fishpatrol

1. I keep writing up LJ entries in my head, but I guess they are of very little use if I don't post them. ;;; postingwhore kindly nudged me to remind me that I haven't posted in over three weeks. I want to post more regularly, but I keep getting distracted by other things! Also, school is still kicking my ass, big time. If I posted more regularly, I suspect my entries would be filled with things like: "And today, I tried reading fifty million articles and write up a paper in one go and I realized that it was a Very Bad Idea."

I did my Presentation of Doom back in April and I thought that was going to be the major hurdle. It was a pretty massive hurdle, but now I'm inundated with all the work I've neglected and I have supervisors and collaborators emailing me with stuff like, "Where is the data/write-up/analysis/study design" and I'm all, "D: D: D: *hides and procrastinates more*" My way of dealing with stress is to read fic and let me tell you, that is a terrible coping method.

2. MEME!

1) Comment to this and (if you want) I will give you 3 (fictional) people.
2) Post this meme to your LJ with your answers.
3) Provide pictures/text descriptions and the names of the 3 people.
4) Label whom you would shag, marry and (push off a) cliff.

postingwhore gave me: Dean Winchester (SPN), John Sheppard (SGA), Atobe Keigo (PoT)

These were tough choices! But it did give me an excuse to go through my SPN/SGA/PoT picture folders and ogle at all the pretty. I also realized that I have very few pictures of Dean (if Jensen were on this list instead of Dean, I suspect my answers to this meme may be very different...).

( ...and onwards! )

3. The keynote speaker at last week's conference talked about some really interesting research about the psychology of scarcity and how people can be "money poor" or "time poor". ( ... )

4. The topic of marriage comes up more frequently now that I'm often with people who are several years older than me. One of the fifth year students expressed her surprise when I told her than I'm not particularly invested in the idea of marriage for myself. ( ... )

5. So, despite my antisocial mannerisms, I had a lovely, brisk walk with cantarina1 around the neighbourhood. That was a particularly efficient and healthy way of "hanging out" (as opposed to huddling together in front of a computer screen, as we often do ;)). If we make this a regular thing, perhaps I'll be able to shed a layer of padding around my middle that I've picked up during my semester of thinking-about-going-to-the-gym-but-never-actually-going.

6. Now for something completely different: so, the other day, I came across a discussion about the importance of technical quality in stories posted online. Some of the people involved in this discussion were appalled that some readers would completely skip over stories that had grammatical mistakes and other errors. "The authors are writing these stories for fun!" they said. "They're even posting the stories for free, you entitled readers!"

As for myself, I have three general rules that I use to decide whether or not I will read any particular story (I would've sworn I'd written about this at some point in time, but maybe it's one of those in-my-mind!entries that I'd never gotten around to writing out and posting). I developed these three rules-of-thumb back in high school, during my Harry Potter days, when I realized that there was more fic being posted than I had time to read.

( cut for length. i haz ~opinions )

Tell me about what makes you click the "back" button!

7. I should post more often so that I don't end up spending 40 minutes trying to write up an LJ post.

8. Is Firefox 4 actually faster or does it just look Chrome-like, with no actual redeeming qualities?

eta: Adding more Lj-cuts because long entry is long. ;;;; [/spamming your flists]

1. Ever since W told me how Nyquil knocked her out for sixteen hours straight, I've wanted to try it. Unfortunately, I am not sick enough to warrant the Nyquil treatment nor do I have the time to sleep for sixteen hours.

I sound like a frog and my brain is leaking out through my nose. D:

2. If I'd chosen to go to Queen's, I would be a third way through my degree already. If I'd chosen Waterloo, I would have completed a sixth of my degree. However, as it were, although I've successfully survived (and passed!) one semester, that's only one-fifteenth of the way. :|

3. Today, the new second-year research assistant I was training said that I looked younger than her. In China during the summer, people kept asking me if I'd just graduated high school. In San Diego during the winter break, a prof thought I was in high school. On the plane ride home, the flight attendant asked for my age because only those fifteen and older can sit in an emergency exit row seat. =___=;; I suppose I'll appreciate this when I'm forty.

100. I don't have much to offer for help_haiti in terms of auctions, so I'll go make some bids tomorrow when I'm more awake (hopefully?). :) (and think carefully about which charity to donate to >__O)

99. Hee, this is amusing. Personally, I quite like Pachelbel Canon -- but then again, I was a first violin. ;)

45434351. All right, all right, no more procrastinating editing. I'm going to bed finish an article.

Had my last exam today! I probably should have attempted to study, but my concentration has been shot since the beginning of December. I just could not study. I don't want to talk about how much fic I read and how much TV I watched and how many mini panic attacks I had. Just one more paper to finish up and a bit of work for my project to do. (the work? it never ends. >__<) I'd been looking forward to Christmas break since August, for serious.

Also? Five hour essay exams are kind of brutal. Comps are going to kill me dead.

I met up with lilie_charlotte after my exam. We watched random episodes of SPN and made inappropriate comments, as always (I'm very glad my suitemates weren't home since our conversation --and mad cackling-- was kind of loud). Somehow, we ended up searching for the transcript and playing Mad Libs (because we felt that certain conversations made more sense if certain words were changed -- also, we wanted to re-live our youth, playing the games of the non-Internet days). I told her I'd post it, so here goes our attempt at a collaborative ~*fanfic*~:

( sparkly mad libs.rtf )

Yeah, that's right, two grad students spent Friday night playing dirty!Mad Libs. This is where I say MLIA, right? To be honest though, spending the evening cracking jokes with a friend who gets you is much more fun than going to a party or what ever it is "normal" students do. ;) S went to a party a couple weeks ago; she's a nerd, through and through, and it was the first time she'd been to a party that involved alcohol and drugs and the like. She called me a few days after the party and following exchanged ensued:

S: It was so weird! I felt like I was an observer and doing an anthropological study or something!
Me: Heh, like Jane Goodall and the apes?

Thank you to aldehyde, hils, and kelene for the snowflakes! ♥♥♥ eta: Holy crap, the snowflakes multiplied. Thanks, kashmir1, scorpiod1, and trolleys! *more ♥s*
eta2: *wants to jump on the bandwagon and send snowflakes too. it'll be like a virtual snow fight! only...wimpier. :D*

I'm not feeling particularly festive this year, so I'm not doing cards or anything -- sorry, guys. :x

1 presentation, 2 papers (more like one-and-a-half because I'm desperate and cutting corners), and 3 exams. Whoever told me grad school is easier than undergrad? LIES. \o\

The amount of TV I watch seems to be proportional to the amount of school work I have to do. This could be a problem...

White Collar: Eek, cliff hanger much??
Glee: Fucking finally!
Chuck: I just started watching this (it has become my substitute for Psych -- come back soon, Show!) I am entirely unsurprised to find myself shipping Casey/Chuck.

eta3: I have this lemon-cookie-smelling hand cream. It makes me want to lick my hand.

eta4: I am doomed to never finish this paper.

1. I had my stats midterm this morning. It wasn't as horrible as I'd anticipated, but then again, L and I did spend the past couple of evenings gorging on sour gummies I keep in my office (they don't taste that great, but hey, sugar is sugar) and going through all of the past tests. Even though I spent more time staring blankly at the questions and whining, something must've made it into my head. ;;; The past few days was very similar to the days preceding the computer programming exam last year, where L and I flailed and were all "Of course I'm right WHY DO YOU NOT TRUST MY JUDGMENT" at each other.

1.5 I'm glad there aren't any midterms for my "real" grad classes, but I have a couple of research proposals coming up and my mind is drawing a big, huge BLANK.

2. Autumn is my favourite season, but man, I don't remember there being so many ladybugs around in past years. I remember liking them when I was little, but one day, a switch flipped in my brain and now I'm terrified of them. I was flailing (think windmilling arms) like a crazy person in the middle of the street, trying to avoid them. Ugh, bugphobia.

3. I find the hard drive of my Macbook to be really noisy even though I'd already had it changed once. I had a bit of spare time today before I had to catch my train, so I walked all the way to the Apple store (half an hour), waited around even though I had an appointment (fifteen minutes), had an Apple Genius take my Mac to the back room (ten minutes), returned the Mac to me saying that he couldn't hear a thing and refused to change my hard drive, thus leaving me to drag it back to res (half an hour). On the plus side, at least I got some exercise?
I'm pretty sensitive to noise, so it could be just me -- or maybe the Apple Genius was hard of hearing. >__O Either way, the hard drive noise is irritating and ugh, idk.

4. I let my dad have first dibs on my Kindle because he drove out and picked it up for me (also, I didn't want the additional distraction before my midterm ;)). My Kindle is significantly grubbier than when I received it, two weeks ago. I should've put it in a Ziploc bag before loaning it to my dad. ;) But hurrah, a new toy to play with ♥

5. Since I'm all caught up on Leverage, Psych is on hiatus, and Supernatural is going on hiatus soon, I'm thinking of taking akeyoftime's advice and trying out Dark Angel. Can't go wrong with young!Jensen and sci-fi, yeah? I watched Young MacGuyver and hee, young!Jared is so very adorable. But back to Jensen -- I have My Bloody Valentine on my iPod and I've been slowly watching it in increments. Watching it in 3D would be neat, but I think the "Omg ugh" factor would win out the "Omg, Jensen in 3D", haha. ;;;

5.5 And now I'm going to go curl up in bed and watch yesterday's episode of Glee.

I've been stuck in my office for the past hour, trying to run some basic SAS code and I keep getting error warnings. I don't understand what I'm doing wrong! It's like the Python nightmare all over again. :|

I pretty much look like my icon right now. \o\

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You know you go on LJ way too much when LJ starts thinking you're a bot. D:

Also: I HATE PACKING. For the past four years, I've had to load and unload all my crap into boxes and bags twice a year. Clothes seem to multiply when you pack, yet there never seems to be enough during the other times of the year. I'll get to meet my new housemates tomorrow (I don't even know how many housemates I'll have or what floor I'll be living on or...anything else, really, because the Grad House sucks with communication) -- hopefully they'll all be lovely people. :x

My classes start on Thursday and no, I'm not looking forward to them at all. :| But on the bright side, new SPN on Thursday! \o/ Given the spoilers I've read so far, this season sounds pretty damn awesome.

I was only going to do a wee bit of configuring on my new Macbook and set up some essentials, but the next thing I knew, the whole day zipped by and I didn't get any studying done. =__=;; I'm quite liking my Mac, but I do miss some of the PC keyboard functions -- never realized how much I depended on Home, PgUp, Delete, etc (having to remember to hold down fn just isn't the same). Also, I keep forgetting when to press control and when to use command. Also-the-second: this whole two-finger scrolling requires far more coordination than I possess.

I'll of course become accustomed to these keyboard quirks eventually, but my loathing towards iTunes will persist. (to be fair, I hated Windows Media Player too -- I preferred Winamp, where tagging and organizing are for the ambitious -- the rest of us could just drag-and-drop) It is bulky and syncing it with my iPod is time consuming and what's with this only allowing my iPod to be synced with one computer? *throws up hands in frustration*

--
I found the last two episodes of Psych rather lacking. Next week's episode could be improved with the following changes:

"The Devil is in the Details... and the Upstairs Bedroom" August 28, 2009
Shawn and Gus investigate the suicide of a college girl at a Catholic University. Father Westley Sam and Dean Winchester, one of the professors at the school a pair of demon-hunting brothers, is are convinced the girl was demon-possessed, and while Gus is on board with the idea, Shawn is more skeptical... Guest starring Ray Wise Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki.

...because crossovers make everything better. \o/ Picture this: epic!snarkfest between Shawn and Dean, and random-information-spewing!competition between Gus and Sam. *wants*

--
Exam's on Friday, so I should probably make myself scarce for the rest of the week. I'll keep up with the flist by surreptitiously checking LJ during the break between lecture and tutorial. ;) (there are totally people who check the internet on their iPod Touches/iPhones during class -- but they probably have a better chance of passing the damn course than I do, so I shouldn't really judge)

Two days of the math/stats review course and I'm ready to throw my hands up and say, "Fuck it all." It's everyday from 11 to 4 for three weeks, and my commute is four hours both ways. As soon as this course is finished, PhD courses officially start. Goodbye, vacation. :'(

The class is full of economics Masters students, which means that I'm pretty much the most disadvantaged student there, having taken no economics courses or university level calculus. Everything is going way over my head. D: The MA students can be kicked out of their program if they fail the course (I don't even know what percentage is a fail ;;;) -- I don't think I'd get kicked out of my program, but I'd really rather not risk that. Failing my very first course just as I enter the program? Not something I'd like to have on my transcript. I remember back in elementary school and middle school (when I was a proper, studious Chinese child, heh) and doing so well in math -- I even entered those ridiculous math competitions. I miss those days. D:

I'm experiencing severe cold feet re: grad school. I feel like I'm on the verge of a panic attack everyday, and have been for the past few months. This is a huge can of worms that I don't have time to delve into right now (I really, really should be reviewing and studying for tomorrow's class). I just hope that once I get into it, things will start looking up.

PhD comics is becoming more depressing than amusing. >__O

On a much happier note, my Macbook and iPod Touch arrived today. \o/ I have named them Rodney and Rella, respectively. I won't have time to format the Macbook until the weekend, but I definitely have gotten my grubby fingerprints all over the iPod Touch -- it is such a nifty little toy, eee♥.

eta: iTunes is driving me batshit. D: What's wrong with good old drag-and-drop??
eta2: Why is it trying to analyze all of my songs? D: stopitstopitstopit