Summer

This summer, I'm staying in beautiful Montreal where there is sunshine,
gentle breeze, and great nature, just so I can have more chance to rot
in front of my computer at home.What a great time to stay home and hack
on OpenGL and write
management papers. That's right, folks: I'm not going anywhere this
summer.

I was hoping for a few months of home alone adventure. Alas, mom called
last week to tell me that she may be coming back much earlier, possibly
by the end of May (which is really soon). BTW, it was Mother's Day. Who
invented Mother's Day anyway? Does the author not know how much trouble
it means to people who know a lot of mothers? We had to call our moms,
our grandmas, and all our aunts. Thank God mom is away in Hong Kong
because a quick estimation tells me that I will become quite Vogonish
by the end of the phone calls from my cousins.

Let's talk about something else. Apparently Star Wars Episode III is
coming to the theaters soon. I almost completely forgot about that. I
can still vaguely remember some of the cheesy scenes in Episode II.
Meh. Anyway, anybody interested in watching it together? BTW, the
official website of Star Wars looks quite b0rk3n...

- SwordAngel

My Inkslab

Dad brought me this really nice inkslab a while back. The whole thing is carved from a piece of rock. It's for use with
Chinese brush calligraphy and painting. I haven't had a chance to try
it yet. I wonder how well it grinds. Anyway, below are pictures of it.
Can you guess where it is from?

- SwordAngel

聲聲慢

尋尋覓覓，冷冷清清，悽悽慘慘戚戚。
乍暖還寒時候，最難將息。
三杯兩盞淡酒，怎敵他、晚來風急。
雁過也，正傷心，卻是舊時相識。

滿地黃花堆積。
憔悴損，如今有誰堪摘？
守著窗兒，獨自怎生得黑。
梧桐更兼細雨，到黃昏、點點滴滴。
這次第，怎一個、愁字了的。

南宋 - 李清照 (1084 - ca 1151)

Good morning.

Another day spent at school, writing JSP code that may or may not work
and making purty little images for our web application project. Chris
gave Ahmed and me a lift home. And guess what? When I stepped out of
the car, I heard birds chirping. It's the first time that birds'
chirping get on my nerves. It was as though they were laughing at us:
"Haha, look at those no-life who had to stay 14 hours at school to rot
in front of computers."

4:30 in the morning. This is like the usual time that you see Ojiji's
and Obaba's getting in a line for morning Dim Sum in Hong Kong. Too bad
we don't have morning Dim Sum here in Montréal.

- SwordAngel

I hate my life.

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

Don't try these at home.

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

Food...

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

Who is on strike today?

Concordia is having a voluntary strike today. I still went to class though. Anybody on strike?

- SwordAngel

Tomorrow is Strike Day

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.

Correction: this car turns out to be an
AE92, a newer front-wheel-drive version that replaced the AE86. Thanks
to Jeff Lange at www.club4ag.com. I'm looking into it's specs to see if
it's a decent car.

- SwordAngel

Little poll

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