time flies... really quickly. on small little transparent wings. and as it goes there's a faint 'ssshhhhhhhhhhhhitttttttttt' sound.

trying to manage time is like trying to catch a fistful of sand, or fighting with shadows or catching up with a mirage or playing 'freaky factory' on neopets - the game where the stupid skeith would sneak in and steal your toys when u have your hands full in manufacturing and don't have the freedom to bonk him on the head. 

basically, i don't know where it goes. oh maybe too much of my time is spent stumping out on my projects.

oh, and had you ever had the experience of pulling your thumb muscle while trying to squeeze out the last few cms of toothpaste? 

i worked till 3.30am last night on my stupid excel project. "That's not much," you'll say, "Stop whining, everyone's like this," you'll say and you'll say "you deserve this since u are such a procrastinator, i hope you rot in hell."

the thing is i finished the project at 12.30am, saved it, and turned off excel, only to have our familiar friendly microsoft error message pop out at me. whoa, excel crashed.

no biggie, i thought. i'd been conscientious like a true blue final-year student with 22 years of 'the comp crashed and killed my project just before the deadline' experiences, and had been methodically saving my work every half hour, so the damage wouldn't be great.

so i opened up my last saved file and... our friendly microsoft error message popped up again. gyaaaaan!!!

well, i acknowledge the fact that i'd been working kuro-tan for 3 nights straight without giving her her much deserved sleep. so i tucked her in to bed for a short nap whilst i went to take a long, relaxing bath...

only to come back, and realize that my last saved file still can't be opened. apparently midway through, the computer just can't keep up with my changing formulae and switched off its brain, corrupting the file.

so i had to make do with the excel repair file... which was really much harder to work with then the original from 6 hours ago. formulae were missing, graphs had disappeared, some data were there, some weren't, and they don't repair based on any remote form of chronological order so i have no bloody idea just which parts were undone, where the broken links were and bleah.

three hours of grappling with it, i finally came up with some semblance of what i had before. it looked a lot less complex. i keep having the nagging feeling that i missed A LOT of things.

but i just can't be bothered anymore and just sent the new file merrily on its way to its next victim. i may be perfectionist, but not when my bed is crying out to me in loneliness and neon signs are mentally stapled all over it screaming "COME TO ME! SLEEP HERE!".

zzzz.

(yea, i slept. this is the post-catastrophe entry entered in the morning) 

hey~ i'm blogging regularly! maybe too regularly. i guess this is to make up for the hiatus of one month plus in jan-feb.

basically i'm trying to do a literature review for my final year project. a lot of literature reviews, actually. 15 to be exact. its simple fare, to be honest, we just need to shrink a research article (18 pages) to a quarter page. this normally comprises of taking the first sentence+summary of "Research methodology"+ a few crucial sentences from "Results and Discussion". very simple fare.

but somehow the academics have this unwritten rule that the simple stuff must be presented as complicatedly as humanly possible, sentences should be a composition of at least five different parts each with its own topic and gist, and if you manage to lose a reader halfway through your essay, you win a brownie point and prestige as a very highly-esteemed and untouchably intelligent ACADEMIC.

basically my job is reading through 17 pages of sentences structured as above, and trying to ascertain, through all the mumbo jumbo, just WHAT THE HELL this article is raving on about.

like sheesh. =2 hours into the same old, same old article, the worst of the lot (so far)=

and getting no where. which is why i'm back here. 

i realized i'm an evil mean disrespectful person who likes to criticise others after the third time i screamed 'this article has no link to its stated topic! does he have tofu for brains?' and flung my papers across the room. i really shouldn't do that. especially when the object of critique is a much smarter and experienced and rah-rah person then me.

anyway, on the point of mean nasty criticisms, check out rotten tomatoes' criticisms of 10,000B.C. i chuckled out loud in class just browsing over their grouses and their commentaries on all things stupid about the show. currently its got a rating of 8%.

well, i wouldn't exactly diss the movie based on that. but at least i know what to look out for, and i would set my expectations low and just cross my fingers and hope it overperforms.

just for the record, a film that i liked back in sec school was absolutely massacred by the critics, and had a rating of 3%. it swept up the raspberry awards'00 for worse movie, director, supporting, actors, screenplay and couple ('travolta and anyone sharing the screen with him'). my heart bled tears of blood for travolta, but hey, the more criticism there was, the more people wanted to watch to see just how bad it was so oh well.

and what's the point of that last paragraph? well, hmm. 

I love spiders.

It might be because they have 8 legs, which is a lucky number for the chinese which symbolizes "prosperity" and i LOVE money.

Or it might be because there was this short sentence in the Enid Blyton book, "The Secret Island" which said that it was a lucky sign when a spider builds its web across your face.

Or it might be because I had a crush on this monkey of a boy in Primary 2 who caught and collected spiders in little plastic bottles.

Or it might be because I was a fan of Spiderman when I was in Primary school and they were airing The Amazing Adventures of Spiderman on Sunday mornings 9am. 

Or it might even be because in my Maths O Levels, I was stumped on a question, but suddenly, 5 minutes towards the end of the paper, a spider crossed my hands, and suddenly the answer popped into my head.

No matter what the reason, unlike most cute squeamish girls my age, I think spiders are really CUTE.

And I'm right now in the midst of dying over my FYP and feeling very very depressed over the fact that I'm well on my way on losing my 2nd Class Upper when I opened the doors of my room and spotted this little red spider dangling outside.

The lil thing was trying to build a colossal web that would span the entire corridor.

And suddenly I felt that perhaps my FYP was manageable after all. Sure it might be going haywire, and it feels like a troupe of monkeys could piece together a more comprehensible piece of work, but at least it was achievable.

kudos to the little spider and I wish you all the best in your endeavors.

Fight, Xueqi, Fight! 

on a rainy day like this, i could never never never get onto the the bus that would bring me to the sheltered bus-stop outside my hall.

i'd just finished editing the first-half draft of my FYP and handed it in to the prof. so i was kind of not-in-a-hurry anymore, and since i was without an umbrella and it was raining like a bunch of freaked-out cats chased by a troupe of snarling salivating ravenous bullhounds i decided to hop onto a shuttle bus to get back to hall.

since i'd already paid for the service anyway.

i take the shuttle bus like only thrice a semester, so i am really unfamiliar with its workings, such as which bus goes where and which button to press to stop the damn vehicle.

but i'm laid-back and cool, so i just hopped onto the first bus that came my way.

when it turned into the lane leading to the unsheltered bus-stop across from my hall i knew it was the wrong one. but no matter, since a dash through the width of a road is shorter than a dash through a whole stretch of road.

as a sidenote, everytime the bus makes a turn, goes uphill or downhill, or decides that its getting too quiet, it would start beeping irregularly.

so it was that the bus trundled right past my stop and a group of people said 'shit, we forgot to press the bell coz we tot someone else did it'. the group of people got off at the next stop and ran the whole stretch of road back while i stayed put and decided to wait for the bus to make one big round and reach my stop again.

midway through the journey, the uncle suddenly stopped at a hall and made a mad dash as though the bus was ladden with bombs. a toilet trip. and then he made another mad dash back to his position as we all waited patiently without a care in the world. 

there is something strangely relaxing about sitting down and watching the scenery roll by slowly, and observing how the trees and shrubberies were soaking up the rain greedily and waving in the wind. or knowing that your speed lies not on how fast you can manage to pump your leg muscles but on how urgently the bus-uncle wants to get to the next stop and relieve himself.

it was then that i suddenly realized that whoa, even though i was described as laid-back, over-confident of time-management capabilities,  and spend all my time playing games, the tempo of my life had been really fast. 

maybe all i need is just one bus ride to nowhere in particular all by myself. 

for the past 1 week after i handed in my fyp half-draft (its not even the first draft -_-) i'd been bored. with nothing to do. really bored. and so i took the liberty of ravaging onemanga.com for all its online scanlations and i hit a few gems. at the same time, here are some other gems i picked up from mangatraders.com. here you go if you're bored, people~:-

Supernatural: 

1. Shiki by Fujisaki Ryu and Fuyumi Ono. Currently at chapter 3. Artistically rendered, with suspense and a bit of spookiness, and it gives you something to think about.

2. Immortal Regis by Ga Onbi and Ju Deo. Beautiful art. About a human recently turned zombie leaving the human world for school in another world.

3. Dokebi Bride by Marley. About a gifted priestess thrown into the supernatural world without a guide and how she tries to survive. 

Shoujo:

1. Koukou Debut by Kawahara Kazune. Ok, this is old. But if I haven't raved enough about this manga, hear me rave. Its great~! A straight-forward love comedy with no stupid things like rivals, parents, rich companies etc.

2. Shiawasa Kissa Sanchome by Matsuzuki Kou. A loveable and funny manga about a happy super-strength girl working in a cafe with a gruff baker and a sleepy idiot.

Other good but very old mangas would be:

MX0, Gokusen, One Piece, Katekyo Hitman Reborn, Fairy Tale,  Claymore, Eyeshield 21, Otogi Matsuri, Aqua, Aria, You are my Girlfriend, Hoshi no Uta.

Things that turned bad halfway :(

D.Grayman, Naruto and Deathnote.