frutti.gummi

According to my plan, I'm supposed to finalize my thesis today so that I could enjoy two weeks of freedom. However, I still have not received the feedback from my supervisor. Furthermore, I'm still stuck with writing the conference paper because the deadline has been extended till Thursday. I'm starting to get tired from all these writing in the past two months.
I finished a draft of the conference paper on Wednesday with minor changes on Thursday morning. When I met with my supervisor on Friday evening, he hasn't read the paper yet. 90 minutes later, he managed to go through half of the paper and we went through the other half together. So based on his comments, we worked separately over the weekend to complete the paper. This afternoon, he sent an email telling me that the deadline has been extended and we should continue to improve the paper in the next few days.
I hope that my supervisor will still have time to read my thesis and give me the feedback before the end of the week. I really would like to submit it by the end of next week so that I could at least enjoy the weekend.

This week, I have been eating food that can be cooked in a short time, like instant noodles and fried rice. I thought I would also be very busy this weekend writing the conference paper but since my supervisor is not exactly contributing to the paper and I don't know whether I'm headed in the right direction, I decided to take a break. I was also looking forward to the snowfall but there were barely visible. It started again this evening and now I see about 2 inches. I hope it continued over the night and I'll wake up to a nice white scenery :)
For me, a nice day always consists of a nice meal. Hehe. Since I had to finish the chicken I bought, I decided to try making teriyaki chicken. I didn't have the ready made sauce so I googled for the recipe. It's very easy if you have sake and mirin which I don't. So I made up my own version with chicken stock and honey. It's doesn't taste exactly like teriyaki but quite similar. Slighty sweet on top of the saltiness. :D

I finished my second draft a couple of days later than what I had scheduled. It was also partly due to the fact that my supervisor was so busy last week that he suggested we meet on Friday. So I took my own sweet time to complete it. I also continued work a bit on the conference paper by copying and pasting some of the materials from my thesis. Now I have a total of 5 pages without abstract, conclusion, and any figures. I figured it's a pretty good start.

When I met with my supervisor on Friday, there wasn't much of a discussion about the papers. Since he is still going to be very busy, he said he'll try to read my second draft as soon as possible. He also said that it's pretty unrealistic to write the conference paper now that we only have a week left. But since I have already started writing something, he'll try to support me. I tried to discuss about the content of the paper but my supervisor wanted to read what I had written first. I hope he managed to squeeze some time to do that and we can have a short discussion on Monday. Anyway, instead of writing the paper together, I'll be writing it myself and hopefully my supervisor have the time to review it the end of the week because it's due on the 30th.

I was reading my old entries and I realised that I had pretty much stopped updating this blog since I started on my thesis. Anyway, my thesis has been progressing well. I just finished writing the first draft. 70+ pages! I've never written so much in my entire life :D I just hope that it's of the acceptable standard. I'll find out when I meet with my supervisor next week. Pretty much done with the development work. Just a bit of fix here and there when bugs are found. And I have a conference paper to write as well. I hope I could get started on that tomorrow.
This weekend has been rather nice in the sense that I didn't do any work. I just watched a couple of movies, coincidenly both have the word 'sunshine' in the title, and cooked myself some nice meals. It's a nice change considering that I had 2-3 meals of instant noodles in the past week. Plus, I have been staying put here for almost 2 months now and it's a record! Haha.. I did shop once in a while and ended up with quite a significant damage. I definately will have trouble moving all my stuff out when I leave. Aahh I shall worry about that later. Hehe

Was told that the weather was at its best. A couple of days of pure sunshine followed by cloudy days with drizzle and then very wet rainy days. And the cycle continues. Pretty much managed to make the most of the few sunny days. :) In the cities, bagpipes are often heard and I was surprised that they play contemporary music as well! Last minute short trip to the highlands was a wonderful experience. We didn't do much hiking though. The view from above would be absolutely stunning. Hope to return to visit properly, at least a week or so. Oh it's gonna be expensive!

It has been quite some time since I cooked chicken. I guess I ran out of ideas as I've been experimenting with various ways of cooking chicken. This is the first time I ended up with a recipe I really like. :) Or maybe it's just because it's a tomato based sauce. :p And I topped it over plain risotto. I was surprised that the rice still managed to absorb the sauce pretty well despite being cooked 30 minutes earlier and has gotten cold and a bit dry. Oh, I'm also glad that I still managed to cook the risotto just right! :D I haven't been making risotto from scratch during my one year in Italy. That's coz I found instant risotto packets. Hehe.

Happy July 4th!

I didn't go anywhere this month because I have been quite hardworking. :P So I thought I could save some money for traveling in the future. But instead, I went shopping and ended up with a monetary damage comparable to taking a short trip. Well, shopping does feel very good indeed, especially when I managed to buy most of what I wanted. :D And it has been a couple of years since I spent so much on clothes and shoes. A little over one third of the amount was spent on shoes so I don't think it's that bad.
I have been looking for a nice pair of black leather kitten heel and I saw them in the store 2 months ago. I thought it was a bit pricey and since I didn't need it asap, I decided to continue looking. A week ago, I finally gave in to the SALE signs everywhere and stepped inside the stores. Then it occured to me to check if that store would have the shoes on sale. And lucky me, it's 30% off and one last pair of my size. :D
Similar thing happened to another pair of shoes that I bought. I like the design but only the beige color was available for my size. I prefer the dark brown color so I decided to look around for others. A week later, I went shopping in Cologne which has a lot more variety. Still, I couldn't find anything that I like more so I decided to go back to the store to see if that pair of shoes is still available. This time, I saw a pair with my size and the color I wanted. SooOOoo happy!

I had 3 eggs which expires today so I somehow had to cook them all if I don't want to throw them away. So was I thinking what I could make and I remembered seeing my Japanese flatmate made the egg omelette in an interesting way. I googled for 'Japanese omelette' to check if that's what it was and I found recipes for it. Although it looks easy to make, I find it a bit challenging especially to evenly spread the egg in as thin a layer as possible. This can be eaten warm or at room temperature and should still be good the next day when stored properly. :D

Recipe taken from Basics: Tamagoyaki or Atsuyaki Tamago, Japanese sweet omelette

I haven't been posting lately simply because I didn't feel like writing. Well, I've also been busy but that's just an excuse. So in the past two months or so, I have traveled to Rome, Prague and Amsterdam at different times. Also made a long day trip to Koblenz that consists of a short hike, castle visit and boat ride. In between traveling, I worked on my thesis and about two weeks ago, I presented my work proposal. I'm currently starting to do the development work; learning .NET 3.x Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). After playing around with it for a while now, I have a better understanding of the major concepts. I'm starting to think of a GUI design that is most user friendly but what can be done is also limited to my newly acquired WPF knowledge. Anyway, I don't have travel plans for this month yet and I plan to get as much done as possible before I go away again. :D

Yael Naim - New Soul

Today is the first time I made something new since I moved to Aachen. Well, I haven't been cooking much either. I'm trying to get used to the super small kitchen and very limited utencils that I have. I have also been traveling for a bit so it was difficult to keep fresh ingredients in the fridge. I managed to make this salad with penne, canned tuna and canned mix veg (carrot, corn and peas). I was surprised to find a tomato in my fridge so I made use of it. :D It's a nice cool salad for the rising temperatures. And I'm off to Amsterdam tomorrow!

After just a month in Germany and especially having had about 2 weeks of lunch at the school cafeteria, Italy feels like heaven. I went back for a workshop over the weekend and I truly enjoyed my stay. Spring has already arrived with warmer weather, blooming flowers and plenty of sunshine. The event was held in a building on the mountain side looking over the entire town. So the view is just excellent. I was lucky enough to get a room with the same view! The food and drink provided were delicious. I get to have cappucino for breakfast and machiato during coffee breaks. I miss machiato because it's not common outside Italy. I also craved for gelato and was about to go on a gelato eating spree. At first I bought 2 scoops and finished it while waiting for the rest to get theirs. Then we hung out in the piazza for a while and since no one had any idea where to go, I suggested to go to another gelateria. I went in to buy mango gelato and was surprised that most of the others also bought more gelato. When we were walking to another piazza passing a couple of gelaterias, I was tempted to buy more. However, I wanted to save some space for dinner and also didn't want to take the risk of getting sick since I was to be flying off the next day. Besides the weather, food, and beautiful scenery, I also experienced superb Italian hospitality. People are friendly with smiles on their faces and Italian guys can be really charming. With a combination of all these, one could easily fall in love!

Founded by the Romans, Maastricht is considered to be the oldest city in The Netherlands. It is home to many historial sights such as the Roman bridge, the city wall, churches and other buildings. It also has beautiful scenery; the Meuse river that runs through the city, the park along the city wall and vast grasslands. The city center is mostly a pedestrian only shopping area. For a small city, there are big multi-level department stores here. The city is charming with a nice blend of the old buildings and the new glass buildings. A 12th century church is even converted to a bookstore with cafe. It's amazing!

We also went to visit the pentagon shaped fortress and a small section of the caves with a total of more than 20,000 passages, which are the result of centuries of excavation of marlstone. Oh..the Coffeshop here is not a place to have coffee. Instead, it's a place where people can buy and smoke small doses of soft drugs. There isn't much free time to walk around because we took the guided tours by the tourist office. It was already 6pm by the time we finished. Surprisingly, all the shops are already closed. Even the waffle shop. :( Since it is only about an hour from Aachen, I hope to return to check out the stores and take more photos.

I just love the sight of snowfall. I can just keep staring out the window. It has been snowing every day for the past week. :D There weren't much accumulation though coz it didn't snow continuously. It's more like heavy snow for 20 minutes followed by light snow and then the sky cleared. After a while, it starts to snow again and then clear again. I think it's due to the strong wind we have here. Still, it's nice that I get to see beautiful snowfall everyday and it feels magical walking under it. This has been the best winter experience I had in Europe. There's no ugly side to this kind of snowfall as there are no dirty snow piled up by the street, no water puddles everywhere and no icy walkway.

I've spent the past week reading some papers on related research projects and playing arond with the application while consulting the user guide. The user guide is the one that comes with the original installation of the app. It is not very useful because the app has been extended with some sort of project management functionality which I am supposed to work at. Although my advisor is patient enough to show me the features that were implemented, there isn't any documentation. So when I'm playing around with it, I have to figure out what is working and if not working, whether it is a bug or a feature that is not implemented. The development environment on this app is through a very bad UI which one can create objects and make references, etc. I don't really know how to do this yet since there isn't any manual for developer.

I know that non-existence of proper documentation is quite common. However, in order to develop something, I'm sure there would be a list of what is desired to be developed. And since this is a group work, I don't think people just keep everything in their heads. Oh, there is a wish list and a bug list but not the current list . Maybe I can try coming up with a current list by looking at those two lists. Hmm... not sure if these list are written in German though coz there are only limited project related papers and documentation written in English.

"Where are you from?" I have been asked this question almost everytime when I meet new people in Europe. This almost never happened in the States. After they know where I'm from, they're usually interested to know more about the country and its people. And this is a problem for me. When they asked what language I speak at home, I said "English". Then they would want to know what is the national/official language and I said "Malay" and they assumed I also speak it. But due to my hesitation, they weren't so sure about it. Friends who have seen two non-Malay Malaysians in conversation were puzzled as to why it was carried out in English and not Malay. So they asked "When do you use Malay then?" In terms of entertainment, I know we have some local shows and music scenes but I can't name them because I only know the imported ones. And traditional dance? I don't remember! I did it in primary school and haven't seen one in ages. Oh it's funny when it comes to names. Why do I have an American/English name? What's a typical Malaysian name? I don't know how to answer. At least in terms of food, I've managed to give satisfactory description from the eating experience (very interesting) I gained while working in Malaysia for 3+ years. I thought I became more Malaysian but now I'm not so sure. Anyhow, at least not so American anymore.

This has been in the back of my head for a while. I wonder why when someone meet another person from his/her country, somehow they can get along. It's like they have something that binds them together. Same culture probably. However, I find that it's not as easy among Malaysians. Or maybe it's just me being not so Malaysian. Actually, how do you define being a Malaysian? Just by being a citizen or PR? What makes a Malaysian different from others?

I met with my advisor yesterday to discuss about the thesis. He did most of the talking, explaining about the project and showing some of the applications. The focus of my thesis would be on process management. Since I already have some related experience, I could easily understand the big picture and the goals of the project. The difficult part is to understand how the existing systems work because part of my work is to port a research prototype to a production system. He printed a few papers for me to read and hopefully I'll get a better idea about the existing apps. I'll also be getting access to the lab's computers so I can play around with the apps. He told me that it'll take 2-3 months preparation work to come up with a specification for the project which I'll have to present to the professors and other group members. After that, the development work will probably take about 6 months and of course, I'll need to write the paper in the end. This will mean that I can finish by the end of the year if I don't take any vacations. Most unlikely since I already have some travel plans in mind. I guess I just need to work more when I'm not travelling.

Just feels so nice to shop here. Groceries are a lot cheaper than Trento especially the fruits and vegetables. I finally managed to buy seedless grapes here and chinese pears! There are also a lot more variety of candies, chocolates, chips as well as drinks. In the few supermakets that I've been, I've only seen soft drinks sold in bottle form. I'm looking for them in can form so that I can limit the amount I drink. Surprisingly, pasta and pasta sauce is very limited. Even fewer variety than what I can get in KL. No wonder there are so many food joints selling pasta. People here don't cook them at home I guess. Retail stores here are a much bigger too and with more well known brands like Mango, Zara, H&M, etc. After being in Trento, I don't find that clothes here are that expensive anymore. There are plenty of home decor stores and a variety of dollar stores that I scoured for cheap kitchen utencils and stuff for the bathroom. I found quite a few handicraft stores too selling beads, ribbons, paper, etc. Kinda reminds me of the times I made presents for family and friends. Oh, I did manage to go to IKEA in Heerlen, Netherlands. It's an hour away by bus from town. I bought a few things including a reading lamp. Some of the stuff are really cheap and I shouldn't have bought the kitchen utensils earlier in the other shops in town. Oh well, now I know where to go for cheap stuff.

The student residence I live in is in the suburb of Haaren, 5km from Aachen town. It's the only place available with a single room with attached kicthen and bathroom. My room is quite spacious and the furniture seems new. It's on the second floor so not much of a view from the window. I expected a blanket and pillow to be provided like in Bonn or Trento but these aren't provided here. I'm so glad I found a really cheap blanket at the discount store around the corner. I had to use it for a night without cover since my shipped luggage only arrived the next day. When the house master told me that I'm getting a new bed since the previous bed was broken, I really thought it's going to be a new bed. However, it turned out to be just another bed taken from another room. The bed is too soft. I wonder if there's any way to make it harder. Add a mattress pad? The room is also dimly lit; not suitable for doing anything productive like reading or cooking. There are plenty of power points so I guess they are for additional lamps. Gonna find out how to get to IKEA to buy some lamps and other stuff. The small fridge does not have a freezer compartment like the one in Bonn so I won't be able to enjoy the convenience of frozen food.

Besides being far, it's also expensive. I was thinking of looking for something cheaper and closer to town but now I got quite comfortable with my room. Even though I have not unpack most of my stuff, I just don't feel like moving again. The main street is just around the corner so everything is near by; supermarket, pharmacy, bank, bakery, diners, and cafes. Just one bus stop away, about 5+ minutes walk, there are bigger supermarkets and a McD that opens 24 hours a day! Hehe. So, I quite like it here. Once the internet is activated in a week's time, I should be home often.

It was pretty warm in Trento when I boarded the train. Spring seemed to have been skipped and staright to summer. When I sleep, at first I didn't need to use the blanket provided. As the train was going through Switzerland, I could feel the temperature was dropping. After the train passed the German border for a while, I started to feel cold and got up to cover myself with the blanket. When I woke up in the morning and head outside my compartment, I was greeted with a white scene. Snow everywhere! And it was still snowing heavily. It only lasted for a short while towns had lesser and lesser snow as the train head towards Cologne. I saw Bonn also had some snow and it was already melting. When I switched train to Aachen, I was looking forward to see some snow and I was glad that there were still snow when I arrived. :D I like the sunny and cold weather here although the wind makes it a lot colder and it's quite breezy here.

Spent my last weekend in Italy in Turin, host of the 2006 Winter Olympics. The current attraction is the Chocolate Festival that is held every year. When someone mention chocolates, I would think of Swiss or Belgian so I was surprised to find out that chocolate candy was invented in Turin and the Swiss came to Turin to learn the trade. The most famous chocolate sweet is called "gianduiotto", made of a coca-hazelnut paste and dates back to the 19th century. It taste like Nutella and of course, Nutella is also from a nearby town. The festival is held in one of tbe many big squares. Local retailers set up booths selling a variety of chocolates, cakes and drinks. Most of the retailers are just selling the normal forms of chocolates while I was expecting to see some special stuff. Anyway, besides the festival, Turin is pleasant town with wide streets, big piazzas, and great food. Try the calzone and pizza. It also seems like the cafe culture is popular here too. The Egyptian museum here is home to what is regarded as one of the largest collections of Egyptian antiquities outside of Egypt. It is really worth to visit especially when you don't know when you can go to Cairo. Hehe.