How to use a clicky pencil

Hehe, my friend did this, check it out: How to : Use a clicky pencil It's pretty cute :D And we can try not wasting lead! ;)

Wanna play chess?

Someone recommended me a site to play chess online: GameKnot.

The good thing about it is that it's not real time, you have up to 3 days (or more) to make a move. My username there is wpyeoh if you'd like to search for me after registering (if you register :P)

I hadn't been playing for about, what, 4 years? and this has made me rediscover the joys of playing (to put it a little, uh, formally lol), so I suppose I have the person who recommended the site to thank. ^_^

14 degrees?!

I couldn't believe it when I looked at the weather report and saw that it was 14°C outside! But it was really sunny, so I opened my window to feel the temperature outside...and it was really...not that cold! After the past few days of super cold weather, I must say I wasn't expecting this! Well, I'll take advantage of the moment and open my window for a while... :)

The good old days in Angoulême...

I miss those days!
When holidays were just holidays, with no work to do...
When it was so easy to find "the others", just a few steps away, no need to even go out of the building!
When we lepak-ed quite often in our class... (okay, at every "pause"!)
When we could recognise each and every one of us only by our shoes...haha

Actually I just re-stumbled onto Firdaus' old blog, and oh my, is it a memory chest! (as in treasure chest, get it?)
21 June 2004, fête de la musique, the first time since a very long time that I had cotton candy! (and I just had it again in Lyon...already missed it :P)

2 links :)

Calvin's Art of the Snowman
I've posted some of these before, but here's the whole works! :P

and some interesting (?) things to think about...

Cutting down 3 hours of class to 1 hour

Oh yeah, holidays are here!

This afternoon, we were supposed to have one hour of Maths, and two hours of Chemistry. But we ended up with half an hour of Maths, and half an hour of Chemistry! Even our one hour of Maths lecture earlier ended 10 minutes early. Everyone's in holiday mood, the teachers just know that they can't manage to teach us much :P

Coincidences

Here are a few coincidences if you like reading about them ;)

(Thanks to Casper)

I got a 53!

I haven't been playing minesweeper a lot for some time, and when I do play, I haven't been playing very well! Then lately I managed to play slightly better on intermediate, and yesterday I beat my "speed" record on that level. However, my expert game was lamentably slow and clumsy...(more clumsy than slow, actually)

So today I've been playing expert, and guess what?! I got myself a 53! My previous was a 55, done in May! So hey, I'm happy! Yippee! :D

Here's the video!

Événements ralentis!

Wow

(Slow-motion photos, really amazing! The comments are in French though.)

Unique chicken rice stall

Here's an interesting article :P It seems that there's a chicken rice stall in Kuching where there are no tables, no chairs, but they actually use plates and spoons and forks!

I'm just wondering though: why don't they just sell ta pau chicken rice?

The chicken rice looks good though...I want some!!! *sniff*

Foire aux interros!

I have two tests this week and two next week. But when you look closely, there are actually four tests in a week (exactly, counting the hours!)

Wednesday 13th Dec: Computer Science (10am-12pm)
Friday 15th Dec: Maths
Monday 18th Dec: Physics
Wednesday 20th Dec: Chemistry (8.30-10am)

So you see, in 7 x 24 hours we have four tests.

Then we'll have two weeks Christmas holidays, then a test-free week, then a Mechanics test.

Title: Test fair (literally)

Trop bien ce prof!

This happened last Friday. Don’t know why I didn’t write about it earlier, though.

This year we have a great Chemistry teacher (and by that I mean the teacher for our group) We have a teacher for lectures, and depending on our group, we might have the same teacher or a different one for when we do exercises.

This teacher explains really well, of course, without which he wouldn't be a good teacher at all. But what makes him so great (to me, at least) is that he has a sense of humour I totally agree with. He manages to say the most dictatorial things, with an absolutely straight face, yet not seem like a total rogue (or the wicked witch from the west, an expression which comes to mind :P) I don't know how he does it. (okay, maybe it's with that little smile at the corner of his mouth...)

For example, last week he had given us some exercises to prepare (he does that every week) but there was a change in our time-table and we didn't have our usual Chemistry lecture. So we hadn't learnt what we needed to do the exercises. When we told him that, he asked us whether we had seen certain things, and it went something like this:

him: Have you seen [something]?
us: No
him: It's okay, you don't need it. And have you seen this?
us: No, we've only seen [another something]
him: Oh, that's enough! You've seen this formula? [he gives us a formula, THE formula we were going to use]
us: No
him: Well, now you've seen it.

And here I just cracked up with laughter (inwardly, though ;) ) It might not be so funny written down, but each and every one of his replies were just so calm and unperturbed, he was calmly telling us that no way were we going to get away, we were going to do the exercises!

Oh yeah, and another thing I love about this teacher is that he does mental arithmetic! If he's solving a problem on the board, when there's a sum or a difference (or a multiplication or a division, okay, you get the idea) that we can solve without using a calculator, he does it! Up till now the teachers always ask us for the values...

The one thing I don't like about him is that he corrects test questions on the board before giving us back our papers, and I do not like that! He's only done it once, since we've only had one test, and I hope he won't do it again, but I somehow doubt it... :/

The title means "this teacher is so great!"

For French-speakers, I'll put a little "original quotes" here for the end of the dialogue:
le prof: Vous avez vu cette formule?
nous: Non
le prof: Ben maintenant vous l'avez vue.

[I thank my teacher, S.P., without whom this post wouldn't have been possible ;) ]

Megapixels

Here's an article I found interesting: The myth of maximum megapixels

Aha! I thought so! (okay, well, I just thought that I didn't need that many megapixels, since my camera seems okay to me...:P)

Courtesy of Casper the friendly ghost (hehe, I didn't know ghosts took photos)

Friend quote

My mother sent me this quote. I wondered where to put it, and why not here?

A true friend is not like rain that pours and goes. It's more like the air,
sometimes keeping quiet but is always there, constantly being around.

Yum yum!

Imagine that you are in France, and you haven't eaten any of the Malaysian kuih-muih in months...then one day you come across...sagu! That makes you think of kuih sagu, and you suddenly remember that your mother had made it before! So you ask her for the recipe, and one day when you finally get all the ingredients you try making it...and ta-da!


Unfortunately I had to use dessicated coconut instead of freshly grated coconut...but I guess it's good enough when you're not in Malaysia! Actually it gives a bit of "crunch" to the kuih...but then that's not what we're looking for...:/

Which way is the wind coming from?

We did this in Fabrication (it’s a subject ;) ) We had to cut out the pieces of metal, solder a few together, drill holes, roll them up or “fold” them (all with machines, of course!) I must say that I like the drilling part best :) I don’t like soldering (the tail was done by the teacher, he did it for everyone) ‘cos I can’t solder :P I just can’t do a straight line, and when I do, it doesn’t work either ‘cos I didn’t heat the metal long enough, bla bla bla... :/ But this time I managed it! Hehe, it was because we only had to solder a few points (or dots), and I didn’t even do that very well, it looked totally awful when I was done! But at least the pieces of metal stick together! :P And we don’t even see it because the rolled-up piece hides the, um, ugliness :P

Now I have to find a place to put my fish (no, not in water!) I would have liked putting it outside my window, but I can’t ‘cos there’s no flat surface...there’s a slanting window ledge and even if I managed to put it there it’s too narrow to let the fish turn.

Moonlight

Some nights ago it was the full moon. Each time I thought of writing this it was at night, when I had already switched off my computer, and by the next morning I had forgotten. (you'll find out why I only think of it at night :P)

In books we find a lot of references to the moonlight. But I had never actually seen moonlight before. (have you?) I've seen the moon, of course, but the light was never bright enough to actually be seen. I think that one of the reasons might be that in M'sia, when we're outside and see the moon, there are streetlights that drown out the moonlight. And at home, I never see the moon from the window since it is, uh, blocked :P

When I was in Angouleme I never saw moonlight either, though now when I think of it, it might have been possible from a higher floor. I was on the first floor, and there was a streetlight just across the street from my window, so every night I had the light from the streetlight streaming into my room. That would probably drown out the moonlight as well. (and maybe the moonlight was blocked by other buildings across the street...who knows?)

It was last year, when I was staying in INSA that I finally realised that all I had read in books were true, that moonlight can actually be bright enough to see things! lol One night I came back to my (usually) dark room (I think it was after playing badminton or table-tennis) and when I opened the door, instead of a dark room there was a light coming in through the window (I had windows stretching across one side of the room, so there was a lot of space for the light to pass through!) I was on the fourth floor, so this time there were no streetlights, and it took me a moment to realise that it was the moonlight (of course, I've gotten used to that by now :P)

Now I'm on the seventh floor, and the moonlight was quite bright these past few nights, which is why I thought of writing this! :P

Do not confuse speed with haste

A golden example!

It's a new minesweeper record in the non-flagging (NF) arena (45 seconds), by Roman Gammel from Russia. Played really calmly, and quickly as well, he certainly manages not to confuse speed with haste!

A change to adapt to

I just came back from playing badminton. In the club, we just play for fun, but sometimes we play a few matches (matches are fun ;) ), and today we played using the new scoring system. I had never used that before, so it felt weird...I kept forgetting that every point counted, and we seemed to lose points really quickly, and then catch up pretty quickly as well! It’s kinda dangerous, I guess :P Maybe I should be used to this kind of system since it is really similar to the table-tennis scoring system (duh, first table-tennis changes from 21 points to 11, then badminton decides to copy it’s old scoring system! Okay, not exactly...) but then when I think badminton I think a different scoring system! lol

(If you want to know more about the scoring system, I suggest you take a look at Wikipedia, I took a look at the article to understand the system, since I didn't quite understand it while playing earlier :P)

PS: I really think it's crazy to change the scoring system this way...it kills traditional badminton! I mean, the game is hardly the same any more! At least in table-tennis the change only shortened the game and nothing else... anyway, whatever. It's not like I have a say in it :/

A little experiment

Check this out:

A man in a restaurant asked a waiter for a juice glass,
a dinner plate, water, a match, and a lemon wedge. The
man poured enough water onto the plate to cover it.

"If you can get the water on the plate into this glass
without touching or moving this plate, I will give you
$100," the man said. "You can use the match and lemon to
do this."

A few minutes later, the waiter walked away with $100 in
his pocket. How did the waiter get the water into the
glass?


Answer:

First, the waiter stuck the match into the lemon wedge,
so that it would stand straight. Then he lit the match,
and put it in the middle of the plate with the lemon.
Then, he placed the glass upside-down over the match.
As the flame used up the oxygen in the glass, it created
a small vacuum, which sucked in the water through the
space between the glass and the plate. Thus, the waiter
got the water into the glass without touching or moving
the plate.

You can try this experiment at home!

Hmm...can we really try it? I'd like to...but I don't have matches! lol
I'm a bit skeptical... is the vacuum really strong enough to suck in the water? Let me know if you try it!