Friday night. I can feel the tiredness in every muscle fibre of my body. But especially the tiredness in my mind. O..kay.. so maybe those two weren’t the same things. Maybe I’m not even making sense anymore. And I’m not even a paragraph into this entry. … … told you I was tired! Now you have proof, instead of just having to take my word for it! *V*

I’ve had had a hectic week. I’ve had to finish up my CS1105 project on a tight deadline. That involved doing a website and a powerpoint presentation. It was slow going at first, but we pulled through. Looking at our website, I have to say it seems very substandard compared to other groups’. Oh well, I can feel a not-so-good grade coming. What can I say, after the pain of the past sem’s math modules, it doesn’t seem like I’m gonna have an especially fun time ahead of me. I DID learn lots of stuff, stuff related to the module (ie. Computing and Society stuffs) and other stuff like experience working in a group, and especially the saying that groupwork is always less productive than individual work. It is!!! I can probably finish everything myself sooner and with a much better quality, though I would end up doing more work and be more tired. But in a group, we always have to consider the feelings, ideas, and decisions of others. We need to meet to decide stuff democratically. It’s terribly inefficient. But people (and esp. a certain prof. Ben) would say it’s what we learnt that matters right? Sure. But the grades also matter. Oh well, like I always say, I store A/A+ grades for buffering modules like these.

Two LSM modules up next special term, and I can only hope they’re gonna be fun, or at least academic, though initial forecasts don’t seem to bode well. I can only wonder where my love of learning went. Did I get too burnt out? Or did I never have it in the first place? 2.5 years of NS can really make one feel like studying again. But after more than a year of studying, it’s not really a walk in the park either. What I think I would love to have again is the support of friends. That usually gives more mental strength! I haven’t seen alot of friends for a long time…

But the good thing is, I have seen Dom&Co. alot in the recent past! Last Friday, we went out (AGAIN!). (Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good thing!!) Let’s see if I can still remember… We went out to Beppu Ramen! [Aside: As I typed the last sentence, IE inexplicably crashed. I know, I know, why am I still using that browser? I never really made the change to FF due to habit, and IE has never before given me grief. Until NOW. Luckily, WordPress has autosave. At least one friend I know will be interested to know this.] K, back to Beppu Ramen. Given the hype Huishan made, I thought it would be the ramen place of my dreams. I eat a bit of ramen every now and then, and I always thought they tasted great with chilli and char siew. So I was looking forward to this one…

To my dismay, the Char Siew ramen came WITHOUT chilli option. The other ramen with chilli option came with only one slice of char siew. (Except the beef char siew which had 3, but that was beef char siew!) So after much painful deliberation, I decided char siew was more important than chilli. Char Siew ramen it was!

To my surprise, when the ramen came, the char siew tasted like eeew. Maybe I expected a different kind of char siew. I dunno. Every char siew I ever ate that came with ramen tasted heavenly. Like tender, succulent slices of pork. This one was literally 50% fats. It tasted exactly like the soft pork belly people sell at hawker centres. I was EXTREMELY disappointed to say the least. It didn’t help that Huishan told me I should have expected this sort of “char siew”. Next time, I am grilling her about exact food specifications before I make any life-changing decisions.

We went to Huishan’s house later and played mahjong. Well, what can I say about that. I won some, lost some, learnt much. Actually, I learnt ALOT cos people like dom arrange their tiles nicely, play with some strategy but not much. This made it beneficial to read his tiles, so I got practice doing so. It was always useless to read my father’s tiles cos he jumbled his up, and sometimes tear up combinations on the fly, while at the other end of the spectrum, my mom and brother play quite haphazardly that it wasn’t worth to read theirs too.

The rest of the day was quite fun, but I think I shall refrain from going into too much detail as I always have. Interested readers can read Jia Hao’s entry here and Huishan’s entry here.

Then Saturday my mom, brother and I went to IT fair at Suntec. Agenda: buy new laptop and digicam for Jon. As expected, it was super crowded, due also to the fact that it was a Saturday. We went around collecting flyers/satellites/brochures. I didn’t know which brands had a “better rep”, so I ended up just doing a very theoretical, on-paper comparison of specs vs price. Lenovo won, Toshiba came a close second, and Fujitsu was third. Acer came a very distant fourth, despite the fact that when I researched online, it seemed to be the best choice. (Later, when I went back to try and find the particular model I bought, I couldn’t even find it on Lenovo’s site.) Anyway, so I went straight to Lenovo booth, saw the laptop, design looked decent, screen looked ok, keypad felt alright, so we got it. I am now typing this entry on my new laptop! There was quite abit of interesting “incidents” when we bought the laptop, but oh well, all’s well that ended well, and I’m pleasantly pleased with my laptop so far (it hasn’t crashed or anything yet, that’s gotta be good ) so I won’t speak about those unless you ask me privately.

Later we went to buy the Canon A470. Entry level camera, and we really got it very quickly without much testing or anything. Salesman seemed somewhat hostile with the just-buy-it-already look, but when I looked at other salespeople, it seemed like it was just bad luck on our part. He wasn’t that bad also la, maybe we were influenced by the extreme helpfulness of the Lenovo staff. Oh, I nearly forgot to say this, the Lenovo salespeople were like, EXTREMELY nice. You know usually when buying tech stuff I always encounter people aggressively pushing their products. If I buy brand X they might “passionately persuade” me to buy their preferred brand Y, and if that’s not the problem, then it would be when I get model A and they again “passionately persuade” me to buy a more expensive model B. Or sometimes they were totally silent and it felt like a “buy-it-and-get-out-of-my-store-already”. But the Lenovo salespeople made me feel like I was in a high-class restaurant as an extremely valued customer or something. They would have made me feel good about my purchase, if not for the fact that this is the first time I ever experienced such niceness in the IT industry. I felt very suspicious, and wondered if my laptop would blow up when I went home and plugged it in. It didn’t! It worked fine, so now I have classified that experience as “they probably WERE really nice because people in such services should be nice and not because of some ulterior motive.” Maybe if I experience more of such niceness, I would be willing to consider the proposition that not all the IT industry is evil.

Come to think of it, I’m a CS major. I might become part of this IT industry soon.

Oh well, so now I got a digicam too, it’s not very pro and I don’t know how to use it well, so I can’t take really nice night pictures. I’ll have to learn sometimes soon. Whoever said death and taxes are the two inescapable parts of life forgot learning.

Sunday! It was Fathers’ day and also Dom dom’s birthday. This very fortunate dom had us cooking lunch for him! Except he doesn’t like to eat garlic and onions and that means 99.95% of dishes I can cook instantly became inaccessible to him. I couldn’t work with that, so I just decided to cook what I knew and leave out the garlic and onion part. Stuff like onion soup obviously wouldn’t work if I took out the onions, but perhaps other stuff can be tried.

So I randomly picked out some stuff for the soup, and decided on tried-and-trusted tomato sauce capsicum dishes, though I chose a non-tried squid for the meat. I didn’t actually like to eat capsicum much (though I don’t hate it like Dom hates onions) but with having to work in a foreign kitchen, to make food for people with unknown preferences, I decided not to take too many risks. What can I say, the cooking ended up frantic, with Dom’s mum worrying about us and helping us alot, not enough equipment to go around, and my realising that Dom didn’t have a big enough soup pot to put all the stuff I bought. I forgot, once again, that when cooking for people other than my family, I should try to halve all portions. My family eats crazy lot. Other families don’t. The soup ended up with less water than vegetables.

The capsicum dish went quite well, and I must say it was probably the nicest I ever cooked for any capsicum dishes. Maybe it was the fact that Dom’s mum sneaked some onions into the dish? Nah, I also always used onions as well. Haha. Huishan also made bacon-mushroom omelette. I actually dunno what omelette, but those were the stuff I tasted. Then there was cold tofu and kebabs! Lots of fruit were provided too (by Dom’s mum I think?) but by the time people ate my gigantic portion of soup no one had much space for fruit. Then finally, to top it off, there was a cake. Jia Hao once again has a wonderful blog entry of that here with lots of piccies! Edit: Huishan now also has an entry here!

So yeah, that was the weekend before my big project-rushing week. It’s all over now though, and I have a weekend of rest before school reopens on Monday again. Hopefully I find my enthusiasm for school by then. Anyway, all this typing has made me tired, I think I did have more random stuff to write but Imma take a break now. Seeya guys, and be good!