frutti.gummi

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.

The door locks in my dorm are very difficult to use. You can turn the key around and around and when it reaches the end, your key is not in a vertical position that can be taken out and the door cannot be opened. So, you turn it back to a vertical position, try pushing the door but it wouldn't budge. So you turn back another half circle and try again and if it still doesn't work, turn it back another half circle and repeat until you get it to open or you reach the other end. When you reach the other end, turn back and try again and eventually you'll hear a click and the door can be opened. After fumbling with the door for a few times, I realised that if I turn the key half a cirle anti-clockwise first, I will hear a click immediately and the door can be opened. So, I made myself to remember to turn anti-clockwise every time I enter the room. The door is automatically locked when it's shut.

I don't really know how the lock works but I think there are other ways to turn the key to open the door. I know this coz whenever someone has entered my room, I couldn't get the door to open by simply turning the key half circle anti clockwise like I usually do. I kinda had to "reset" it to my style and the next time, it can be opened using my method.

And I was pretty distracted that someone entered my room that I left my keys outside the door the entire night. I didn't realised my keys were missing until I went out this morning and saw it hanging at the door.

Oh, and for the entrace door to the dorm, you had to turn the key half circle clock-wise, stop there, pull open the door, and turn the key back to vertical position to get your key out. At first, I turned the key all the way round and I couldn't get the door to open.

I really don't understand why they design door locks that have so much room to turn and it only works when it's turned half way or something.

It's only mid November and the temperature is hovering between -5C and 5C. It's not that cold for me yet since this is typical Chicago fall weather and I rarely need to wear gloves. However, I wished the fall weather of 13-18C could lasts longer.
What I dislike is the wet gloomy weather for the past 2 weeks. There are a few days in between where it was back to nice fall weather. The locals said that the winter came early this year just like how summer sprang on them. So they only have summer or winter. Hehe.

I'm starting to like my Saturdays eventhough I have to be up at 5 in the morning to catch a train to Aachen for German class. Perhaps the informal teaching style makes it a fun class to attend. It feels like a bunch of friends hanging out together just chatting. And when we need words, the teacher will help. For the first half of today's class, we talked about what we do during weekends. During the second half, we talked about food and drinks.

Some of use went for lunch together after class today; a Spanish, a French, a Nigerian, a Japanese and a Malaysian. It's just fascinating to learn about other cultures. Found out that in Spain, Santa Claus is called Papa Noel but he's not famous. They have their own "Santa"s which they call the Three Kings. They leave food in the window for the camels to eat and when the camels stop for food, the Three Kings will leave a present or three for you. Interesting! I'm amazed that the French guy have not even heard of the words "Santa Claus". I guess they really don't get much chance to learn things not French. Then, there's the Genghis Khan story which explains Mongolian descendants in Spain!

Oh! And I got to know a North Korean in class last week. All these while we thought he's from South Korea. Hehe. Well, we didn't think North Korean get to travel out of the country.

I found out that not only does the German uni has compulsory courses, the Italian uni has compulsory courses too. And we have to satisfy the requirements of both unis. These are the requirements for the standard students enrolled in each uni and somehow it applies to us as well; which makes life super difficult for us since some courses are only offered during a particular semester. So, we'll end up with a lot more than the required 90 credits of course work. These courses are mostly intermediate level general courses which I have no interest in whatsoever. Luckily I managed to get exempted for 2 mandatory courses since I have taken in undergrad. But I'm still only left with 2-3 courses which I can choose for myself.

Besides compulsory courses, the uni in Germany also group courses in categories and we have to satisy a certain amount of credits in each category. Which means I need to check which category the courses I want to take is in. And these courses will be taken in Italy so have to make sure it satisfy the German uni as well.

I think this is the third year the programme is running and things are still unclear. Plus, the school break is also not in sync. Classes in Italy will start mid February when we're still having final exams in Germany. No school break for us and we'll miss 1-2 weeks of classes.

I kinda like to eat when I'm reading and I have tons of materials to read. So, I finally decided during my grocery shopping to buy 2 packets of gummy bears thinking it would last me 2 weeks. I also bought 3 cans of 0.33L coke. Two days ago, I bought a packet of raisins as well. Suprisingly, I finished everything in a week. Once I opened a packet, I pretty much can't stop eating. If I put it back into the fridge, maybe an hour or two later, I would start thinking about it and I'll get distracted. Eventually, I'll go and get the remaining packet. The thing is I'll fall asleep easily if I don't chew something while I read. As for the coke, it's just tempting when I see it everytime I open the fridge to get something. On the otherhand, I took over 2 weeks to finish a tub of ice cream which is hidden in the freezer. Now, I'm thinking whether I should re-stock my sugar supply for next week.

In relation to the previous post, it seem to me that it's expected of us to also study or do our assignments or research in the weekends. However, the libraries and computer labs are closed on weekends! I know Germans don't work on weekends and everything is closed on Sunday but I didn't think that university facilities would be closed as well. So, they expect us to do so much stuff but they don't provide the environment for us to do so.
Furthermore, you would think that if the CS departments have their own little libraries, they would have quite a collection of books. Wrong! They only have 5-7 shelves of reference books; mostly in German. Though there are quite a number of shelves holding journals from ACM, IEEE, etc. I have yet to check out the main library in Aachen but I do hope they have more books. Othwerwise I would have a tough time writing my technical paper with only a few references.

I'm glad classes are over for this week. Well, except for German class. I had no idea that these classes requires so much work outside of lecture. Most classes here comes in 2 parts; lecture and lab. Lecture session is only once a week so it could last 3 straight hours. After each lecture, there's usually an assignment and you'll need to submit the assignment before the lab session in the following week. During the lab, the answers to the assignment will be discussed. On top of it, there's reading assignments!

A professor told us that each credit for a course is equivalent to 30 hours of work. And we are expected to spend the same amount of time we spend in class at home doing the assignments/reading books/reviewing materials. One of my class has 8 credits so I'll be spending 8x30=240 hours for this class over 14 weeks in which 3 weeks are holiday. I have 22 credits this semester, excluding German class and technical writing. After calculation, it comes out to about 50 hours a week. It's already worse than working and I haven't add in the hours that I'm putting in for work.