Pimp Your DS!

So now you have your spanking cool Nintendo DS lite and have been having hours of fun on it, how about pimping it up?

1. Get a cool case for it. And an even cooler keychain





2. Customise the background of your flashcart menu. Themes for the R4 DS can be found at NDSThemes. Or if you're feeling more adventurous, DIY at the official R4 DS forums.





3. Stick a cool sticker onto the front of your DS.



No it doesn't have to be costly bling like the official Mario skin. But just a simple computer printout with double sided tape for backing and a layer of laminating paper for an overlay. Not elegant, and it looks pretty amateur if you paste it on at an angle like I did. But hey, it does the job of telling everyone else what games you play. And you don't bring home the wrong DS after a group gaming session!



4. Install lotsa hombrew applications. Especially stuff that gives your DS Internet capabilities. Be warned though that they don't work on wifi networks that require a login page to begin such as Wireless@SG!

Beup - a MSN client that works reliably. Get the updated version here for the R4 DS as the author did not update his to reflect the new MSN server address. Dump everything from that zipfile into the flashcart.



DSOrganize - a primitive web browser (most forms and stuff don't work, doesn't display any images), a calender, an IRC client all rolled into one! Patched for R4 DS here.



Point your browser to http://web.singnet.com.sg/~lkc2002 for the DS-friendly links I go to!

Muthu's Curry - Suntec City

(Note: This post's photos are in 1024x768 so you can click on them to enlarge them, unlike my usual photos.)



Classmate's birthday celebration!

The thing about Muthu's Curry in Suntec City is that it does away with the old-school stuffy atmosphere which we often see in those traditional Indian restaurants that do a roaring trade.



Instead, we see exquisite lighting and stylish furnishing more typical of a gourmet restaurant.

And oh well, the price reflects that too.

Here's the obligatory food pics. Mostly done with my Canon, so the colours are slightly better.


Pardon me for not knowing the weird dish names, so I'd just tell you what the main ingredient is. This has lady's fingers and peas and other veges. In a (overpoweringly) cinnamony gravy.


Mutton curry. Above average. But hey, don't all mutton curries taste about the same?


Cottage cheese in weird green gravy. Sorta bland, but I guess that's how the way it is.


Fried mushrooms! Yummy!


Fried chicken! Just tastes.... fried.


And of course, the highlight - Fish head curry. Surprisingly, it's not half as hot as expected, but the fish is really soft. In a good way. Pricey though.


Served with a whole load of white rice.


And a way smaller load of poppadums. How do you enjoy them? Soak them to death in the fish curry until they're soggy and tasty.


Bones.


Dessert! It's some strawberry Indian ice-cream.


Pistachio flavoured. Took a small lick of it. It tastes spicy, and nutty and .... weird.


Birthday girl's not in the photo (I'd probably be curried if I put her pic) but here's me and 3 others! In brown! Multiracial too!

Pancakes!

Delia Smith's pancakes

Delia Smith's THE chef of BBC. That's before the era of celeb chefs like Jamie Oliver, I mean. Her cooking shows tell you things that matter - stuff like, fresh eggs, when hardboiled, are hard to shell. In ther TV series, she had spent 6 whole half-hour episodes just on the various methods of cooking eggs.

And this time round, I had little doubt about the replicability (is there such a word) of this recipe. Stuck to the recipe almost perfectly, except making a minor boo-boo of mixing in the butter without melting it first (it didn't really mix).

Ingredients:
110g/4oz plain flour, sifted
pinch of salt
2 eggs
200ml/7fl oz milk mixed with 75ml/3fl oz water
50g/2oz butter

These makes 12-14 small pancakes, or 7 of the large pancakes which I had made. Feeds about 3 people for breakfast.


The final result looks great, but the camera's wonky auto-white-balance feature belies the golden yellow of the pancakes.

I made them barely-cooked, so that they're still chewy and soft, rather than the light and fluffy ones most people would prefer.

Call me crazy, but I'm a sucker for the taste/smell of half-cooked flour.

Verdict? You gotta use even less butter than that or they'll simply soak up all the oil and end up greasy. And adding baking powder might make them fluffier. They're sorta plain because there's no sugar in it, so you gotta add quite a lot of maple syrup for taste.

Despite, it's yummy and met my expectations!

==

Offtopic, but here's the beef steak I had made a couple of days back. Too much paprika powder and the cut of beef was tough (you could literally see the fibrous connective tissue planes when you tear it apart).

Friday's Dust

I guess I haven't been blogging blogging for a while now - I've been documenting just bare snippets of my life the past week, without really telling you what really goes through that squash of mine. So here goes.

It's Groundhog Day again, waking up, sneering at the clock, cussing at the absurd kind of time I have to wake up to get to Pasir Ris.

Quickly shook off the dream I had of 1. looking out of the bedroom window 2. seeing a grey bus go over the kerb 3. and topple 4. and killing everyone on it.

Come to think of it, strange that I had had so many looking-out-of-the-bedroom-window dreams. In my slumber I've enjoyed watching a parade from my bedroom, witnessed the building of a new residential building and even saw the whole world engulfed by toxic gases.

Thinking about dreams, I find that they occur mostly during these times:
1. when sleeping patterns are irregular
2. after consuming caffeine late into the night
3. being awoken by someone/something, rather than waking up by oneself
4. when the bladder is full

In a way, dreams are fun. I did a project on it in Secondary 3, mainly about dream interpretation. While my conclusion was that it was a load of bullcrap, there's still some principles that can be applied. Such as understanding the ideas that subconsciously preoccupy you.

But what can I draw from this particular dream of mine? I don't know. What does a grey bus bursting in flames and culling all in it mean? You tell me.

==

And the drudgery of the trip to Pasir Ris that takes forever. Played Pokemon again and yay, I managed to capture that elusive Abra that teleports out of battle in the first turn! Tried to capture a Snorlax but ironically, the sleep attacks must have transcended beyond the LCD screen as...

... I jerked awake in the middle of Pasir Ris, clutching the DS in my hand. When do I get dreams? Point number one: when sleeping patterns are irregular.

==

Lesson wasn't too bad, the teacher was amazingly nice and friendly.

==

And finally got around to buying a new DVD burner for the computer! BOTH the DVD burner and the DVD reader on the computer were on their way south.

The DVD burner - a Sony DRU-710A (I'm listing the brands and model numbers so that other users of the same drive can Google it up if they're curious) - stopped reading discs reliably.

The DVD reader - Samsung SD-616 - still reads, but the chips have gotta been fried, as the drive tray sometimes ejects and refuses to stay closed. And sometimes when I eject a disc, it's still spinning in the middle of the plastic tray, complete with a horrible grating sound. This is gonna scratch all my discs in the long run.

New one's a LG GSA-H44N. Works smoothly so far!

Took the time to de-gunk the chipset fan on the NF7S motherboard YET again. Somehow the grease just loves to dry up into a sticky goo and make the fan whine like a dying rat.

==


Arctic Monkeys's new album isn't my cup of tea.

I vividly remember going to the CD shops once every few days after the UK release of their debut album, only to be told repeatedly that they didn't have any stock yet. Waited almost 2 months before I could get my grubby hands on an Aussie import. Who could not like the infectious singles When The Sun Goes Down and I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor?

But here comes their sophomore album with mechanical rhythms reeking of The Klaxons. Truth be told, The Klaxons do a better job of being The Klaxons than Arctic Monkeys can ever dream of.

They'd do better with their own advice: So get off the bandwagon, and put down the handbook.

Thorny Thursday

I guess it started off crap to begin with.

Woke up to the patter of rain. Pitch-black sky. And it's yet another sleepy early morning.

Slept late last night, not so much because I had stuff on my mind, but more because Pokemon FireRed was infinitely more interesting than sleep. Picked it up again lately after leaving it to gather dust for a while. Those 1-hour bus and train rides I've been having lately sure does spur on the Pokemaniac in me.

Getting my way to Pasir Ris in the rain took 2 whole hours, because the roads are all jammed up when it rains. Badly.

It's depressing being stuck on the bus, in the middle of the expressway, knowing that I'm already 30 minutes late. Everyone I know is having a bad day. I blame the weather.

Learnt some stuff at Pasir Ris Polyclinic. Then decided to leave early with the 2 classmates who went there as late as I was. Didn't feel like staying there. Didn't feel like talking to anyone.

And in my self-pitying daze I forgot to take my file back home! Thank goodness for great classmates who care enough to hold on to it for me.

==

Scrambled back to the MRT station in the rain, because the damned sheltered linkway was still under construction. Hung a while at the Pasir Ris library. Cold. Shivering. Wet.

Then home.

I'm alone at home today, parents are out to watch a music, brother's overseas. Today's a lonely lonely day. I can count the number of sentences I've said out out loud today on, like, 1 hand?

==

Slept. Awoke. Slept. Awoke. Pokemon. Homework. (Did a crap shot at it because I just couldn't concentrate. It's 1/3 crapping, 1/3 leftover material from the previous abandoned writeup, 1/3 recycled material from the other 2 writeups.)

==

No pictures of today, because the weather's so gloomy and all, there's nothing cool to document and there's way too many rain-splattered window or bus-interior or similar kinda shots already.

Oh wait. There's one. Baby octopuses (octopii?). tasty, yummy, delicious!

Book Review:Timeline

Timeline is a another Michael Crichton sci-fi novel, and when I say 'another', I mean 'yet-another-Crichton-sci-fi-novel'.

Don't get me wrong, it's pretty alright actually. But I'd have expected something fresher and slicker from Crichton.

Timeline begins with a group of postgraduate students studying a historical excavation site that's very heavily funded by a tech corporation called ITC.

Mayhem and adventure ensues when 4 people were summoned to the ITC, only to find out that they had to go back in time and rescue the professor, who had been trapped in medieval France.

You get generous dollops of knight battles, medieval-era weaponry and politics. And lots of bloodshed and gore.

But. It feels trite. The time-travel (oh wait, they claim it isn't time travel per se, but shifting between different alternate dividing timelines but that's trivia) themes are played to death, the suspense's sorta predictable and all. It's entertaining, but it remains as that - no interesting sci-fi dilemmas or paradoxes that would creep us out.

You'd be better off reading other more polished sci-fi works of his like Sphere, Congo or Jurassic Park. Just like Prey, Timeline falls in a category of Crichton novels that are fun-to-read, yet not special or witty enough to make you remember it.

Wetness Day

Not really in a blogging mood, so a short one.

Oh wait, there's really nothing I can blog about.

Or that I want to blog about.

I went to school. I went to get my hair cut. I played Pokemon. I'm sure you'd rather not have me describe mundane things like that in painful detail.

Same-old-same-old syndrome is creeping up into my life again. Days blurring into weeks into months, passing by without me feeling even a bit wiser or happier. Days lived, just because I have to live them. Time won't stop for me. True that I have the little pleasures here and there, but it just doesn't feel like the days when I was younger where everyday was a new discovery or a new event.

Help me. How do I make life fresh again?

Terse Tuesday

Home. Kitchen's a mess. Tried to make chocolate cookies to use up the spare baking ingredients at home, all by myself.

Disaster, burnt, too cakey, stuck to the trays, it's embarrassing to even talk about it. Argh!

==

Read Timeline by Michael Crichton. Done with 3/4 of it so far and first impressions: uninspired for a Crichton novel, but it's still decent by normal standards. I'll blog about it more once I finish it.

==

Bicycling, in the chill and fog after the rain. Still felt sluggish, but hey, I'm improving after than 6-week period where I was too tied up to even exercise. (Trivia: it takes a week to gain half a kg of muscle mass, so it'll take quite alot of work to make up for that 6 weeks.)

4 things I'd like to see invented

Inspired by Ryan's post on the 4 things he'd like invented, except I'd put a focus on things that I think are actually workable. Here it goes.

Intelligent automotive gearboxes

Can I confess? I'm a self-confessed closet automotive gearbox fanatic, so this has special meaning to me.

While modern-day automatic automotive transmissions these days fare quite well, they have 1 major drawback. They're dumb.

Scenario 1: You're going uphill. The car slows down. You mash on the accelerator trying to get it to downshift quickly so you won't lose too much speed uphill. But nothing happens.

Then, 5 seconds later, the engine rpm falls to a value where it starts downshifting, and because it's shifting under a huge amount of torque, it lurches violently.

Any driver who isn't braindead driving a manual transmission would shift gears earlier, doing a smooth transition and then speeding up the hill.

Why? To put it bluntly, the automatic transmission is unable to judge the gradient or predict the gradient of the road ahead.

Scenario 2: Guy driving a manual transmission sees lights turning red. Guy slowly brakes in 4th gear, without bothering to sequentially drop the gears while he brakes to a halt.

Guy driving an auto transmission brakes. Car downshifts from 4 to 3. Lurches. 3 to 2. Lurches again.

BUT: Guy driving a manual transmission slows down to join a pack of cars which had just been moving off from a red light that had just turned green. Guy shifts into gear 2 immediately and speeds off together.

Guy driving an auto transmission lurches from 3, and before he slows enough for the gearbox to downshift to 2, he accelerates, and the engine putters for a couple of seconds before the gearbox decides to shift to 2.

No fun.

Why? Automatic transmissions can't read road situations.

My solution? An artificial intelligence system that reads current road gradient using a pendulum weight kinda thing, change in gradient ahead using infrared sensors and a camera to read the traffic situation.

It'd be a challenge to program an algorithm that reads the camera and determines if it's a red/green light, if the car ahead has its brake lights on, and the distance between the car and the objects and stuff, but I guess it can be done.

Modular computing

This needs little introduction. Every part of your computer comes in different shapes and sizes. Video cards, hard disks, they have different connectors, different power sockets, different places to mount them.

How about a Lego-style system where you just connect the parts together, irregardless of what they are, without care for what goes where? You don't even need to open up the computer casing.

Parallel cables have been superseded by USB connectors with just 4 pins. Serial-ATA connectors use embarassingly few wires in the cable as compared to the old 80-wire IDE cables. So why not modular connectors too? It'd work.

Computerised medical diagnosis

We're living in an age of cookbook medicine. There's so much information, so much clinical trial data out there, it's impossible for any human mind to grasp all of that at once. Therefore we have clinical practice guidelines compiled, where everything is condensed into algorithms, objective biochemical targets and stuff.

The truth is, 90% of the time, doctors are applying cookbook medicine.There's the lofty talk about tailoring treatment to patients and stuff. But really, would you go against the guidelines and protocols and take the risks in an increasingly litigious medical profession? So go by the cookbook. Tried. Tested. Evidence-based. Modify it if necessary.

I'm envisioning a system where a computer can ask relevant questions about signs and symptoms, and using existing data, rank diagnoses based on probability and provide treatment suggestions based on established guidelines. And use artificial intelligence to update itself on the local prevalence of disease presentations and stuff like that.

Saves lots of error, and makes sure doctors don't miss out on stuff.

Michael Crichton has quite a bit to say about this idea in his book Five Patients.

But then, the old fogeys would never accept it!

Language-specific data compression algorithms

Ebooks are getting more popular. Legit or otherwise. They're large chunks of text, and are often left uncompressed, or at best, using som generic compression system like ZIP or RAR.

Words like 'because' and 'however' are a Scrabble player's wet dream, but they appear so often in plain text and yet take up 7 whopping bytes in an uncompressed text file.

Letters like 'z' appear so uncommonly, you won't be increasing the file length much if you used 2 or 3 bytes to represent them.

A system can then be programmed to analyse texts from various sources (technical manuals, fiction, nonfiction, etc) and determine the prevalence of words that are long yet often-used, and use shortforms to encode them. And vice versa, short-and-uncommon letters and words can be encoded using less efficient ways.

Of course, you can do the same for subparts of words, such as the suffix 'ing'.

It can also re-analyse the text to be encoded to build a further database, so that words specific to that text would be represented by shortforms. You'd expect a book on how to use Microsoft Word to have the word "Microsoft" represented alot more often than other texts.

==

If you didn't understand me, it's OK. I'm rambling.

Feel free to steal my ideas and patent them, I'm not going into those fields anyway.

Blue Monday Blue Monday

Woke up to an azure Monday blue sky. In the wee hours of morning. Gotta rush all the way to Pasir Ris where my next clinical attachment happens. Great luck. I always seem to be the one getting the furthest of places. I swear there's a conspiracy against me. Or is it? Better get them tinfoil hats ready just in case.

So my journey involves getting up the bus, going to the train station, then taking the train to a station where I have to transfer trains, then alighting at the last train station then taking a bus from there.

Spending more than an hour in solitude in public transport is downright depressing, except for the fact that I have my Nintendo DS and my Pokemon FireRed with me.

And it's compounded by the fact that I had missed BOTH feeder buses at the interchange. This is how it goes. In the interchange, the buses I could take were 12 and 21. And the bus bays are really far from each other.



What I have to do is to stand in the middle, then run to the appropriate bus bay once I see the bus from far.

First time was a false alarm. It was a bus that had just finished its route and was heading towards the bus park.

Second time, and I was all jittery and sweaty from all that bus chasing.

I hate my life.

Reached there late. There's simply no way I can make it there in time, no matter how early I wake. It's absurd.

I hate my life.

Rest of the day was sorta boring, left early.



They have new Moove Media cows in the empty grass fields all over Singapore these days. A couple of years back, they had these cow-shaped plywood cutouts in bright colours dotting Singapore as an advertising stint by ComfortDelgro's advertising arm, Moove Media. Now, these cows are back mooing with a vengeance. Some irate-member-of-the-public must have complained about the travesty of letting naked cows show their udders in public, so they now don colourful clothes instead.

Well, sigh. It just rained and I just woke from an uncomfortable nap on the sofa.



I'm not sad, but the Monday blues gets to everyone, me included.

Super Sunny Sunday

You wouldn't believe it, but Bishan North's so colourful and lively, the wild birds can't help to join in.

I can't believe it. But I was woken by the tweeting birds. In the morning. In the middle of a HDB estate. It's lovely cause it's the kinda thing that happens in fairy tales and fantasy novels. Gee, waking to birds. How often does that really happen?

Feeling restless. It's ironic. Reducing caffeine intake is making me way more energised. So a morning run is in the cards, despite having bicycled already!



Random factoid: Ski D'lite Honey Buzz yoghurt is absolutely fantastic. The tangy sour of the honey added with the cloying sweetness of real honey. Tasty! If you like yoghurt and you like honey, what are you waiting for? It's usually found in Cold Storage, Giant and Jason's - somehow it seems that this flavour is a Dairy Farm Group exclusive.

Played Pokemon FireRed for a while first. Or make that a long while. Because the dungeon's extremely long and irritating.



And off to the run I go! Strangely, I'm bustling full of energy. Had this long distance runner guy ahead so I made use of him to pace. His long distance pace is my 2km pace, so it wasn't too bad. Hey at least it was a good workout.



Playful monkeys seen near the reservoir!

But then, he was going quite fast, so, well. I fizzled out on the 2nd leg back.

Home for a while, then out again!

Oh and having had run and bicycled within 24h, my metabolism's on overdrive! Feeling a warm buzzy feeling, hyperactive, and gobbling up huge amounts of food without even feeling full.

Exercise's good. It lets you eat more!

Saturday!

Morning started off early. Slept at 10 the last night, after dreamily falling asleep over some Pokemon FireRed on the DS. Oh noes, Pokemon Diamond/Pearl's gonna be out on 22nd and I haven't even gone past half of FireRed! I blame Ouendan, Elite Beat Agents and Animal Crossing!

I've amended my caffeine restriction, such that I'd be able to take in the equivalent of 1 cup of coffee a day, and I made use of that the morning (pre-exercise caffeine can help in fatty acid utilisation and etc so it makes it easier. However conflicting studies say that it's merely the sympathetomimetic activity that causes it, but oh well, if it works it works,)



Bike ride. After a long while. First ride with my new speedometer, and it works just as it should. Doesn't bring attention to itself, just silently telling me the time, how far I've gone and how fast I'm going.

I feel my energy being sapped away. After med school had robbed my ability to keep myself healthy (no time for exercise, no proper mealtimes, stress galore) I feel my energy being sapped way. Can't do that Old Upper Thomson Road climb while keeping my speed above 21kmh any more!

Overtook by a huge number of roadies. I swear I'm getting lousy. Concentration's waning from pushing myself, feeling myself going swervy, not noticing bumps and potholes until the last minute.

Mindlessly started on a tricky right turn...

and saw the yellow and blue Woodlands Transport livery inching towards my front wheel. I was about to ram into the side of a minibus and I didn't even notice.

Stopped in time. I swear the motorcyclists on the other end of the junction were looking at me funny. Steeled my concentration, and made my way through the park quick.

My concentration's failing me lately. This sucks. Is it the lack of caffeine? The exhaustion from the school? Some insidious brain disease?



Took some wallpaper-ish photos on the way home in the park.



Home.

Ow headache. AGAIN. Exercise induced? (I get that quite often when I'm out of shape) Caffeine withdrawal? Sinus pain? It FEELS sorta vascular in nature, i.e. exercise induced or caffeine withdrawal, but there's frontal sinus tenderness on one side, so I have no idea.

Slacked online at home - and guess what - Pokemon Diamond/Pearl ROMs are out! Get them from the link in my sidebar. Uploaded that, and Advance Wars: Dual Strike onto my DS and touched them for a while, but I'm gonna play FireRed for now!

First impressions of Pokemon Diamond: The graphics are very slightly updated, which is a disappointment for the DS as the graphical capabilities aren't stretched at all. Oh well, but it's the way the game stays true to the series I guess. And there's dual screens, so battle commands are selected on the lower screen either using the old-school D-pad/buttons or the stylus(clunky).

Went out again to AMK central to shop for an electric fan. The old 20 year old one is making a hell lot of clunking noises which does affect my sleep a little.



Shopped around like crazy (I'm indecisive!) around the whole place before settling for a decent Mistral one at $75.

And home again, and assembled the fan, it was quick and easy. Bob the Builder! Can we fix it? Bob the Builder! Yes we can!



And side by side with the old dying 20 year old fan that no longer rotates and rattles like a beast in shackles.



And plopped myself for some DS action and slacking online. A weirded conversation on MSN (was she trying to mindrape me?), and sleepy. early. I think cutting out caffeine's making me sleep normally again!

TGIF!

Thank goodness today is friday!

The clinic attachments have ended yesterday and I'm going to be so much more free.

It's a cold lazy morning. And today's day 2 of my project to but down caffeine to just 1 dose a day. As in, 1 cup of coffee at most. Why? I haven't been sleeping all the best the past few days. And after doing my pharmacology exams, I sorta figured that caffeine is:

1. A drug with a narrow theraputic ratio - too much or too little and you'd easily feel the effects.

2. It's hard to keep a constant dosing regimen. Unless one is a regular morning coffee drinker, the consumption of caffeine is largely irregular, and with irregular blood concentrations, you'll get the caffeine jitters sometimes, and the caffeine crash after that. You'd feel worse.

3. There is much empirical evidence that coffee makes one's sleep irregular. Empirical, meaning, mommy and daddy and friends and neighbours say so. And there's gotta be some truth in this, given it sounds logical.

4. Tolerance develops. You'd need even more caffeine in future and the caffeine lows will be even lower. Not to mention the headaches.

Ouch.

I was musing about changing my room lamp. Instead of a dual tube setup using a 32W tube and a smaller 20W tube, I'd get one with a single 40W tube.

Or wait. How about a self constructed LED lamp? Googled it up. Nay, it'd be too complex and expensive. And to balance the colour temperature using red and green LEDs in addition to white ones will be troublesome. I'd guess I'd stay with the 40W lamps.



Had to rush off to school! Missed the bus. Traffic was bad, had trouble getting a seat on the upper deck. Was it going to be a bad day?

Took a nap on the bus and felt really good after that. So no, lots of little things were going wrong. I was going to be late for school. But no, today isn't a bad day. Cause I feel good. Lecture started late anyway cause there were a bunch of Indonesian docs visiting!



Can I confess? The main motivation for me(and my classmates) to go to school is to hand in our write-ups. Did just that, and stayed for the important bits of the lecture. While blogging on the phone.



Blogging on the phone's tough because you gotta tap out the words at a speed way slower than you can think of them. How do I solve that? I plan out terse summaries, making a rough sketch of the thoughts I'd include. Then when I tap out the actual entry, I can do that mechanically just by following the summary.

And when the important bits were done, off I were to Orchard. Tip: The fastest way to Orchard from NUS Science/Medicine/NUH is to cross the carpark and then the expressway via the bridge. Head across Dover estate to Dover Road, and take bus 14 which is direct.



Was asleep on much of the journey, so the journey really felt like it took only 5 minutes.

Orchard to meet Ryan! First on the agenda. Lunch.



Subway's Pizza sub! The pepperoni slices are ueberly salty but tasty, and the footlong was really really filling.



Hung around, had fun talking about EVERYTHING under the sun. Looked at mobile phones and really, the Nokia E65 seems more and more like the current must-get at the price. Wi-Fi, passable camera and Symbian OS. The Samsung i600 QUERTY phone's quite cool too but it's pricey.



And Orchard library, where I got a mega-haul of books on Ryan's recommendations.

Walked around more, chatted loads, then finally, it's back home again. It's getting hazy, weirdly.

Planning a bike ride and more tomorrow! Maybe shopping for an electric fan for my room, or ceiling lights, or something. And cookie baking on Sunday hopefully!