Malacca has changed pretty much... Including the historical sites. Well, I gotta admit that the rest of Malaysia is also changing rapidly. Hills infested with palm trees...

Wow that's eight centimetres this year...

Finally... Reached 170cm and my P6 weight...

                                                          A random guy from the newspapers

                                                    

                                                      

                                                                  A pool of light

                                                                The power of coffee

                                                    Abominable snowmen at orchard

                                                                   They've got the style

                                                                 I'm lovin' it
                                                                

Let’s start with A: Apples

 

I’m doing something. Something like Biology… Something like what we or most of us have learnt in biology this semester. But it isn’t the same thing… because it was all done by me.

Well I’ve always wondered why apples turn brown. People use lemons, milk and all kinds of stuff they find in the markets to stop that (as usual). And I think that they are effective. But how much? And I am actually I’m testing two things in this test.

One: How good the substance is at preventing the browning for short period of time.

Two: How good as a preservative.

 They ask us not to cut open fruits and leave them uncovered for a long time. If you bite and… talk and talk with someone and look at your apple once again what do you see? I thought the saliva can somehow slow down the browning (sounds stupid but interesting).

So these are the substances I tested… Dilute Vinegar (Classic preservative), Dilute Honey (Sweet thing and often added in fruit juices), Sugar syrup (Sweet thing again), Salt water (Classic preservative), Dilute Soy sauce (Something like salt?), Dilute Milk, Dilute Soymilk (I prefer this one’s smell to milk), Pure water (of course), Dilute Saliva (Mine…), Dilute Lemon juice (Classic preservative), Oil… Can’t be dilute (Classic preservative?) and one test tube with nothing but air. So 12 things to be tested…

Stuffed apple slices into the tubes and… the experiment started (6 November).

I look at the apples set the timer to 5 minutes… that was too fast… so ten minutes… oops that was not enough too…so one hour.  And the alarm went off. Saw little change in any of the apples so I set the timer to three hours… Checked once again later but no change yet… So days went by… and at yesterday night (10 November) the exposed apple finally turned completely brown. What the hell… why did this apple take so long to turn brown? Some funny apple… But, it doesn’t matter… as all I needed was to have the apple that is exposed to the air to turn completely brown, no matter how long it takes. The other apples immersed in the different substances will turn stay fresh/yellow/ brown depending on the substance used.

     

Tried to use a bit of what I’ve learnt from bio…

Key J

+++ - White

++ - Slightly Yellow

+ - Yellow

- - Brown

Exposed apple- (-) smells like alcohol

In Oil- (++), Smells bad, Not well preserved

In Saliva- (++), smells like the exposed one

In lemon- (++), rotten lemon, apple smells and tastes okay

In honey- (+), smells real bad

In Vinegar- (?) turns pinkish with the vinegar, Smells vinegar

In Salt water- (+++) slightly pink, smells salty, tastes good like pickles

In Sugar Syrup- (+) smells bad

In Pure Water- (+++), slightly rotten but good to eat

In Soy Sauce-  (+) moldy and disgusting.

So I gotta say that any liquid coating the white surface of the apples can prevent the browning process… All the apples in the liquids were way fresher than the exposed one.   We all know that salt is the best. And I think I can conclude that eating any fruits by biting them a bit by bit is much better than slicing them up. And if you have no choice there are always lots of options other than Saliva…

I've crossed my biggest hurdle thus far, safely or injured, I don't know...

                                                    

                                                            How my life was-

                                                           Peaceful and normal.

                                      

                                                         Exams came... darkened my life.

                                                         I began to worry.

                                                         And it rained, heavier than I expected.

                                                          

                                                        

                                                            

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

                                                        Back to normal. But things are
                                                         getting pretty boring and I'm
                                                         finding for ways to keep myself
                                                         entertained...

Toy Story

Wow, I didn't realize that I had action figures. I guess I got most of them from Mc Donalds.

                                                                    Monsters Vs Aliens

                                          Wolverine: Grr... He's mine...

                                                                   "What did I do?!"

                                                                    "Gong Xi Fa Cai"

                                                                     "Oh yeah! I can fly!"

                                                                 "3... 2...1..."

                                                              "Scissors... Paper... "   
                                                     

Quote of the day

The meaning of life is to give meaning to life.

Blind

Back to the first few days... It was second day of school I think... And it was great. It went smoothly. Orientation activities. I remember game when we had our eyes tied up and left to go to the groups we belonged to. I... cheated... hehe. It was funny to watch people wandering about aimlessly and... bang into me. It was kinda irritating too to watch people of my group just walk past me or... just keep walking in circles. Oh my god, the whole level was blindfolded. Boys vs girls, January vs February vs March vs.............October vs November vs December. Haha, Sean... I remember acting as if I found him after a long, long time... he kept touching me as if he wasn't sure if it was me. Kinda fun when everybody follows you... Because you are the only guy who know where you are going! That was the Boys vs girls... I think the guys won. I also remember my October group. I kept circling the hall and once everybody were almost forming their groups, had a seat on the corner of the hall we planned. I seemed kinda eerie. Everything is almost black around you except the small holes in the windows of the hall where sunlight streams in. Some haunted place... I was on the the stairs... Watching my other members of the group... One girl at the other end of the hall. And two girls right in the front of me at the corner of the hall. Amanda was seated sure of  where she was. And Chanel kept circling her still not knowing where she was. I wanted my group to win but how? How could I help?

Quote of the day

Adversity is like a strong wind. I don’t mean just that it holds us back from a place we might otherwise go. It also tears us from things that cannot be torn , so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.


— Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

Quote of the day

"Many of our fears are tissue paper thin, and a single
courageous step would carry us clear through them."

-- Brendan Francis

First Days...

Ha.
Time flies...
It runs so fast that I can't feel days pass by...
Man, I'm having too much fun...
Just like the first day of school... I still remember my very first days in NUS High. Wow it makes me wonder if I realy thought that way... About my classmates.
Ha... hahahaha...hehehehe... HAHA.
The first time I saw Sean Phua... I thought he was a Korean. He suddenly talked to me... just all of a sudden he said "Hi". I did not even realise that he was in 104. Oh yeah I think I already knew him. I knew him from the day before; which was actually the first day of school. Wow I remember when I thought of Ms Ng as a very strict teacher. On the first day in our classroom... Ha! I also felt kind of uneasy in it... beacuse it seemed kinda... small... traditional... like any other secondary school. Holy Crap! Was that the NUS High School I imagined? Oh yeah I also got lost somehow before I reached our classroom... I didn't know what what my class was! What the hell! Thanks to Ms Chan... Oh yeah when I went to the class everybody seemed to stare at me and say "Who the heck is this shorty?". Yeah I was kinda short then... When I found a seat... Damn, it was admist the girls... Not that I dislike them... But you know... they were quite tall then... At least they seemed to be.

Hope is everywhere... It's yours if you can catch it...

Begins...

Ha. My first post.