Big Bang grows on me with every new music video. This one is so emo and pretty; the cinematography is really niiiice. I wish JE would spend a bit more money and produce something awesome too once in a while.

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Finally packed, and leaving in a few hours. If all goes well, Allah and Rasul willing, then hello, Scotland! :) yayyyyyy.

Oh, Michael. :( All he wanted to say, eh.

My response to this was :O absolute amazement. I think my hair was standing. Thank you for good people like Chomsky, Finkelstein and friends who stand up for truth no matter what.

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable. 


~ C.S. Lewis


Been reading my old LJ posts. And being uber-reflective. And as I reflect on my younger self, I realise that maybe I don't give myself enough credit. I try too hard and feel disappointed in myself too much. I am not supposed to be superwoman what, right. I know better now; like Yujie keeps saying, sometimes it's good to realise that we're human.


If skies remain clear and ash-less, Eunice and I will be in Scotland this coming Tuesday. :))) And I can fulfill one of the major things on my wishlist. Oh, Scotland - land of many of my beloved things; it's been a long time coming.

Leong Hon Wai had a sharing session for our CS projects this past friday; it was supposed to be for fun -- no grading or assessment, and we had lunch. We wanted to order Oishii Pizza (I didn't know it was halal!!!) but they took too long to deliver, so we tried Dominoes (which was, unbeknown to me, also halal!). But then Dominoes has a super restricted delivery area which did not include NUS -- so at last, we resorted to the regular Pizza Hut. So anyway, it was an interesting sharing session, and I am reminded once again why I think computer science is fascinating. It should be taught as a compulsory subject in secondary school! Like taught properly as concepts (like recurrence and abstraction); not the completely forgettable lessons we had about Flash or Photoshop.

Snapshots of our My Gene-y application produced on the graphical programming interface, Scratch (download Scratch here)! I thought that maybe the project file could be exported as mpeg or flash or stg upload-able on blogger, but I couldn't find anything that worked... so too bad.

Basically, My Gene-y predicts how the child would look like using simple molecular genetics, given info about the parents:

One of the groups made a Love Relationship Predictor, that made everyone highly amused. It's based on differential equations applied to romance and emotion, and was actually published as a paper by this physicist called Stephen Strogatz, called Romeo and Juliet Mathematics. There's a funny New York Times article here (the comments are funny to read too, haha) and some explanation about how the equations work here. The group that did the program made very interesting graphs of feelings against time, and man feelings against woman feelings -- and apparently, there are a few situations where couples will keep spiraling between mutual love, unrequited love (on both parts!) and mutual hatred. XD Drama, please!

"I never could understand differential equations and I never could understand women. Oh well."


Also, here's the website for USP UIT2201 module, Computer Science and the IT Revolution. One of those rare modules I won't ever forget about, yay.

Warning: JE update -- plot thickens!

According to Tokyo Sports via uwasako, Jin is really going to leave Kattun, since he managed to secure a significant role in a Pirates of the Carribean movie (somehow, I seriously doubt this) and is going to be all famous in the US and the rest of the world. -.- Or so he thinks.

I can't even express how irritated I am with Jin right now. He's irritated me from day one, and now, he's more annoying than ever. And if you were to ask me which JE boy I hate, it'd definitely be Jin before anyone else -- because seriously, could anyone else appear more self-centred??? How Yamapi is best friends with this idiot is simply beyond me. It has led to many a conversation about boys and their strange ideas of friendship. I really don't know how Kattun stands him. I imagine Kame barely able to control his temper or something, and I can also totally imagine what kind of scenario led to the breakdown of their once-best-buds relationship. I seriously, seriously, abhor people like Jin.

kuchiks says:
 Hehe
Shake says:
 hehehehe
furby from madagascar says:
 ape korang ketawa ni
Tiki says:
 heeehehe
 secret.
furby from madagascar says:
 tebiat ah
Shake says:
 cute kan
 hahaa
furby from madagascar says:
 aduh... -_-
Shake says:
 yelah
 shamiah jer tak tebiat
Tiki says:
 hahah
Shake says:
 kiter kiter jer
Tiki says:
 pasal dia scot.
furby from madagascar says:
 diam ah
Shake says:
 tau takpe qah
 scotgirl
Tiki says:
 akak, should change your nickname to Scotgirl~
 cool pe.
furby from madagascar says:
 -_-
Shake says:
 hot sehh
 tuka ah tuka
 go go!
Tiki says:
 HAHAHA
kuchiks says:
 Haha
 Furby cute wat
scotgirl says:
 nah -_-

yay, we have settled USS visit dates: 7th and 15th June. :)

I only disagree with this, with regard to cockroaches, eheh.

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Done with exams today. :D Slowly letting it sink in that I'm actually done with undergrad life. I'm giving myself a little rest time before stressing about what to do next. and yoshi, Scotland in two weeks! Dear volcanoes of Iceland, please no more eruptions, please? Thanks.

I want to spot these animals in Scotland!

At the very least, free roaming sheep shouldn't be too hard to find?

I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

~ The Bell Jar by Slyvia Plath

This rings a bell, because my gosh, there was a time when I felt like this -- maybe not quite as extreme. But bad enough that I felt if anyone were to talk to me properly, to ask earnestly and sincerely, Hey, are you happy?, I would have burst into tears without so much as a pause or a warning. The description of a glass of tears full to the brim is just so apt. When you have bottled up so much, that's how it gets. And it's not about one thing or even several things, it's this inexplicable, unexplainable accumulation of hurt that seemed to have no beginning; like it had always been there, and then it had become too much to ignore.

And I have never been more grateful than anything in my life than to have overcome this. And in a way, I'm also grateful I actually went through all that depressed crap; because it has, I like to think, made me wiser and stronger; that now, I can actually talk about it. :) I remember a conversation I had with duckie long ago, when I said how life seems to be a long series of valleys with only a couple of peaks that come far in between. And she was like, Shouldn't it be the other way round!!! More peaks, fewer valleys! Now, I don't even care, haha. It's not about the peaks and valleys; it's that I can smile no matter what. Sometimes, when I see people being sad, I want to say GANBATTE! -- you can do it too. Don't give up like Sylvia Plath, who stuffed herself in an oven and died. What a waste of an intelligent woman.

---

Today, I drove to sayyidat liqa' and back!!! :DDD My brother was all, Just drive lah! So I did, and it was okay, although my sis really had to direct me because I am just totally, totally bad at directions. Then we had waqfa ma'an nafs (i.e. Reflecting on ourselves), and Mami Bee gave me a shoulder massage! Awesomeness. And halfway through I just felt truly happy and fuzzy inside because I don't know how many of us realise how special it is that we get to do this -- sit around every other week, being together, learning, talking and loving each other, just for Allah and Rasul's sake. It's the little things about the usrah, really the little things, that affirm my heart in this.

I finally finished watching Ayat-Ayat Cinta today.

Spoilers!

Mostly, I want to make this face: -________- but I concede there were a few saving graces. And it got a little better near the end, although of course everything was quite predictable. A brief synopsis: Fahri marries Aisha while his Christian neighbour, Maria (who is secretly and desperately in love with him) is away to visit a relative. She comes back and is devastated. Prior to this, Fahri always treated Maria as a friend and they were chummy, and together they helped a girl, Noura, escape the clutches of her abusive fake-father. Noura also falls in love with Fahri (let me make this face again -_______-) and does not hesitate to make it known to him, only of course he doesn't reciprocate. Noura then, inexplicably to him, accuses him of raping her. Maria then becomes a key witness in saving Fahri, and to do this, he had to marry her. -______-

Biggest, widest, gaping loophole: that the court refused to accept future DNA testing in order to ascertain that the child was Fahri's. Hello, which court of law today would refuse to do that??? The excuse of possible miscarriage is rubbish! My goodness. By this point, I was already feeling pretty irritated (and I'll explain why soon) and this was the straw that broke the camel's back.

I was very irritated with almost all the female characters. Seriously. I only barely like Aisha. The general theme is supposedly to show how Islam dignifies women but the ladies in the story are pathetic! As though Fahri is the only dude worth having! Especially that Nurul girl, his senior -- like what was she thinking, letting her parents beg him for marriage after he's married??? Fahri's roommates seem equally decent what -- pick one of them lah. Also, I'm sure the real Al-Azhar female undergraduates feel affronted that Nurul represents their kind; a Muslimah scholar ripping pictures of guys off noticeboards and pasting them in her notebook and drawing hearts and scribbling 'I love you's all over???? Seriously? If I were an Al Azhar student, I'd be waaay irritated. Bloody hell, I'm irritated already. I don't know if I'm being overly sensitive or what -- but I feel irritated, deep in my bones, at how females never seem to be portrayed well enough even by Muslims themselves when we know Aisha r.a. for instance, was a fantastically intelligent woman whose authority on hadith was very much undisputed. We have these guys learning from big sheikhs and being wonderful Muslims and on the other hand we have the women in the movie being pathetic saps, tearing their hair over a single man, however nice he may be notwithstanding.

Haiyoh, things like these make me irritated. I think the drama Nur Kasih made a better portrayal of the issue of polygamy. The Malaysians were a little bit more realistic -- although we have to concede that they both conveniently had the second wife die at the end.

What I did like about Ayat-ayat Cinta: the jail scene - when Fahri was being taunted by his jail mate, and the weird dude actually made reference to Nabi Yusuf a.s.. Very nice. Also, cinematography was very very pretty. And okay, the songs -- awesome, heh.

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Gotta go for liqa' soon, and want to paste this here.

furby from madagascar! :P