If you heard an unholy, indescribable noise a few days back ( kinda like a Balrog's roar + Fran Drescher's laugh + Gilbert Gottfried's voice) it was just me screaming in anguish after weighing in at the gym for the first time since Suraya's surprise posh posh b'day high tea on Monday.

A very *high* tea indeed....

Moseyed on down to Oxford last monday for a day trip. Kudos to Naz who did all the stressing-to-the-max organizing AND made a cake herself. Must have been a pleasant surprise ( albeit a little unsettling at first ) to have someone suddenly drop by, give you a dress to wear , and order you to follow them to an undisclosed location in town.

Even the weather cooperated that day...

*Insert own comment either about sheer number of candles or something else pertaining to the crazed look or the knife*

Maddeningly British ( and carb-laden ) high tea. This plate of shortbreads, scones, sandwiches is for two......and we also got a slice of super rich cake( not counting Naz's cake ) and a pot of tea each. btw its Lapsang Souchong, not Tapsome BongBong

Urm yeah. Phooo-toooo. Eh i wasnt the only guy there okay!

Naz trying to pull an Audrey Hepburn. Malangnya jadi macam the visually impaired woman in front of Globe Silk Store playing keyboard liddat.

The rest of the week? Normal generic-brand nondescriptness:

i. Try and do work. Get sidelined by facebook/googlevids/youtube/msn. Repeat
ii. Swim/gym. Come back too tired for (i)
iii. Semi constructive procrastinating in the kitchen. Refer to Fig.1

Fig. 1 - Apple tarts. Fresh outta the oven. Mmmmmm

Of apples and lies...

Tried an allnighter af F211 instead of the grid - and it was a helluva lot more constructive. Almost got in the whole "fuckfuckexamexammustwork" groove. Read: ALMOST.

Oh wait, i meant to say conducive. *blink blink*

Did a fair bit more progress on ze Lab Report and some reading alongside babysitting torrents on a few of the computers. New shows, work done! Win win situation!

There might not be smartboards and plasma screens at F211, but there's still much amusement to be had! With netmessage for example - a 'run' command line that lets you send messages as windows system popups to other computers on the network - or the whole network. Beyond the obvious use of irritating friends working there, there's also the potential for some deviousness. Like on the first night, there was a girl working a few computers in front who's had an apple on her computer for the whole night. Conveniently just as we were packing up to leave she went out with her boyfriend for "water" so we netmessaged her the following from a computer a bit further away from us and all left the lab trying not to burst in fits of cheeky giggles.

" No apples please. We have a strict 'no apple' policy in F211"

We hung around at the corridors around the corner a safe distance away where we could barely see her reaction to the message. She seemed startled enough. AHhahahhaha

The next day one of the computers i usually worked/torented at had the monitor turned off and a handwritten note that said " Do not touch - running calculations ". I remembered having to clear some torrents on that workstation's temporary disk ( weird chinese videos ) to make room for my downloads so hMMMnnnn........

Sho nuff', there was nothing running on that comp except Bitspirit. Which was downloading nothing. Not only did that feller have the nerve to not babysit his torrents and clear the disk afterwards, he couldn't even be bothered to check whether his files were still there.

whoops.

PENIPU PALAT HARAM "calculations" konon.

Soooo this called for a double sided assault. I netmessaged that workstation "Please do not torrent in this lab, or your logon will be revoked.Sysadmin". KOFF KOFF hypocrite KOFF KOFF. Taib tambah sikit and left a Word file open that said something to the effect of " Calculations? yeah right"

Much ado about nothings that keep me from hitting the books

Still listening to too much Indonesian jiwangness -simmple tunes that stick in your head and simple lyrics that don't take too much reading into. I somehow forgot to mention Mocca along with Tangga and La Luna - they actually made me forget about PeterPan , Dewa and So7 for a while. But of course, there's balance in everything - Also listening to the new albums from Prince, Pharell and Jay-Z - some good shit right there. Preserve the sexxay!

Seriously man, some of these Mocca songs are so sweet and sappy yet so...soo.....like sedap liddat. Ignore the cacated video and just listen to the song.

While we're still on balance, y'all just HAVE to see the new Benny Benassi vid. Its a tribute to 70s porn movies - see if you can pick out any of the titles. In this case its all about the video - altho the song is pretty freakin catchy too....

Just imagine, this is the CENSOREd version. MMmmmmm. Makes "Satisfaction" look like an actual power tool ad no?

Also managed to read "Maus". Its a graphic novel where the author tells the story of his father, an Auschwitz survivor. I didn't care much for what was supposed to be one of the main drawing points of this graphic novel - the visual methapor where the jews are mice ( hence the german Maus) , Germans are cats, Americans are dogs and the Polish are pigs. Not only does it detract from the human element of the story - the core element of any Holocaust story - i personally thought that the metaphors messed up the story towards the end. It was a horribly sad story, as most Holocaust stories go but i wasn't anywhere near as moved as i was with Persepolis. I don't know whether its the scruffy illustration, the metaphorical anthromorphozation or just the fact that it wasn't very easy to identify with either him or his father.

I just can't see why every other half decent graphic novel's compared to it.

The best account of a Holocaust survivor i've seen is the screen adaptation of a survivor's diaries-cum-novel:"Out Of The Ashes" . The actual book is nigh on impossible to find nowadays. Its about a Jewish doctor- a Gisela Perl- who suffers the loss of her entire family and only made it through Auschwitz because of her medical skills where she was made a camp doctor. Not only did she have to stuggle to survive herself, she was also single handedly responsible for saving the lives of hundreds of women in the camps through her position combined with her sheer strength of will. After all this, she still had to endure harsh questioning in the US for her citizenship due to her having worked under Dr. Mengele.

Those of you who think "The Pianist" was a good representation of the Holocaust, you haven't seen anything yet. Fine the cinematography was good but the storytelling was so garbled , and the character development was rubbish. Also you had to put up with Adrien Brody's stonking huge schnozz on half the screen most of the time. Damn irritating. Dunno why Zegna used him in their ads also. The only thing a Brody Zegna ad will make me feel like buying are a pair of solid brogues i can use to bash his huge-ass nose in.

Started on my fairly ambitious booklist by ploughing through the first few chapters of Humanity: a moral history of the twentieth century. Its about understanding, if not justifying the atrocities of the last century through philosophy, politics and history : Hiroshima, Naziism, the Gulag, Rwanda and so on and so forth. The first few chapters covers quite a bit on Nietzche's writings - now i really can't wait to move on to study Nietzche proper. I have a feeling i'll like his work quite a bit. Anyone who forgot my birthday - "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" and "The Genealogy of Morals" are on my Amazon wishlist *hinthinthint*

Well if engineering doesn't pan out ( hopefully not as drastically as computer science) there's always politics and philosophy. Heh. Or catering. Or dancing.

Oh and a final distraction - those 2 small lego kits that i bought in Hamburg at the end of our Germany odyssey 3 years ago? I take'em apart and put together something random and new everytime my fingers get finicky.

Yesh again if you forgot my birthday, small lego kits are welcome too! NO its not kiddish - its engineering man. Lots of engineers tinker with Lego for designs - you can make functional clocks, even computers and logic machines from Lego dammit.

By the way, i just rifled through those videos of us playing with these back from Germany. A roomful of Imperial College students in their PJs playing with Legos. Complete with sound effects. (i still maintain its NOT kiddish).

DUUUDe you know you've got it bad when you're even procrastinating to blog, which is in turn an act of procrastination relative to studying.

"That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises are kept,
Or one would weep because another wept."

W.H.Auden