Good news, and cool links

The research work order for my job finally came through! Turns out it wasn't being held up at the university like I thought; it was held up in WASHINGTON. Still hasn't quite sunk in that I'm going to be working for the US government. Pretty darn cool overall.

I've been volunteering in the lab 2-7 hours a day since Monday out of sheer boredom after 4 weeks of unemployment, and making my boss and the 2 microbiologists supervising me feel guilty ^_^ But she says I'll get vacation time to compensate after I officially start working.

In the meantime, I've been reading a LOT -- van Gulik's Judge Dee novels, O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin novels, Gavin Menzies 1421, which I've wanted to get my hands on for AGES. Laksamana Cheng Ho - the eunuch admiral Zheng He - is a popular historical figure with both Chinese and Malays in Malaysia, because Chinese traders' and diplomats' trips to Melaka gave the Sultanate official recognition with China and established Melaka as the biggest port in SE Asia.

Also started on Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, which inspired me to request a trial version of Mathematica. They only last 15 days. Very kiamsiap.

Also read a lot of webcomics - regretting my ignorance of Chinese culture (hey, it was my parents who decided to raise us speaking English - I found a site that has 100 pages each from illustrated versions of ten classic novels. What's annoying me is that there's no link to the books that the pictures and English translations came from, so if anyone knows, tell me, please!

I used Free Download Manager to read the comics offline (less of a pain than loading each page over a slow connection, since I'm still stealing wireless from some anonymous neighbour. So here's a little plug for them:




Free Download Manager