being bored, i tried googling "mrliew", and to my amazement this blog is #1 on it. muahahaha, at least i can boast that i have a website than features #1 on google - some people pay money to get their sites listed ahead of others', but i guess no one bothers with an obscure search string like "mrliew" =)

anyway, on the second page of my googling adventure, i found this:

(link)

haha am amazed that mcafee would bother parsing through personal blogs to check for potential threats (eg spam, scams). but whatever the case, mine's certified to be safe.. don't you feel a warm, fuzzy feeling in your heart knowing that this site is safe from any malicious threats? =P

i know i'm 7 years too late but.. i'm currently playing lots of stepmania, a ddr clone.

stepmania's great because it theoretically could let the user play any song - so long he has the song and the file containing the steps associated with it, the program would play the file fine. i've gotten ~800mb of ddr songs (from 1st mix to 5th mix), so yep i've got tons of songs to choose from haha.

i started playing only last week, when chris borrowed a dance mat from one of our senior. that night, we had a ddr party of abt 6 people - which is quite a lot cos we only had one mat. among the 6 was a pro who played a lot when he was in secondary school, and he was quite willing to teach us noobs certain dance patterns, for instance:

this is a complete turn - right leg on right, then left leg on down, right on left and then left on up (confusing? haha). this song, butterfly, is from ddr 1st mix, and it's one of my faves cos there are about 3 clockwise and anticlockwise turns in the dance steps haha.

since chris has flown back home already, the mat has been passed to me (on a sidenote, my room accumulated stuff over the past week as pple use my room as sort of a storeroom for their more valuable stuff, and the mat is not an exception to the rule). i've been spending ~2hrs/day on stepmania over the last few days, and now i could pass most 3-feet songs and some 4-feet ones - songs are ranked in order of difficulty by the number of feet, 10 is the max. these two hour sessions are super tiring lah - i'd be sweating copiously and my feet would be aching after those dratted 4-feet 170bpm songs.

according to the pro he could do 6-feet songs reasonably well in 2 weeks' time. let's see how far i (can) progress haha. fun fun =)

plans is actually a not very appropriate word in this case - i'm actually quite clueless about what i'd be doing over summer. basically, i'm part of a team that'd be washing test tubes pottering around in a constructive manner in a lab over summer. what we're going to do exactly is still quite undecided - there are about 10 of us in the team, and we'd be meeting up only next monday to decide what to do in these 12 wks..

it's a good thing that the team size is large - we were told that we could take 1-2 weeks off to travel or go back home, so yep i'd probably be using that to pop back home as long as possible. as for exactly when this is, i have totally no idea haha. great summer plans, i have =)

i got a link purporting to be from "hsbc uk", which directed me to this site that prompted me to "reconfirm" my password with them. i have to admit they made the site look very similar to that from the authentic hsbc - try to spot which one is fake. i blanked out the URL, which actually gives it away haha.











hard to tell, really, but the top one's the fake one. any pros can spot other telltale signs besides the URL?

all of cambridge bereaved the temporary passing of janet - nope, it's not a "she", it's a computer network (used to be a known as the contraction of the UK Joint Academic NETwork) (link).

the problem started around 11-ish, when access to the internet started to be horribly slow, which i originally attributed to my firewall. but after doing a bit of snooping around, i was told everyone in camb had the same problems. by then i could only access certain websites - blogspot was totally cut off for instance.

by 2pm everything went belly-up - zero internet access to anywhere except websites hosted on the cambridge network. i was surprised how dependent i am on the internet - since i'm cooping myself up in my room most of the time, i do a lot of random surfing (and wow-ing now). on hindsight, it's not a bad thing, as i finally "had a life" yesterday after a few days of closing myself up haha.

the internet connection wasn't fully restored until this morning - long live janet!

yep, azeroth's my new home currently =)

the last paper - biochem paper 3 - was a really tough one, and everyone came out cursing and swearing..

we were supposed to plot three graphs - which was really unprecendented! it was tough to even find 2 "plot xx against yy" questions in the same year for the past few years, and now 3 in a year?

grrrrrr.

but on the other hand i dun care liao lah. i'll know my results in.. 12 days time? meanwhile i shall be a happy ignorant person and increase my spectacle lens thickness by playing more computer games =)

bombed my cdb paper 2 haih. section a was relatively ok, could have been much harder, but i guess the examiners spared our lives this year.

for section b, i really should have opened my eyes larger and look at the question - one of the questions asked for the "model organisms" chosen to study developmental processes, but i failed to notice the word "development". after happily writing 3.5 sides of foolscap paper on all the model organisms used in labs, i only realised my grave mistake when i was writing the conclusion of the essay - i swear, my heart sank to the pits of my stomach when i noticed the exact wording of the question..

and i didn't have time to reword the essay. HAIZZZZZZZ

anyway 2 papers left, am looking forward to the end of tripos already, and the mindless days of fun ahead =)