I'm spending my last day in Melbourne before I leave for my US trip WORKING. That's right. But it's ok - I guess it'll help calm my nerves. I don't know why I'm so nervous! I'm very excited but every now and then I would have butterflies going psycho in my stomach and freak out. "I must have forgotten something!", "It's so soon, it can't be!!", "I'm going to miss my bed!!!" etc etc...

It's not my first time traveling by myself overseas. I've been to Malaysia a couple of times by myself but this America trip is just so much bigger! And also I'll be moving around a lot so I guess that adds to it. Stop it George! I'm gonna travel and FEEL MY POWER :P

*Puff* *Puff*
Okay so everyone... keep updated on my trip on my travel blog. I won't be spending much time on the net I suppose but I will take some time off to update you guys. I've also got an STA Travel Web Wallet. I've put some addresses on that and when I write a journal on the Web Wallet, it'll be sent to you guys. But I'll probably blog before writing in that journal.

I must run... a few last minute things to do!
Cheerio!

xo

I'M FINISHED! YAY!!!

I had my last paper today and that was for MEC 3406 Mechanical Vibrations. Safe to say, I went well. During reading time, though, I was panicking and trying to figure out how I'm going to work out these problems. The questions were presented in a very unfamiliar way but the methodology wasn't. And thus it took me a while to get over the former as things just read funny. As soon as we were allowed to start the paper, I relied on my intuition, stated assumptions, drew force diagrams and BANG things were working out. I prefer questions that allow you to solve problems with your knowledge over questions that just ask you to present your knowledge. I'm a problem solver so it worked for me.

The lecturer was nice too. He gave us the Fourier approximation for the periodic loading on a spring-mass system so we didn't have to spend time working it all out (and if any of you know about the Fourier series, the calculus can take a fair amount of time!). However, I wasn't aware that he gave us the formula to work out the Keq of a beam so I full-on derived the formula from scratch! Silly me.

Left the exam early, had coffee with Andrew and Downsy (they had a BEER cos they are off their Ps - rub it in my face why don't you!) and went to Chadstone to do some present shopping. Turned out to be rather unsuccessful.

Came home and started cleaning my room - it's getting a huge makeover these holidays. And then had a "BOOTIFUL" night out which involved some heavy discussion about space, diseases in Africa, Orwell's 1894, the media, and teddy bears. Yayness!

So enough about me... I want to know what the result is regarding the whaling issue in Japan. Science? The poor whales. It will only encourage other countries to whale within their own economic borders. I thought this world has gotten over this mass killing of large and potentially endangered animals - but obviously not. SAVE THE WHALES!!!!!

xxoxox

I can't seem to study. any. more.

I've got one paper left, Mechanical Vibrations, on tuesday. I've got 2 whole days to study for it... not getting anywhere.

For one thing, I can't stop thinking about my trip which is exactly two weeks from today!

Also, can't wait til Monday night because a live recording of Little Barrie's show at the Northcote Social Club is going to be aired on triple j's live at the wireless. This was a gig that I had planned to go to but didn't end up doing so because I just had too much to study for my exams. I love love love Little Barrie. Please play at Lollapalooza!!

Some bands/artists/MCs that I'm luvin' at the moment:
Little Barrie, I am X, The Grates, Idlewild, Louis XIV, Gorillaz, Lyrics Born, Handsome Boy Modeling School, The Panda Band, Go! Team, The Bloc Party, Krafty Kuts, Interpol, Black Mountain, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Antony and the Johnsons.

So so great.
I wasn't a great fan of Architecture in Helsinki before, but there's this new song that I've been diggin that has made me pay more attention to them. I can't remember the song name but it has these words "Play play play play play!" in them.

I hate studying.

So now I'm cramming in some stats study. I spent yesterday practicing some Fourier stuff, that was okay... but when totally lost with the whole Spectrum and Data Conditioning business. Today I've moved on to probability which is SO MUCH EASIER, though I've never encounted calculus in probability before, I must say I was very silly when I said a few months ago to my friends "What kind of probability uses calculus?!?!" - probability IS all about calculus - area under the distribution curve? Duhhhhh! Hey, what can I say... most of it has been completely simplified for the high school and commerce students :P

So 50% of the Stats paper is based on probability and the other 50% is for that crazy Fourier hard-core mathsy part. I'm thinking if I can master all of probability and half of the hard-core stuff, I can pass the subject. ;)

I'm working 3 days this week, tomorrow, Sat and Sunday so I'm going to have to do as much study as possible now. (Btw: Senseless advertising - come to A|X, we're on sale!)

xx Ciaoz

So I have a very high expectation that I failed my Fluids exam. I was such a nerd over the past weeks studying like... well, a nerd, for this exam and the questions didn't even give me a chance to fucking prove myself. And to make matters worse, the topics that I am strongest at, I totally stuffed up. Major.

Feeling totally crushed, I went to the gym holding back tears and went nuts on the bike. I wasn't going to just come home and bury my face in the pillow because what good is that going to do.

And now I can't seem to get calculus out of my mind. And thinking where I did wrong and what I did wrong. All I know is that I couldn't even answer any of the questions completely and correctly.

Screw you boundary layers, compressible flow, turbomachinery and stream function!!!!

I have 3 more exams to go... I don't really want to let this get me depressed and feel demotivated to study for the other ones... but I just feel so down. Some 'great mind' I am. *Sigh*.

Well guess what!

Steve Canane, yes THE Steve Canane (see this) emailed me saying that he will MARRY me!

Hmmm... yeah, dream on ;)
I'm kidding. But he did email me replying to my suggestion that the organisers for Splendour In The Grass should consider the method used by the guys at Lollapalooza to discourage scalping. One of the stories a few weeks ago on Hack was about the problematic scalping of big music festivals. Scalpers would purchase all the tickets (yes, they actually become SOLD OUT) before the general public get to the ticket offices and sell them on eBay for more than 3 times its face value. I'm sure his next email would be accepting my proposal, though.

Had the finance exam today and I'm feeling rather confident about it. I just wrote everything I knew so... yeah. Fingers crossed :P

Fluids tomorrow... :( *sigh*

Mars bar? I meant side-bar. Look to your right... I mean, left, and you'll see my side-bar. There have been some local changes in that area such as the addition of a few new links. Let me point them out to you.

1. Robyn's blog - My travelling buddy has a blog without my knowing until late last night.

2. Spence Does America blog - One of my friends from Melbourne Uni (who is mighty jealous that I might be going to Lollapalooza :P) is also going to America around the same time as me on an educational/research tour with his classmates. The subject: "Searching for the American Dream" - which I believe, will be very interesting. Keep up to date with his blog, which will be a journal that will record his experiences and insights on his research topic.

3. The Tall Poppies - My friend Lee from work (and Uni) is a drummer in this band. They're good. Check them out! Or come see them at the Hifi Bar on Fri 17th June and be a groupie with me.

4. Mink Engine - I just love them so much.

5. Chris and Craig kissing - Yes I know I've already pointed this one out but I'll just do it again. *Points*.

Yeah, so I'm so bored that I actually blog about the updates that's happening in my side-bar. I blame it on the fact that I'm confined to this desk because I have an exam tomorrow and I have nothing else to do.

I woke up at 11.30 this morning to my surprise. Had duck with egg noodles for breakfast... Mmm... I'm the type of person who can eat steak and potatoes for breakfast, so don't let it surprise you. Then I downed a big cup of filtered black coffee and went straight to my books to finish summarising the last few chapters for finance.

It made me so tired!!! I was at the point where I wasn't learning anything anymore and just writing crap just for self-satisfaction. I managed to pull through by the end of the afternoon which sucked because I wasted a can of V. Note to self: Only drink V when you are actually going to concentrate! Then I walked around the house and blinked and downloaded some music for my iRiver which needed some serious updating. Most recent addition: some Idlewild and Fabienne Del Sol songs, a live set of The Grates' gig with Bit By Bats and a sweet-as remix of Bang Bang by Audiobullys. Oh, and a MoMA podcast for Pablo Picasso's painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon that I can listen to when I'm staring at the real thing itself in New York.

I pulled out a 2001 past paper for Advanced Business Finance and started to do it. It looked good because it had a lot of mathsy questions of which I needed a lot of practicing. It's such a huge contrast to the current course. Back then it was 95% quantitative. Now its 50/50 which is so much better. Let me tell you why!

Remember I was complaining about how irrelevant Irrelevance Propositions (oh the irony) in finance were? I'm glad they have changed the course to accomodate topics that will make students better business people in the future. They elimnated a lot of cross-over topics such as the Imputation Tax System, etc, etc (which we have covered in subjects before) to make way for qualitative, more important and practical topics such as Risk Management (which is a heavily weighted section). It is important to drill into us the factors that impact on financial decision making. It teaches us to be corporately responsible managers who are working towards the welfare of others. Whether we practice this or not comes with our own discretion... but atleast they taught us!

So I have my first exam tomorrow at 2.30pm and that's finance. I'm feeling prepared and can't wait to get it over and done with. I'm more worried about Fluid Mechanics on tuesday... who knows what on earth is going to happen to me in that exam. I feel as if I'm walking into a jungle with a miniscule backpack of limited supplies to survive - even with the amount of study I've put in.

I'm going to go to bed now!

xoxo

My favourite show on the radio is "Today Today" on triple j (apart from PBS occasionally, its really the only station I listen to). The hosts are Chris and Craig and the show is generally a piss take on current events and popular culture. They mock commercial radio stations with their "Coma FM" sessions, mock reality TV, the OC, and everything else that is 'hot' today. They have cool regular guest speakers such as Jack The Love Nerd, Ugly Dave, that guy frm America who writes the scripts for the Oscars, etc etc. They play good music, incredibly sarcastic and very funny. They even have this caller game called "Save The Puppy", where you answer questions from their quiz and if you get them wrong they'll electricute a puppy. If you get it right, they'll electricute a celebrity of your choice. So far, they have eliminated a few tedious people such as Paris Hilton, John Howard and Shannon Noll.

They are on from 3 til 5.30pm every weekday afternoon - check them out on FM 107.5 (also available online)! I have added a little .gif on my side-bar of Chris and Craig having a pash. Very hot. I hardly ever miss a show.

And not to mention Hack with Steve Canane, the half hour youth current affairs program on straight after Today Today. I have this major crush on Steve Canane. He's so intelligent! So well poised! So unbiased! Marry me, Steve!!!

xx

So my post really has nothing to do with the title - I just automatically felt like writing that in the the title field. Big whoop, wanna fight about it?

I really need to watch a few episodes of FAMILY GUY but I can't because I have so much crap to do. I'm still going at Fluids... just doing some past year papers. It's going ok... I think I have enough knowledge to pass it if I stopped studying right this moment, but I want to be extra sure in case its a super hard paper and I want to have something to fall back on! :P IS THAT YOUR REFRIGERATOR RUNNING? BECAUSE IF IT IS, ITS RUNNING LIKE YOU... VERY HOMOSEXUALLY. (Disclaimer: Please mind my occasional relapses into Family-Guy-quoting-mood).

Very tempted to go to Lollapalooza festival which is happening in Chicago in July. Provided my financial status, I might make a round trip to Chicago from NYC - the line up is amazing!! Tickets aren't cheap, but then again - so many great bands. And I'll get to see The Killers again. DEAR DIARY, JACKPOT. I'll have to look into price of transport, accomodation and see how things pan out.

OK. Um. Yeah.

Ok. Bye.

I spent more than 7 hours yesterday doing hardcore Fluid Mechanics study and I'm proud to say that I have NAILED the NAVIER-STOKES EQUATIONS. They look so so so so complicated with all its partial derivatives and curls, but basically its just a differential method of analysing fluid flow. So if you ever run into the need to determine the velocity distribution of a fluid flowing in between two fixed plates, just call! :P

Since I was on a roll, I also got boundary layers, streamfunction and potential flow, PLUS the Reynold's Transport Theorem down pat. I'm finding Fluid Dynamics really interesting... now that I actually know what is going on. And to think that I actually wanted to be an AERODYNAMICIST at one stage, I should actually appreciate these things. Of course, my young determined mind would have never have dreamed of being faced with such unbelievable calculus.

I've got one more topic left to cover before I have a grasp of the entire subject and that's Open Channel Flows. The maths in this topic isn't that hard at all compared to Navier-Stokes; it's just having to understand the concepts behind it and how waves and hydraulic jumps occur.

My brain has undergone some major bashing over the last week and I feel sorry for it. It was so restless last night that I couldn't even sleep. You know the feeling when you have been studying so much that your brain takes a long time to come to a rest? And when you find yourself trying to figure out some random integrals related to your study that day? Well, it finally did this afternoon when I almost fell asleep at work. Yay.

Ok so this post was basically crapping on about my studies and probably of no particular interest to anyone - but I'm proud of myself and so I shall shake a tail feather or two. Some people get through uni studying as little as possible, understanding as little as possible... only striving to pass and believing that none of this knowledge is actually required in industry. I used to be like that - in fact for the past 3 years. But I've came to a realisation that you do need to know these things, whether or not you're going to be applying it or not. I'm studying engineering and so I'm going to be an engineer! (Or a financial analyst, whatever). I read something that really inspired me and that is "If you have a vision, you will become one of the greatest minds in the engineering profession" - I want to have a great mind and a great mind = knowledge, and I want to use this great mind to make a difference to communities and generally, the world around me - giving form to ideas that make the way of life better.

OK. Enough blabber.

In support of my hardcore study week I went to Safeway today to pick up a bag of Sherbies and a 6 pack of V. Go the cans of V. Fuel, fuel! At the check-out, I was being served by this guy who I used to casually say "hi" to during my time at Safeway. He didn't recognise me but the guy next to him did and asked me "How long since you stopped working here?", to my surprise. Safeway - such a high staff turnover workplace - I usually walk around as if I had never worked there. It's a nice feeling to know that people still remember you!

I studied some hardcore finance today. Just finance all day and a little bit of fluids revision class at Uni. I got a major headache now and my brain seems to be pulsating violently. I'm going to go to bed soon.

Today I heard something on Triple J that proved my naiveity. As I was speaking of Schapelle Corby's case a few posts earlier (which Australians are still continuing to be as hostile as ever towards Indonesians, sadly), there has been a case in Australia where a Japanese tourist was convicted for heroin possession in her luggage in 1992. The story goes that this Japanese lady was in Malaysia and had her baggage stolen and then later returned to her (of course she didn't check it) and flew to Australia with it. Much misunderstanding occurred as she couldn't get a proper interpreter and she was sentenced to 10 years jail in Victoria - which she has finished serving recently. She still claims that she wasn't involved in the drug smuggle and is trying to clear her name. Evidence has been found that indeed her baggage was stolen in Malaysia. A handful of documentaries have been made and shown in Japan about this issue and it seems to be very quite big there, quite like the Schapelle Corby case here.

So before Australians criticise another country of having an inferior and unjust legal system, we have done it too.

Check out the Hack website on triplej.net.au (click on Wednesday's show) to see some links to more on this case regarding the Japanese drug bust.

Again, I am still blaming mainstream media who have kept this issue supressed during the whole Corby mumbo jumbo. Forgive me for using this totally cliched "A pot can't call a kettle black"!! Puh-lease. I mean, we couldn't even give her a good interpreter and thus a fair trial!!

Sometimes I feel I live in a country of idiots. But don't we all?