Gosh these 2 weeks have been a crazy mess of furniture, homework, shopping and settling misc. bills.

Most of the kitchenware i’ve ordered from Amazon.com are here finally – thanks to the UPS guy who delivers to my doorstep. Amazingly enough, a pair of tongs, pancake flippers and misc. cooking utensils still have not arrived after one week! Oh well.

I made baked honey baby-back ribs for dinner yesterday – soy sauce, honey, maple syrup. Although it turned out really overdone(!), it was still kinda yummy. Will perfect it before letting others try. I made myself some grilled chilean sea bass too, but that turned out really weird, cuz I cut myself waayy too thin a slice and ended up really hungry. Oh well. It’s fun though!

I’m a Teaching Assistant for 15-462 Computer Graphics this semester – pretty fun actually, I love teaching about my favorite topic in front of the class! The graphics cluster in Wean 5336 finally got an upgrade (64-bit machines!) – so looks like I might get to create a shader-related Project 4 for the students after all. GLSL ftw! =)

So I realize I do have a lot of homework, but thankfully my Mondays and Fridays are almost empty. Slept an average of 3 hours since Monday. So i’m REALLYY tired today. But going out with DSTA freshies for supper later. Argh. And o/s (operating systems) is really a lot of work – project 0 took a little longer than i thought.

Yesterday I went for training with the CMU Water Polo team – it was really fun! But zomg waayy more tiring than expected. The actual maneuvering in the water wasn’t as difficult as i expected, and the ball can be caught and thrown with a little practice, but it’s REALLY tiring sprinting up and down the pool, even though each quarter is only 7 minutes. (You say, “Only 7 minutes?!” Give it a go yourself first =)) After training, we went to flagstaff hill close to midnight and slid down on 20 pound blocks of ice – it was surprisingly fun! Together with friends under the star-studded sky – really feels like college. I don’t know how long i can continue training with the team though – I sense that my homework and projects are just going to pile up this sem.

-

On a techy note, Google just released its Chrome browser this week – I highly recommend you to go try it out! It’s blazing fast – especially with GMail. It’s basically Safari for Windows, but what I like about it is that plugins run in their own separate process. That means that if like Flash or Greasemonkey quits out on you – your browser won’t crash!

Google Chrome.

However, it’s really buggy and still needs a lot of work. For example, the AJAX script to Sound the Horn in the popular Facebook game Mousehunt doesn’t work at all in Chrome. And during my summer internship, I found a couple of bugs myself which I submitted to the Chrome team to fix. (eg. local HTTP proxy couldn’t be localhost for some reason!?)

-

On another techy note, Facebook is enforcing their =“new”= facebook layout, which in my opinion, totally sucks! If they manage to go through with it, despite the huge number of user complaints, it spells out the demise of end-user rights in tech products developed by huge conglomerates. It’s worrying – Facebook has millions of users now, and i would say they have a tremendous amount of power. Let’s hope that our appeals go through. The new Facebook is really ugly – the news feed isn’t center aligned anymore and things are all messy and chaotic. Oh well, let’s see how things play out.

Time to go for supper!
Chionging homeworks this weekend..
And a potluck with the Singaporean grad students this weekend! alrighty (: