qing ming

The morning was chilly. I crawled out of bed and floated towards the bathroom; my feet barely touching the cold marble floor. I switched on the lights and looked into the mirror. good lord! Better shave and clean up so that I would not scare anyone at the cemetery later. Late nights do wonders to your eyes. Should I put one some male eyeliner to cover the eye bags? After adam lambert broke into the music scene, there is nothing embarrassing about a guy putting on make up anymore. I toyed with the idea for a while before dropping it. No matching tones to go with my white shirt.

My memory drew a black for what happened between here and arriving at the cemetery. Probably I fell asleep. I got off the car into the semi darkness. A dormitory stood half a mile away from the burial plots. Didn't remember it being there a few years back. What a place to house foreign workers. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw a few families spread out across the whole of Block 13. ah, its the time of the year where dead people grant living beings the right to walk around in pajamas. Why can't people put in a little more effort to dress up a bit?

There's not much cleaning to do. The tomb was well kept by the attendant. Within a short moment, we were already tucking into our breakfast. I hung around and chatted with my cousins whom I have not seen for years. Blue uniforms seems to run in our family. My dad and uncles were police NSFs. My sis and I were from NPCC. Now I have 2 cousins in it too. Our cue to leave came, when the morning sun rose above the horizon.

It was a beautiful sunrise. I'm gg to bed now.

Kakorrhaphiophobia

Here is a new word i have learnt today. Kakorrhaphiophobia which means a fear of failure or defeat. Which brings me to my personal fear hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia.

hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia - a fear of long words. aww man!?!? seriously.

googled

I just checked my Google Wave account. After all the hype, its pretty disappointing to see it lying inactive for months. A few new contacts added me to their list; other than that there were no new messages. From my experience, even the later released Buzz is faring better. Are my friends not tech savvy or do I not have a lot of friends? Sorry. At you guys' expense, I decided not to entertain the second thought. hur.

Alright. Got to get the morning started. First, I will check my Google mail, then will read my news on Google Reader, reply to a few messages on Google Buzz, check my schedule for the week on Google Calender, search for academic papers on Google Scholar and check out the exact location of Bt Timah Shopping center for dinner on Google Map.

What to do if Google decides to pull out of Singapore too?

irregular hours

My running plan has been disrupted. Morning rains, late nights rdv, evening lectures, hairline fractures, swollen ankles and continual assignments struck successively and repeatedly. I shall start pounding and cycling again from this weekend.

hot heels. hot wheels.

my kind of humor

"who goes first? the chicken or the egg?"-cj

hur hur.

we came and we ate

The hunt kicked off at 10am. We scurried to the following places in order; following our taste buds more than our heads. We weren't there to win the prize, we were there to eat as a prize. Unlike the foreigners who were acting like eager beavers running from food stalls to food stalls, we moved as we deemed fit. I could tell that our facilitator was slightly disappointed that we weren't running. Anyway, who runs after eating? We hit the stalls in the following order (* are those I personally like) :-

1.2. Zai Fa Mian Jia and Lai Cheng Shu Shi at Jurong west market and food center.
3. 4. Ice Garden Dessert and Boon Lay Fried Carrot Cake and Kway Teow at Boon Lay place market and food village.
5. 928 Laksa* at Blk 928 Yishun Central
6.7. Ban Heng Nasi Lemak* and HK style Zhu Chang Fen* at Chong Pang Food Center
8. 8 Tarts and Pastries at Tampines Mall
9. Xiao Bei Taiwan Food at Century Square
10. Love Bite* at Ubi Teckpark Kopitiam
11. Katong Famous Tau Kwa Pau at 126 East Coast Road
12. Lau Pa Sat Pig's Organ Soup at Marine Parade Food Center
13. 14. Ming hui yu pian tang and Ah Yee's Soon Kueh at Duman Road Food Center
15. 16. 17. 18. Western BBQ *(youan's fav), wang wang crispy puff, Aunty Oats Pancake and Geylang Lorong 20 Banana Fritters *(my all time fav) at Old Airport Road Centre.
19. Sweet Stone Holding* at Beach Road Golden Mile Food Center.

Imagine how much food we have eaten. After such a great eating experience, I came up with my principles of savory utility:-

1st principle of infinite marginal utility: When you are tired and hungry, everything taste good.
2nd principle of max utility: When you are tired and very stuffed, no matter how good the food taste it's just ok food.
3rd principle of Spatial Expansion: Even when you have eaten a full meal, there's always space to take in more desserts and sweet pastries.

So if any of you happen to drop by Tiong Bahru and know of any great local fares there, give me a ring. We go makan boleh.

i don't want to count my calories intake yesterday.

food hunt

Nus FASS Food hunt is on tomorrow! Why did i take part? Because there's food involved. It involves an island wide hunt for mouth watering local flavors. Scattered over more than 30 locations, participating teams can only move around using public transports. As my saying goes, "You can take the personality out of an engineer, but you cannot take the engineer out of your personality." First thing that came to my mind is: let's write a routing algorithm. Being a proponent of stochastic optimization, I have already mentally modeled tomorrow's food race using the famous Traveling Sales man Problem (TSP). Objective: To earn as many points as possible. Constraints: 8hrs time constraint. Using graph theory, the food stalls can be the vertexes while the time between food stalls can be the weights of the non directed edges. Discrete computational optimization? No problem. Genetic algorithm will then be used to generate the best solution! Voila, we have ourselves a winning formula!

what the heck. why not just go there, have fun and enjoy the good food?

engineers. hmpt. people who take the fun away from everything.