Sorting out life

How goes the life-sorting, lB?

I'll be visiting your territory next week and bringing Spanish chocolate for you. I'm free for dinner Thursday night and/or Saturday night. What fits your schedule?

As for my life-sorting, I think I've reached a good point - I'm refreshed from my first journey across the Atlantic to beautiful Spain (and France). I'm already dreaming about going back, especially to Barcelona! I adore the art nouveau look that Gaudi sprinkles upon the city. It's far nicer than the rigid art deco look of NYC or the lacking art of SF and HK. From the trip, I've realized that I was meant to live in a walkable city, so after I get my PhD, I'm inclined to move eastward to Boston or Europe. My lingering ideas of moving to HK or Singapore are rather remote now - both cities lack science/technology and art in comparison.

I'm also happy in lab. Experiments are moving forward, albeit slowly. I'm starting to feel useful and proficient at what I do at last! My extracurricular project at Noisebridge is serving as a great outlet for my need to create, and this semester I'm taking a course on tangible user interfaces (TUIs). The class has confirmed my love for soldering, building, and electronics, and more importantly, has made me realize that my thought process is best utilized in science and engineering. More precisely, bioengineering. I was offended when a guest professor made light of my interest in biometrics for TUIs by retorting with "Anyone can slap on sensors." He clearly has no idea what many scientists and engineers do on a daily basis...

I've come to realize that regardless of what I do, I will always be meek and uncertain about myself. Perhaps it's an inferiority complex. C'est la vie.

Ending on a girly note: my love life is stable too. Single and comfortably so! Still not over my past, but at last I can live by myself for once. I don't need a guy besides me...well unless perfect he magically shows up. I've now openly accepted the fact that I do in fact have a type preference. For so long, I tried being open-minded and practice equal opportunity in dating, but alas, I'm attracted to certain things: drive, sense of adventure, talent in the performing arts (to contrast with my abilities in the plastic arts), football (aka soccer) passion, metro style, and the most superficial of all - guys who look like Ricky Martin or Kaká (below middle between Cristiano Ronaldo and Messi):

I love this blogger's comment to the following photo too:
"clearly, ronaldo can also see how hot kaka is." She's totally right! Though I'd cave to the bad-boy look that Ronaldo sports.

lol, I always end up talking about boys with you, lB, huh? The things you put up with! =P

...continued

Went to Berkeley Bowl today after the hospital to buy my favorite snacks, tea, and some fruit. The amount of heirloom tomatoes there would put most farmer's markets to shame. Will go tomorrow to the Cheeseboard for dinner and to buy some cheese and bread for the plane.

Dinner at my friend's co-op the last two days has been delicious and free (though on the other side of campus from where i'm staying--like 25 minutes walking there and 30 walking uphill back). Co-op's are fun and friendly! Somebody stopped me in the dinner line to ask if I knit my sweater. She had just been to "Sock Summit" and took classes from all the knitting celebrities I knew. I'm jealous! (Yes there are conventions for sock knitting).

Also I sort of wish I knew about the new School of Information when I was applying to grad school. It's really something closer to what I'm interested in (a combination of their old library studies program folded together with new media studies). And they have their own offices and study lounge accessible 24/7. Though public schools do tend to treat their grad students as the cheapest, lowest form of labor... I guess it's not a trade off I need to concern myself over.

Berkeley...

I'm here on my old campus stomping grounds staying with a friend who has never let go.

I've been eating cheap Thai--like fast food, yum! Everyone is away for Burning Man starting this weekend so it's quiet. (Also Berkeley is the only town that noticeably empties out for Burning Man). California budget cuts has made it so the libraries are barely open on the weekends-boo! And it's predictably cool (the hottest two days of the year faded away just as I arrived).

My usual partner in crime dB is still in Spain, I think, so this trip will be quieter, require more exercise as my host lives on the top of the hill, and perhaps more productive.

Yet to be seen.

Also the boy reads the blog, or I'd be exuding about some hitherto unseen eloquence and thoughtfulness, dB. You'll just have to call for the scoop when you're back in the country.

Spam and other distractions

I'm going through "major life changing" events. So of course my email was hacked today.

Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Hope you're well dB. Tell me how the trip goes.

Plushie distraction

Still missing him, so I'm turning to more crafts and chocolate.

The cute creations on My Paper Crane are adorable. Right now I'm strawberry, but with sufficient amounts of chocolate, I'll be smiling again:

Here's this weekend's craft-in-progress. It's a mini sheep walrus - travel-size! It's being attacked by my housemate's plush killer bunny from Monty Python. I have yet to give my sheep walrus Jr. tusks.

Interests collide

Thanks for the well wishes, dB. And good job on the glowing food.

How about this? Weird, right? Though I would never want one of these really... I still feel the itch to knit one.

Light-up LED brownie

Aside from enjoying the company of friends and their amazing culinary skills, I created more art this weekend. (No wonder my dad now constantly asks if I'm dating. =P)

Anyhow, this weekend's feature is a light-up LED brownie - a deliciously brilliant dessert!

The utensils used are shown below - a brownie on a plate, a color-changing LED, a battery pack for 2 AA batteries and wires extending out, and edible silver foil (some of which is on the brownie, and the rest is in its envelope package):


I began by baking a small brownie about 9 cm in diameter and 3 cm tall in one of my Hello Kitty baking tins. After sufficient cooling, I popped the brownie onto a plate, where a cleaned LED awaited, along side a button battery that I didn't actually use to power the LED. The ultimate goal is to use such a battery though.


The edible silver foil was from Gold Gourmet, a German company, and came in a small booklet of 25 3-3/8" square sheets. It's 23 K, and consequently is a superb conductor, as oppose to the conductive silver paint I bought, which only conducted because it had ions (like sodium benzoate, a food preservative) in aqueous solution.

Below is a photo of the edible silver foil:


The foil was extremely delicate and tended to stick to objects via static, as seen below with the foil floating up, attempting to meet my finger:


The foil tore when I tried to remove my fingers from the foil. The tear can be seen in the photo below. The foil was also impossible to cut with scissors, and shearing it with a fork worked moderately well. A layer of silver remained on the fork, refusing to transfer into the brownie. I didn't manage to remove rectangular pieces from the foil, but rather irregular flakes.


I meticulously placed this flakes onto the brownie, starting at the LED that was stabbed at the center. You can see the foil wrapped about the left lead of the LED:


Instead of using forks, I settled for wooden chopsticks. Because they were made of a nonconductive material, the foil didn't really cling onto the chopstick. I had one chopstick in each hand and teased apart pieces of foil from the sheet with one chopstick doing all of the pulling and the other steadying the foil. I didn't push down hard, because pressure would transfer down to the other sheets of the booklet. Below is a photo of me transferring a torn sliver of foil onto the brownie:


To complete the two traces across and down the sides of the brownie , I used approximately 12 sq. cm (roughly 3 cm x 4 cm) of a sheet:


Then I touched the wires of my battery to the corresponding traces of the brownie and made it light up. Apologies of the poor resolution in the following photo. This is a screen shot from the video documenting my creation:


The videos (parts 1 and 2) are here:
- Light-up LED Brownie: Part 1
- Light-up LED Brownie: Part 2


lB, when are you posting some of your latest creations?