cheatsheets

The next big difference between highschool and university is the amount of time that it takes to complete problem sets.

In highschool: homework is usually completable during class time. 20 chem questions, half an hour easily enough time.
In university: 10 chem questions? Say goodbye to the rest of the night.

Why the dramatic time increase? I don't think that the increase in difficulty is the main factor. It boils down to the triangle of work, social life and sleep. Sleep is already out of the picture, and replaced by copious intakes of caffeine (oh gosh, without res next year, I'm going to be unable to fund my coffee requirements. Will also need to buy overpriced fancy cereal T_T"). Work and social life is pretty intertwined with each other, as in the main form of socialization is doing homework with friends. Which inevitably leads to fooling around half the time.

And that is how it took 9 hours to complete a double sided cheatsheet for earth sci.

Annnnd, one more midterm for round 1! Leggo programming e_e"
Then it's CDS due next week.
And then becomes round 2 of midterms.
And then finals.

First year's going to be over very soon. Panic.

rocks

This is why I never took bio, why rocks, whhhy!
(I exaggerate, it's mostly memorized after writing them 3 times).

Oh and hurray Dean's list!

sparkling water

Went to Pizza Liberetto yesterday to celebrate Amy's birthday and end of reading week/temporarily forget the misery known as CME and programming midterm yesterday.

Food is gooood. Mark touted it as the best pizza place in Toronto. So without further ado, and since there's midterms to study for, here's some pictures of the glorious pizza.


Bread is definitely the best with olive oil and vinegar


Appetizer - potato cakes with salted cod


Meat lover's


Prosciutto with arugula


Duck confit, tis delicious.

Breathe in the air if you care

This song was introduced to me by my awesome roommate, it's been on repeat one for the past few days.



I was crying over you
I am smiling I think of you
Where your garden have no walls
Breathe in the air if you care, you compare, don't say farewell

Nothing can compare
To when you roll the dice and swear that your love's for me
Nothing can compare
To when you roll the dice and swear that your love's for me

I was crying over you
I am smiling I think of you
Misty morning and water falls
Breathe in the air if you care, you compare, don't say farewell

Nothing can compare
To when you roll the dice and swear your love's for me
Nothing can compare
To when you roll the dice and swear your love's for me
Nothing can compare
To when you roll the dice and swear your love's for me

Virtuous sensibility
Escape velocity
Nothing can compare
To when you roll the dice and swear your love's for me
Nothing can compare
To when you roll the dice and swear your love's for me
Nothing can compare
To when you roll the dice and swear your love's for me
Breathe in the air if you care, you compare, don't say farewell
Nothing

fills

Been eating way too much these past days "orz

Since I didn't go home for the weekend of Chinese New Years, my mom decides to prepare a feast this weekend.


Lunch and dinner.

It makes me wonder why I ever left home. Will never have such delicacies on a regular basis ever again T__T Ugh let this be motivation to learn cooking really well this summer.

Since coming back to Chestnut, been snacking non-stop on cookies & other stuff. Friends also decided to get more Indian food for dinner Monday night.



Soo good too *u* Especially with sweet lassi.

Today's the only day that I'm kinda glad that Chestnut dinners usually suck.

Tiny Beautiful Things

My summary of thoughts after reading Tiny Beautiful Things is that what we (or I, but I think its we) want in life is to make our loved ones happy, and in turn hope that they do the same.

Shall update with quotations tomorrow when I'm not typing on a touchscreen. But its amazing and you should all read it!

It was very hard to choose which quotations to jot down, every single advice is golden xD But since that would involve posting the entire book, here's some that I found to be universal:

She understands that attention is the first and final act of love, and that the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn't cheap oil or portable water or even common sense, but mercy.

Trust yourself. (...) trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.

I especially needs to hear this haha.

and this:

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is mo choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quite room.

...
...
...

Going through old journal and saw that the grade 11 me wrote:
So what do I want?
to be an optimist

xD

hammer

Spending the weekend at home is really not the productive time. I don't know how I managed to convince myself to bring ESP home knowing that it probably won't even be taken out of my bag.

Instead I watch movies and window shop on Etsy :D

 Clockwise from top left: sparkling, nugget, stack, labradorite, twig (on right).

New slight obsession is with thin rings, they're so delicate and pretty *u* Also not terribly expensive either, but I can't justify purchasing any since I've pretty much stopped wearing jewelry (and make-up for that matter, oh the things engineering school does to you).

good intentions

I've made it alive to reading week! In around 2 more month first year will be over with. Time flieeeees.

ESP quiz and MSE midterm weren't too bad, met up with Rui and Ryan too, and obviously played sgs until too late into the morning, so all in all a good ending to the week~ All there left to do is catch up on Suits and Space Brothers :]


(I had originally planned this post to be much longer, but lack of sleep is catching up.)

Reams

The majority of my printing quota is spent on past exams.
There is a great feeling of panic and doom when one cannot find any past exams. CME will be a nightmare.

ice climbers

The coefficient of friction was not on my side today.
Had the civ 1t6 class photo today, on top of a 3m high pile of snow that has now turned into ice. I happen to wear my oxfords, with a completely smooth sole. Needless the say the results of the climb was not pretty. Bonus for not being tall enough to be seen in the back row haha xD

MSE midterm was alright, didn't do as well as expected. The questions were less standard than previous years, booo. Hopefully still 85%+. ESP on the other hand, my only hope is the 40% that comes from individual assignments/assessments <_ gg.="" it="" otherwise="" p="" s="">
In the spirit of that, resume studying!

snail

So I'm #2 in civil, whoo!

Let this be motivation for me not to slack off this week. Bring it MSE midterm and ESP quiz (which is basically a shorter version of ESP I's final wth...). Reading week is at the light at the end of the tunnel!

Who am I kidding, I've piled so much work onto reading week that I'm gonna shut myself in a room and work for 2 days (at least) straight.
Task list:

• CME notes & vocab.I'm so screwed for this midterm, so many new terms to know && I suck at reading topographic maps. My previous belief that I was good at visualization has been completely shattered. 
• Programming extra problems. Been majorly slacking on this, so there's still a page of week 4's to do and then all of week 5, 6, 7 whoo e_e Also should practice writing code by hand. 
• ESP CDS. Don't think I need to further elaborate on how painful this will be.
• Calc WeBWork, aka lyryx for calc. Took a look at the questions, they don't seem too easy durr. And really should do Wiley on top of this to be prepared for the 2nd midterm.

Aside from academics, there's building the rube goldberg machine for NEM, marathoning a chinese drama with friends, hopefully going to snakes and latte, and do some reading.
Yeah all those and sleep.

The last one's funny :D
and I'm glad to report that the effects of espresso is fully restored. Phew.

road salt

Happy Chinese New Years!

Had a mini celebration with friends consisting of trekking through the snow/slush to eat dumplings, playing sgs, and streaming the CCTV new years gala.

Went to a small basement restaurant called Traditional Chinese Buns for dumplings (3/5 of us were all craving them for some reason). The food taste good, and is reasonably priced. Service wasn't timely, but the restaurant was busy and the waitresses had good attitudes so it's forgiven.

Did I mention that the food taste good?

 Ordered 4 different types of dumplings:

• Pork with chive
• Pork with cabbage
• Shrimp with pork
• Chicken with mushroom

My personal favourite was pork with chives (classic classic combination), but some friends liked shrimp with pork better. The mushroom was also good, but chicken was a slightly weird pairing.

In terms of other dishes, got the 天津狗不理包子, shrimp 烧麦, and a beef stir-fry.

All of which were good as well.

Dinner somehow ended up taking 2 hours, so we quickly went home (actually took a detour to buy some Chinese jellies *u*, which got devoured during sgs) to start on 春晚. This year's show had really cool holographic effects and a lot less singing compared to previous years. There were more comedic events, which is always great xD Was disappointed that Jay Chou didn't show up though.


Overall a fun evening, spending time with friends is the best~

活在我想要的场景里

Early weekend thanks to the snow storm!
Time to do more work and try to catch up on some sleeeeeep.

Here's Jay Chou while I go bury myself in MSE and hopefully finish those programming extra problems.

你说我比大笨钟还笨 要怎么比
瞧瞧我的安静总是想还有声音
要我离开 我这就打包好行李
喝完这杯咖啡我就走 答应你
我怎么就 怎么还没见我还你DVD
再不打给我 我就不大声追回你
我就在你喜欢的电影找秘密
你却活在我想要的场景里

耍什么嘴硬 耍耍什么嘴硬
有什么毛病 有有什么毛病
我很大气 我没你小气 我为了你 

你仔细听

我从未爱过你 怎么会想念你
发什么神经 有理说不清
只是脑袋还不清醒
其实还爱着你 其实还想着你 Yeah~
请你别太得意

Wow~~ Baby 
我从未爱过你 怎么会想念你……

algae

So true to my words, once ESP kicks in, all sign of leisure activity on the internet disappears (with the exception of browsing through Jetpens).

But more importantly I've just been majorly slacking off this semester. Really don't want to hermit in my room and do work @_@ In fact I've probably spent less than 2 waking hours in my own room...
Sighh, "shoulda woulda coulda" will soon be applicable to this situation.


ANYWAYS.
Been meaning to make a quick update on the Sustainable Engineering Association's conference last Saturday. The speakers and panelists were alright, some really funny ones, others not so much. A memorable line was spoken by a UofT professor, who was trying to explain the difficulty of ceasing our dependence on fossil fuels through an analogy:

How hard it is to get off a drug really depends on how good the drug is. And this drug [fossil fuels] is really, really good. 

How he came up with the analogy on the spot is beyond me.

Aside from the content of the conference, I made the 2 following observations:

1. The default expression of most people is a frown, or at least the corners of their mouth is turned downwards.
2. The majority of the delegates at the conference really, really, sucked at asking questions. A specific incidence involved this guy asking a rather short question, and then following that with 2 minutes worth of rambling on what he thought the speaker might return as an answer.
   Though I'm not any better myself. I wanted to pose a question to the first speaker, but ended up wasting the entire questioning period rephrasing the question in my head that I missed the chance to actually ask. So at least the rest of them had the courage to actually open their mouth xD

Overall it was a good use of a Saturday. Bonus points for a trip to Bulk Barn afterwards (I am forever thankful to my Shad roomie for introducing me), I now have enough clodhoppers to last the semester :D

int main ()

It's slightly weird how I can go for a few days without opening my computer at all. This use to be unthinkable, how can I survive without checking all the blogs/mangas that I follow?

(to be fair I check email and facebook on my phone throughout the day, so I'm not cut off from the internet, now that'd be terrible).

But yeah, schoolwork and seeing friends in person (prioritized in the opposite order) takes precedence. I have pretty much stopped watching anime (only playing catch-up with Space Brothers now), stopped gaming (sans phone games to pass by time in lectures), and drastically cut down on the number of mangas I follow. SGS and the occasional non-academic book that I read has replaced all of the above hobby wise.

...
...
...

In other news, I've watched The Perks of a Wallflower twice, on consecutive days ahaha. Once I was bored at home, and the other was because roommate and I decided to procrastinate and invaded the twins room since they had a comfier and larger bed. In retrospect, should have gone to Jeff's since he has a legitimate tv.

Anyways! It's a great movie, very heartwarming by the end.
Soundtrack is really nice too :]