frutti.gummi

Was planning to finish the first draft of my seminar paper, review German lessons and go through the materials for the network class during the Christmas break but I failed badly. I've only managed to finish three quarter of the paper, reviewed German lesson once, and not even have a glance at the network stuff. I did have a lot of time during the long Christmas weekend but somehow I wasted a lot of time being lazy. Sigh! Now, I need to continue to work on my paper in London. Still, I look forward to having a good time during the one week vacation. :D

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year!! May 2007 be a better year for all.

The Christmas atmosphere here is awesome! At the Weihnachtsmarkts (Christmas markets) , one can find all sorts of things for sale. All pretty pretty things. As for food, one can find a variety of meat, potatoes, pastries, candies, roasted nuts, etc etc. They're all tasty! The famous drink is Glühwein, which is warm red wine with cinnamon and some other spices. Throughout the day and night, people would stand around small tables with a drink and chat. It can be cold sometimes but we still do it. It's all the fun with shopping and eating and drinking.


Some of my personal goodies include Christ-stollen, dominosteine, half a bag of chocs from France, and a souvenier mug from Christmas market in Bonn. The stollen a traditional christmas cake in Germany. I guess it's like the English fruit cake but the taste is different all together. It has sugar dusted on top and the one I bought had marzipan filling. Yummy! There are other variety of stollen too; some contains almonds, some has rum. Dominosteine are small layers of gingerbread with jam and marzipan covered with chocolate. I think these are the best choc fillings. Hehe. And the choc pralines are so smooth and it just doesn't feel like choc at all. I could have finish the bag in a day. Also, there's all sorts of Lebkuchen. I've never really liked gingerbread but the ones here are really nice. :D

It's Christmas eve and I felt like having something nice. Since it's too difficult to make the typical Christmas food for one portion, I didn't really know what to have. Then I thought about the ingredients I have in my kitchen and it struck me. Katsu don! The egg yolks here are just too yellow. I have already took half the yolk out and it's still so yellow! Nonetheless, one satisfying meal for the eve. Guten Appetit! :D

Wishing everyone a blessed Christmas and may the new year bring you much joy and love. Happy holidays!

My iPod has been a wonderful companion especially on days which I have long commute. Most of the time, I don't know exactly what songs are in it. The other day I discovered Home by Michael Buble on my iPod. I think it's a simple and beautiful song . It kinda made me reflect on my personal experiences. Anyway, when I found a nice "new" song, I usually listen to it over and over again. So, the next day I was eager to listen to the song on my iPod again. But when I turned it on, it wouldn't play. It was blinking green and orange. I was worried that my iPod was sick and I thought maybe it's too cold. It still wouldn't play after I warm it up with my hands. Came home, looked it up on the net. Then connect it to iTunes and found that the playlist has disappeared! I had to reset the iPod and load all the songs again. It was such a relief when it worked after the reset. Maybe it's getting close to its shelf life. So, should I get a new iPod? If wanna buy one, I should buy it this year coz VAT is going from 16% up to 19% next year.


Michael Buble - Home

Some of my classmates in german class have the idea of sharing alcoholic drinks from their home country. Two Saturdays ago, one of the Japanese gal brought sake and some riceballs to class. We all had some after class. Then, this past Saturday, a few others brought theirs to share. This time we had it during the class break since some had to leave immediately after class. The turkish couple brought Raki, a traditional alcoholic drink with whopping 40% alcohol and feta cheese and chic peas to go with it. You add a bit of water to the clear liquid to make it a bit milky. It smells very nice and I like it though you can feel your throat burning after you swallow it. Then, the French guy from the champagne region who went home a week earlier, arrived with 2 bottles of champagnes and chocolates :D Of course everyone was waiting for the champagne so we opened a bottle. Oooh, it's so good! Later, the Russian arrived with a bottle of spicy vodka. You can actually see pepper inside the bottle. We decided it was too much alcohol in the morning and we still have another half session of class so we kept the vodka for later. We offered some to the teacher too and she seems cool about it.

It just occured to me that there are other ways to make use of leftover cold rice besides making fried rice. Rice stew! Just need to make the soup base first then throw in all the ingredients and the cold rice and let it simmer for about 20 minutes. A hot, hearty meal for the winter. It's even easier than frying rice and also less cleaning in the kitchen. :D

Finally went ice skating last week. The atmosphere was very nice with colorful lightings and music. It cost 4.50€ to rent the skates and it was only for two hours. I'm not sure if they impose the time limit due to high demand. There were lots of people and the ice was melting and puddles of water everywhere. I was anxious to know whether I can still skate. I had expected the worse but it turned out that I didn't entirely loose my skill. I started skating quite clumsily and tried my best not to fall. One would be very wet if one fell onto the ice. My friend's jacket and pants were soaked and the water was also dirty. By the end of the 2 hours, I was getting better though still not skating as smoothly as I did before. Still, it's quite nice :D

Have always loved risotto but had never attempted to cook, until recently. Read the recipes and seemed like it's easy to make so I gave a try last month. Was surprised it turned out being edible! Haha. I had already made risotto twice for dinner but the lighting in my room was just too terrible to take pictures. So, today I made it for lunch. I doubt it's something I'll cook often as it takes longer time in the kitchen. Can't multi-task either. Frying rice is a lot faster and I still like fried rice.

Ich liebe das Lied :D

Been having a tough time getting out of bed lately. When I wake up, I look out of the window from my bed and it's usually either dark (4-7am) or gloomy (8am). Without some sunshine, it just didn't feel like the day has started. I think I spent at least half an hour more in bed trying to make myself to get up. The sky only starts to get bright around 8:30am. Then there's those gloomy rainy days, which is quite frequent here, which makes you just wanna cuddle up in bed.

At first I was quite pleased that most of the courses here doesn't require writing programs. I wasn't sure if I could still write anything in C++/Java. However, having experienced the tedious process of writing papers, I'd rather write programs now. You can just start writing the program and it either work or it doesn't. So you know whether you are doing it right. But with papers, you gotta read tons of materials written by other people first and then decide which of these papers are useful for your paper. Still, you can't be sure whether you're on the right track especially when you're not sure what exactly needs to be written. I'm in that situation with my seminar paper now. It took me days to write the "table of contents", basically a detailed outline of my paper. Furthermore, over the weekend, we had a writing assignment in pairs to write about Douglas Engelbart, the person who "invented" the computer/web as we know it today. It's already difficult to write in pairs and yet we are also graded for writing style! I forgot most of what I learnt in English 101 and 102.

If you're interested in Engelbart's work, check this out. You'll be amazed what he had built in 1968 and some of the nice features in his system are still not available in ours today.
Video:The Mother of All Demos
Article:Engelbart talks about his demo

Been having lack of sleepy lately due to a huge amount of assignments. I myself was surprised I could wake up at 4am to go for German class yesterday. I usually sleep in the train but yesterday I overslept and ended up one station further than the Cologne Hbf (central train/bus station). Luckily, that train's last stop is just one station away so I went to another platform to catch another train back to Cologne and make it back in time for my usual train to Aachen. Phew! Otherwise I need to wait for another 30-45 minutes for the next train to Aachen and will be 15 minutes late for class.