carrots in a berlin pastry shop

Euro

Absolut paris

nice hostel, small and clean and comfy. rooms are compact. attached
toilets. free breakfast, even though its just croissonts, and bread
and coffee and orange juice.
pretty far from the main tourists things, but very accessible by
subway. free internet.

It is worth while to buy a pack of 10 subway and bus tickets, which
cost 11.50 euro, than to buy individual tickets. in the 3 days, we
used about 10 tickets each.

Brussels
must visit petit rue bouchers. awesome food street with restaurants.
thanks to Mr Dumortier for recommending the place.
the grand place is also very nice.

Amsterdam- stayokay zeeburg

very impressive hostel. clean and large rooms with attached bathroom.
toilet bowl and showers and sink are seperated, so people can use
differet facilities at the same time.
there is wifi facilities, but they only gave 30 mins free per person.
additional time needs to be purchased.

we just missed the flower exhibition which ended on 21 may. a pity.

saundeman's free walking tours are awesome. they give a good idea of
the history and geography of the city. we haven't tried any of their
paid tours.

paris

I don't like paris. Its smelly, and dirty. Lots of graffiti and cigarette butts everywhere.

We spent about 11euro each on transport (pack of 10 single trip tickets). Food costs about 5 to 7 euros for fast food or kebabs, and 12 to 15 euro at a cheaper french cafe.

We visited the eiffel tower, arc de triump, champ elysees on the first day, notre dam and the lourve on the 2nd day, and chateau of versailles, church of the sacred heart, and moulin rouge on the third day.

Day 2 in london

Change of guards at the palace

Millenium bridge and st pauls cathedral

natural history museum

lunch in a chinese restaurant

change of guards

its 10:45pm in london now. im too tired to write. i shall just upload pictures and caption

Hate this

901

Spent my afternoon setting up my dad's old 901s. It took so long because many components were spoilt. i had to trouble shoot between 3 cd players 2 receivers and an amp.

biochem

After 2 days of stressing thinking i lost my biochem file 1 , i found it hidden behind all my other files. So silly. I have too many files. Ug.

Bye bye

Dinner

This was my dinner on sunday. It was terrible preparing it. I dropped a glass bottle of olive oil while preparing the spaghetti, then spent most of the evening cleaning the kitchen. I realized i didn't have tomato paste, so i tried using cream as a base. Looks like the rocky's pizza boston clam chowder, doesn't taste as good.

argh

so much to study. argh.

Welcome to Women's Clinic of Singapore - Commonly Asked Questions

I was reading up about abortion in Singapore while working on this week's ethic's assignment about gender selection. When I came upon this...

Welcome to Women's Clinic of Singapore - Commonly Asked Questions

I feel disturbed reading this guys FAQs.

and this...

"Although, Dr Jen’s background is in O & G, which he has been practicing for more than 25 years, he has also had a special interest in the field of aesthetics for a number of years. His patients are all female and beauty is always uppermost in the female mind."

Besides the bad grammar, it seems to shout "MONEY!"

Travellers

a 20 hour train ride

some travellers are restless. they walk up and down the corridor and explore every corner of the train.

some will try to get to know as many other travellers as possible. friendly? annoying?

some take detours at every stop possible, prolonging the 20 hours to days... months

some just stay in their seats and sleep. eyes open / eyes closed. thats what the train companies expect. the optimal configuration. buy a seat, stay in the seat. if everyone talked and walked, the train would be a mess.

Jbl in a box

Very Pleased

A few months ago, I felt something was wrong with my car audio. Something was different. I thought my right speaker was wonky, and that the sound was softer on the right side. I remember my sister and feli was in the car, and I kept asking them if it sounded off balanced. I thought maybe I had hearing loss in one ear or something. I tried to compensate with the rather limited EQ on the stock head unit of the Lancer EX.

I thought maybe I needa crank up the woofer a bit, so I decided to yank off my passenger seat and adjust the amplifier for the woofer. That took a while because I procrastinated for weeks, and couldn't find the right spanner. Yesterday I finally bothered to go to the hard ware shop to buy the correct sized spanner to yank off my passenger seat to tune the amplifier below the seat.

I played around with the amp, only to realize it was my speaker that was spoilt, not anything to do with the amp. I double checked by hooking up my yamaha stagepas 300 speaker to my car amp, which worked beautifully. I tried the reverse, hooking up the powered mixer to the car speaker. The speaker produced no sound, unless I applied pressure on the 4 o'clock position, and still only fuzzy crackly sound was produced. Dad said the speaker coil was stuck. He advised me to go sungai road to find someone who could repair it.

My uncle and cousin came to visit today, and to pick up a pair of shoes which my cousin will pass to my sis in aus. He said no one really repairs speaker coils nowadays, so I decided to buy a new one.

Searched around, autobacs, chuan sing, and this nam huat audio, managed to find a 2nd hand jbl sub woofer for $80, which included helping me mount it in my old speaker box. I'm quite pleased with the price, and the sound quality. I just hope it doesn't spoil like the boston accoustic one I had for just over a year.

I felt happy driving home. The sound is so much fuller now.

I brought the old subwoofer home. I'll try to repair it some day... right...

Basment SketchUp

I was fussing over the mess in my basement when I was looking for a spanner to remove my front passenger seat of the car to adjust my sub woofer amplifier volume. My basement is just too messy because theres hardly any furniture, so our junk is just piled all over the floor in boxes. Our TV sits on an shoe chest turned on its side, theres a couch, a piano, an ironing rack, and some metal shelves in the side store room area.

So I was imagining (again) how I would do up the basement, and tried to youtube for some CADing software, then I found this FREE Google SketchUp, which was pretty simple to use. Initial learning was quite challanging, but it wasn't rocket science. The help tips were actually helpful (unlike most microsoft help tips) and unobtrusive.

I sorta sketched my basement. Took me a while because I had to go dig up my floor plans from the last renovation, clean it up, print it out, measure the room, then measure the scale. For all the time I took, I don't think my 3d model is very much to scale. All the rounding off here and there would probably add up. But I'm really glad I could use the software and print out a vague representation of what was in my head, because the last 3 or 4 times I tried to explain my concept to my parents and my maid... nothing much got through.

Whats not in the plan are the 2 ceiling fans, the aircon unit above the piano, the intended projector, and the intended projector screen which will be on the short wall perpedicular to the cabinet and opposite the sofas.

Vase or electric bulb?

"the rectal contents are supported by the levator ani muscles, possibly assisted by the transverse rectal mucosal folds. For these reasons, the removal of a large foreign body, such as a vase or electric light bulb, from the rectum may be a formidable problem" - snell

A vase or light bulb. Wow. Formidable problem indeed.

Facial!

Some body likes seaweed eye mask! Thats not me!

Da Qin Christian Monastry?

"At first it seemed to be a wonderful Chinese scene of the Five Sacred Mountains or possibly a representation of the five peaks of Hua Shan, one of the Taoist sacred mountains. But as my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, I could see what had foxed the cultural experts from the province. For the centre of the mountain had a cave created within it. And in the cave was the lower portion of a statue. The mountain and the cave were classical Chinese in design. The figure was not. The robes were Hellenistic in style and the posture was one never seen in Chinese religious art. I have worked extensively with the Russian and Greek orthodox Churches and thus I have become familiar with Orthodox iconography. I suddenly realised what I was looking at. In Orthodox iconography, the Nativity is not depicted as in Western art. The orthodox follow the description contained in the Book of James and this says that Mary gave birth to Christ in a cave in a mountain, by herself. In front of me I could see the mountain and the cave. And the figure of Mary - for so I believe it to be - lay exactly as she is often depicted in Orthodox icons, her right leg drawn up slightly, her left lying along the ground, holding the Christ Child who looks towards her. Above the cave, the celestial light shines down. Here was Mary; here the place where the celestial light had once been but had been ripped down; here outlined by dirt, was the shape of a child. I was looking at the earliest known Christian statue in China and it fused, just as I had always thought it would, Christian and Chinese art in the way that Gandharian art fused Greek and Buddhist art."

hmmm??



and whats up with this?

"Many have tried to present the early Church as one ship, ploughing forward, driven by truth, with odd heresies breaking away from it. In fact the Early Church of the first 4 centuries of the Christian era were a motley collection of distinct tradition s which drew upon and fused with a variety of local, pre-Christian traditions. In Britain for example, the Celtic Church arose, distinctive through its fusion of Christianity with Celtic traditions and even deities. Antioch developed a Christianity that fused Christianity with a humanism which was the hallmark of the philosophical schools of the City. Meanwhile down in Egypt, the Church of Alexandria fused Christianity with the ancient traditions of the goddess Isis and her infant son Horus to produce the earliest known statues of the Virgin Mary and the Christ child. Egyptian Christianity was far more transcendental, more concerned with godhead than the humanitarian traditions of Antioch.All this came to a head in the fifth century. The Roman Empire had turned Christian during the 4th century and sought to create One Church just as it saw itself as the One State. As a result, local divergences and differences came to be seen as a profound threat to the concept and unity of the One Church model. Gradually local versions of Christianity were absorbed, dismantled or dismissed. These differences often expressed themselves in debates about the nature and person of Christ. For reasons too complex to go into now, the Archbishop of Constantinople, Nestorius, was in 431 dismissed as a heretic and his teachings about the humanity of Christ were declared heretical."

Little John

Pre CA2