Lol so hot right now;)

Think this is an ordinary pair of goggles? Hoho you'd be wrong... This trusty gadget is no normal pair of goggles, it serves a truer purpose: Ensuring your onion-cutting ventures remain tear-free. Hehe, ahead of the times eh;)

And aren't these Sony Vaio laptops gorgeous? (And one in pink too!;D) The screens are 13.3 inches and there's 802.11a/b/g wireless connectivity and a DVD burner built in. At 5 pounds, these babies are light too! What's not to lust?;)

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Did you know...

• Rabbits are born hairless and with closed eyes while hares are born covered with fur and with open eyes.
• The cheetah is the only cat that can't retract it's claws. Poor feline needs a mani!
• Fingernails grow faster on your favoured hand.
• Cabbage is 91% water. Ultimate diet food, ladies!
• The average eyeball weighs under 30 grams.
• Clams have a row of eyes around their shells 0_o
• Owls are apparently the only birds that can see the colour blue.

If you think this is a photo...

...think again.

I can easily understand how you might be fooled, though. It got me too. This piece of art (no other word can do justice!) was created by virtue of the talents of one Wayne Forrest using Adobe Illustrator. It's a masterpiece made possible by the use of a gradient mesh to create photorealistic vector art. Brilliant eh? For more on these photorealistic masterpieces, clicky this linky. This blog entry also features some other beautiful pieces done by other artists=)

And before I completely forget to post my little gush-sesh about Kyouya's awesome-looking mansion as seen in Ouran 24, here it goes;)

Gorgeous eh? While I mull in my head whether this could actually work as my future home one day, the features I definitely like are...

1. The floor to ceiling windows. Look how pretty the lights look showcased like so! I have an official thing for floor-to-ceilings, even if I know that they'll be beelzebub to clean. Of course, if I was rolling in the $ sufficiently enough to have earned me such a fabulous abode, I would hope I could more than certainly manage it's upkeep;) And of course, to fit floor-to-ceilings in more feasibly in my future home (because I think I definitely definitely want to=p~), I'll figure out a way to maximize gorgeousness with easy cleaning. (Having a roof may help hehe...and ceilings which aren't too high...) I'd probably figure out a way to have efficient drapes which hopefully won't cost the world=p

2. The balcony on the top floor=D I(You can see it better in the winter shot.) Isn't it gorgeous? Probably a personal bedroom balcony. I suppose that you could even have a balcony all around the top half of the building, like a mezzanine, from the way the two stories are structured. Although, if I were to do that, I'd find a way to have a more private bedroom balcony...

(3). Special mentions are the recessed staired entryway and the arc-shaped arrangement of the house. (I imagine this just spans the front, because i think it would be less artistic and more ridiculous if the whole house was round or elliptical or the like!) Nicely fits in with the floor-to-ceiling windows. All you need is a breathtaking vista to behold and you're set! Just imagine that you've got a huge jacuzzi somewhere strategic and you're looking out at heaven-on-earth while you're soaking. Ahh...

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Some other stuff I've come across...

1. Did you know that swans are monogamous? That's what it says here. A German swan couple set to join the star-crossed ranks of Romeo and Juliet! A rare black swan has fallen in love with a white plastic paddle-boat designed in the form of a swan and biologists are worried that this poor swan will spend it's life pining away for the plastic swan! Aww...true love XD

2. A 3-year old buys a car on ebay! Haha, so cute! I read another article which said that he loves cars and made the $17, 000 "Buy now" purchase using his mom's ebay account, which she was still logged in to. I think the car was pink and I remember the mom saying that he just shifted coyly in his seat when quizzed as to whether he knew what he'd been up to. This article says he's a whiz at computers so ooh, you just know little Jack Neal's going to own a flash car when he gets his license. Although, he may not decide to wait that long;)

(if you like the true-to-mail-provider images I've got on my contacts/msn list on the sidebar to your right, check the site out ^_^)

Blurring the lines of history on a Friday evening; Fact vs. Fictional Fabrications

It is the weekend again and I can almost hear every single millimetre of my body, inside and out, resounding a collective 'Ahh...', which would, granted, be seven kinds of undeniably-freaky but I wouldn't blame them;) I feel as if I've been running around ragged finishing up all the assignments that are due, as the weeks start drawing towards the end of the run soon-ish (3 weeks closer to catching that plane home=D). But for the moment, I can just take a step back and just...breathe...and relax while catching up on fun (sort of)!=D

Mr. BR blogged about something really interesting today. He talked about how the original Bruneian rulers may have been Chinese. How Ong Sum Ping may have been the second Sultan, Sultan Ahmad, and how Sultan Abdul Majid Hassan died in China, a fact which seems to cue that lighbulb over my head to turn on anyhow;) There was even a mention about Brunei and a Bruneian King naming a mountain "Darussalam" in Chinese records some 1000 years before Sultan Muhammad (I'm presuming Sultan Muhammad Shah)! Fascinating stuff. Of course, we can never know what really happened way back when, or (dare my skeptical side say it?) if the truth may have truly been left to someone's imagination, so to speak.

I have a feeling my skepticism may have been a little amped by some anecdotes a friend was regaling earlier. There was a prank issue of the uni student mag and one alumnus was saying that in the lead up (or was it after?) to their graduation, they decided to pull a massive trick. They decided that NZ would spot some UFOs one fine day. Being spread out across the country in various campuses, they planned the whole operation so meticulously; from fabricated pictures to calls to the police from various parts of the country reporting a UFO sighting at their calculated times of when a flying object of that kind may theoretically traverse that part of the country. It was soooo well-planned that the news made the front page! And 20 years later, a conspirator comes out with the actual truth: they were faking it!

Another tale along the same lines was about this Peter Jackson documentary about NZ and how a Kiwi, and not the Wright Brothers, invented the airplane. And the docu also recorded the discovery of a lost city in the Fiordlands somewhere. This friend goes tramping there and she says that people who tramp there would know that there couldn't possibly be such a lost city of wonderful proportions there. But it made the documentary. And 10 years later, guess what, the documentary was professed to be a fake.

Remember the whole drama with the discovery of DNA? (Sorry, it's Friday afternoon, names are failing me at the moment and I'm too lazy to do my research=p) It was actually that lady who died because of too much radiological exposure who really made headway, but those 2 dudes published first and got the Nobel! If she wasn't acknowledged, us future generations would never have even known of her very existence!

So I guess my point is: how much of what we know is what truly is? Especially, as I've demonstrated, what we have come to know and learn and teach as facts may have been a lie, a mistake or a misunderstanding? Or even, as particularly applicable to inventions, medicine and royal lineage and the like, may not have been etched into history until the next one comes along with the same invention or title and has it in records? It seems that whoever speaks up his claim and whoever has the pen makes history. And most importantly, whoever believes and perceives this to be fact marks said history as the future's truth.

It would be amazing to know what really went on between the lines, behind closed doors, underneath the underneath of the pieces of history that we have come to know as facts=) Oh, to have been an immortal (slightly-more-attractive-being-than-a-) fly on the wall!

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And some more frivolous reading;)

1. Chapter 10 of Beautiful Fighter by ronsmyhero is up!=D
2. The eagerly awaited Chapter 325 of the Naruto manga is up!! Can't wait to find out the workings of that brilliant mind of Shika's!;D

Some frivolous reading on my to-read list...
1. Lover Eternal and sequel Eternal Flower, which I think may be SakuSasus, by Kiasidari Ixari.
2. A KakaSaku Sins and Tragedies by Kjata.

Are you listening?

You know you've been trawling the Net way too long (which isn't necessarily a bad thing IMHO XD) when you've done your usual rounds of your usual hit-list 3 times in a row. Minimum figure.

Anyway, I was lurking on Global Voices and got myself a pretty badge (click on said pretty badge on the sidebar to your right to check their site out!) To quote, "Global Voices Online is a non-profit global citizens’ media project, sponsored by and launched from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School." A bunch of bloggers worldwide blog about their respective regions, some doing the rounds of their local blogs to come up with their most interesting posts (their "daily roundups") and a whole bunch of others contribute posts; all this culminating in the Global Voices Online! Pretty neat eh. Have a read!=D

A post from Turkey alerted me to the fact that Ramadhan is referred to as Ramazan there. Granted, there are probably a gazillion different inflects and variations across the globe but it's nice to stumble upon a reminder of that fact once in a while ^_^ So it's that time of the year again... Ramadhan has already started today for those practising back home and due for us in NZ tomorrow at the start of the new week. Since the Islamic calendar is based on the lunar cycles, the dates and months don't correlate with the arbitrary annum of January to December that the world centres around. As such, the months annually creep up in relation to the standard year and such is the cycle.

The previous 3 Ramadhans we've had in NZ has been quite the gruelling test. Occurring so late in the year, it was close to summer here as opposed to what Ramadhan would be like in the UK. Our Subuh would be at around 4ish and Iftar as late as quarter to 9. This year promises to take less of a toll on my body (currently similar to Brunei but will probably lengthen as the year progresses) which is much welcomed considering that of late, it's more sensitive to low fuel levels and the consequences manifest more as the more horrifying faint spells and incredible headaches, rather than plain old cumbersome borborygmi, albeit of gastronomic audible proportions.

~Ramadhan mubarak, to all those practising!~

Another year of abstinence from yummy local sungkai food and family iftars... I can, however, look forward to the very-real-I-can-almost-taste-it possibility of not missing Raya/Eid what with our academic year due to pave way for an early summer vacation in oh, about 4 weeks;) My feet are certainly itching to catch that plane...

(One of my brothers turned 18 today. May he always be blessed ^_^)

Of literary pursuits

We have these 'Professional Development' sessions in the 4th week of every 5-week run that makes up the bulk of our medical curriculum this current annum. These sessions are designed, as indicated by the astute label, to endeavour to keep track of our...professional development. With every path in life, every career, every pursuit, there are ups and downs and all sorts of joys and pitfalls. Like confrontations with your own moral beliefs over closing one eye and having said morals beaten out of you. Learning that you should always protect yourself whatever you do, lest you get hit with a lawsuit claiming malpractice. Getting insight as to how to avoid bad communication and becoming a complete prick of a practitioner. Or just having a life outside of medicine, avoiding having it consume you till you're bone-tired and worked to the ground. These PD sessions help us cope with these issues and help us come to terms with what has or may overwhelm us in it's entirety. Or at least that's the skeleton of what is meant to structure these sessions.

We've been divided into 6 groups this year of about 12-13 per group. Our individual group gets further split in half for these sessions to make up our PD group. In mine, we don't follow the themes set out for each meeting. Instead, we just sit around with our assigned mentor and he asks us about our past 5 weeks in fast-forward. And we talk. The past 2 sessions we talked about balancing med and non-med life. How best to possibly maximise both and still be happy and satisfied. What non-medical books we've read.

I was loathe to say I hadn't been reading any (unless you counted my Kaikan Phrase at the time lol). I feel like the 24 hours in a day is not enough sometimes. They just whiz by and after a blink, you're 3 days down the week. Well, maybe not that bad. But anyhow, I feel like academics aside, there just isn't any time to. Once I get home, all I wanna do is slack and relax. One could argue that this is ample time to kick back with a page-turning paperback but, despite reading at a relatively speedy rate, I still prefer having loads of time at my disposal to do so. I get so engrossed (given it's a good book!) that I have to finish it and if I had to do that in one sitting with the evening left, then once I emerge from the trance-like state of the book-world, it'd be hours of my life gone! It's either that or stop a few chapters in to continue another time which leads to another time until you've lost the plot and need to refresh. Well, that is how I see it. As it is, that's why I end up catching up on all my reading in bulk during the holidays.

Anyway, thinking on about it, I haven't actually abandoned reading completely. I get my fix of a multitude of wonderfully written pieces of fanfiction here and there. I blog-hop. I have lj communities. And manga surely counts! Because in the end, what I really enjoy about reading is it's ability to take me somewhere else. To exercise my escapist tendencies and vicariously enjoy someone else's life for a while. To have a story woven that reels you in so deep that you squeal when the heroine gets the man and cry when he sobs over her inopportune accident in the rain. To experience the Catch-22 where you can't wait to finish the tale but not want to reach the end quite yet. I came across an awesome quote once that I can't quite recall but rings so true. It goes something like, "You know you've read a good book when you reach the end and it and feel like you've lost a best friend". Blogs have that added charming quality too of gaining a new perspective on life, which I always welcome to broaden my mind (not so wide till my brains fall out, mind you) and experience a world beyond my own or seen through different oculars. Someone else's experience, someone else's knowledge, things that may never occur to you. Other people's stories have something to teach you and it's nice because ultimately, that is what I feel the true purpose of reading is.

On that note, I leave you with a couple of interesting blogs I enjoy reading:

- The Datin Diaries. So darn readable! Exquisitely written with wonderful style (you can refer to my brief take on what I mean by that here), this blog is one Datin's journal on her life married to a Datuk. Set in KL today, it gives an honest insight into what goes on behind closed doors. A refreshing read but you need an open mind (and your sense of self and values deeply entrenched) in order to appreciate her blog for what it is!

- The Daily Brunei Resources. Duh, I love home;) Mr. BR blogs about so many interesting stuff about Brunei. Things I often wondered about and debated over with friends. It's nice to have someone more knowledgeable expand on just the kinds of matters I want to know more about in the quest of broadening my mind and knowledge about my country. Plus I love getting an insight into our history and things like how places were named and old legends. I love that stuff;)