Burning Low

This reminds me of the time when we talked about quach bases.

This episode was quite good. I really like how Finn does not hesitate at all when trying to save ____ even when it's seems like suicide. Also tiny plot twist at the end, I like those.

I had the pork rice at Gumshira. It was nice, at first. Then yeah the meat was really salty. Maybe it was lack of appetite due to lower than normal blood levels but yeah. I should probably stick to ramen.

Another day for science

My Tuesday classes are made entirely of labs, one for biotechnology and other for molecules cells and genes. It's kinda weird but I'll get used to it. Biotech seems more easy to do. Today I had to isolate a single colony with a loop and agar plate for the first time. I had no idea how much pressure I had to put on the surface. Guess the results next week I'll find out. Then it was diluting E. Coli and spreading those onto plates. Using pipettes was super easy. My partner used the plastic pipette tip on the bunsen to sterilise. I was like "okay.." apparently he did micro so I'd assume he knew what he was doing right? Finally gram staining. Lots of steps involving a lot of crazy solutions. Luckily I was wearing gloves, that stuff went everywhere. But in the end I made a good slide of stained Bacillus.

Finished early and got to leave, I should remind myself to take a look at what GMO topic I want to do for my assignment. I then went to the library to finish the pre-lab for BABS. The lab consisted of doing one thing which was placing human cancer cells of different concentrations in medium which contains all the good stuff it needs to grow. Unfortunately the rest of the lab we needed to answer questions. I told my demonstrator that my knowledge of PCR came from song, which she's never heard of. She probably thinks I'm weird now. Turns out the song didn't have all the facts. Who knew? 

After lab I went to Town Hall and donated blood. It was a weird feeling. While I was being drained I actually had no idea how much blood was coming out. What I was looking at was the other small bag used for testing which wasn't filling with blood. To my surprise they told me I was finished, and I saw the actual bag which was huge. I didn't even notice it! I got home alive. I remember one friday when I had a bandaid on my arm and Carmen thought I donated blood. Having now officially donating blood I don't really see how she could mistake that tiny bandaid with this.

365

Obligatory birthday retrospective post time!

I still remember what happened on my last birthday. It was during the time of SM Town gathering and I was relatively new in the crew. During one of our practices we were having break and then the lights went out to find that there was a cake for me. It was such a nice gesture and it really made me feel happy.

On my actual birthday I decided to go to Carmen's dessert thing instead of staying at home and study. Despite trackwork I managed to get to the place on time. Shortly Yuki, Huy, Carmen and Elena showed up and we went to Glebe for some churros. They were really good. Afterwards we went shopping in the city and then crashed at Crossover. I was feeling sleepy so I ended up crashing on the couch while the others were jamming.

Haha I started writing this a week ago and now I've put it off till now.

Sunday was interesting. Not everyday you get to do something like that. I enjoyed it. I want to see someone else play the exact games and see how they go. Had cake at the studio where I was presented with a really unique jumper/jersey thing! I should really wear it sometime but I have no idea what occasion would suit it. During a performance? haha.

Went to watch The Dark Knight Rises with my brother and father at IMAX. My thoughts would be that you would need to have watched the other two since the third draws a lot of elements and back story from them. It wasn't as awesome as The Dark Knight and I knew that would happen. Expectations were raised a little too high if you ask me.


I feel like as I have aged, everything around me has aged also. Things weren't the same as they used to be. Where things are going I don't feel like it's going to be good. But I don't know, maybe I'm just imagining the worst but by extrapolating facts it's hard not to. Sometimes I think I'm being biased, while the other times I think I'm the only person who feels nobody is willing to do the right thing.

On another note I don't feel like myself anymore, if that makes sense. Guess I'll have to find it again.

This year has brought me good times and happiness. And I'm grateful for that.

I don't know what to put here

Thursday I crossed another thing off my list which was to visit my old high school. During the year I've had a lot of people tell me that my old headmaster wanted to see me. So I visited him and we talked about last year and this year, my reasons for leaving UTS after first semester and reasons for choosing Medicinal Chemistry. He thought it was good that I decided to stop my old course after one semester and not longer than it could have been. He seemed to support my education in the medicine field, which I then found out that he did med at USYD back in the day. Not sure how far he went with that but yeah. He had to go from Castle Hill to uni for his first class in the early morning and then go to Westmead in the afternoon. And then go back to Castle Hill via multiple transports. Took hours from his day but he said he learned to study while travelling which was productive. All I do on the train is sleep.

Afterwards I went to the bus stop which I used to take to go to Parramatta. Luckily back then I didn't have to worry about which bus to take since all buses terminated at the terminal at Parra. And it still applied now. I took the next bus and got to Parra. Since I'm going to do some photo work soon, I decided to buy a new lens for my camera. I needed something for low light situations so I got the 50mm f/1.8 lens. The thing can't zoom in or out but that also means it can take generally nicer photos than zooms since they don't have all that extra parts. Also another thing is it's really wide aperture which is definitely good to catch more light in dark places like a theatre. It was also cheap, like the cheapest lens you could possibly buy. Not sure if that's a good thing actually. Now I need to do some practice shots, I suppose Friday will be good for doing that.

Walked home in the light rain, and pretty much spent the day reading everything I could about using my camera and all the functions. Turns out I need a program to work with all my photos and convert them from RAW to jpegs or something similar. I could use iPhoto but I feel like the program is doing more harm than good to my photos, which I previously used to work on the RAW photos I shot at Yuki's birthday when I forgot to set it to not shoot in RAW format. So far the two programs that I could use are either Apple's Aperture or Adobe's Lightroom. Aperture is cheaper I think but everyone seems to prefer the editing power of Lightroom. Sigh and I wanted to save money for upgrading my kit lens.


Guess that's all for today's blog. I should sleep. My sleep pattern is all over the place, especially when I was sick. After I had dinner I had a nap and I had no idea how long I slept. Perception of time is lost to me.

This episode looks promising.

Cleaning up

I can now cross off one of my things to do during the break, and that is:

• Clean my computer

As in literally get rid off all the dust and dirt collected inside my computer which meant manually pulling apart all the keys and give them a good vacuum.

Yesterday was Carmen's birthday party at her house. I woke up around three due to staying up the previous night playing games. I managed to get to Cabramatta by train and carpooled with David, Dan and Huy. We ended up lost and finding ourselves in steep dark holes. That's what we get for changing the address number to sixty nine.

There were snacks and party pies and pizza. Should also mention that I hadn't eaten anything beforehand so it was a very unhealthy day for me. People were playing Monopoly, and we were going to play Cluedo but never got around to it. Trivial Pursuit was played by the majority of us and the questions were so random. Eventually we had to go, which was like past midnight. Good thing my parents were out. I got dropped off by David and went straight to sleep so at least I would have a decent wake up time.

Woke up today around midday and got around to cleaning my room and my study room. My study room is better but still needs some more work, mainly dealing with all my previous semester work. I'll have to find somewhere to store it all. Also my brother came home from camp today, don't know if he'll be studying or playing games all break haha.

I suppose I should start being more productive since David said yesterday, we actually don't have much of a break before next semester. But I'll most likely have enough time. Also I should stop being on the computer so much, especially if I'm bored. That's always a recipe for disaster.

I started listening to The Chaser by Infinite more since Dan taught it on Wednesday. I find it very catchy. I like the sound of their voices and how their vocal range is usually higher than any other group. Also their music video for the song was weird for me since I found the slow mo car flip which felt like it took up good 45% of the MV to be distracting. I'm guessing that they spent a lot of effort getting that shot and felt like they needed to use it as much as they could in the MV. But other than that it's a nice song.

Mid Year Break

Now that my final exam is complete and my last assignment is left finished, though not necessarily perfect, I finally am able to catch a break from the craziness that is the final moments of semester. Speaking of crazy, I taught Crazy today (Saturday) at the studio. Yuki and Kelvin also came to my class along with three totally new people. Kelvin and Yuki were very helpful when my pupils found it really difficult. But in the end they managed to pull through. And yes we did the screaming.

On a side note I just finished downloading Diablo III. So as soon as I finish this post I'm so playing that.

Nao's class... was actually interesting. Maybe I'll keep it up Dan, MAYBE. Yeah next Friday is Carmen's birthday, also the Friday after that is another friend of mine's birthday. Not sure if I can make dance then. But then again their party is clubbing at King's Cross, which is probably late at night. Yeah I don't know the people at all who are confirmed so maybe I'll just not go. If more friends go then maybe.

Ate lunch at Eating World with Elena, Bec, Jibbie, Kelvin and Yuki and then walked to Star City gangsta style to get gelato. The mango flavour was so much better there. Maybe I shouldn't have got lemon but it was nice, like lemonade. Teaser parodies were made and we went back to studio where Jaye finished teaching some of the KCO people. We all jammed for a bit and everyone ended up going home. My parents were eating to city so I ended up eating with them since everyone went home and I did not want to go by train with track work. That meant going to Strathfield to catch a bus where I bet there were huge amounts of screaming people due to a certain bunch of people at a certain frozen yogurt place.

Now that break is on, time to fulfil my goals for this holidays! What are they? You'll find out when I actually do them.

Every cough is like being punched in the chest and head

“Self-control is self-mastery. It is kingship over all life. At the center of your being sits yourself. Your seat ought to be a throne. If you are not in control, if there are any forces in your nature that are unruly, that do not acknowledge your sway, you are not the king you should be. Part of your kingdom is in insurrection. The strength of your life is divided. The strong man is he whose whole being is subject to him.”

I recently read this quote in an article about willpower. It made me realise how important it can be and how I can actually work towards it. Sometimes the first step is to acknowledge its presence. Now to go on from there.

I realise I haven't made a post in like, forever. I could make an excuse like too much uni work but that would be stupid since everyone else seems to have time and are doing fine. I guess it's just laziness on my end.

Uni's going okay, I suppose. I got my class test marks back for SCIF. Let's just say I didn't do awesome. That combined with huge amounts of homework and assignments is enough for anyone to hate it. However despite the random spectrum the course seems to cover, I wouldn't complain about it. I guess you could say it's a reminder of how it's not enough to just learn facts the other courses provides. If we're going to do something that isn't just done like the HSC then obviously we're going to do stuff outside our comfort zone. To the people who are bitching about this course constantly, I hope you never make it as doctors. Like hell I'd want people who get by with the minimum effort to become people who have lives in their hands for a living.

As everyone knows, I've been extremely sick lately, and it really sucks as assignments need to be done and exams are coming up so I don't really have much rest time. Sunday was audition day at Crossover for those doing Kpop summit. I got to the city at around 2pm and decided to eat lunch at Mappen. When I got to the studio, there was already a lot of people there practicing. After Jaye finished we set up studio 1 for auditions. Dan and Ellyn played judges while me and Yuki had the easiest job ever - camera operator and music player. What we didn't expect was the entire session lasting three hours. So much for our own rehearsals. After watching some of the good auditions, I wonder if our performance will be the same standards of how we expect theirs to be. I hope we can work towards it. It was also interesting watching people's body expressions. You could tell people who were nervous, attentive or just rude while the judges talked to them. Also people who want to do songs just because of how they're big fans of it without actually knowing the choreography properly shouldn't audition with it in the first place. It actually comes off as a selfish thing since you're clearly not doing it for the sake of entertaining others. It would have totally happened again for B.A.P if it wasn't already taken.

Afterwards was dinner at Eating World and then Karaoke at CEO. In hindsight I probably shouldn't have gone since I was sick and my voice was broken by the end of it. But it was a rare occasion and it was nice to do something recreational with the others.

Well I'm off to bed, hopefully I can finish my work tomorrow, since it is due Tuesday anyway.

Also it seems like literally everyone is playing Diablo III now. If it weren't for uni I would be playing it. But then again, catching up to others is going to suck. Well at least I could play with my brother. But won't be long till he also gets way ahead.