The past 14 hours have been horrible for me. I got completely pissed
off at MATLAB because of its horrible documentation and examples. And
now I’m home, except I can’t find my keys and my sister is still
downtown. So right now, I’m sitting on the stairs in front of my house
freezing my ass off. It’s now 00:50 and I don’t want to wake my
neighbors up. Yay for laptop with wireless Internet!
- SwordAngel
Although I’m in software engineering, I’m still half a physics geek at
heart. Now, you’ve probably all heard about not putting metallic
objects in a microwave oven. You probably wonder what kinds of
bad thing can happen if you decide to do otherwise. You’re curious, but
you don’t own the microwave oven at home and your parents will probably disown you
if you decide to mess with it in dangerous ways. Don’t you wish that,
out there, somebody is crazy enough to conduct those whacky experiments and
show you the results? Here is your chance: Unwise Microwave Oven Experiments.
Follow the links on the page to see photos and video clips of
experiments. The author, William J. Beaty, is a professional electrical
engineer and knows all the precautions and measures to take to conduct
those experiments safely; so I would suggest that, unless you are an
electrical engineer yourself, just read or watch the results and don’t
try these at home. 
- SwordAngel
Mom has been gone for over two weeks now. The greatest concerns for my
sister and me are food, housekeeping, and transport. Housekeeping and
transport are quite straight forward and we have those under control
already. Food, however, proves to be more tricky. The other day Chris
asked me if my sister is making food for me now and I was like “… ya,
my sister… and Chinese restaurants”. Chris was shaking his head and
chuckling. My sister doesn’t make all the food though; I cook too.
Anyway, here’s what we made for supper tonight. First there were the
chicken breasts that have been sitting in the fridge, defrosted for
over a week. They went “funky” before we knew it, so we had to throw
that away. Then there’s the new omelette that my sister invented…
with diced Chinese conserved sausage (臘腸, làcháng) o_O. It was good
though; I just never thought about using Chinese conserved sausage. And
then I put too much water in the rice when re-heating it so it got a
bit mushy. I made some stir-fried watercress with a bit of chopped
garlic (we Cantonese people put chopped garlic in a lot of stir-fried
dishes) and it was good too.
We’re still trying to stay away from last-resort stuff like curry, sweet and sour chicken, and instant ramen as much as possible, lol.
The food reserve should allow us to subsist for another month without
major grocery trips, hehe. I mean, we do have like 20 kg of rice in the
basement and a lot of meat, McCain Garlic Fingers, muffins, buns,
Shanghai noodle, etc. in the freezer. 
- SwordAngel
Concordia is in for a 24-hour strike in protest to the $103-million cut
in bursaries. I’m not striking; nor are my friends (although Rostopher
will still probably be MIA). I’m curious how things will work out.
In other news, I saw what I think is a Toyota Corolla AE86 outside of
the Hall building yesterday. Anybody into drift or street racing, or
who has watched Initial D, would be drooling. The car I saw was the SR5
version though, which is apparently not as good as GTS. A little face
lifting is probably in order too.
- SwordAngel
I would like all of my friends who live around Montréal to answer this
one question for me: what is your prefered time to go shopping, taking
anything you want into account except business hours (in other words,
imagine if they were open 24/7)? Just tell me the
day(s) of the week and the approximate hours. Leave your answer in
comments or in the Flame Box to the right. Thank you.
- SwordAngel
I finally found some time to make my room today. I was busy the whole week studying for midterms. Anyway, phase one is complete:
- SwordAngel
I’m pretty bored tonight, so I’m posting pictures of the teapot I use.
It’s what we call a “purple sand teapot” (紫砂茶壺 – zǐ shā chá hú) in Chinese. I don’t know if
this one I have comes from Yíxīng (宜興), the region of China where the best
“purple sand teapots” are handcrafted. I like the inscription on the
teapot a lot because it’s a very clever pun. Literally, it says “To
exit (into) the world is good, to enter the world is also good”. In
Chinese, “to exit (into) the world” really means to be born, and “to
enter the world” really means to blend in with the world. So in the
end, the sentence translates to “To be born is good, to blend in with
the world is also good”. The inscription is signed by a certain “Owner
of the House of Double-Goodness”.
Figure 3. Centered on the signature: “兩宜軒主人” (liǎng yí xuān zhǔ rén)
