Just in case you want to take a look and do something about it =)

http://athousandcranesforjapan.tumblr.com/

Just changed my language preference in tumblr to German

Then my brain said,

"Seriously? You are even afraid to read German 3."

trololol.

Another thing to ponder

from @ijennaush on twitter

"There are a lot of things God has granted us in every moment of our lives. Do you want to realize them? If you have realized, then, do you want to share them?" - ci Mel (paraphrased)

The awkward moment when you were about to collect mid-term result and were supposed to mention your name but the lecturer already knew your name

It was creepy and super awkward.

I stunned on my way home. After reaching my room, a friend called. He must hear a very very loud, high-pitched scream:

ACKHOWCOMEHEKNOWSMYNAME??!!

Mosaic Music Festival '11

I went to this year's Mosaic specifically to see this guy performing. My friend is a huge fan of him and I kinda like his and his collaborators' music, plus this performance is FREE =D

And haibara wasn't herself if she does not bring her camera along, so, actually this post is meant to showcase my (always in mediocre level) photos. LOL. As usual, the complete set of the chosen photos are submitted to my tumblr log..










All photos were taken using haibara's Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5

MARTABAK!!~

So, we had dinner at a food stall selling street foods from Jakarta before going to Mosaic. The owners are an Indonesian couple and the reviews in the internet have been good this far. IMO, this is the best Indo food stall in Singapore so far, from price, foods offered and taste. PLUS, this is definitely a good alternative to all ayam penyets that are really popular in Singapore, which IMHO, don't taste like in Indo at all. They are more Malay-like.. or.. (OK, the NTU students from Jakarta may hit me now, cos my friends from that specific town love eating there!) well, simply they don't satisfy a Chinese-Javanese-stayed-in-South-Jakarta like me (and how many people with that combination are there here in NTU??). So if you want to know how Indonesian foods taste like, the best way is to go directly to Indo and eat there. =)

The good thing is this stall sells MARTABAK. Oh God. Love it. They also put pangsit, both fried and soup-made, in their menu but I had never encountered this type of pangsit filling before until I ate there.. I don't know, it was just different. Anyway if you're not familiar with these foods, I can't give the English names, sorry, so you have to try them yourselves. The closest names in Singapore would be Indian murtabak pancake and dumpling but the Indonesian's are different and unique that I completely refuse to call them Indonesian murtabak and Indonesian dumpling.

I don't have the picture of the pangsit (we ordered the soup one and the contrast was not good because they were all white, including the bowl, so I discarded the photo right away..) but these are what we call martabak. The first image is buttery-sugar martabak and the second one is martabak filled with the combination of rice chocolate, cheese and peanut.





They also sell siomay. This is inherently one kind of dumpling too.. Siomay is fish-cakes (I hope this definition is correct) topped with peanut sauce (you can add lime water on it if you like) and usually served with cabbages, boiled eggs, beancurd cakes and this bittery veggie called "pare". Anyway, the peanut sauce and the fishcakes are the most important part of siomay; if one of them don't taste nice then the dish is a fail. Back to basics, people. LOL. So I tasted the peanut sauce, it tasted nice. I didn't taste the fishcakes since my friend said that the portion was quite small so I didn't have the heart to take some =D But my friend said that this tasted nice =)



Anyway this is not the correct way to eat martabak, actually =D But there were only 3 forks for 4 of us so the one who didn't get the fork used this Chinese way for eating instead. Haha.



Anywaaaay *promo* just in case you want to give it a try, I'll give you the details =P

Jtown Cafe
220 Orchard Road
#B1-04/05 Midpoint Orchard S238852 (nearest MRT station would be Somerset MRT cos Midpoint is just across 313 Somerset)

Facebook page
Review 1 | Review 2 | Review 3


All photos were taken using haibara's Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5

I'm high

My line below just popped out instantly when I saw the first sentence with the circled word.



LOL. Too long staying here already, eh?

A walk from Somerset to Esplanade

16 March 2011, ~6pm
By Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5














Make me melt, Haägen Dazs. Give me a coupon for daily free ice-cream for one month =P (same thing goes to you, Starbucks! lol)



The rest are in my tumblr blog.. So go there if you'd like =)

Rachel

I was in the mood of screen-capping scenes and combining them into one, so here's what I made for the latest ep of Glee (yep, the series I was watching while multitasking writing the lab report)


Rachel Berry! Oh girl, you stand by me* finally you have friends!~

While they were group-hugging (did I just see Santana, who supposedly be one of Rachel's biggest hater-enemy-torturer?), I suddenly remembered two things:

1. After competitions, they usually have a group number to sing together, either for celebration (two Sectionals) or crying their heart out (last season's Regionals). There was NONE in this episode. We were given an award session, speech, and super-sweet group-hugs moment instead.
   
2. Rachel Berry was said to be named after Friends' Rachel Green by her dads.

Taking note that Rachel's MVP award is by vote (which is also unanimous), I would love to if they (minus Rachel) sing this song for this little misunderstood future Broadway diva =) I've been hitting the replay button for hundreds and hundreds times, and I really feel the need to rewatch the series of this song, the whole series, too! Summer, maybe?




*"Oh girl, you stand by me" makes reference to Glee/Finn-Rachel's rendition of Journey's Faithfully in last season's regionals

How to keep up with a really busy academic schedule while there's a need to catch up with a series that will be on hiatus for the next one month?

This makes use of the fact that female brain is designed to enable her to multitask =P

What's for dinner?

So this was what I had for dinner today.


The white balance was quite a fail. Had been working on it in photoshop but this was the best I could do. Sorry ='(

IKEA's ocean salad + KOI's black tea macchiato. The salad was considerably healthy (REALLY? with the mayonaisse and stuff? OK, I am comparing to foods sold in NTU canteens where most "more affordable" foods are fried and even their veggies are cooked with LOTS of oils! DUH). The tea macchiato is KOI's new variant, so I decided to give it a try because the nearest stall to my place is not really crowded. It was quite nice =) But on the darker side, these were quite expensive. But it was the price to pay for better food and more importantly, better health *back to the 2nd sentence above*. I am looking for personal earnings so I can have what I want (nway, I am not a shopaholic nor a hedonist, so please don't have bad opinions on me, haha) without feeling guilty for my parents' money.
Until then...

When the world gathers and people are forced to put their ego aside. Pray.

Think. Ponder. Decide.

After this, comes this..

cr: weheartit

Shine, so everyone can see our light :)

cr: tumblr

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be - brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.

Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so small
that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.

It’s not just in us, it’s in everyone.

As we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.

- Marianne Williamson, 1992
1994 Inaugural Speech - Nelson Mandela

cr: vicky.com

A quote that describes your feelings in the lab when your experimental yield exceeds the theoretical yield

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure." - Nelson Mandela

trololol

The reason why I still print my notes and write on them

We support the printed word in all its forms: newspapers, magazines, and of course books. We think reading on computers or phones or whatever is fine, but it cannot replace the experience of reading words printed on paper. We pledge to continue reading the printed word in the digital era and beyond.

Nothing can replace printed forms and handwriting and liners/highlighters on them =)

http://readtheprintedword.org/

One advertisement on why you should go for PhD

A short chit-chat with one of the TAs in teaching lab today, while waiting for my reaction to complete.

Him: Next week is my last TA session.
Me: Woah? Why don't you continue? *hope this super nice and helpful TA will be an exception to the TA scheduling rule*
Him: After that I will go to Cambridge.
Me: UK? I always want to go there!!
Him: Me too!
Me: Anyway why are you going there?
Him: Research!
Me: As in, continuing your PhD there? Or for post-docs?
Him: No.. My boss asked me to go for 6 months then I'll return here. He is paying for me.
Me: Oh. Super nice.
Him: I'm really happy to go there.
.
Me: (by heart) pleading to my boss: Boss? I want this, too! If not for research, you can bring me.. err.. maybe me and my labmate(s) along to your business trips or if you need to do some measurements abroad. Please? =P

Noticed this on twitter:



No Bahasa Indonesia?
I strongly believe that Indonesians are among top twitter users. Proof? Just check the daily trending topic. Some TTs are Indonesian-made, some TTs make it to the list because of the Indonesian users' contribution (especially those Korean topics.. DUH), and well, one of Indonesians' stereotype is : "I eat, I pray, I tweet". True.

Well, I'm not going to help them translate twitter to Bahasa Indo (my Bahasa for formal purposes is not so good either and has become even worse since I came here, lol) but they should really consider this. Should.

I was surprised that a lab-tech at teaching lab knew my name!

...Hopefully it was because of the fact that my name sounds Italian, but I don't even look like one since I am a Chinese descent with no European blood (I presume), and not because of bad behavior (or the accidental shots of ethylacetoacetate at two fingers in the morning of the first lab session).. I still want to (or have to, if I go for PhD) be a lab TA.. PLEASE??

Does loving your career equal to being a fanatic of it?

I don't know why, but while my labmates (as in, research lab-mates) aim for more and more papers published each year, my primary goal is *ahem* to contribute cover/frontispiece design(s) for my or my fellow groupmates' paper(s) and have them pinned to the board in front of my prof's office or pasted at the lab. It's not like I put my own publications behind; sure, I really want to publish more too - it is a privilege for an undergraduate here (suddenly an image of Natalie Portman passed by), but it won't be perfect if I have not achieved the aforementioned goal. Weird? Yeah.

My strong attachment to cameras and my habit of taking photos of anything, everywhere (including teacher's notes and unposted lecture slides since I was in junior high) plus enjoying my spare time (or having guilty pleasure my mind refreshed in busy times) with photoshop make me wonder if I'm a real full-time budding chemist..

Sheesh. My fellow friends in chemistry or those in physics and maths who are seriously pursuing their majors often relate to their respective fields in their convos.. Wow. Again, it's not that I'm not serious in here, I really love what I'm doing, I just think that I don't sound as enthu as them *staring at my camera, then to the ICES brochure at my push-pin board... and thinking, why I'm so contradictive?*

I hope that being a real chemist does not mean having mind filled with a fanatic enthusiasm on chemistry 24 hours a day, 7 days a week..

Oh anyway, I finally took a sip of this! One of my friend had bugged me to try this since, like, 2 weeks ago. I think she's a fan. Good that a fundraising event had this sold on campus, otherwise she will have to join the long long queue at Iluma for her obsession (OK, the Ang Mo Kio stall is said to have shorter queue, but I still don't understand the fuss). LOL. Anyway, I think the milk tea taste was not very intense, like it had too much water in it.. Maybe it was because I did not drink it immediately when it was still fresh and cold.. But it was smooth and the pearls were chewy. Well, at least this has much more appropriate feel than hawker's ones which are super intense.