Anus Kings @ The Smell

Nothing particularly blogworthy has happened recently. There has been some gallavanting. Lots of new friends, and old ones too.

And then today I caught the Anus Kings at The Riot Grrrls' Xmas Carnival, and had my mind pleasantly and most unexpectedly blown by this young lady.

More random updates

My schedule is driving me crazy. I have about 5 big intractable projects on my platter that I would love to spend 1-2 weeks working intensively on individually. Instead, I have a weekly schedule that requires me to spend 1-2 days a week on each. Half of that time is spent trying to catch up with what I was working on the previous week.

And my ex-boss is wondering why I haven't finished rewriting my last chapter for resubmission after it got rejected from Invertebrate Biology this summer - reviewer 2 had helpful comments but it was obvious reviewer 1 didn't really read the manuscript. Spent last night being very agitated at having to respond to the insipid comments of a person who did not read the manuscript and I really want to finish this but there is a weekly update due for another project tomorrow. Luckily it doesn't look like very many changes will have to be made unless it gets rejected again in which case I will have to rethink the way we're trying to sell the article.

As usual I will either have to learn to cope with multitasking, fix my schedule, or go insane trying to make it work.

Also, against all measures of good sense I decided to adopt a kitten about 3 weeks ago. The cat is an extremely vocal torbie, she grunts when she is perplexed, yowls when she wants something, makes a funny squawky muuur-rrr-rrr noise while she is eating or enjoying being petted, and often meows to herself for no reason that I can yet fathom - perhaps an invitation to play because this is often followed by rapid ducking under furniture. She spends most of her waking hours galloping from one corner of the house to another and pouncing on things with claws out. We are still trying to work out the cat-minion dynamic. Last week she decided pounce on the minion is a fun night time game. This week she decided pull the house apart and tear down the curtains would be fun. The spray bottle trick works for about a second before she is singlemindedly back on her destructive activity. I can only spend so much time providing alternative distraction, so it's a good thing I have $4 curtains from Target. Not being a very good minion, I am devising good ways to frustrate and annoy the cat in return, like chase the pointer to a point just above the bicycles that she is iffy about jumping to from the top of her scratching post.

Just got a recipe for youcharkway and plan to test it out along with some century egg porridge sometime this week.

Sigh

The iPhone b0rked and after basking in 3.0 and unlimited tethering, it's time to figure out how to jailbreak anew in 3.1.3 which was the only thing it would allow me to restore to. Would update to 4.1 but there currently isn't an easy jb option for windows users.

I hope redsn0w works because there is no tethering for unjailbroken 3.1.3. :( Compounding the problem is the lack of easy access to a Mac since our lab's dinosaur iMac G5 died. Tried Sn0wbreeze so far, with no luck.

Sad, sad day.

Ah well when I finally figure it out at least I will be able to try a bunch of newer apps. Also on the bright side I don't really care about unlocking so that somewhat simplifies things. Also lots of good SHAtter possibilities on the horizon.

But...

How will I survive without home internet access in the meantime? :(

Update: jailbreakme worked like a charm. Cydia installed and tethering re-enabled with tetherme. 3.1.3 doesn't seem to be much different from 3.0, except I had a lot of broken apps on the old phone that are now gone and so overall performance has improved slightly. SBSettings, tetherme, backgrounder and mxtube installed. All systems ready to go. :) As a plus, my international keyboards are fixed so i can finally use chinese input!

Hurrah, time for a social life

Quite by luck, I've finally found an alcoholic beverage that doesn't cause an adverse reaction! Heh. And it's tasty too. A friend brought some Widmer hefeweizen to a party last week and it's my new bevvie of choice from now on.

Have also noticed that I also can drink a good quantity of lambic without the typical flushing, nasal constriction, headache, hypotension and sometimes hives that set in after most alcoholic bevvies.

I wonder what's different about wheat beers and if it has anything to do with histamine content. I've always had a slight reaction to histamine rich foods, which I ignore in favour of the wonderful flavours. As reports online seem inconclusive, I guess the only way is by testing more wheat beers. It will be fun to finally be able to join in the general imbibing and merriment at social gatherings.

Foreigners

Have not been monitoring the Singapore blogs for awhile, and have just been catching up on the PM's national day speech addressing the need for foreigners in Singapore, and anti-foreign sentiment.

In the interest of refining my particular dissatisfaction with the gahmen's policy of mass importing foreigners, my issue is with the whole concept of importing foreign talent, as the term means literally - the implication being that there is no talent to be found in Singapore. Importing foreign talent would be fine if there was any intention of said talent grooming our own, but I did not see any of that in NUS Biology, which was just a training ground for future underlings to people Biopolis. It was implicit in the way we were taught to think (or not think). I find myself struggling against my education all the time, and especially so when I try to think as a PI would to come up with novel research ideas and directions. I am getting better, but it is still a struggle. Anyway that was just my personal take. To evaluate whether there is in fact any grooming going on would require real opinions from the minions at Biopolis. Are we seeing more homegrown Singaporeans take on senior researcher roles as times goes by?

Now that I have escaped the system and am seeking mental and professional development as a foreigner myself, I often think about what it means to be foreign. To some extent, as a first world country, it seems like a given that grooming foreign students is something that is done. In fact, a lot of the scholarships here for foreigners stipulate some condition to return to your home country, implicitly to apply your knowledge to better your home country in some way. Not to say that anti-foreign sentiment does not exist, especially with our current economic woes and the crazy right. While I am here I am not just taking. I TA, I volunteer, I contribute to the economy and the social, cultural and scientific dialogue. I pay taxes. And though I miss having people to sling Singlish around with and bakkua whenever I want, LA is a great, inclusive city to live in. Thinking back, I do get along very well with the foreigners who have a sense of humour, reach out and participate in CCAs and stuff back in Singapore. It's those who cling to their own small diaspora and never learn sufficient English to TA effectively that I have a problem with.

I suppose if we must embrace the trend of globalisation, then it would be nice if people could just get along, and truly integrate into the system. Though how to build community where it doesn't already exist is an interesting question that has been bouncing around my mind for awhile, and may be stuck in another post down the road.

Read/watch list

A couple of recent additions, pertaining to the history of LA. Mike Davis' City of Quartz (Mike Davis in general), and Taken for a Ride, a documentary about how the public system in LA was destroyed by GM.

Classes

Haven't blogged in awhile. I have been keeping busy with no lack of things to do in LA, what with family and friends visiting, and a million fairs and performances and whatnot to check out. Classes have resumed as of last week, a huge but not entirely unwelcome distraction. Having some structure and things to fill my days with is a good way to battle the funk caused by my crazy department. Regarding that issue, it has been unsatisfactorily swept under the carpet, and though the elephant still stands in the room whenever I encounter some of the people involved, I think I've managed to convince myself that it doesn't matter what people think of me as long as I live my life in a manner that satisfies my own conscience. With this comes a renewed resolve to be a go-getter and restore positivity and productivity.

I'm taking a couple of interesting classes this semester, one about communicating science and another about population genetics. Hopefully the latter will allow me to finally delve into some concepts I understand only superficially in more detail with the help of other brains. As for the former, I basically get to be an aquarium volunteer/intern for class credit. I had an interesting session with people from the aquarium's education branch yesterday, talking about how formal science education leaves us with no notion of how convoluted the real process of science is. Reflecting on this, I realised that it did take me about 2 years of graduate school to really understand how science really works. Anyway, the aquarium folk clearly have given a lot of thought about how to make the likelihood-driven conclusions thrown out by our convoluted scientific process palatable to non-scientists so I'm looking forward to picking up a few tips from them as the semester proceeds.

Finally, I'm taking a class in multivariate stats under a pass/fail grading option, which still worries me because we've spent 3 classes talking about distribution theory which looks like greek to me. I think it would be really enlightening as far as understanding how the statistical tests we use all the time really work, if I could only understand what he was talking about, but the instructor has no intention of letting me know where the holes in my education are beyond deriding me for not being a physics/math major. We just got our first assignment today, and I have absolutely no idea what any of it means. I'm pondering dropping the class, but hoping it will actually prove useful later on if we start looking at data like he keeps promising we will.

Attack of the parents

So my parents whizzed in quite unexpectedly, spent the last 5 days, and whizzed away again. Sigh. Our interactions are always interesting. My parents know just which buttons to push to bring out the worst in me. Also I've spent most of my adult life trying to fight against the same traits that I have unconsciously picked up from them over the years that I find so annoying. But good moments (mostly on the first day of meeting after a long time of not meeting) can be extremely good, and of course I miss them terribly now that they've left, as abruptly as they've come.

Time apart always makes us notice the changes that usually happen too slowly for us to notice in day to day existence. They are so much older and frailer now, a startling reminder that they are older than my grandparents were when they were taking care of me all those years ago. Looking at them thus makes me want to spend more time in closer proximity, not halfway across the ocean.