District 13

Among all movies I watched, I favor action movies, because they are exciting and fast. One of my favorite action movies is District 13. It is a French movie. The actors in these movies were not famous. What I like most is the Parkour style and the French sense of humor in this movie.

Optimist & Pessimist

This is a story told by my CS1102C (Data Structures and Algorithms) lecturer Dr Tan.

There is an old woman who has two sons. One son sells umbrella, the other sells ice-cream. She was always worrying, because on sunny days, no one buy umbrella while on rainy days, no one buy ice-cream.

One day, a friend of hers said "You should feel lucky. Because on sunny days, people buy ice-cream, and on rainy days people buy umbrella. Through a whole year, neither of your son have to worry about their business."

That is the story Dr Tan tell in the first lecture of every semester. He encouraged each of us to be positive. We can choose to be optimist or pessimist. Charles Dickens said "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. " Our attitude does matter.

Isolation is not a wise choice.

Last week, I attend a solar cell conference in NUS. The conference lasted two days. On the first day, it was a two and half hours period with presentations from each research group in NUS. On the second, it was a one and half hours presentation given by two top researchers in this field who are from India.

On the first day, graduate students, research engineers, and professors from related research lab presented each of their result. Most of the presentations were about chemical cell(organic solar cell, dye-sensitized solar cell). My presentation was about improving efficiency on traditional single crystalline solar cell. Besides me there were only two more presenters talking about traditional solar cell. However, their research are about studying mechanism like cracking and minority carrier diffusion, which were quite different from my research direction. I noticed that my presentation did not raised much attention.

On the second day, two professors from New Deli presented their research work on the 4th generation solar cell. When I listened to their presentation, I was shocked that these two professors' ideas and results are state-of-the-art. To my surprise that the new solar cell structure they proposed was a 5 layers cell structure with conventional metal contact, single nano carbon wall, new organic material, and quantum dot. Their work is truly much advanced than my work. At that moment, I understand that why my previous presentation did not raised much attention.

My current situation is I am working on this project alone, because it is a small project and it is not the main research direction of my lab. It is kind of carrying out a work in isolation. After I attended the conference, I received a lot of new ideas 100 times faster than reading journals by myself. It is true that isolation is not a wise choice. I have also find that NUS and A*Star arrange conferences and seminar every months, which most of them are free for registration. Now I am ready to attend more of these to get new ideas and open my mind.

Marrige? Rush?

I am glad that I have 5 elder sisters and 1 elder brother here in Singapore. They gave me a lot of good suggestions. Two weeks ago we had a discussion about marriage.

Recently I heard that one of my friends is going to get married next year, which means he is going to get married at the age of 25. I have one more friend who is going to get married at his age of 25 in this August. Last year one friend got married at the age of 24. In this two years, there are a lot of weddings going on.

One of my childhood female friend got married in this February. Not only she and I are good friends, but also her mother and my mother are good friends. She asked me when I will get married. I told her that I don't know.

In a Sunday afternoon, I discussed this marriage issue with my brother and sisters. They said getting into marriage too early is not a good choice. My sisters opinion is that if a man get married in his 20s, and when the man get more power and more money in his 30s, having affair may not be rare. They said to me that if I get married earlier, there is a high possibility that I will have affair. They suggested that I can wait until I have stable job and income and man should not being rush.

I am glad that I can get advices from my sisters and brother. They are older than me. And all of them have experience on marriage. Off course, Daddy Peet also gave me a lot of good suggestions. Their opinions help me see the whole picture instead just feeling the pressure from my friends.

Songs in Different Language

Recently, I found I become to like songs in different foreign languages. Here is a song from a lovely singer named Shy'm.