Last week was exceptionally busy, particularly with term coming to and end in about 1 weeks time. Time do pass rather fast when you are buried with work almost literally every day! I even do not have time to send out Christmas cards yet, despite having telling myself to send them weeks ago!

Nevertheless, some interesting things note over the past week was the rather unpredictable weather here at this time of the year. Strangely as I was told by my seniors, it usually do not rain as much as it does last year. This year is exceptionally “wet”. So as I come to learn the hard way as well.

I was caught in a downpour when cycling back from a from another college supervision about 2 weeks ago. I was literally drenched despite having much clothing on me, but that didn’t make much of a difference as they are all cotton and not water repellent! Dang! was that a night to remember, I was literally “sick” the following 1 and a half weeks after, not that I was down with a bad fever, but had those lingering symptoms which makes you feel horrible and won’t go away. I had a bad sore throat which slowly developed into a bad cough, (which proved rather interesting in developing the coughing chain-reaction in lectures). I am actually getting better now and so appreciate hot drinks now- something which I never did so back in tropical Singapore. It’s just wonders what a nice hot cup of green tea can do to not only soothe your throat but warm your day up as well.

“You always bring a jacket out in England!” So as I learned from a causal chat with my block cleaner when making breakfast one day in the kitchen. She’s a nice lady to chat with where she goes about her rounds in the morning sprucing up our rooms and common area. Interesting were her stories of how strong the wind gets here, it can get so gusty, it can literally smash windows or even blow your balance off your bicycle!

Ok, that much I have for this update, the rest of them can go in photos:

Touch the sundial!

Bike overload!

Everything tastes like chicken!

Oh yes, we had another cookout, this time with a group of Malaysians living round my block! We experimented with Maggi Goreng and had curry chicken as well! Just like food back at home here! whoa! The ride back home with the groceries for the cookout was rather interesting as well. Tested out the fancy new pannier bags I’ve brought from Amazon and they are really good to transporting loads off stuff on your bicycle. Full trolley visits to Tesco are a breeze now!

Meegoreng? Goreng!

Operation Chicken Lice!

The Meegoreng cookout gang!

Oh well, that is all for now. The weekend is here!

Ah, good old San Francisco, one of my favorite cities in the world, only this showing how it looks like in the past, specifically set in 1905 before the big earthquake and fire of 1906. Well, besides the fact that this video is more than a century old and almost everyone you see in this video is not much among the living now, it’s still a blast into the past of how life was like back in the past which, in terms of organization with the exception of horse drawn carriages here and there, is not very much different from life we have today (and the exception of lack of vehicular control). Nevertheless still a fantastic city, through the eye of a camera on a cable car on this video.

And come to think about it, nothing much had changed in terms of how the city is still laid out today, specifically the trademark cable cars! This video really want to make me want to visit the place again. It also makes you wonder what things will be like 100 years from now and how people in the future will see us living today. Go figure!

I came across this problem when doing some word processing on my new installation of Office 2007 on Windows 7. If you are running the final release build of Windows 7 (build 7600) and Office 2007, you may have this problem of being unable to use your mouse to click on text or click-drag the right scroll bar. Closing your Word window will result in an App crash. Even after many restarts, running the Office diagnostics (no problems) and having the latest Office updates do not seem to work either. My add-ons do not seem to affect the situation enable or not, so the problem will lie mainly on word’s core.

A quick fix which worked for me till Microsoft releases an official fix is to revert the office registry settings back to the default value, (well despite my Office install being still largely set on default). That means renaming the current registry values to an alternative backup value so that word can re-create the registry values again.

Click start and under run, type “regedit” (start -> Run-> enter “regedit”). The registry editor will pop up and navigate to: CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Office. From there, do the following:

Make sure that word is closed when doing this. After that start word and you should be able to click on text and drag the scroll bar using your mouse. Unless if you are really sure of what you are doing, do create a registry backup before altering any values on the editor, do this at your own risk. But if anything crops out, you can always rename your registry values back to the original values.

In my latest email from home, it seems that there were some highlights and talk in Singapore of our PM Lee’s speech at Cambridge 800th anniversary gala dinner. Well not that I do not know of despite it happening within close proximity from where I am, but hey I have other things to worry about.

There was social last weekend at the CUMSA club (Cambridge University Malaysia and Singapore Association) and ironically it was actually founded by Lee Kuan Yew, LKY almost 60 years ago in 1948. Well not that I actually knew of it when I joined. Haha anyway, I kinda signed up as a lifetime member with the club. It was games night last Saturday and we had quite some ummmm fun, as you can see in the pictures, hey it’s a social event after all right?

Deck out the Wii!

Table games

And there’s always CS!

Besides the doses of fizzy drinks and oily fingers from food, it was largely a social event, we had games, Nintendo Wii, poker, card, board games and the best part (and why I was there) LAN gaming! Yea Counter-strike, DOTA and possibility L4D in the future as well. A fragfest it was, a much needed one too after a long week. Wahahaha I don’t think LKY envisioned his club as it being such as now, haha but at least we are keeping on with the times!

Food Alert!
Play hard? Also work hard! I was literally packed over the weekend, I had to submit a report and 2 example papers homework over the weekend, so I was relatively busy, so were the lack of updates as well. But that didn’t stop me from organising my first cookout over the last weekend! as well, that was earlier that same Saturday as well!

Turn this stuff

into THIS!

Yea! I love cookouts!

I initially wanted to prepare linguine with clams, but Saintsbury’s (aka their NTUC or cold-storage) was out of clam chowder, so I had to settle for beef stew with a vegetable mix instead of the sauce. Top it up with some smoked ham and going generous in helping some of my college mates finish up some soon-to-be-expired eggs. I prepared my first cookout!

Yea, a cookout for the gang as well. Ahah not bad for my first! I COOKED THAT Wahahah!
Oh yes, in short, that is pasta with beef stew, cabbage vege-mix, scrambled eggs, shredded ham and leafy vegetables, very wholesome!

Lastly on the weather, despite winter being quite far off, it gets cold enough here at night and in the mornings to “smoke from your mouth” when you speak. I think it hits close to freezing here at night, despite the meteorological services reporting 4-8 degrees. Nevertheless, I am still getting on the temperatures here very well, strangely being clad most of the time wearing only 2 layers of top clothes with single layer jeans and shoes. I should be able to handle winter with not much problems. The only problem is that your hands do get only very cold after awhile when outdoors, especially when you are cycling, but gloves always help!

No one seems to wear slippers of sandals out here, unlike what I do everytime in Singapore, maybe I should actually dress less sloppily?