Panthera Sapiens Ellipsis: The Blog

Nineteen days since the last update! How very remiss of me. I shall do my best to make up for it--but then, of course, nothing terribly earthshaking has occurred in the past three weeks or so... well, nothing apart from the last two weeks of holidays (ha!) and the first week of school; what an odd sensation to be on the second week of school already. One keeps on getting reminders that one is graduating soon--between all the career fairs and DONATE TO THE UNIVERSITY NOW! reminders that one keeps getting in the inbox, it's slightly eyebrow-raising how much attention is suddenly being paid to one by the University. But then of course it looks good for the University if one donates, and if one finds a job soon after graduation (the nature of the job doesn't seem to be a concern, only that there is a job). Which is really why I'm running through one of the University's job-searching aids at the moment, or I would be running through it if I could access it; apparently high t...

Every now and then it happens that a course requires me to get up before the class and make something of a speech--during the past semester it happened no less than five times. And most of them went horribly wrong, because I have a habit of speaking too fast that gets exacerbated when I'm under pressure; and the combined gaze of thirty-plus pairs of eyes counts as pressure for me. Heck, more than five pairs of eyes on me and I get prickles running down my neck. But one of the speeches I gave that I think could have certainly been done better was the one on Professional Communication--the group had been assigned to present on job searching and I had been tasked with the section on resumes. (The other speeches were very technical and so had much less potential for entertaining either myself or the audience.) In fact the idea for this post came to me on the way back from lunch just now--a stray thought set it off and I ruminated on it for the rest of the walk, and now I present: A (Ro...

I'm awake, and having paid off my sleep debt by sleeping for 9 hours, I'm rather alert as well, which is a new and unusual thing for me--at least, the combination of being alert in the morning is... Not that I would have normally had a sleep debt, as it's the holidays, but I'd only gotten about five hours of sleep between Saturday and Sunday and Sunday is usually a quite busy day for me. It's only been a week since the last post, but it's still been a pretty packed time--not very, not at all, but things have happened and so I shall be my usual loquacious self about them; though, of course, my memory is hardly the most trustworthy source of information around, it's still the only source of information about those things. Heh. Last week I and the FYP-mate met up to attempt to make some progress on the FYP; it wasn't too long before we both found the machines that we wanted to use occupied (apparently the holidays are a very popular time for people to catch...

So, it's the New Year. 2011, one year closer to 2012 and then we'll all see if the Mayans were right when they predicted general doom and catastrophe--or, at least, we think that's what they predicted--as far as I know all there is to it is that their calendar ends on our equivalent of December 2012, or something like... At any rate exams are over. It's a little hard to believe they were only--what, two weeks ago? My final paper was the 23rd December, and it's now the 1st--a little over a week, then, about nine days. And in 9 days I've gone through so much relaxation I wouldn't mind if the next semester started the coming Monday, because I can already feel the fluff building up between the ears. But there's still 3 weeks to go, most of which I'm projecting will be spent in Singapore. I keep telling people I'm here for the FYP, but honestly there aren't any projections on that yet; I'll start work on the literature review portion of the th...