new phase of my life to begin and with that comes a change of scenary and a fresh canvas to start on.

I'm not closing down right here, right now... but I will slowly start to fade this blog off. Some of you will probably know where to find other stories, in lands where dimsumgirls reside and life rests on a hurricane or two.

Don't miss me for now. I'll be back with more stories to tell...

In the land I call home

A few thousand feet above the ground, I could see the oil palm trees swaying and I felt... like I was home.

The sun is brighter, the sambal belacan is spicier and the family folk are louder. If things stayed this way, I could live in this place forever.

Honey, I'm home.

Master Engineer...

And with my final year project presentation finally tucked out of sight (it was soooo awful, I do not want to talk about it... except at length to everyone I meet), I am now (if I do not fail, touchwood) an ahMeng. Which is better than being an ahBeng, you'd agree.

When I was still a wee lass in school, graduation and earning a degree seemed like such a big deal. But now, I've passed the threshold and I've attained a masters in engineering. I've gone one step further than my parents in education. If I get a first, I'll possibly be the most successful academic in my extended family... a first class from the 9th best university in the world! I've come a long way since I was top of the class in primary one and couldn't understand what that meant ("Mummy, teacher said I got number 1. Why 1 only?").

But after all is said and done, I'm not really sure what I've acheived. And I feel no different from that seven year old girl in the navy blue pinafore colouring butterflies on notepaper. "Mummy, they say I've got an MEng now. What's that all about?"

Printed, Bound and Submitted

There was supposed to be this feeling of ecstatic celebration, like fireworks, like a burst of confetti.

But all I feel is the aftermath of a headache that has just only subsided. I'm not proud of myself, I probably did the worst project in my entire life. It only proves how much of an academic I am not! No, I will never do a PhD. It would be much too painful to subject me to that torture again.

So four years of engineering is drawing to a close, and I'm just as unsure about engineering as when I started. Clearly I abhor research and I have no creativity for design. I liked applying the goobledygook I learnt to programming mostly, but I'm not much of a software engineer. I like signals and telcos and I could live with that for most of my life. But I suspect there is a much bigger picture to this engineering business that I'm just not seeing. That I just can't see yet. It's me and yet not me.

Now that I've packed up my report, it's time to start on my room. Starting with my cooking utensils. It's so sad to put them into a box and say goodbye.

All night long

Report update as of now (without a conlusion) has reached a grand total of 46 pages - thanks to LaTeX and it's immense generosity of line spacing.

Gonna nap for an hour and a half and pray that there is enough printing paper in the labs tomorrow. Then gonna present my draft to Dr. Mandic, discuss my new results, pray that he lets me include them, come back and rewrite the report, add in all my graphs, all my appendices, and all my code... and then call it a night!

It's gonna be a long, long day...

I have an inkling this headache is going to last all week

So the report is due on Thursday and I have drafted up around 38 pages. Just another 12 more to reach that glorious number 50. After which I can attach all my code and place graphs and pictures wherever I please, until I reach that esteemed number 70.

I hate writing reports. I'd rather just code and demonstrate my work for all to gawk at.

The internet is really, really great...

So at the eleventh hour yesterday, as I was trying to explain my code to a PhD student of my supervisor, he turns to me and says

"Well, I've just discovered that the instantaneous frequencies are meaningless, but when the IMFs are in phase you can locate the spikes... which is what I am trying to do now but haven't succeeded yet"

And with that my whole FYP just fell apart. My entire project rests fundamentally on instantaneous frequencies and nothing else. What he has just discovered almost disproves everything I've been doing! CRAP!

I spent 2 feverish hours testing with other types of data, hoping to prove him wrong (what was I thinking? Me (stupid undergrad) prove him (superior PhD) wrong???). After I had crashed my laptop and was running late for Avenue Q, I gave up and ran (almost) all the way to Leicester Square.
It was crude, it was inappropriate and made me forget about my doomed FYP. I also thought the guy voicing Nicky and Trekkie Monster could have been switched at birth with Eddie Cahill who plays Det. Flack in CSI New York.

So after overeating at a Korean restaurant, and then lazing around re-watching the first episode of X-files (boy do I miss that show!), I started surfing for Avenue Q videos on youtube and came across this:



When Avenue Q meets Fiddler on the Roof... everyone IS a little bit Jewish! Isn't the internet great? (No Chris, not for porn).

News of the world... and all that goss...

Yesterday was an interesting day in terms of fulfilling my gossip quota. This girl is after all gossip/pat-kua/kaypoh central.

The first story wasn't so much gossip as congratulatory news. Congratulations to my ex-coursemate Asa and his wife, my ex high schoolmate, Awanis on the birth of their new baby Azalea! Such a pretty name!

And following more baby news is the one we're awaiting from my seniors Hawa and Kolget. Will keep an eye on that.

And in other less joyful news, while chatting with an old primary school classmate, I discovered the shocking news that an old friend/schoolmate/pri-school mortal enemy had a sex video of hers leaked all over the internet. Apparently all the buzz was in Australia and word never reached Malaysian shores... until now. *ahem* And of course it is now being passed on by vile word of mouth, from girlfriend to girlfriend. The only rather comical part of this is that, being girls none of us know where to start searching for this video. Or as one girlfriend said: "I wonder what keywords you'd have to type into Google to find it? It's not like I regularly search for porn"

Finally at the end of the day, after a round of late night badminton, I arrived back in my room to find my msn blinking furiously. Apparently Iylia couldn't wait to gossip about our Prime Minister's new bride! Iylia and I don't talk politics. We gossip about it like two makciks at the market!

Oh well, it's a brand new day. Let's see what other interesting gossip lies in store for me.

Counting down the days

I never thought the end would be like this. I never thought I'd so desperately want to leave.

So many Malaysians come here to stay, but after 4 years all I can say is - I've had enough, I want to go home.

It's not that I've had a terrible time. I've had the time of my life, and you'd better believe it that I've had. I'll miss the good laughs in the JCR, the endless bridge and Dai dee card games, the running around Europe with a backpack and sunglasses, the snuggling under fleece blankets watching TV in the midst of winter, the waiting for snow, the teasing from ISE everytime I appear at an outing, the free museums, the picnics and frisbees in the park, the running to catch a musical after 6pm lectures, the abundant pubs, the first sight of daffodils in the spring, the Ben's cookies and Krispy Kremes...

I've had an amazing time, but I can't stay put in one place for long. I can't grow roots and acclimatise. My time is up and I have to go back and try something new.

Ironically I haven't started packing yet. It's not like I'm working on my project (which I'm procrastinating as much as I can). I'm slowly working towards my farewell. Beginning with the few gatherings with old society/department/hall friends. Next it'll be the handing in of my final year project, the Summer ball, and then I'll pack up 4 years of my life in boxes, ready to be dispersed. I'll say goodbye to the winter clothes and my collection of scarves which will now be ornamental. My tattered gloves will probably be tossed. My many blankets will not be coming home with me. Who needs them in 30 degrees heat?

I don't think there's any point to extending this post further.

I'm done.

I.Want.To.Go.Home!!!

It sounds a lot louder when screamed in my head.

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... the irony of uni life is that, at the end of the day you really have to do some work in order to graduate respectfully... i am saying this in regards to my unfinshed FYP... oh, to be an unfinished song or novel or script instead... but no, i am only an unfinished 50 page report (which hasn't even been compiled in LaTeX without warnings, without errors)... and an unfinished technical presentation where I will wax lyrical about filters and spectrums and white gaussian noise for perhaps the last time...