"I always thought that would be sort of exciting." I didn't really, I was trying to be responsive, but I was conscious as soon as I'd closed my mouth of the schoolgirl gushiness of the remark.

"Exciting." He snickered briefly. "I used to think that. It looks exciting when you're an eager brilliant undergraduate. They all say, Go on to graduate studies, and they give you a bit of money; and so you do, and you think, Now I'm doing to fid out the real truth. But you don't find out, exactly, and things get pickier and pickier and more and more stale, and it all collapses in a welter of commas and shredded footnotes, and after a while it's like anything else: you've got stuck in it and you can't get out, and you wonder how you got there in the first place..."

Magaret Atwood The Edible Woman

proxy string bookmark

A* people who use firefox, and are sick of typing .ejproxy.a-star.edu.sg into your address bar, or worse, going through brenner library everytime you come across a paper online, which you have found through pubmed or whatever science literature search engine, here's a solution. Drag this link A* Proxy to the bookmark bar of your firefox browser. and name it as you like. whenever you're at a paper with limited access, click the book mark. and then you log in if you haven't yet, or just wait for the paper to load if you've logged in once already.


I of course know zero java script codes. it's modified from MIT's reload via MIT libs.

(And btw, you can install firefox on your computer. just save and open the whole installation package on your desktop.)

Dafen Painters

Here's a post my friend shared on google reader. Pretty interesting story about these replica painters in Dafen, Shenzhen, China. I used know a replica painter myself. When i was taking night classes at the academy, he used to hang around the classrooms painting replicas. he was probably a friend of the teachers, who never charged him for anything. I remember him having an extra little finger, and that he was painting this portrait of a southern woman sitting beside a stream. i remember him telling us about being paid 50 yuan a painting. not a big sum considering the amount of time he spent doing them. looking back now, i think he was probably a student trying to make some extra bucks to pay for the tuition.