Friday, January 29, 2010 00:41
I am not even supposed to be typing here, but I am too pissed off, too frustrated, which became can't-be-bothered to continue working on my report.
The most frustrating part of writing a lab report is when you find that after a long session of laborious excel data entry and operations, the outcome of your calculations serves to only tell you that your experimental results contain large amout of ERROR. And you know for sure your experimental data are problematic, because your theory confirms a trend for data that isn't quite the same trend you get after your calculations.
And then you think it might have arisen from poor Excel literacy, or personal errors, or systematic errors in Excel data entry, but when you've checked and double checked all the formulae in all the cells, the only conclusion you can draw is PROBLEMATIC EXPERIMENTAL DATA.
So, you panic.
Because this just isn't simply titration, where you can roughly work out the correct volumes. This, is a matter of an ARRAY of data, of which you have NO CLUES whatsoever where the error could possibly have arisen.
This is what I should have got:
See how perfectly shaped the curve is? According to theory it should tend towards zero as mole fraction approaches both zero and one. But look what I've got:
What a BEAUTIFUL quadratic curve! Awesome fit (R-square is 0.9982)! But it does NOT tend to zero at both extremes.
To make things worse, I selected TWELVE entries for Y, yet Excel stubbornly displayed SIX of them only. Yes, stubbornly, because no matter how many times I changed the scales, selected the data again and again, or even changed the chart type, it just insisted on displaying SIX out of the twelve. Why people's Excel so obedient but mine so OUTRAGEOUS!
Oh Excel how I hate you now.
Saturday, January 23, 2010 09:23
Not only am I squandering my time away, I just bid goodbye to a good sum of money at John Little yesterday as well.
On my bus ride to Marina Square to my slight dismay I realized there are actually THREE John Little outlets along Orchard Road: one somewhere around somerset MRT, another inside Plaza Singapura, yet another at Marina Square. Which brings me to wonder, why in the world are they concentrating all three outlets around Orchard, when places further away are completely devoid of any John Little?
Anyway, since there is a Spring sale 20% storewide, I decided to replace a few items in my makeup bag since they are either running out, or beginning to malfunction. Of course I also got my ZA hydrating gel which I refused to get without sale because I was too cheapo to pay 20-odd dollars for a moisturizer.
In total I swept:
1 mascara
1 liquid eyeliner (actually I wanted a glittery one from Splash because it was cuter and a little larger BUT they priced it at 17.90 my holiness!)
1 bottle cosmetic olive oil
1 eye&lips makeup remover AND
1 ZA deep hydrating gel
Wahaha laying all the items on my bed made me feel LOVED!! Initially I also included a Maybelline blusher in Watermelon (super demure pale pink!), a Rimmel pencil eyeliner, a blending brush and a few eyeshadow palettes. But in the end I concluded since I'm more of an eyeliner person AND I already have a pencil liner, AND the blusher I have can probably last me til I'm 40, I decided to only get the 'essentials' and forgo the 'I-wants'.
By my shopping day ended up with quite a nasty stomach upset. My dear Rabbit told me he got the same thing too, which made us wonder if the culprit was the Jasmine Tea we both drank.
Thursday, January 21, 2010 00:30
Today is a sleepless night. Couldn't even drift near Lalaland despite rolling all over my bed and transfering all that's on my pillow onto my face, and back again. But it also in a sleepless night like this that unknowingly, I put on my thinking cap and, well, started thinking about everything that has happened, happening, and may happen.
I thought about friendship, and what this ten lettered word that is so ingrained into our urban dictionary, actually means in a realistic world like ours. How do we define a
friend - people we know? or we talk to? In my 21 years I have known more than 400 people (Facebook says I have 417
friends)! That is sufficient to qualify me as a 'very friendly person'. Reality check: I don't even remember having any recent contacts with more than three-quarters of them. How much a friend then, is a
friend whom you never spoke of, spoke to, or even thought about in the last one month?
I have (almost) lost contact (completely) with (all) my Primary school classmates, schoolmates,
friends. Some of them I still remember vividly whom I regarded as
best friends, good friends back then. Yet now if you put us on Orchard Road side by side, I wonder if any one of us is able to recognize one another on the streets. So what became of the friendship we once shared when we were still young and innocent? It is but just another piece of history which we all have learnt to put behind, because the reality of life presses us to look forward, not backward.
Then I thought about the
friends I currently enjoy the company of. They are great people, each a star in their own right. So much we have shared between us, but will we still be the same when everybody moves on with their lives in future? We have seen how a certain misunderstanding, a certain misconception already put people at loggerheads with one another, almost completely dissolving the friendship ties they once made. With so many years still ahead of us (I am optimistic that we will live long enough), how sure and certain are we that we will emerge unquivered even the slightest through the test of time? And that we can still firmly profess "friendship forever"?
Then I started thinking about relationship issues. This I shall not elaborate further. We have seen enough break-ups and divorces to justify "people
change". It is true to a very high degree that you will never know how well a person fare as a boyfriend/husband until you get together/married. I have failed once, and know it all too well, the pain of picking up all the broken pieces one by one by myself while the other side doesn't even give a shit. But will we always end up with the Prince Charming we date and marry off like fairytales always do? Even so, will marriage withstand, again, the test of time?
I certainly hope we will last, baby.The hour is getting late, and I should probably get back to bed in hope of catching the last train to Lalaland, that I could finally be in Lalaland, no matter how short a time I'm gonna spend there.
Til then, I'll see ya.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010 15:31
I'm loving my time-table. But this is an obvious evidence that I'm squandering my precious free time away, just as how a spendthrift squanders his money away. I mean, time can be better managed to increase my level of chemical literacy such as reading the most boring character tables, point groups and symmetry operations for example. Or, time can be better spent in engaging my mind in solving the wonders of thermodynamics, a task I prefer to describe as a dog-chase-tail type of merry go round.
Instead, I chose to let time ooze past, minute by minute, second by second, by engaging myself in our very familiar and hedonic past time - online shopping.
Why am I just not filthy rich! Else I would be living such a blissful rosy life of indulgence.
Sunday, January 17, 2010 21:35
Amused.
I find it amusing that the position that brings ultimate comfort when you're having some life-threatening abdominal pain is just squatting. Yes, that simple squatting as you would inside a squatting toilet. I used to dismiss this position as something disgraceful - it's so unglam, ungraceful and un-ladylike - until I finally come to enlightenment the pleasure it brings. I am indeed squatting as I am typing this out.
It has been a hell of a Sunday today. What worse way to wake up to a bird-chirping Sunday than to jump off the bed realizing the
auntie you most dislike has paid you a *surprise* visit. And because of that what was originally supposed to be a pleasant weekend became mostly bed-ridden.
Oh gosh. These cramps brought me ultimate mental exhaustion and physical torture.
The first week of the sem just breezed past, and week 2 is about to kick in. And Imma say goodbye to this honeymoon-style of a life soon. Okay, no complaints unless I want a punch in my face, haha.
Sunday, January 10, 2010 15:29
Okay, let me see. My last post was dated 4th December, which means it's been a record of more than one solid month without any post.
In the space of one month, blog image bandwith exceeded its limit and crashed, mixpod totally deleted all my songs because Youtube requested audio files to be streamed together with their videos, and yours truly had next to nothing to write about.
The very last part was a joke and you should already know it.
The last month has been nothing but eventful, which was great and horrible all the same. Of sheer fate and perfect timing I attended a six-day course on Longevitology (see http://www.longevitology.org) during the week of Christmas, and I must say, believe it or not, this is real and people around the world are bearing witnesses to the healing powers of nature. No, this is not about rubbing stones or smelling trees; it's about you accepting nature's energy in its abundance, and letting it (energy) help your system to re-adjust and hence bring you good health. No frills, no hidden costs, just you and your hands to make miracles happen.
You may think I'm out of my mind to believe in such things. Fair enough, the topic of energy healing has been the topic of scams for as long as we have seen. That's why we need to see for ourselves to believe it.
Longevitology isn't the only thing that happened. In fact, most of my holiday was devoted to packing up things in my old house, to move down to PJ. Well, new place, new life. But it will never be the same as Ipoh ever, considering the circumstances at the new home. In fact, I still find it difficult to identify with the PJ house, because it just isn't home.
Sigh.
I hope this skin is pleasing to your eyes. At least it pleased mine (:
