Panthera Sapiens Ellipsis: The Blog

I just got the news a few days ago. It seems my family's going to be separated yet again--the Empress has decided to go to Hertfordshire, in the UK, to do nursing... it's a rather quick decision as far as I can tell, almost nothing is quite settled yet--including her accommodation. It's quite worrying, but I talked it over with the Corn and she says to leave everything to God, which does make sense... After all, I can't do anything to help the Empress in this situation except support her decision... But it's still rather unsettling news; it's as if myself and my siblings are taking after my father's example and sending ourselves flying off all over the globe. In his family, my father was the first and only one to leave the orchards and farms and go get an education (and by extension a little more money than his 11 siblings); now here we are, doing much the same thing. If this trend goes on, it won't be too long before not a single one of us is in the sam...

Is it not obvious yet that I have a math quiz tomorrow? I should be consolidating my scant knowledge of exact linear first-order ordinary differential equations by doing practice questions, but I'll be satisfied with knowing the principles and methods behind it... for now anyway. If I ever have the time to--or if I ever make the time to--I shall fill up my logbook with those questions. But now isn't the time to do that... In fact now isn't even the best time to blog, but I see my blog very often and not having something new up there rankles somehow. And besides, going on an unannounced hiatus would defeat my purpose of having this blog in the first place. Even if said hiatus was caused by exams or whatever. It's been slightly more than a month now since I and a whole slew of freshies arrived in NTU, and... the changes are startling. People are falling back into the old routines of study life, while somehow balancing it with suppers and extra-curricular activities, and m...

I'm supposed to be studying for a Physics quiz tomorrow that's supposed to make up about 5% of my final score this semester or something like that. I think I'll study later, but that raises the question of whether I'll even study at all. In fact the plan was for me to be studying with Marsh in the library, but he bailed out suddenly because he wanted dinner. He seems to develop food cravings at the oddest of hours. Anyway... thus far little has occurred that seems to be of moment. I've been having chats with the Corn and the Emoticon and a bunch of other people who found their way onto my MSN contact list; I've gotten used to the Corn's opinion that Malaysian guys should become a little more vain than they are now (her points being that they should buff up and wear nice clothes); I've done some studying and, to my horror, I'm starting to understand some of what the professors are saying; I've gotten used to Marsh's method of starting a chat o...

I woke up at 1pm today, after 5 hours of sleep. You got that right: I went to sleep at 8am this morning. It's not the first time; after all, I did it once before. I merely did it this time with different people. It turns out the Emoticon and the Corn have taken a strong liking to each other, and since the Corn is (or was; I don't know if she won the election) on the Hall Committee and was finishing off a Vote-For-Me poster late last night, she somehow dragged the Emoticon out of his room, two blocks away, to accompany her in the TV room while she painted. And since my room commands a very convenient view of that particular TV room (and vice versa), I got dragged out of my room too, to accompany them. I didn't complain too much since I wasn't doing much more than playing BeJeweled and Virtual Villagers at the time. So we sat around and and chitchatted, excepting the time when the Corn's foot (my goodness, what a pun) got stuck to some wet paint and she had to find so...

Yesterday I went for a bash organised by my Hall. It was held at some club called the Butter Factory--a rather odd sort of name, to be sure, but then again it'd sound much worse in Malay. (Even though I can't figure out what the translation would sound like.) Anyway... I went there around 11--one hour late. I blame the buses for being completely stuffed with people at 10pm. In the end I had to take a cab with a senior (the Corn), and we got out of the cab far too early and wound up about 200m away from the club. It wasn't too bad for me, but the Corn was wearing high heels. (And she was running. I shudder at the damage to her heels.) Anyway, the Butter Factory is actually a kinda nice little place. The wall decor is a little disturbing, though... flowers with skulls for heads and little gnomes with more flowers sprouting out of their fingers... but I very much liked the section of the wall that was covered in pixelart. Kelvin would have approved, I think. I suppose it's...

I went to a Singaporean church for the first time ever, last Sunday. (Two days ago.) It was with Herr Robson, to a Methodist church two bus rides away from the University. (Doesn't it look simply grand to have the institute's species in capitals?) In any case it was an OK experience, though heaven knows I'm in no place to judge. It's not a performance after all... Which reminds me, last Friday, the University had a performance by the Singing/ Symphonies Organisation (or something like that--they kept referring to themselves as "SSO" but never said exactly what it stood for) and it simply rocked. Or maybe I like classical music too much... Tee Four was there too, by coincidence, and so was Marsh (who probably only came along to avoid being left alone in his room). I enjoyed it very much, and right now I just think it's a pity they didn't record the performance and give out CDs after it... Anyway, after church, we visited some place called Book Is. (Well...

I'm typing this in between Maple sessions. That is to say, I play my Maple account until the character's HP and MP are too low for comfort, then put it somewhere to heal up, and do this while I wait. The Coconut and Claus would surely denounce me as being too cheap to use potions and the like to heal the character, but *shrug* I'm not exactly in a hurry to get to the next level or whatever. It's been an interesting time so far, certainly... having met so many people in such a short span of time means I've got a lot of faces to remember the names for. It only complicates matters that I've found two people with nearly the same name as I--one of them in my block, and the other in my course. Their spellings are more conventional than mine, though, and probably consequently more memorable... Today is the National Day of Singapore, and it's a public holiday. Herr Robson says Singapore and Brunei will soon be jointly issuing a polymer 20-dollar note (the two countr...

Sorry I haven't updated for some time; uni life got in the way a bit, and besides I'm not exactly hyper at the best of times so I'm actually somewhat tired at the moment. Anyway... I got my laptop, and so far I've done a heckuva lot of downloading stuff onto it... emoticons, various game programs from GameHouse (I've got a patch that lets me bypass the 60-minute-free-trial thingy), and other things that I find to be necessary for myself (eg school class timetables). I don't know how many more gigs I have left on the hard drive, but I'm willing to bet I've used up a couple by now. I've almost finished getting MapleStory down... it's the last of the many free programs I've been getting at (don't worry, I've got my firewall enabled and an antivirus running), and it was probably also the most troublesome: I tried downloading the whole file at once, but for some reason it didn't work. I tried doing that again with a download accelerato...

[Wednesday, July 18] I haven't gotten a chance to go online at all for ages now... I must have gotten too used to having constant access to the Net (well, not quite constant, but at least it was there) and now that I'm back in the Gorillas' house, going online has become vastly more difficult. It's rather annoying how the local topography seems to resist allowing us to go online from here: the Gorilla says there's a hill at the back of the house (where the computer is) that blocks the wireless connection; and the front of the house is too crowded, as well as having too few sockets, to allow us to try from there with any amount of ease. So I'm typing this on the desktop that isn't used for much more than printing or the children's games... My laptop has been delayed twice. Well, I suppose it's actually only been delayed once, but from my point of view it's twice... you see, I ordered my laptop from So Hour. (Which reminds me I should record some m...