Compaq is back! Fresh hard disk. Which means I lost everything before. But nevermind. At least compaq is up and running again.

As promised: photos from our outing to the zoo to celebrate mumu's birthday.

















That's it for now.

It is 1.45 am and I am so incredibly happy, I want to dance! :D I managed to successfully compile my first ever complex computer program and I can almost cry for joy. I am a nerd, I know.

yayyayayayay! I am not hopeless at programming after all. There is hope yet for me. :)

When I saw the "Awesomely Excellent" results, I wanted to collapse in happiness and relief. Thank you, thank you, thank you God. And I am so proud that I didn't take the entire night debugging! It is not even 2 am. I think I'm finally getting the gist of the approach to programming.

ohmygosh. I should celebrate with a long bout of tv tomorrow morning, and some nice eclairs from delifrance. Or stg. Haha.

I'm sorry to bore you with my nerdiness, but I am too happy. And I still feel like dancing. :p When I get back my laptop (hopefully, by tomorrow. don't good things come in pairs?), I shall post those photos that have been long-due and this place shall have less programming-related stuff.

G'night!

Laptop still not back. -________-

I've been thinking: the best things always come unprecedented. (I'm not talking about my sick laptop now. And there were omens of the crash.) But really. That's why people always say love begins with a show of hate, eh? It then catches you unaware, and all for the better. (Think Elizabeth and Mr Darcy.) Part of the beauty is in you having missed it in the first place, and you think, "How could I?".

Also, with regards to celebrities: There comes a point when you start to pity them. Fame really is a double-edged sword. When you can't walk the streets to get a can of coke you're missing out on the most basic freedom, I say. I love some celebrities, and when their discomfort becomes obvious as the cameras are flashing and the girls are screaming, I just start feeling extremely sorry for them, and pray they are able to find peace someplace. How horrible it must be. And I just wish fangirls would stop screaming sometimes. Can't you be silent and appreciative fans from a distance?

If ever I were to bump into a celebrity I love, I'd properly freeze like an ice block or at least feign indifference. Like Kak Naz, who worked in a 7-11 once, and Sheila Majid walked in with her dad to buy stuff, and Kak Naz pretended she didn't know them. And only started screaming when they left. HAHA. That's what I'd probably do. Which is dumb, because you could have gotten their autograph right.

I have work to do, which I can't make myself do. It's so utterly depressing. Everytime I think of programming, my blood turns cold, I swear.

My laptop is sick. :( I think it got overheated, and then the hard disk could no longer be accessed. So I took it to Challenger this morning. I am majorly DEPRESSED. Nothing takes away joy like ripping my beloved laptop from me. I sleep with my laptop, wake up with my laptop. Now dearest compaq is absent, and there's a hole in my heart. How do I live!

More realistically, missing laptop spells disaster - how am I going to catch up with my lectures now? (Thank god at least that the coming week is recess week.) And how am I going to complete my programming lab? (Just thinking of C++ gives me shivers, I tell you.)

And mumu must be annoyed by now, cause I still haven't put up her birthday outing photos. And now it's gonna be even more delayed! :( My dear laptop, get well soon.

Aside from laptop fiasco, I have to report a strange change in me - I've become scarily more rebellious. Not the superficial scream-at-your-parents kind. It's more the so-what-if-I-don't-live-the-way-I'm-supposed-to kind. I want to rebel against the me I've been all my life. To look out the window, and just take off. I'm there at the window now and I just want to go so bad.

I've been wanting to to put up my CNY family picnic photos! BUT NO TIME. I can cry. Programming is killing me. NO joke man. I have been brought to tears. Nothing is worse than this. Chemistry almost seems like heaven to this. Goodness. I should have done pharmacy with Eunice, I think.

And tomorrow, we have a sit-in lab = code and submit within 2 hours.

And someone posted something real funny but very true in the forums.

How a sit-in lab will probably turn out for me:

Log on/open browser etc 1 min

Reading the question 1 min

Understanding the question 10 min

Figuring out an algorithm 20 min

Typing it out into Sunfire 10 min

Debugging code 20 min

Realising I misinterpreted question 1 min

Smacking my forehead 1 min

Cursing and Swearing 1 min

Frantically Trying to figure out another algo 30 min

Finding out it's too late, stares into my impending doom 15 min

HAHA. But man. People who have not given this a go just have no idea of the absolute hear-tearing frustration of programming. You should look at my bedroom floor after a night of, literally, hair-tearing and sleepless frenzy over Lab 2 the entire night and early morning; but sadly, I couldn't work that either.

Am walking a path of doom here!

Ugh. The next time I post better not be about programming.

I am so incredibly disappointed. I spent half of yesterday figuring out code for my programming lab, and stayed up till 4.30am at my laptop, and I still couldn't work it. :( Seriously. Programming causes much heartache and insanity. I should have taken a photo of my ragged self on my bed, surrounded by piles of notes, with crazed, wide eyes. I kept rummaging through the freaking notes every 5 minutes, when a possible new idea came to me, but still nothing worked. And the only reason I turned in at 4.30 was cause I could hear my granny waking up for morning prayers and I didn't want her to exclaim in shock that I hadn't slept a wink. Otherwise, I think I'd have kept at it till the deadline at 9 am this morning. Which would be nutty, but I was so irritated.

argh. so geram! I was so close to getting it. It was down to two freaking things. But they were essential things that made the output wrong. This means that, no matter how I was on the right track to figuring things out, if I cannot make the output exactly the same as the question states, I fail all test cases and lose 70% of the marks! It's like giving "Ilikeapples" when they ask for "I like apples", and they give you NO CREDIT AT ALL for cracking your head for more than 24 hours on it. EEESH. Yes, I understand, precision is of the utmost priority in computation, but goddamn it all, is no one going to acknowledge the crazy amount of effort and time that goes into this thing?

And I was so looking forward to going out with my sis today. But now, freaking codes are still swimming around in my head (cause I still haven't worked it out, although I am now powerless to alter my submission). I get so hung up about getting things.

I now have even greater respect for computer nerds.

Happy New Year, you Chinese people! Even I have elaborate gatherings coming.

Sometimes I think I'm so psychologically damaged, it's not funny.

Anyway, we were eating at duku road tonight. I managed to get the delicious briyani; it's usually sold out. And there was this adorable, adorable cat that kept mewing all the time for food. And it gave me the classic puss-in-boots-from-shrek type of teary stare - it was so irresistible! If you think that the people who did Shrek were overdoing the teary cat stare, you're wrong! My heart just melted at the the sight of his stare, and my sis and me kept throwing him chicken and mutton over the side of the table.



I swear the cat looked just like that! Except that he was black and white, not orange, and his eyes weren't green, and he wasn't holding a hat. But otherwise! This is a replica. Ohmygosh. I so want a cat.