Looks can be deceiving. that's an important lesson for anyone/everyone to learn, and i seem to have forgotten that somewhat. though saying it is easy, it's sometimes hard to follow, especially when your instinct has prematurely made certain decisions or judgements based on previous interactions. but well, in the face of solid evidence, i have to accept that my instinct and logical deductions were wrong after all. it's still quite a mind-blowing revelation, and i'm sorry that i can't say anything more here. you see, it's sensitive information about someone i know in real life, and spreading such things is just not nice.

to celebrate the start of recess week, we had a chem kids drinking session at my friend's place at the bedok area, which was also the venue for our barbeque during summer. this time, however, we all got wasted pretty quickly, partially due to the lack of substantial food, and mostly because we were drinking too quickly. thankfully, there were a few friends who sobered up more quickly, and they took care of those who were drunk beyond belief (like me). good thing that i didn't vomit, because i look forward to vomiting about as much as spraining something. ended up reaching home at about 4:00am, which is later than i've ever reached home before, not counting the army clubbing experience. got in about 7 hours' sleep and woke up around 11:30am this morning, then decided not to go to school. figured a day off wouldn't hurt, especially since all i had to do was a column and decide what to NMR.

i saw a notice lying on the table at home. a couple of months ago, we received a similar notice about the government wanting to build a nursing/retirement home on the football field-sized piece of land right in front of my block. the residents protested, and the government said that it would do a study to better determine the feasibility of such a project. well, the study's done, and it seems that the plan is still going to go ahead. i briefly read through their study, and i have a few issues with their work. first, the need for such a home was never proven. all it said was that the home had to be built to better meet the needs of my district's ageing population, but there's no facts and figures to back that statement up. also, their proposal on alternate sites was pretty ridiculous. for instance, they considered the ITE, beside the ongoing condo development, and bishan park, amongst a few other sites. in my personal opinion, those choices were there just to fill up space. building on the ITE isn't going to work, since it's a school. similarly, building in bishan park could have effectively been left out, considering that the park has just been given a facelift. and building next to the condo would have invited a whole lot of other problems from the condo developers. so why even put them there? the other thing is that the plot of land is quite small...like 100 square metres at most. and the proposed height is 6 storeys. is it really going to be of any use?

a secondary concern is about traffic. even though the government says that additional entrances and exits to and from the main roads will be made. my prediction is that that's going to cause some traffic flow problems. all of a sudden, the prospect of moving doesn't seem as unattractive as before. if i decide to do further studies in NUS, maybe on-campus accommodation might work as well.

yesterday, i went to enquire about postgraduate studies in NUS. after getting the required information, i registered for an account in the application system, and had a massive wave of doubt. it's what i imagine pre-wedding nerves to feel like. so, i'm sitting on it a bit more. the deadline is in november, so there's still time. but i figure i'll apply by october. speaking to a few postgraduate friends has given me some useful information as well. from what they told me, postgrad studies are 4 years long as well, and i only have to clear 6 modules in those 4 years. that means that a lot of time will be spent on research. maybe if i negotiate with my professor, he'll let me take japanese 5 and 6 too, especially if they can pull my CAP up. that aside, i also have to consider funding. there are various schemes available, and i also have to consider which one to apply for.

before all that, though, i think i need more sleep. have to try and be productive tomorrow.

-random thought of the day: Must avoid heavy drinking for the next year or so.-

Good thing i blogged on thursday, if i hadn't vented a bit, the things that happened both yesterday and today would have upset me to the point of yelling at my tuition kids. granted that some of them deserve it, but i'll get to that later.

2 bad things have happened within as many days, both related to school. the first one has me quite upset, actually. i mentioned that i had a med chem mid-term yesterday in the last post. prior to the test, the lecturer announced that we didn't have to remember the names and structures of the 20 essential amino acids for the test. and wouldn't you know it, he tested us on those amino acids. i'm not upset that he tested us on the amino acids. after all, it's part of the syllabus and therefore we're kind of expected to know the content. the thing that gets me is that he tested us on amino acids DESPITE announcing that we didn't have to study them. worse is that he had the nerve to say that the naming was only worth 5 marks. if we can't even trust lecturers to keep their word, NUS doesn't deserve its high ranking. thankfully, i did study those amino acids before his announcement, so it wasn't a complete loss. still not going to get all the marks though, since i mixed leucine and isoleucine up. that might still kill me, considering how steep the curve is for biochem-related modules. and i'm disadvantaged here, because most other students have taken one module with similar content (and some have even taken 2).

second thing is that i got my first parking summons in NUS. i have to admit that this one is my fault, because i parked illegally in the middle of a roundabout. the roundabout is only painted on the road surface, so it's not like i drove up a kerb or anything. but anyway, i've done it a couple of times before, and i guess i was just unlucky today. but once again, the act itself is not what upset me. i have no complaint about getting caught for something i did wrong. however, the reason on the ticket which they left on the windshield was "parking in such a way as to obstruct traffic", and i can't accept that. i parked in the middle of a roundabout. if traffic is supposed to go AROUND the middle (as "roundabout" implies), how does that obstruct traffic? unless they're trying to tell me that it's ok to drive through the centre of the roundabout.

but i can even accept that stupid citation. the foremost reason i'm planning on making some noise is because they'll be reporting it to the LTA, which means unnecessary trouble for my dad due to the car being under his name. after some research, i figure that the worst they can do to me is a $120 fine, and 3 demerit points (unlikely, but possible). even the fine is not the issue. as far as possible, i'd like to maintain a clean driving record, and i try to avoid even the chance of getting demerit points. would have settled it today, but the guy on duty said that the traffic management department was closed. why couldn't the person who gave me the ticket be off-duty as well!!?? so, i'll give them a call on monday, be nice and apologetic while explaining the situation, and try to get them to either waive the penalty, or keep it within the school at least. hopefully i can catch them in time before the case goes up to LTA.

tuition-wise, i've made a pretty liberating decision. i'm going to drop the 2 guys. today, the sec 4 kid arranged for tuition without preparing anything. and he kind of lied to me, by telling me that the J1 kid would be having his chem exam in the coming week. so, the plan is to see the J1 kid once more before his exam, and never see them again after that. the money will be reduced, but i'll be happier. think it's a fair trade. despite TKGS girl being less academically-gifted than them, i actually feel that it's more worthwhile teaching her. of course, she's contributing to my stress as well. i simply can't understand how a student can forget mole concept in 2 weeks.

it's not all been bad, though. was suddenly asked to join a few of the chem kids for drinks at this place called nabin's in the bugis area. it's kind of middle-eastern/arabian inspired, and it was funny/ironic to see that they served alcohol, since it kind of clashed with the overall theme. i liked the furniture, though. there were cushions and low tables for the people sitting on the floor. thankfully, we got a raised sofa/bed hybrid thing. imagine a queen-sized (or thereabouts) bed coming up to slightly below waist level. then, place raised, cushioned back rests at 2 opposite ends. put a low table across the middle, and you'll end up with something pretty close. it was actually really comfortable, and was more intimate than sitting at a regular table-and-chairs set-up. seems like a worthwhile furniture layout to consider when i get my own place.

we had drinks over the span of...3 hours? considering i had to wake up early for today's group meeting, i only had 2 beers. our conversation also ranged across many topics, and i found out a few interesting things about some (unspecified) people in our group of friends. just to clarify, this isn't gossip. gossip is spreading true and/or false stuff indiscriminately. for us, what we share in our group stays in confidence, which is something i value quite a lot. even then, not everything is shared, though. guess it depends on how much an individual trusts each of us.

next week is recess week, which means i'll be taking a couple of days off for various non-school purposes, including another chem kids drinking night on monday, and probably the day after to recover from that. have to address some crazy cooking urges too. but before all that can happen, i've japanese class tomorrow (guess whose homework isn't done?) and i'm meeting one of the SJI juniors' friends for chem tuition. he's in army and studying on his own to retake A-levels, so i think i shouldn't have much problem with him. we'll see.

-random thought of the day: Updated to iOS 6!-

Considering that i haven't blogged for a week and 2 days, i'd say that i'm holding up pretty well. starting to feel my fuse shortening though, hence i'm blogging now. actually, part of the reason that i haven't been blogging is also that i get home late, feeling horribly tired. since i had to study for med chem tomorrow, i didn't do any lab work, and that's why i'm not dead-tired for once.

in the past week and a bit, i've done a bit of lab work, which has yielded some promising results. just need to finish optimizing the temperature and time and we're ready to move on to other substrates. hopefully i can get enough examples to publish something (together with my mentor, of course), by the end of honours year.

recently, japanese has been stressing me out a fair bit. not having regular dictation during vocabulary quizzes is kind of causing my response to become inaccurate. it's all the annoying little things, like leaving out the 2 small dots for some characters, missing a particle, or getting the general meaning, but not catching the exact sentence. i just wonder if i'll be able to get an A grade this semester as well. goodness knows i need a CAP boost.

despite taking japanese 3, i find it weird (and quite irritating) that some of my classmates can't get the pronunciation right. in particular, there's this girl who pronounces the "ra"-line as though it was english. that's quite horrible, especially since taking japanese 3 implies that you've studied japanese for around a year (assuming you started with japanese 1 in NUS). in case you aren't aware, the japanese "r" sounds more like the english "l" than anything else. it's not identical, but about 80% similar. don't know why, but i cringe inwardly when i hear her saying any of the japanese "r" characters.

you know how sometimes, you meet people that you just don't like? an email which i got says that maybe the reason that you don't like them is because they remind you of negative attributes which you yourself possess. of all the people i've had the misfortune not to like so far, i have found that to be true for only one person. the reason i didn't really like him (despite him being a reasonably nice guy) is because he looks kind of (80%) like me. i suppose now might be a good time to admit that i don't particularly enjoy looking at myself, hence my extreme reluctance to be photographed. as for the people i have issues with now (one student from the lab group which i TA, and a couple of people from japanese), i don't really see any reflection of myself in them. i don't know...maybe it's something underlying.

speaking of people i have issues with, there's this guy in chem who did something which i feel was rather shameless. the reason he did it was to secure his honours place in a popular professor's lab. while i find his behaviour kind of spineless, a part of me also acknowledges that he must have been desperate enough to entertain the possibility of such an act, and following through with it. though if i ever become a professor, and end up popular enough to have students fighting for a place in my lab, i'd just call campus security if someone tried that on me.

it's almost the end of week 6, which means that recess week is coming soon. while i'll take a couple of days off, i'll be in school either studying for mid-terms or finishing up the reaction optimization. as for mid-terms, they're quite nicely spaced this time. med chem is tomorrow, organometallics is after recess week, and japanese is the week after that. logically speaking, i have enough time to study, so i shouldn't do THAT badly, right? i don't know. hoping for the best, though.

-random thought of the day: Library books are overdue again.-

Remind me to sit down more often when i TA for year 1 labs. remaining standing for over 5 consecutive hours can't be healthy. you know the joints where your fingers join to your hands? the analogous joints of my left foot have been hurting since monday night. then again, it's hard not to constantly patrol along the rows, because i don't trust most of them not to mess up in some way or another. now that the kids have 3 weeks of lab experience, i'm trying to relax a bit. and you can see how well that's working out.

school is...ok. now that honours research is going more smoothly, it's less stressful than before. my stress levels haven't reduced, though, because japanese just got a whole lot more difficult. with the introduction of intransitive verbs and a few new forms, the grammar now becomes way more complicated. actually, the forms are more of a killer. just think about it. i know about...150? 200? verbs. whenever we learn a new form, each verb has to be converted. the conversion rules are easy, though. the bugger is remembering the verb groups. remembering the wrong group for a particular verb means applying the wrong conversion rule, which means screwing up. but at the end of the day, i think the interest in the language will carry me through. there's a bit of irony, though. through learning japanese, i've learnt how to properly use linguistic terms (verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs), and that's something i never learnt while studying english!

today's japanese quiz was rather upsetting. i knew the answer, but wrote the wrong character down. the closest analogy would be like a spelling mistake in english. kind of annoying, since i even converted the form correctly. so i guess you can imagine my surprise when i saw the tutor give it 9/10. oddly, i'm having some difficulty getting over it. despite knowing that ultimately, it won't count for much, it's kind of hard to forgive such an idiotic mistake. on the bright(?) side, there are 10 more vocabulary quizzes to make up for this.

crazy cooking urges have been surfacing again. so much so that i bought taucheo (mildly fermented soybean sauce/paste) and century eggs. i haven't had those 2 things for at least a couple of years (conservative estimate). now, all i have to do is buy some fish during one of my free-r days (probably thursday or friday), and i'll be good to go. i must be crazy; just the idea of cooking with those ingredients is getting me excited.

don't think i've blogged about tuition yet. TKGS girl amazes me. i don't see her for one session, and it's like all the good i've done so far has been erased. she's gone back to being blur about mole calculations and writing compounds. i could scream! and her exams are in 3 weeks. well...i'm hoping for the best.

i know there was something else i wanted to blog about, and it involves the letter "g". just that it's slipped my mind right now. knowing my luck, odds are i'll remember it as soon as i shut the computer down. well, there's always next time.

-random thought of the day: 3 consecutive days of Japanese tutorials is a bad idea.-

My reaction worked! *finally*. the NMR looks good, except for a bit of residual solvent. probably didn't vacuum-dry it for long enough. nevertheless, it's light years away from my previous attempts. i'm quite inclined to believe that the success is due to the reagents' purity. too bad the yield kind of sucks, though. i have no idea how the literature people got a 90% yield, since my obtained yield was about...20%? reminder to self: control the reaction time, too. keep it within 1 hour.

after this success, there are 2 things which i want to do. (1) carry on with the next step, and (2) try to produce starting material on a larger scale. while setting up the reaction for the next step, i realized that i really had too little reagent. my current scales of 0.5 and 1mmol are not giving me enough. so tempted to try a 5mmol run tomorrow, though i'm not sure if i'll have enough time to set it up and get the column done all within a day, with classes in-between. then again, med chem is cancelled tomorrow, so i might have a fighting chance if i get to school early enough.

i was just thinking that science is quite black-and-white. say if i didn't get my desired product, the NMR spectrum wouldn't make sense no matter how i tried to assign the protons. but once the right product came out, the assignment was easy. kind of like maths, too. most of the time, you (or I) remain lost until someone shows me the model answer. once the rationale behind the steps is explained, they all make sense.

about the situation in NUS, it's got horribly crowded. i don't remember peak hours ever being this bad from years 1 to 3. the crowds are horrible! and for some reason, the arts-bound bus gets crowded around 6:00pm. maybe more people balloted for late tutorials. but the point is, it's ridiculous! i did my fair share of waiting and squeezing for 2.5 years already (back when the circle line wasn't completed yet). to think that year 4s have to squeeze alongside the kids. maybe they should have a "seniors-only" bus. or better yet, have year- or faculty-specific buses. i know it's not going to happen, but one can hope, right?

actually, i wouldn't mind squeezing with people, provided that they're considerate and socially responsible. yet, i've met my fair share of idiots while waiting for buses. currently, the 2 things that annoy me the most are people swarming to the bus doors in hopes of getting in fast, and people trying to board the bus without waiting for others to alight first. the former annoys me because most people get on the bus, and DON'T MOVE IN. it's basically selfishness. getting onto the bus is all that matters to them. come to think of it, it happens on the MRT as well, so it's probably not an NUS-specific problem.

the second thing is my #1 annoyance right now. i know that the people who try to get onto shuttle buses immediately after the doors open are all year 1 students. how do i know this? because anyone who has been in NUS for at least a semester will know that both doors on the shuttle bus are used for entry and exit. so, spotting the newbies is easy when they try to push their way up a bus. though nobody has tried to push up as i'm alighting, i can guarantee that the first person to do so will get yelled at. it makes no sense why people would try to get on a crowded bus, instead of waiting for the bus to become emptier first. either they don't bother to look, or are above all, simply concerned with being the first on.

due to increased crowds in NUS, i've also become aware of people's general lack of spatial awareness. like, people don't seem to notice their surroundings. 2 people can walk slowly, occupying an entire corridor, oblivious to the fact that i'm walking fast and trying to overtake them. same thing for the escalators. i will never understand why people rush for the escalator, then just block the way by not keeping left. seems to happen more with elderly people. even though senior citizens are supposed to be accorded with respect, i can't respect someone who doesn't feel bad about holding up everyone else behind him/her.

tomorrow can go either way. thinking whether i should try to rush my reaction, or save it for monday. my conscience tells me to do the reaction tomorrow, so that if it messes up, i still have monday to save the situation. and even if tomorrow's reaction succeeds, i can use monday to produce even more starting material. since my mentor is going to join in to do the same reaction as i'm doing now, we'll need more reagent.

-random thought of the day: HAving crazy cooking urges again.-

Things seem to be looking up this week. though i don't know for sure yet, it seems that my reaction is working well. at least i didn't see any unwanted spots after running the column. either the nitrogen protection or the reduction in scale (maybe both?) must have done some good. perhaps the higher purity of my starting material helped too. at the risk of being too optimistic, i'm kind of looking forward to seeing the NMR results tomorrow. if it looks good, then it's on to the main reaction.

for some strange reason, i've been getting gastric pains after skipping meals. the reason i say it's strange is because it only started recently despite my previous experience skipping meals during UROPS. looks like my body needs more maintenance as i get older. must start planning more regular mealtimes, or in the worst case, have some light food standing by in the student room.

so far this week, there's been TA, as well as the usual honours research work. the year 1 kids seem to be getting better at lab, which is good. my friend (and fellow TA) shared a story with me, about some people in his group. the experiment had to be repeated over a range of temperatures, 2 of which were 12 and 20 degrees. to achieve those temperatures in typical singapore weather, they had to use an ice bath. to get the temperature up from 12 to 20 degrees, some of his students went to heat the ice bath to melt the ice. while it's not wrong, a much faster way is to just add water to the ice. basic common sense, right? i was having a nice laugh over it until i saw some students in my group doing the same thing. then again, we're all prone to senseless acts now and then, and even more so since they're year 1. still, i have reasonably high hopes for them.

my time management seems to have improved this week. i don't find myself rushing experiments in between classes, and things are generally more manageable. have to set aside some time for study, though. and speaking of studies, the core module lecturers decided to remind us about their mid-terms. the med chem one is 2 weeks away, while organometallics is after recess week. japanese should either be in the same week as organometallics, or the week after. at least they're all reasonably spread out. should make better use of the time which i spend out of lab, or between reactions.

last significant thing which happened recently. just met a couple of judo juniors for ice cream at J8. well, they had ice cream, anyway. talking to them was interesting too, and i found out a few more things which are not really public knowledge. unfortunately, i was unable to tell them anything about myself, despite their persistence. even though i want to, it's just not easy. what's worse, they kind of know the other person involved. so...yes. it sucks. i'm still looking for that one perfect person to confide in, i guess.

i also wanted to blog about how the new year 1s are inconsiderate morons in general, but i'll save that for the next post. right now, i'm feeling sleepy. good thing i don't have class tomorrow, except for 1 hour (6:00pm to 7:00pm). though i'll probably be in school a little earlier than that to check on my NMRs and see if i can continue with step 2 of the reaction.

-random thought of the day: Long days suck.-