First of all…
Happy anniversary to Leighann and Thaddeus! (Leighann, you’re still with Thaddeus, right? xD It’d be funny if the answer turns out to be no.)
Happy birthday to Marty!

I had a look at my posts from this time last year to make sure that I have the dates right, and I realised that I didn’t really post that much this time last year. Well, 8 posts in March last year compared to 14 this year, but this year’s posts are longer. In March last year I was probably just getting to know the person that ended up being mentioned too often for the rest of the year, and in March this year I had to settle down to a new place once again. I’m probably writing down a lot more now.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to tomorrow because I’m getting a high-speed Internet connection. It turns out that they do offer those here in Sydney. I just hope it’ll really be as fast as it claims to be.

Given all the different ways that people’s names can be pronounced, even the linguistics tutor didn’t know how to pronounce some of them. It would be so funny if everyone had to transcribe their name in IPA on the assignment in addition to writing their name. Then again, it’d be cruel. If you get it wrong, you’ll get addressed by the wrong pronunciation, except you can’t even blame the tutor for getting it wrong because that’s what you wrote. xD

How do I pronounce my name? I think I would say [ˈkhεɹi].

Come to think of it, I ought to ask the linguistics tutor whether he thinks I have a Cantonese accent or not. It’d be awkward if he thinks I have a “Vietnamese” accent too. Then again, the other girl probably didn’t notice my Cantonese accent because she’s Chinese, so it would sound more or less neutral to her. Then again, my Vietnamese friend said that my Cantonese accent isn’t that obvious. May be I now have a more mixed accent as I slowly pick up accents from various people. May be I should try and pick up an accent that I like, but what would that be? xD

All this about accents. xD There you go, it’s my latest obsession!

According to someone I met today, I have a Vietnamese accent.

That can’t be right! I can’t possibly have a Vietnamese accent! May be my Cantonese accent isn’t as exaggerated now, but surely I don’t have a Vietnamese accent? I don’t like my Cantonese accent, but having a Vietnamese accent would be worse. Not that I have anything against it, but that just wouldn’t be right! I’m from Hong Kong, and only last year I had someone tell me how heavy my Cantonese accent is.

Is it? I probably say [θ] or [ð] as [f] or [d], but that’s what it can sound like to me. Even in a song American singer I hear “though” pronounced as [doʊ] (as in “though he’s way too young to drive”). Then again, I don’t think I have a problem with liquids, and I definitely don’t exaggerate final consonants.

I’m so glad I chose to study linguistics. I’ve wanted to learn IPA for a few years now, and I never quite got it. At the time, I tried to read all those articles on Wikipedia and I only got confused.

May be it’s actually part of the reason why my accent changed? It probably made me pay more attention to how I pronounce words, especially since I had to transcribe words in IPA for an assignment.

Either way, I don’t want a Vietnamese accent! I do sit next to a Vietnamese person in all my maths lectures. I can’t exactly avoid him either, because I always sit at the front. Hmm… I guess I’ll have to try and balance it out.

Today I’ve also told a group of friends about SSP. They like it so much that they tried to say it even when the group has only been silent for like, two seconds. It’s so funny! Look, Xumbra! I’m telling my friends about #ennui!

I bet that many people will be glad to have that extra hour of sleep, but I don’t want daylight saving to end!

I like being 19 hours ahead of (most of) my friends on #ennui. (Look, Xumbra! I’m advertising for your channel!) Well, it’s already only 18 now that they’ve started daylight saving, but 17 just isn’t enough.

It’s a sign I need more friends.

No, I actually have a lot of friends here. It’s just not the same.

Of course, this is still a lot better than the year when I first came here. At that time I used to go to every site that I frequent to change the time setting to match my time zone. I don’t bother about that now. This almost makes it sound as if I’ve been here for a really long time. It’s only just over 2 years. Then again, I post about daylight saving when it starts too, so this should be my 5th post about changing the clock. If I include the posts about whether daylight saving should have an S or not, there are probably more.

Here I go again. I mentioned that incident. It was almost a year ago. (Well, two months short of that.) Yes, even now I do think about those funny moments now and then. May be I really shouldn’t. It’s not like I’m bored or anything either. I have a lot of work, I have a lot of friends, and I’m having fun; so why do I still think about you-know-who? (If you’re reading this, you should know who I’m talking about.) May be what Kelly said when we were on the train was right. Now, if anyone other than Kelly (and may be Annie) actually gets what I’m referring to here, I’d be surprised. Whether you get this or not, don’t ask.

I was so shocked when I couldn’t find my bright lime green jacket. I went back to the lab that I was in yesterday, and no one was there. I tried looking in through the windows, but I couldn’t see anything. Just when I was going to leave, the technician who worked in that lab walked past. I asked him if there’s a lost and found anywhere nearby, and surprisingly he actually asked me what I lost, so I told him and he said it was in the lab! I’m so lucky this time. That jacket is my favourite. It was cheap, but I don’t know where I can buy another one like this if I lost it. This kind of material just isn’t common.

Today was actually quite a good day. Hyperbolic functions were mentioned in maths today, and everyone laughed at the pronunciations of “sinh” and “cosh”. I already knew these, and I even had a smiley face for sinh, so I stayed at the end to show the lecturer. There I go again, I just can’t miss a chance to show off. I also showed it to the line of classmates who were waiting to asking questions, and one girl said that the smileys were cute. The lecturer didn’t have any comments though. May be they’re just too cute for him.

The linguistics tutorial was also fun. We had to take turns writing the pronunciations of words on the board.

Most important of all, I’m glad it’s Friday.

Well, I had to take a computer apart today, and it wouldn’t work after I put it back together.

It would be so appropriate if I was wearing this t-shirt. I should’ve expected it. As if I can take something apart and have it working normally after I put it back together.

Then again, I’m glad that I wasn’t, because my friend pointed out that I’m always wearing science t-shirts. I wore a tie-dyed singlet instead, so now I have someone suggesting that I can be making clothes for that runway show (whatever it’s called… I don’t even watch it). May be I should fish for a suggestion to go on some other show. Hey, that’s a great idea for a new collection: I can collect suggestions to go on TV shows (or things that I should do in general). Come to think of it, I do have a tendency to get suggestions to do just about everything. At least my “official” studying is more interesting now. I can’t even put a computer back together. That’s something to work on.

The person who said that I should be making clothes for the runway show also said “go go gadget” to me after seeing my lasertemp. Right, he wasn’t even the first one to mention Inspector Gadget to me. I remember someone else who said I reminded her of Inspector Gadget. Yay for these random references!

I can get away with riding on the footpath in the city because there are many cars, but the footpaths inside the university campus are even more crowded than those outside and there aren’t as many cars, so I ride on the road like I should. However, this means I get chased all the way from one place to another. Riding on the road is a lot faster than riding through the crowded footpath, but I have to pedal a lot harder so as not to hold up the traffic so badly. (Then again, I probably slowed down the traffic significantly anyway, although there’s another lane for all the cars to overtake.) It reminds me of someone’s bike that I saw parked outside the Woolleys building the other day – it has “Cars hold up traffic” on it. That’s a very reassuring slogan to see.

It’s the normal busy Monday for me, but this week my timetable is slightly different again because I changed my differential calculus tutorial to the first one in the morning.

I wish I didn’t. The tutor is the lecturer for linear algebra – the one with the accent that I can’t understand. What a weird problem to have in maths. If it’s a foreign language class then may be it’d even be normal. In a way, it’s even more ironic considering that I’m studying linguistics too.

Come to think of it, I really tend to notice the lecturers’ accents. I don’t notice my classmates’ accents as much even if I talk to them a lot. Let’s see… On Mondays, the day starts with a linear algebra lecture and then a differential calculus tutorial by the same lecturer / tutor with the almost incomprehensible accent. After that, I have a  computer engineering lecture. Luckily, this lecturer is much easier to understand. He has what I consider a “neutral” accent (the “no accent” kind of accent) which doesn’t really make any sense – what would that be? Theoretically, “no accent” would be the accent that I speak with, but that can’t be it, because I’m well aware of my own Cantonese accent (which I don’t like) and it doesn’t sound neutral to me at all. For the introduction to engineering disciplines lecture, one of the lecturers originally came from Canada, and he has an obvious accent, but it’s actually quite cool. The other one has a neutral accent. As for the linguistics lecture that I couldn’t attend for Monday, that lecturer’s accent makes him sound so harsh! I think he’s from the United States, but none of my friends over there have a similar accent.

Accent or not, the information covered in the engineering disciplines lecture actually overlaps with that from the computer engineering course. That’s actually fine with me for once. (I normally hate repetitive classes. This is really a sign that I’m too tired.) What’s more, another part of it reminds me of  year 10/11 ICT which I hated at the time. Control systems, anyone? The Arctic climate built in an enclosure the Amazon, complete with thermostats to keep the polar bears alive. (If any of my friends from Hong Kong are reading this, you’ll know what I’m on about.) Luckily, the unit that I’m studying now is much more interesting.

It’s getting late… I hope the EasyWay near the train station will be open when I get there tomorrow. (There’s a chance. It’s only on Mondays when they take their time to get ready.)

I never realised that the lectures were so difficult for some people to follow. I almost fell asleep during yesterday’s lecture, but I still got most of it. My friends were probably just as tired at the time, but they didn’t seem to get any of it. They didn’t seem to have looked at the lecture notes nor the textbook either. I had to tell them how to do the conversions between binary and hexadecimal.

I wonder if it was the right thing to do. Should I have made them ask the tutors instead? What if I was telling them the wrong stuff? Then again, I had a calculator with binary and hexadecimal modes, so I used it to check my results, which were all right. The tutors probably won’t notice even if I just used the calculator and not tried doing it by hand, but I had to do it by hand to show my friends how to do it, and I think I should have a go at doing it anyway.

Then again, I probably have a slightly better start than they do. All that random reading in the past comes in handy once again! Really, time after time I seem to be getting by just because somehow I’ve actually read relevant information years ahead. Sometimes I wonder when I actually read all this. I even wonder if I really did. It might just be dé&jagrave; vu. Either way, this won’t last. One of these days I’ll get another huge shock when I can’t keep up.

On the other hand, for now I’m glad I don’t have to do physics. I’m doing as many units as I can for this semester, but I only have 17 hours of class each week. (Well, 19, but I have 2 clashes so I can only attend 17.) According to my friends, physics on its own is 7 hours a week. I have linguistics instead, which is only 3 hours a week (and one of those I can’t attend because of a clash). I’ll probably end up having to do it later, but I can worry about it then.

Riding my bike everyday is actually really stressful. The paths are crowded, and I have to hold onto the brakes at all times and go really slowly. I always get stuck behind people who are walking slowly and don’t seem to react to my bell at all. Taking it onto the train is also very difficult, especially at peak hours when the train is already crowded enough.

Then again, I don’t HAVE to ride my bike if I don’t want to, but I wouldn’t have it any other way now, even if it means arriving in class looking as if I’m melting and all stressed out.

I arrived at my maths lecture on time today. Now that I’ve had a lecture for advanced linear algebra, being in the advanced unit doesn’t seem like such a good idea after all, because the lecturer’s accent was really difficult to understand. He also writes the letter r in a reversed way so that it doesn’t look like an r to many people in the class, and someone actually asked what that symbol was. That was hilarious.

I have to rearrange my clashes again today. I think I’m better off clashing the maths tutorial with the computer engineering lecture, since it’s all information that’s in the textbook. Someone else said that the lecturer was going too fast. I had trouble paying attention because I was too tired, but even then I thought the pace wasn’t that fast (then again, I don’t think it can be any faster without skipping any information). Then again, it’s mainly stuff that I already know, so I can’t say anything. This always seems to happen to me. I always have at least one class where someone says it’s too fast and I can’t honestly agree because I already know most of it so there isn’t that much new information, but I don’t want them to know that I already know it either. Just the kind of thing that happens to me. Too bad there isn’t an advanced unit for that. I’ll have to be extra careful not to lose motivation. That’s me. I have the patience to spend 40 hours hand-sewing a dress, but I don’t have the patience to follow a slow-moving class.

On second thoughts, I’m glad that I changed to the advanced units for both maths units, because this means that the lecture has to be at 8 (well, the regular unit has one at that time too, but I was assigned to the other one), and I’d rather get up early and get that one lecture over and done with, and then I have the rest of the day to myself. Today it was funny that someone came in for the last 10 minutes of the lecture. He might as well not come.

After the lecture I went to buy a basket and a kick-stand. I’ll need those now that I ride my bike everyday.

It’s been a great week. I met more new friends, and since it’s the first week, everything is either introduction or revision (for both maths units). It’s still physically demanding though, because I have consecutive classes on opposite sides of the campus.