Saturday, March 29, 2008
i am back!
i think that you always need a holiday to recover from your long holiday. :p
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
outdated. and loving it. ;)
Today, gaston and i managed to revive hugo's dying ipod. Well, basically when we turned it on last night, it sputtered for about 10-20 seconds, and then blacked out. We tried to revive it by warming it up, talking to it, coaxing it to come back to us, all to no avail. We even gave it time to decide it wanted to come back of it's own accord. Finally, as a last resort, we managed to defibrillate it and it came back to life! With all its innards (and music) intact! *grins* Hugo's ipod, by the way, is old enough to not have a color display. Hence the drama. ;) Which brings me to the point of my post. I fall in love with old things and refuse to give them up even when they're way past the point of being en vogue. For example, I own the little blueberry clamshell notebook from the last century.   Out around the same time as the bubblegum range of iMacs, I love this baby to bits - even the name sounds edible.  Don't you just love the ad? I remember when I was 16, we used to have an entire mac lab outfitted with these things, and it was the coolest thing. Prior to this, all you saw was drab grey and cream - occasionally black - PCs (or macs). Of course I don't use it for big applications, but it sure came in handy when my ibook's logicboard crashed awhile ago. It was apparently the first wirelessly equipped laptop, although I never really used it with the airport card till *after* the crash. There is just waayyy too little space and ram. But it's good for typing up reports, and instant messaging, and photoshopping - all an undergrad really needs urgently. ;) The logicboard that crashed? Was from a laptop that was *almost* as old, but not quite. It's 5 years old, and it was one of the first ibooks introduced in the market - the kind with the transparent casing that you could decorate on your own once you remove the white paint underneath. I wish I had a photo to put up, but I loved it too much to take it along with me here. When I sent it in to apple, the dudes there were horrified that I wanted to replace the logicboard. Why? Because the laptop was so old, that replacing the system would cost almost as much as buying a brand new MacBook. Instead, now, I'm using yet another ancient ibook that my obop (thank you!!) gave me last year. It's faster than my other notebook, but not by much. And it runs almost all the programs I need, albeit slowly. The only complement I need to these dinosaurs is a half terabyte of external HD space in case these thingies die out on me. I hope they don't, but every day I come one step closer to the possibility of buying a new one. Perhaps I should update to one of the later versions, but once I fall in love, it's hard to fall out of it. Haha. And I love my small little ibook to bits. As tempting as the new MacBookAir is, I'd rather stick to my vintage little customised 12" anyday. ;) Same problem with the ipod. I've still got my chunky little green iPod Mini (with no color display), and a new-ish black and red version. None of the new ipods really do it for me - perhaps the iPod touch.   Phone-wise? Same issue. I've yet to found a phone I love more than my v70, although that is entirely TOO outdated - it doesn't even have a phone display. I mean, I have replaced it of course, because I do need an all-in-one phone with a camera and an mp3 player and what not. But I've yet to fall in love with another phone. Heh. And I still do carry it around as a spare phone. Although maybe the iphone might solve the phone/ipod problem for me. ;) Haha. Too many issues with that though - I'll wait till Apple has all the kinks ironed out. =) But at the end of the day, all these majorly outdated things slowly become vintage after all. Just like my quaint 1960-ish Cinquecento.
Sunday, March 09, 2008
elia's visit
*update:* placeholder status over, and here are the pictures. ;) it was super exciting because officially, elia was *my* first guest. haha. i mean, our house has enough space that someone or other is bound to have a guest over, but i was never really around often enough to actually have a guest over - i'm usually not here on long weekends. And on the longer holidays, i'm obviously not gonna stick around here. :p imagine the horror when the italian dudes upstairs hijacked the mattress they lent us the night before elia got here! i mean, they lent it to us 4 months ago, and never took it back, so i thought our guest room was all nice and done up, but nooo. they had to take it back. *sniffles* but no worries, cos our room was big enough and comfy enough to share anyway. haha. not that we spent much time sleeping. we had to wake up SO EARLY all the time! imagine, 7.30 on a sunday morning. *faint* but i get ahead of myself. first and most importantly, the food!! pizza, gelato, pesto, more pizza, more gelato, a kebab with bread made from scratch (falafel for me. haha. ), more gelato, and mensa food of course. ;) the places? pisa - obviously we spent so much time in the sunshine by the green green grass of the tower. at first i was in awe with how green the grass was even in winter. but it takes a lot of hard work to keep it that way, or so i found out late one night. hahaha. :p  bologna it was gorgeous! apparently according to yeow it's got the oldest university ever. founded in 1100-smth. and here i thougth galilei's university of 1343 was ancient. think about what singapore was then. hahaha. it was so big! and yet so old - it had the vibe of florence and rome, except, no tourists!!! we could have quite possibly been the only asians i'd seen there. which was coolness, cos you don't have people snapping, and shops there just for the sake of selling things. it was truly a quaint little big town. heh. pistoia the hospital/medical school. the pretty florence-like chapels. you can so tell you are in italy. i think i recognise italy enough that if you threw me in the middle of somewhere, i could probably tell you whether or not its in italy. or it has italian influences. i should so be here studying architecture, or art, or renaissance history, or something like that instead of dinky engineering. bleh.  Vale del Diavolo Translated to: Valley of the Devils. We read off some website that it was something that was both disturbing and unforgettable. You wouldn't believe the ribbing I got in the car when we got there. I was the one who decided to go there you see. But you gotta admit it sounded seriously intriguing! But hey, everyone was disturbed and we'll never forget it. :p And we wonder how the residents live there. *shudder* grossetto a tiny little medieval village within the city walls, but it expanded SO MUCH out of the wall, that the city centre was more like the hub, or the shopping centre of it all, so to speak. pisa really is the smallest town. haha. i actually live within the old medieval city walls. right next to the old wall actually. in a small corner. heh. and elia walked wall to wall within the first couple of hours she was here - not non-stop, mind you. but uh. we stopped for pizza. and gelato. :p pisa really is the smallest town. haha. i actually live within the old medieval city walls. right next to the old wall actually. in a small corner. heh. and elia walked wall to wall within the first couple of hours she was here - not non-stop, mind you. but uh. we stopped for pizza. and gelato. :p some lil coastal town of which i forget the name, starting with f methinks. it was so completely dead. as in, seriously, the shops were ALL closed. on a saturday afternoon. at 1pm. even the places to eat!!! cos the people only head out at 4pm apparently. unbelievable. oh, but we did find a place to eat. haha. ONE. :p livorno a lil town by the sea, with SO MANY shops! seriously, for a town like that, the shopping lanes, unbelievable. even more than florence methinks. but again, so many italians! so few tourists! and the families that went out: mommies, daddies, kiddies, all decked out in really stylish gear, of course. which brings me to the fact that i think there's a dress code. for italians. haha. as in, cliches exist for a reason i think. and you always imagine the italians a certain way. and i *will* upload photos soon, not to worry. ;) lucca it was the closest to pisa, and yet we went there last, and woke up at the freakish hour of 7.30am on a SUNDAY to get there. the entire town is surrounded by a wall. yes, again. what else could they do? it is a medieval city. where people try and break other people's cities down or something. *shrugs* but this wall, it was thick. it wasn't just a wall, it was like, an embankment. with a lane atop the wall. with trees, and streetlamps, and bicycles and grassy patches, and small ramps leading down. haha. it was like the whole city was just this giant stadium. with churches and roman amphitheatres they built over. and lucca also has the nicest old chocolaterias, where they melt chocolate and put it in a cup for you to drink with milk, or not, the choice is yours. of course, i can't deal with dark chocolate, and ended up adding so much sugar. but it was still yummilicious. *smacks lips*  cinque terre finally, i had to abandon elia to the cinque terre by herself for a morning, while i went for class, and joined her later on. we did, however discover something that isn't down in the photos in the previous post... a playground!! all the way up there by the cliffs, overlooking those colorful houses and the blue blue sea, with the wind whipping all over. so gorgeous! i can so see myself growing up there! or erm. behaving like an un-grown-up. heh.  elia's photos were all so pretty! my ancient camera recently went into a coma, so i'm living off elia's photos (although i hijacked yeow's camera, heh.) and i must say, she took so many emo shots without me even realising it!! and once again, i'm reminded of how much i talk due to pictorial evidence. *hangs head in shame*  p.s. this i have to add. haha. while her check in gate opened at the pisa airport, we were just sitting down having dinner. that's how small pisa is. hahahah. :p or maybe i'm just lucky to live near transportation to zip around. hee. =)
bird sushi
pardon the geek attack, but this piece of randomness i had to put up. courtesy of my last lecture with a german prof who used to work for rolls royce - the plane engines, not the cars. before an engine can be deemed safe to be used onboard an aircraft, it has to pass stringent real-life simulations. you don't really want your engine dying on you mid-air like a cinquecento might do on the road. one of the tests that has to be done is with birds. yes. you see, since planes fly, they tend to have lots of accidents with birds. this means that there is actually a rig where birds are thrown into the engine. and i quote : then they are killed, and boiled and thrown right in there" when i heard that i was like.. wha...?!!! but he was kidding of course. anyway. the engine must be able to survive a couple of medium birds weighing 700g each or a massive bird weighing 1+kg. these birds (no more than inanimate lumps of clay or plaster for rolls royce - some other pple actually use poor frozen birds..) are then shot into the running engine and everyone at the test site prays the engine will emerge victorious against the dead "bird". of course when the real bird hits it, the rotating fan makes sure the bird gets sliced up into pieces - the faster the bird or plane was flying, the bigger the slices. morbid huh. actually, birds fly into engines all the time and the pilot hardly even realises when a small bird goes in. the problem comes when the birds come in the slightly larger variety, or there are too many of them sucked in - sorta like stuffing your mouth when it's already full of food; one at a time is no problem. so apparently, there is this canadian goose, which is 400g heavier than the normal "big bird" estimates done for all planes. meaning practically all planes on the market now can't ingest this bird without significant damage. check out the damages. i never really thought about how serious bird strike could be: Date: 09 June 2001 Aircraft: Airbus 300 Airport: Dayton Intl. (OH) Phase of Flight: Climb (200’ AGL) Effect on Flight: Precautionary landing Damage: Engine Wildlife Species: Canada goose Comments from Report: A Canada goose was ingested into the #2 engine shortly after lift off. The engine had an uncontained failure and a precautionary landing was made. The cost to repair ($3.5 million) was not economical so the engine was scrapped. wanna go to canada anyone? *grins*  p.s. there ARE videos online, but they are waaaay too morbid for my tastes. hence they're not here. but kidding aside, it's a major problem, and there have been quite a number of fatalities due to aircraft collision with birds. not the big jumbojets, mind you, but the smaller civilian aircraft.
Thursday, March 06, 2008
congrats!
i am soooo proud of my baby bros! hahaha. all their mugging paid off and they did really well in the As. so they've officially done better than me in both the Os AND the As! heh. and one of em even got company best in NS - and here i was thinking being in THAT company it would be harder for him to do too well. haha. too bad i won't be there to see him leading them out next week. =( that's the prob with being so far away.
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