Good Eats

One thing I have learnt since starting my studies & living abroad is how to cook with the least washing & cleaning up and with cheapest ingredients possible but still healthy(ish...). I try to reduce my processed food - the 'bad' ones, at least - intake and one way that helps with that is by cooking my meals from scratch.
I learnt how to pick ingredients and dishes that can be mixed and match with other ingredient/dishes - roast chicken that can be eaten with rice and turned into a sandwich, stews & curries that you can have with rice, noodles, bread, roti canai, frozen peas that can be added to instant noodles, fried rice or made into soup etc..
Yesterday I found a recipe from the internet that was quite easy and relatively cheap, too. I  have diced lamb neck in the freezer; halal lamb is cheaper and easier to find here as compared to beef. I have a can of plum tomatoes (also cheap here - 38p!) and most of the other ingredients are the usual cupboard stock. I guess the recipe is a Northern Indian one - it is called Adhraki Gosht. A friend's aunt taught me to cook a similar dish using chicken and it tasted nice, so I thought this should not be bad, either.
I didn't follow the recipe strictly; to be honest at first I thought of making Lamb Kurma. I have been eating quite a lot so I thought I could do without the extra calories from the coconut milk in the kurma. I had about 300-400g of diced lamb neck (with bone). So I chopped 2 small onions and 2 cloves of garlic and about an inch of ginger and fry them in a bit of oil. I added a cardamom, a bit of cloves and a small cinnamon stick (still thinking of making kurma at this point). And then I changed my mind and decided to try the adhraki gosht recipe instead. I did it differently; I added the garam masala and let the fried things go brown and fragrant before adding the lamb. The lamb was browned for a bit before I added a can of plum tomatoes (I guess u can use canned chopped tomatoes or even fresh tomatoes) and a bit of tomato puree. I didn't have any proper chilli powder so I substituted that with pimiento powder left by a Spanish former flatmate. Added a chopped carrot (because it has started to go bad in the fridge), about a cup of water, let the pan go to boil, lowered the heat, and left it for the lamb to become tender.
I like the tomato sauce as it doesn't make the lamb taste too oily. Had it for the first time with roti canai. There's enough leftovers to last me two meals :).

1976 was a great year...

...because I was born in that year :D.

It was a great year for audiology, too. Southampton Uni presented electrocochleography, multifrequency tympanometry was studied, and so was hearing aid fitting by prescription. There were even two papers discussing hearing loss caused by diving and flight. And all of these in just one journal! It must have been a very exciting year.

Now, if only I can access the fulltexts....

How old are you?

Tak perlu kusut kira umur dengan calculator lagi! :D

How to calculate age in Excel (provided you have the birth date, of course)

This is probably trivial to some, but i just looooove this function at the moment. Thanks google!

3rd Annual Review coming soon

...and I am still struggling with ranges. Seven months being away from doing any writing slows my (academic?) brain. Words don't flow easy. Mind easily distracted (hence this post). Being in a new place does not help, either. I want this to end so bad.

Anyway, back to ranges. Does 2 SD as 95% range apply in my case?

Lazy day (+ help in academic writing)

Did not do anything today. Except window shopping. On the internet.

I have several baskets filled in various shopping website. H&M, Gap and M&S are having sales, it's just too tempting not to click on the 'add to basket' box...But I'm resisting the urge to click Check-out so all is well (for now).

Anywaaaaaaaay...

Sort of finished the first draft of my methods chapter, after so much telling off from my supervisor. It is definitely not perfect. According to dear SV, I just don't have the argumentative flair (yet?). Somehow it is common among South-East Asians students to not be so argumentative, and somehow that doesn't fit well with Western assessors (that's what she said).

So the draft came with many comments attached, as she did it in Word. I somehow missed the red-pen marks; they're so much more convenient :) . She even suggested a website that helps you to write argumentatively (to think that such websites exist is funnily comforting). If you have any problems in producing analytical essays, do visit http://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk . There are lots of examples of phrases that can be used in academic writing; they even categorised the phrases according to their function, if you can call it that :) .

I guess I'm going to skim through the comments and then lie down and think on the best strategy to tackle them. Or sleep, whichever comes first.

Good night.

Breakdown

I witnessed a nervous breakdown today. At first I heard someone breathing heavily; I thought it was just someone with a blocked nose. Then the breathing got heavier, and then I saw her closest neighbor went over to calm her down. She cried for a bit, breathed heavily again and the cycle went on for quite some time until her supervisor came and talked to her.

I am thankful to God that I was not being tested that way. I've felt what she felt once upon a time and it was not a nice feeling. I am thankful to God for the strength that I have now, and I pray that He doesn't take it away for me. I am thankful to God for my family and friends, for having someone I can talk to when things go bad or awry. And I am thankful that, if and when I couldn't talk to my family or friends, God is there for me. Alhamdulillah.

Ethics application

...submitted at last!

But I received a conditional registration. Have to make a transfer report; looks like my MSc is a few months too early to get away with the transfer. Hmmm....

University Challenge

Was watching an episode of University Challenge when a thought occured to me, 'How would my students, or even I, fare in this quiz?'. I have never encountered a range of questions so wide, it covers the whole spectra of arts and science. I don't I can survive 5 minutes into the quiz, let alone 30.

But here's a bit of trivia for you, just in case you're selected to be in a team for the University Challenge:

7 Fundamental SI Units:

• metre for length 
• kilogram for mass 
• second for time
• ampere for electric current
• kelvin for temperature
• candela for luminous intensity
• mole for the amount of substance

(Source: Wikipedia)

Fusilli Chicken Tomyam

Perfect when it is chilly outside, you just walked home from class and couldn't be bothered to cook rice & the accompanying dish/dishes.

Ingredients
boneless chunky-diced pieces of chicken
ready diced carrots and swede
potatoes, diced
fusilli
bell peppers
instant tomyam sauce/tomyam paste
oil

Heat oil and fry the paste/sauce till fragrant (or follow the instructions given for the paste/sauce). Add carrots, swede and potatoes. Fry for a minute. Add water, chicken pieces, peppers and fusilli. Let boil till everything is cooked. Season to taste.

It may not be haute cuisine but it may just be the thing you'd want to eat in front of the TV at the end of a busy day.

Cracking my head...

...over Excel.

I discovered that DBP has a corpus of Malay words (yay!), and researchers (e.g. me), or even members of the public, can access it (double yay!).

After several trials and errors, I sort of got hang of the process, and got some important output from the corpus. Thing is, if I wanted to transfer the output to a Word document and check it manually, it would be thousands of pages long. with almost 30,000 words to look over. So I tried to analyse them on Excel, instead.

Now, the last time I properly used Excel, with formulas and all, was 10 years ago. I know that as long as you can think 'logically' and 'mathematically', you'll be able to churn out formulas as fast as David Teo churning out films.

But 10 years ago I was playing with numbers and wave, and now I'm faced with texts. I'm stuck, I just can't figure out any applicable formula for the data that I have and I need. It is trial and error all over again, and my worry is that Excel just don't have the functions that I need :( .

All these thinking make me hungry...

Recruitment form done!

One thing to cross out from my to-do list, yay! Am going to reward myself with a shower, a lather of my newly-bought vanilla & apple body butter, and Xpress Noodles noodles :D :D :D.

14-month plan

Was asked to construct a 14-month plan, October 2011 - December 2012. Looking at it, December 2012 does not seem so far away anymore (which can be both good and bad heheh...). Finished that and also the annual review form. A little bit more work on the ethics thingy - consent forms, recruitment forms, etc.. But first, a trip to town because it is SO sunny and I need to get a few supplies. And perhaps reward myself with a couple of fried chicken pieces; three meals of fish fingers in 4 days is more than enough even for a (lazy) student like me.

How does the brain makewords? Will it turn us into cyborgs? | The Hot Word | Hot & Trending Words Daily Blog at Dictionary.com

How does the brain makewords? Will it turn us into cyborgs? | The Hot Word | Hot & Trending Words Daily Blog at Dictionary.com

Bismillah...

My first entry.

Have been alternately staring at the monitor and the papers in front of me for 3 hours. And all I managed to (academically) write are four sentences.

Time to make fish finger sandwich!