Panthera Sapiens Ellipsis: The Blog

The last four days during which I have been totally away from my laptop... were spent with family. A most informative tidbit of information, isn't that? Doesn't that kind of sentence make you hang on the edge of your seat hankering for more details? No? How disappointed I am. Anyway, last Friday evening (around 5), we left the flat and went onto a train. We were very nearly late, because it's a half-hour ride from the flat to the train station and passengers are expected to be at the station at least 15 minutes before the train departs or else there isn't enough time to run across all the platforms and get to your cabin, you see. Train tickets, here, are separated into many categories: the soft-sleepers and hard-sleepers are self-explanatory. Then there are the seating-only tickets, where you may sit on the various chairs nailed to the train cabin walls but not sleep on a bed, and the standing-only tickets where you're not even allowed to sit (and yes, there are che

I've now been here for nearly two weeks, if I'm counting correctly... the flights were the 4th, and we arrived around the 5th midnight, and it's not the 17th so it's been about 12 days, so I have indeed been counting correctly, and I have indeed been here for nearly two weeks! It turns out that I have been a most dilatory photographer; in the seven months or so since I acquired my camera I have only shot a little over 2 gigabytes of photos. It's rather disappointing, since I was planning to take advantage of the DVD burner in the family computer (not mine) to burn all the photos off and let me start the 2009 collection (my photos are organised by year, place, and then theme, and if the same place or theme is revisited multiple times then I add date-labels to the folder). In any case it seems I shan't be able to do that, though I've been running through my dad's camera memory card and if I consolidate enough I just might accumulate enough for a DVD collec

I type this on my laptop from the computer room of the little flat in Fifth Hun. Outside are my mom and Gobbler and my aunt (mother's older sister), and somewhere running about is the latest addition to the family and the latest in a long line of dogs, Oreo (whom my youngest brother named). She's a little black-and-white ball of fur, whose face is pretty evenly split between the two and so there's always a little bit of oddity for me when I look at her and only one eye is visible (the other is only visible by the light reflecting off it in bright places). It's pretty cold right now--I've no idea what the temperature is, but it's cold enough that the heat radiating off my laptop is a very nice thing for my fingers. I've considered buying myself a nice pair of wool or cotton gloves or, really, any sort of covering to get my hands out of the wind. It's probably compounded by my parents' refusal to turn on the heating except at night, and even then it&#

So exams ended today. They haven't ended for the roomie; his end tomorrow, in classic Bioengineering style--it's a tradition, it seems, that my course must always have the last day of its exams on the last possible available day. My own is a subversion then, since it's ended on the second-last day; but I should be a liar if I said I don't mind being a little bit early for once. The exam was probably pretty difficult. I probably shouldn't be quite as cheery as I am, except I've spent the last two days in a certain haze of euphoria at being able to breathe freely without pain. It's nice being able to do things like sleep uninterrupted by your own respiratory tract, or drink, or yawn... I'm also pretty sure I botched up some formulae and made bad estimations or assumptions and mixed up a few others that may send my lecturer into hysterical apoplexy. All the same! I've now got a stretch of holidays to look forward to. (And my roomie just gave me a lozen

I'm sick--again, for the second time this semester. I don't remember having been sick like this before, so I'm chalking it to either the weather or the room placement or some other variable that was different in the previous room. Again, it's a sore throat, and began about five days ago now with coughing bouts and the occasional headache; at the time I just put it down to studying too much for Biomol, but a couple days ago I woke up groggy and unable to swallow without bright flashes of pain going off in my throat. At the same time I can't sleep well anymore--a great pity since sleeping-time is my favourite time--and I frequently wake up coughing and then have to drink, but that means I have to swallow. Also I'm very depleted of energy and move like an old man, or like a badly-done 3D film--the kind where everything seems to happen in slow-motion. Even walking is tiring. This time I'm taking Strepsils cough syrup instead of the pipagao I took the last time;

So yeah, it's Sunday now and my second-last paper, Biomol, is the day after tomorrow--I should be panickedly memorising orgachem formulae and various metabolic pathways, except I just can't seem to remember the hundred-or-so-odd names and things. Never mind that there's interconnections between the various pathways, they have like maybe three or four intermediates in common each--well if you don't count the electron donors/acceptors anyway. The body is amazing and all that, yes, and I don't just mean the outsides of people (although come to that, the skin is a pretty useful thing too). Anyway, after Fluids... I had little to no study mood left. All taken away after possibly failing that, and Electronics two days before it too--I fail at Electronics, very much. Easy Kill doesn't--he's likely as anything to get an A+ in it and that's only because no higher grades are available--I'm likely to have to re-take this module next semester or whenever it'

Exams began yesterday, two weeks after my last post--yes, it's terribly irregular posting. In my defense I've been busy reducing all my lectures to a small pile of written-on foolscaps (someday I'll photograph those foolscaps and put them up here so I can burn them and still have a copy around to refer to in future--or I'll have them scanned on the school computers if/when Herr Robson returns me my thumbdrive, or if/when I borrow one from Easy Kill). I'm taking a bit of time off my regular studying schedule to bring you this post because--unsurprisingly, really--I misread my exam timetable and thought the exam would be at 9am; it's actually at 2.30pm. Regardless, it means I slept very little between yesterday and now (about four hours really) and have already gone through the examinable material to my own satisfaction, though of course I'll be re-reading again shortly to buff up memory of the various formulae and conditions, characteristics, etc. Yesterday&#

Well! The exams--my third round of them--begin in a little more than two weeks now. And I'm still woefully unprepared: biofluids is arguably the most worrying one, unintelligible as it is despite the genius of the lecturer--in fact it's quite possible, I'd say, that his sheer genius is the reason I can't understand it. After all when a genius talks, mere mortals must necessarily be confounded until such time as they meditate on the talk and, with glorious snapping of the fingers, understand what was said. Unfortunately time is not a resource I have in large quantity, and biofluids is only one of the many things that worry me. And then? Mechanics of materials, which the Pig apparently has already studied and has most kindly attempted to help me with--the most recent example being a voice call over MSN re: the Mohr's Circle; but with the number of diagrams associated with it and the numerous variables and unknowns, not to mention the fact that he has absolutely lousy

This morning was not a good one for me; well it wasn't an entirely bad one, but it was still very irritating as well as time-and-money-wasting... You see, my church has this shuttle bus that leaves a certain bus interchange at 8.40am, which behooves me to take an 8.15 bus from the nearest bus stop to the interchange (it's a fifteen-minute ride) and then wait the ten minutes until the shuttle turns up. Generally I make it on time; in the past year I've only missed the bus two or three times and even then it was my fault for waking late. Today, on the other hand, it wasn't my fault. I woke at 7, was at the bus stop by 8.10... and remained there until 8.30 when a tiny little thing trundled around. By my conjecture the bus company decided that this route brings in too little revenue, and they seem to have reduced the frequency of the buses without having the courtesy to say so--and heck, the frequency as it was, was low enough already! There are two bus routes in the Unive

I have been pounding my desk quite frequently today. I woke at 9am, or thereabouts--unlike Crazy Scary, I don't tend to wake very early on weekends. Especially not on weekends (although I make an exception for Sunday since I have church). Actually the pounding is days overdue: my computer, again, is having troubles. I've been assured by various sources that these troubles are likely to be recurrent, especially since I'm using a Dell; also these same sources advocate any one of three or four remedies that will be both time-consuming and expensive and I really cannot afford to carry those out at this time in the semester. The troubles, specifically, are: slow start-up time (this has been going on for a little over a month now)--the computer takes about 15 minutes between the time I press ON to the time I can actually begin using it, and I take only 2 seconds to enter my password; and more recently, spontaneous shutdowns/restarts regardless of conditions, as well as inability

Whatever happened to the days when the further a place was, the longer it took to get there--and conversely the nearer it was the quicker you could get there? They've gone away apparently, and I'd very much like whoever's in charge of these things to set things right. The reason being mostly that I just got back to my room, and I left at 2 from the grandfolks' house; which means it's been a five-or-so-hour journey, which is more or less equivalent to the time it takes to get between So Hour and KL--or, for that matter, Spore and KL. And the three journeys were conducted by bus, so you can't pull the different-methods-different-speeds card. Ha! My fourth aunt, who made the journey with me (she works here), was somewhat stunned too at the spectacle of a jam reaching back halfway across the Causeway, and even though she is something of a genius when it comes to finding the quickest route between places (though she does say so herself), she was utterly unable to sho

I'm typing this from the grandfolks' place in So Hour; I arrived a couple days ago--but I'm getting ahead of myself already. First, I must deeply apologise for the immense delay between posts; not that nothing of note has occurred, and not that I've had no time or inclination--I've simply been such a horrible procrastinator, and it does keep slipping my mind and only popping back in when I'm in no position to do it--on a bus, for instance, or moments just before falling asleep. Well, I'm typing up a post now and so you can be grateful for it... though of course, my future self will be grateful too when I come back to see what's been happening. So what's been going on? Not much, I may say--or maybe, a lot, although I don't necessarily remember it all or remember it well. My memory's like a sieve these days... or rather, it's like a somewhat clunky old computer that breaks down every now and then and loses a bit of data when it's back.

There are mosquitoes everywhere these days. Flitting behind my computer, around me, on and under my bed, and rather surprisingly they circulate around my nearly-brand-new copy of Fluid Mechanics for Chemical Engineers. I suppose if your life depended on sucking the lifeblood out of people through straw-shaped mouthparts, you'd like to know how to make the process more effective or efficient too; but the mosquitoes aren't taking any notes, which either means they have a better memory than I do or they already intuitively understand the principles--which entirely justifies my ability to snatch them out of the air as they hover over the Bernoulli's Equation. I snatched two yesterday and one today; but in all fairness I only notice them when they're flitting between my eyes and the monitor really; except, of course, when I'm looking around the room to see if they happen to be anywhere noticeable. I typed that entire last sentence (and this one too) with both my eyes clo

I'm ill. Quite badly so, too... Last Saturday I began coughing and had a sore throat by the night time, which caused me to lack sleep rather and then I developed a headache and a fever. Herr Robson was also sick, with similar symptoms; and I know of a large number of other people who were also sick. We blame the weather, which has been rather bipolar: hot in the mornings, cloudy in the afternoons, and pouring in the evenings and nights. I suppose I should be very happy about the pouring, but I really can't enjoy anything when I'm having coughing fits every now and then. Though I'm thankful that the sore throat went away on Monday and the headache and fever with it, the cough remains and has progressed steadily. I now cough about once every five or six minutes; every now and then, it's a coughing fit that wracks my entire frame (when I'm lying down, this can actually wake me up as well as shake the bed) and sounds rather like a sort of honk, and sometimes creates

I moved into my new room yesterday, with the help of Tee Four's god-grandfather or real grandfather (I didn't ask) who has a car. He was very nice, but it reminded me that my grandfolks and a cousin are still back in So Hour possibly suffering chikugunya... well, that is, if it isn't actually dengue, but it's hard to tell. For some reason that sentence reminded me that a friend has Rich 4 and I should ask for it sometime, and also that I really don't have the kind of time that would allow me to spend hours deciding the monetary fate of little cutesy characters on a virtual game board, even if it IS extremely and oddly fun. My camera is working again! I realised it only runs on alkaline batteries, which turn out to actually be different from regular batteries in that they provide a higher output. I'm considering getting myself a few rechargeables now so I don't have to buy myself new batteries every now and then, though Herr Robson is likely to start gloating

Well. The last post published badly, I must say; the changes I made didn't get saved and so it ends badly, or rather it doesn't end at all. But then again, you can probably guesstimate how it would have ended anyway so I'm not going to bother fixing it up. I'm feeling rather all-over-the-place at the moment; I wish I were in my new room (I got the keys to it on Thursday) but I can't move without assistance and I have nobody around to offer that since Darth Bo is away at his aunt's place and the roommate's not around--though even if he were, I wouldn't like to ask him for help with this. Of course, I would have had assistance if Brain Rink were a little more dependable, but she isn't. Right now, however, there's a lot of things to think about and worry; for one, the folks in So Hour are coming down with some sort of strain of dengue: at last notice, my grandpa and grandma and a cousin had it, though I haven't called for status updates yet. For

So, school's started, and I'm getting all swept along in schoolwork and various stuff. Add to this that Darth Bo, being very active in the Campus Crusade, is transmitting this activity to me by seeming osmosis, plus the fact that I have several little personal projects going on at the moment, and now you have a quite frantic me--though, I suppose, to the casual observer I look exactly like a relaxed University-goer sitting calmly and typing out a blog entry while shaking legs. I also recently decided I want a new body shape, as far as my decisions ever go, and Just Cash (who apparently is a gym bunny in addition to his other achievements) says I'm at just the right weight to do it since I'm 0.1 on the BMI scale away from overweightness. Unfortunately I have no idea what to do in a gym, and not being a gym bunny myself, I'm rather intimidated by gym bunnies. Just Cash, though, thinks there's nothing to be afraid of--while I freely admit to feelings of deep and ab

I continue from the last post; Darth Bo came back to the room just as I was typing so I returned him the LAN cable, which makes it sound as if he were imposing on me when it's really the other way 'round... In any case he's out at classes and I'm in the room so I'm using it now. In any case... Well, the Gorillas are moving, and I (along with a couple hundred thousand other people) will miss them greatly. But the eulogies can come later, since for now I'm going to detail the activities of that week in KL, maybe follow it up with a detail of what I've been doing in Spore for the past few days, and then I'll get to the eulogies. This is just so you know where to scroll to if you want to skip all the dry details, or any of them. I arrived in KL on Monday night, having left the University around 1pm since I had to return the room keys to Darth Bo (who was very intermittently in the room then). The bus trip was nothing special since the bus rides back to KL ar

I'm quite incredibly tired these days. I blame school... it's the second day already and I'm already dozing off in classes. It's been quite a week, at least since the last post... No, wait. It's been, ye gads, two weeks since the last post. Time certainly does fly, and I've just given myself more reason to say so: it's two hours since I typed the opening sentence and this is only the what, the third? Darn Maple for being so distracting; the Coconut passed me a private server file the other day and I'm already level 39 after a few hours; unfortunately the private server has bugs and I keep on losing data: I was level 58 awhile ago. Well, at any rate it's been busy days, and not too happy ones either; I'm still without a fixed address either here or in Malaysia. The University still hasn't given me a room, and I'm getting increasingly pessimistic about my chances of ever getting one, since it's apparently been three intakes and everybod

I've got a bit of a headache at the moment, which I blame partly on lack of sleep and partly on my late meals the past couple of days. Considering I've been a most dilatory blogger in the past few weeks, I suppose I should provide an overall account of what's been happening ever since that day, let's see... ack, 13 days ago. I at least have a good idea of the past 5 days, which leaves 8 days of somewhat blurry memory, though I remember at least 5 of those days, which leaves 3 of uncertainty, unless I'm wrong and I do remember them after all. Well then, let's start from the time after making that list... if it was 13 days ago, then it was the first of several days of procrastination. You see, I haven't got a room in the University due to a bunch of reasons, foremost being a system that gives priority to pretty much every year except mine, and even then discriminates within my year itself. I'll be very enthusiastic about the triple-room arrangement if it w