Refraction

I went for my eye exam yeserday and was once again told that I had made the wrong decision by choosing not to wear contacts. As a result, instead of staying relatively constant, my presciption has doubled in 9 years. (I have a feeling we’re looking at something like… from -3.75 to -7.50. He always gives me my prescription in terms of hundreds, so I’m not sure if there’s some kind of converstion going on there.) Yeah, so I’m basically blind without my glasses, and I guess it’s my own stubbornness that’s at fault.

He didn’t try to give me a hard sell on contacts, this time, although he did hint that I needn’t wear contacts all the time and that they now have daily disposable contacts which I could wear when I chose and then go back to my glasses if I so desired.

When I was trying on new frames (because that’s always fun, whee! :tongue:) he offered me a pair of lenses so that I could actually see what I’d look like with the frames. I said, “Sure, why not?”

And let me tell you, it was so ODD to take glasses off and still be able to see. It didn’t feel right. I haven’t been able to see at a distance for a very, very, long time (and since my prescription was already moderately high when I got glasses, maybe I never had 20/20 vision) and it reminded me of the first time I got glasses–“WAAAA!!!!! I CAN SEEEEE!”

That being said, putting them in and taking them out is hard >_O They must have irritated my eyes or something, since I was walking around with bloodshot eyes for about 2 hours afterwards.

… Because apparently people are looking for the entire 200 things survey, I shall (re-)post it here. I should mention that the latter half of that survey is quite… specific. I mean, really, how many people in this world have fallen in love at a Mayan burial ground?!

Read the rest of this entry »

WHEREAS Michael has revived his blog; and
WHEREAS some people who read this blog read that blog too,
NOW, THEREFORE, LET IT BE RESOLVED that you all go read his blog now; and
LET IT BE FURTHER RESOLVED that people keep blogging.

See, this is what happened when I get bored before an exec meeting and start wandering around the Student Union Building. I read Council Minutes!

*has just been subtly reminded that she owes people layouts* Send me an email, people, you know who you are (and, hopefully, you know what my email adress is :tensed:). Procrastinators unite! Tomorrow. (Slogan on the back of one of George’s t-shirts.)

This has been one random entry. So I think I’ll add some coherency to it.

In case you were wondering about the spammers, they’ve slowed down. A lot :biggrin: SK has caught every single spam comment and let all the others through ^_^ So far, that’s saved me deleting 372 comments. Hopefully it’s good enough to keep the spammers away forever.

I’ve been plugging away at both Le libraire and Le coeur est un muscle involontaire. They’re different enough books that I can keep the characters straight in my head (unlike, say, two Jane Austen novels.) I’m actually enjoying Le libraire more than I thought I would, actually, which can only be a good thing, right? The latter is more difficult to slog through because of the slang… although I find the random bits of English amusing. How often do you find random bits of French in English novels? (Okay, so there was some in The DaVinci Code, but it was all glossed. I think.)

I also read Eats, Shoots & Leaves this weekend. It’s a great book. Who would have thought that punctuation could be so interesting? Or that a stickler needn’t be alone? Oh, hrm, there’s actually a good quote about the use of emoticons like 😉 in there–we’re demeaning noble punctuation marks by making them into eyes, noses, and mouths! 😯 The author makes a good point when she says that using colons and semi-colons is addicting. I think I actually had that written on my composition for the myth test in grade 10. Heh. :pirate: I think it might have happened to me in Socials, too.

My hard drive is now making funny sounds. 😮 I think this means that I should format the thing soon, which means I’ll need to back up all 20 GB >_>;; I’ve only been putting this off for five months…

I’m really looking forward to CORE OF SOUL’s new single, which comes out on Wednesday. I downloaded the PV for it (a streaming version can also be found at their official site), and it’s just so cute–they have a little boy introducing them! :kawaii: The video itself is kinda odd, certainly not one of my favourites, but at least it makes sense. In a music video kind of way.

I’ve given some serious thought to starting work on a COS fansite again. Last time, my host disappeared on me, but with some careful planning this time (and a better host :cry:) that shouldn’t happen. I think it’s time this group had an English fansite, anyway.

It’s always fun to listen to covers. I download a cover of Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” this weekend, and… well, it’s different, but I like it. Tanya Chua sings it; her English is quite good (not surprising, given that she’s from Singapore) but her rendition is a little breathy and lacks the power of the original. w-inds. (Japan’s answer to, um, the whole boyband phenomenon) did a cover of Clay Aiken’s “Perfect Day,” and that’s just funny. XD It’s about an amicable breakup, while the original is… not about an amicable breakup. :weird:

I have installed Spam Karma, a truly delightful WordPress plugin that kills spam dead. I decided I really had to get a move on after I discovered 158 “Please approve” messages sitting in my inbox this evening. I chose Spam Karma over some of the others because it discriminates and gives commenters a chance to prove that they aren’t spammers (using an image authenication test.) That being said, I really encourage everyone who thinks s/he will leave a comment sometime in the future to comment on this entry so that I can add you to the “safe list.” (I think one of Neale’s comments got caught by the default filter for no reason several entries back…)

It even emails you a list of the spam deleted, so that you can tweak the settings to your liking.

Tee hee hee hee hee.

[edit @ 11:29]: Tee hee hee. TAKE THAT! AND THAT! AND THAT! Spam Karma is great.

You know how those lemming surveys that get propogated around blogs (and email and xangas and LJs) usually include a question asking “If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?” I usually don’t write much for those questions because there’re too many things about myself that I find unsatisfactory. Indecision comes into play and I don’t know what to pick!

Well, now I do. I’d get rid of my cursed absentmindedness which causes me to lose books, keys, lunchbags, umbrellas, and other such vital items. In fact, by now, I’ve probably forgotten that I’ve lost some of these things. Hrm. I have a good memory for absolutely random things–I can tell you that when I got my first pair of glasses, the frames were tinged with pink and fuschia and I was wearing a pink sweater that day (the opticican commented on it); I can tell you that for every lepton, there is both a corresponding neutrino and anti-neutrino (muon, tau, and electron, if I’m not mistaken); I can even tell you that the man who drove the last spike in the CPR was Donald A. Smith.

Probably it has something to do with my always being in a rush, but that’s not really a habit that’s going to go away anytime soon.

My Cantonese sucks.

I’m not being modest; that’s a statement of fact. If you asked me to have a conversation with someone wholly in Cantonese, without any English at all, I wouldn’t be able to do it. Especially if it came to something like, “So, what do you think of university?”

I still consider my Cantonese comprehension to be better than my French, though.

Recently, I came across a blog entry (I’m afraid I’ve lost the link) of someone who travelled through Europe. This gentleman had been immersed in German at an early age (but subsequently lost much of it) in addition to having studied French academically for several years. He remarked that he had to work really hard to understand French; he couldn’t let his attention wander in the least, or he’d lose the conversation completely. Conversely, when he understood a German phrase, it was practically instantaneous. (BAM would be the correct sound effect to use here.) By the end of his trip, he concluded that his German had improved markedly, while his French only showed marginal gains.

I believe that it’s not necessary to learn a language depuis la maternelle (as about half of my French class seems to have done…) in order to achieve near-fluency in it. But if studying for years didn’t help him, then… what exactly is the point of such instruction?

Speaking from personal experience, I go tongue-tied whenever I need to speak in French. Oh, I can stammer my way out of things, but there’s always gesticulation and sometimes even (gasp!) the use of franglais to bail me out. Ask me a similar question in Cantonese and I’d probably be much more confident in answering. (Unless it is the aforementioned university question, in which case I stammer in English, too. Unless it’s been raining.)

Obviously I’ve been exposed to Cantonese my whole life, and French for a comparatively shorter period of time. My parents speak Cantonese at home, not French. That might account for the level of comfort. Yet, in terms of vocabulary, I would say that my French vocabulary is probably larger than my Cantonese. My skills in writing Cantonese hover at around a kindergarten level (verified by a friend who grew up in HK and declared my most advanced Chinese school books to be her grade 1 texts), while in French they’re definitely higher. I can struggle through a French novel, but I wouldn’t dream of picking up anything other than a children’s book in Chinese.

All in all, it seems my French is better than my Cantonese. I’m still more comfortable conversing in my “mother” tongue, though. So, the question for all the multilingual readers of my blog: Do languages that you learned through limited immersion come more easily to you than those that you learned at school?

The comment spammers are back.

I’ve probably deleted something in the area of 1500 spam comments by now. They trickle in steadily, and the spammers are getting more and more resourceful–tricking the filter by using HTML entities, for example. They usually don’t show up because WordPress (correctly) flags most of them for moderation, but it’s still annoying to have to manually delete all of them. (And rather discouraging to find that by the time you’ve done away with the first batch, a couple more have popped up.) This is only compounded by the fact that WordPress doesn’t catch all of the spam–and the longer spam sits on your site, the more likely Google is to cache it, and let the spammers know that you’re an easy target.

So I’ve installed two plugins, one which will glean “spam words” and add them to a blacklist from comments I mark as spam, and another which will … actually, I’m not exactly sure what it does, but hopefully when I check my inbox tomorrow, I won’t have any emails with the subject line “[Refraction] Please approve: …”

It seems to me that I’ve been posting a lot about course selection and possible major choices.

Today, I attended an information meeting about a mentoring program (which is primarily directed at the life sciences, but ah well, whatever.) While I was listening to the presenter talk about how important it is to have a direction in life, she said something that really shook me out of my stupor.

Some people don’t know what they’re going to major in. Some people have no idea. At least you know you’re all in Science.

It immediately reminded me of the difficulty of choosing between Arts and Science. Everyone who reads this blog should be familiar enough with the arguments; I won’t go over them again. What that quote really triggered was the memory of a conversation I’d had with my English prof–we were chatting about my status as a Science student and I told him I was considering an English minor. Naturally, being an English prof, he didn’t see anything wrong with that :biggrin: But then he said: “After all, it’s not vocational school.”

I didn’t think much about it at the time. But it struck me, right in the middle of that presentation, that he was absolutely right. University isn’t vocational school. It’s about taking control of your education.

Strange. I like chemistry; I’d like to major in it, but all the same, I’m still wondering what I can do with it. “Research” is really just something I say to mask the fact that I have no idea what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. The average person spends 70,000 hours at work. That’s a lot of time.

Sad, isn’t it? As much as we would all like to rhapsodize about how we’re at university because we like to learn, the fact remains that ultimately, most of us are studying for the money (or glory, fame, prestige…) Or at the very least, security. The two can exist concurrently, but we like to think we have noble ideals that aren’t concerned with such mundane, prosaic things as money.

(On the other hand, I think that’s just my bias showing through. I hate commerce and economics, and I would never take a job in that sector.)

Okay, see, this is what happens as soon as I get back to school.

I sit down for a few hours and I make a new skin for my blog. :tongue: Plus, now the skins index actually has descriptions and stuff for each skin. Plus, I have Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell to read. It’s about 700 pages long, so we’ll see how I deal with it. And it’s due back to the library on Friday.

I don’t know how I’ll survive this term if I keep doing stuff like this. 😉

Don’t you love it when stuff works in your favour?

I got into the Biology class I wanted!! :star::star::star::star::star::star: And I can drop the class I’m not really all that keen on and… yeah! :biggrin:

Ah, maybe that was a bit too enthusiastic.

Anyway. I will still have to talk to Science Advising, I think. I’m not sure that I will actually be permitted to pursue a Biochem minor if I’m majoring in Chem (something about the fields being too closely related). Ah, perhaps a French minor is in order? English? Philosophy? :tongue: (I am not doing a History minor, don’t even START.) Hum, I’d still like to take a Biochem course eventually, though. Hey, maybe I WON’T have to take a course in the summer! *_*

The first day back. Usually when I go back to a place after a long break, it feels really foreign. That’s how it felt. Despite all these familiar faces, I still felt jaded. I didn’t care. I ran into a friend after Bio, and we chatted for a while about how we felt that we’d never quite feel at home at the universtiy–I suppose it’s just too large for that kind of feeling. Maybe things will change. In all likelihood, it’s just a first-year thing.

*happy mood carrying over from actually getting into BIOL 121* :cheerful: