All those exams are easier than the midterms. Quite a reasonable strategy to make me studied so hard during exam period. And I laughed at myself when I was reading my post during the summer, I said "probably around 30 ppl in science would get 3.7 or above after one semester." I have no idea how many people are getting 3.7, but there are absolutely at least 50 people, probably even more than 100 are getting 4.0 this semester. That's soooooo "competitive" and the reason why people have to do lots of voluntary work and care about the Africa to get into Med school, because everyone have a "stunning" GPA.
I'm not blaming the education system nor the course difficulty but just revealing the facts, as I myself would worry about not getting good grades if they made the courses harder. And on the other hand I am going to take EAPR 250 (Research Essay and Rhetoric), which makes me worry about bringing my CGPA down, (wtf I did not even understand the word "rhetoric" before registering the course, and THAT's my current English level). So in any extent, I still prefer for easy "A"s rather than harder.
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And now, I'm staying in Montreal for Christmas. I have changed my way of killing time entirely. No mahjong, no poker, no nonstop chatting with friends on phone (charging rate in Hong Kong is unlimited minutes by month), no worrying about Christmas homework and post-holiday exams. Things are so different now.
Today is the last day of library opening in 2009, I headed to the Life Science Library at McIntyre. Now I know that I can loan out at most 200 books at the same time. Makes me wonder how to finish reading 200 books in 1 month loaning period haha. Anyways I borrowed 7 books there, only thing to do in Christmas now is reading and gaming.
It's not hard to spot someone with earphones on while walking on the street, taking metro or buses, exercising in the gym, studying in the library or even listening to lectures. I don't know what are those people listening to, but I'm fairly sure that most of them are listening to pop musics. (Guess what? I listen to previous lecture recordings in the earphone while sitting and listening to the present lecture. Cool?)
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My experiences on listening songs originate from folk songs (country musics?), not pop songs. When I was around 12, my mum bought me some CDs named "Let's Folk". Inside there were 40 songs from the 60s and 70s. My mum asked me to listen to them often and claimed that I could improve my English by that. Anyways I love those songs, they are easy to sing and really nice. (That's why they are still here after a few decades.) That's my earliest memories about listening to songs.
American Pie performed by Don McLean, one of the songs in Let's Folk that I love the most.
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My mum went to the University of Oregon in the year after. She came back when I was 14, she brought me a DVD with a collection of 20 pop songs. I still remember some names of those songs, The Reason by Hoobastank, Meant to Live by Switchfoot, Hey Mama by Black Eyed Peas, Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand, etc. Those were really great songs, especially The Reason, I was amazed by the voice of the singer and the fact that I couldn't sing that song properly because of the high pitch (Back then I always thought myself to have no difficulties on the pitches of singing).
The Reason by Hoobastank, the first and my most favorite song among the 20 songs in the DVD my mum bought for me. (It's quite hard to sing though.)
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And in the same year, sometimes my friends would ask me to go to karaoke. Trying not to be sitting silently and wasting the money, I started to have some knowledge about Cantonese and Taiwanese pop music, knowing the most famous artists, songs and trying to sing a few of them. However I still didn't listen to any music outside the karaoke room. Using computer to search for songs didn't fit into my lifestyle.
浮誇 by 陳奕迅(Eason Chan), The song that I learned due to karaoke, it was such a hit song in the karaoke, everyone sings it and I soon learned it without listening to it outside the karaoke room!
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And it finally fit into my life in the year after, when I was preparing for the Certificated Examination (CE). I was really stressed at that time. And it's the first time I intended to listen some songs. Not Cantonese, Mandarin nor English, but Japanese Pop. And the reason I listen to J-pop is that the lyrics won't bother me studying since I don't know Japanese. Most of the songs I listened was performed by Hikaru Utada and YUI, because they were the only J-pop singers that I had already heard of at that time. They sing really good and I still enjoy listening to their songs till now.
Heart Station by 宇多田ヒカル(Hikaru Utada), everyone knows "FirstLove" so I didn't bother to put that up but this instead :)
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After the Crazy Exam (CE), I went to karaoke more often so I had to find out more Cantonese and Taiwanese songs that I could sing. So I changed my playlist back to some language that I could understand. I tried to improve my skills of singing, especially tried hard to get to a higher pitch. I've really made some improvements since then.
千年之戀 by 信樂團&戴愛玲, still such a hard song to sing for me now.
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Apart from English, Chinese(Mandarin+Cantonese) and Japanese songs, I started to listen on another type of music since the beginning of 2009. That's the songs sung by Vocaloids. I found them just because of some random searchings on the internet. The first Vocaloid song I listened to was ココロ(Kokoro) by 鏡音リン(Rin Kagamine). It was a really touching song. I loved it so much and soon moved onto other songs from Vocaloids. And eventually it now shares a same portion of disk space on my computer comparing to other type of songs.
ココロ(Kokoro, "Heart") by 鏡音リン(Rin Kagamine). With a song as sequel named ココロ・キセキ(Kokoro Kiseki, "Heart, Miracle") by 鏡音レン(Len Kagamine), even though the composers are different, both of them are really touching indeed.
It's really been a long long time from the last time I wrote on my xanga.
So what happened after the mid-terms was that I screwed up my BIOL lab final. Getting a 12/15 After a very complicated calculation I now know that I need to get 84.986% in the final lecture exam in order to get an A in BIOL 111. Not really bad but still enough to make me worrying about it all the time.
On the other hand, I bought my new laptop at the end of November. Quite a powerful computer for gaming based on its price. Thanks for Jerry's help on choosing this one. After finishing Devil May Cry 4 and Call of Duty 4 in 2 weeks. I was finally able to focus on the coming BIOL lecture exam.
I used a whole week's time on reading through the lecture slides and taking notes. And I realized that it seems that I'm actually copying from the slides. While today I found out that the NTC from FUSS (I didn't buy it, but one of my friends did) does the same thing I did. (And it costs like 15 by the way)
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There's a facebook group about "cheering for Eason Chan's Olympic Torch Relay in Montreal on 10th Dec, 2009". I'm really not sure if it is real or fake(I couldn't find any supporting evidence for that). But I'm definitely going out that afternoon since the fxxking BIOL exam is over!
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I have to stay in Montreal during this Christmas because my mum is holding me here (not letting me go to Toronto), and experience the SNOWY winter in Montreal. =)
This is the second month of my university life. The passion in September starts to fade out. I used to go through all the readings in the textbook before lectures back then, but now I spend most of the time in front of computers reading unrelated stuff. The textbooks are now left alone on the shelf. I started to skip math lectures. (That's what I'm doing now)
However, on the other hand, October comes along with the fleshy and bloody midterms. Especially BIOL, the only science subject I have never convinced myself that I can handle it. The weekends revising BIOL was a torture, I said to myself a thousand times how I regret to get into the life science group, and said another ten-thousand times to convince myself to be a biological man (wtf is that?) Along with the ambivalence thoughts, I sit in the exam room to face the midterm that I hate the most. Hoping to survive and see the sunny days again.
Well the BIOL midterms have now passed, I finally feel a little bit relieved. I don't think I did good in the practical and written lab exam for it, an A- in it would make me very happy already. Anyways, life still goes on after this. Let's enjoy!
Among the 5 animes that I will watch in this fall, 4 of them are now in the season 2, hopefully to introduce them later.
And the anime remain is, 生徒会の一存/Seitokai no ichizon/Student Council's Discretion/碧陽學院學生會議事錄/學生會的一己之見
Well this anime actually originates from the light novel, and the manga is coming out as well. I found the manga on a fan site a last Friday and the introduction tells me that it comes from novel. And instantly after reading this page, I close the fan site because I believe that no novels can generate good mangas. Even though those animes can be good. (For examples, Haruhi Suzumiya, fate/stay night)
However I felt quite interested after reading the introduction of the story. It tells the life of the student council in a private school, where the executives are elected in only in terms of beauty. The most popular girls are elected each year. And apart from election, the one with the best academic results in the school can also take the position as a "special reward" for being the top student. And in this year, our main male character, a gal-game lover, Sugisaki Ken 杉崎 鍵, became the lucky guy. He will work with the other four pretty girls for the whole school year, trying to accomplish "harem ending" in this real life game.
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After googling and web surfing for this story, I found out that the first episode of the anime was released on 2nd of October, 2009. After reading part of the novel and watch the first episode of the anime, I decided to keep track of it because this is a really funny school comedy. However some basic anime knowledge are needed to understand the jokes well.
By the way, I did not know any of the voice actors that cast this anime. Maybe because they are new, this is not a bad thing though because eventually the popular voice actors will get older and we will need the new ones to replace them, right?
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Well this is my first blog about anime which is written in English. English writing is really hard... But I hope I can do better in the later time...
