My Blood Drive Interview

As part of the community service activities I usually participate at, this year I took up the role of Blood Drive coordinator. Basically I find/organize volunteers to advertise for the NZ Blood Services visit to campus. After seven blood drives (eighth one is next Monday), I got an email from a post grad student in journalism (call her K) who wanted to write a story about it. She explained how journalism students write stories and send it to newspapers and the ones that are accepted will get published. I was like mm'Kay, just give me a call whenever.

She called me a couple days ago and I gave her an overview of what we do, how I find volunteers, my experience bla bla bla. Then came the question

K: so have you donated blood in any of the Blood Drives yet?
Ali: No, I haven't had the chance yet :(

few more minutes of lame questions

K: so how many times have you actually donated blood??
Ali: aghhh hmm.....ya about that....never, you see me and my Blood can't depart.

I told her how I kinda didn't feel well in a normal blood test(i.e. fainted) and wasn't sure if I can handle getting HALF A LITRE of blood sucked out of my veins.

K: oh ok, I didn't know you had a condition.
Ali: >_< please don't print that.

Great now I have a condition?! I hope her entry doesn't get accepted.

To be honest, I did go to donate on the first blood drive but the queues were too long (due to my efforts of course hahah)... I just didn't have the time since then ahm.

Oh and I am totally doing those so I can have it on my CV. Just clarifying if anyone though I am actually nice or something muhahhaha

Give me 1/10th of his confidence...

Gee.. forget his skills, money, fame or whatever.. I just want 1/10th of his confidence.

Ronaldo: I have changed football

"The best candidate for the other prizes is Cristiano Ronaldo," the 23-year-old said."To be honest, I think I have been the most consistent and the best. And over time I want to enter the book of the all-time best players."

sheesh what a knob..

The Big Bang Machine

I am sure most of you have heard of this Large Hardon Collider used to try and understand what happened after the Big Bang by analysing particle collisions. It is insane how large the project is, cost up to 6.4 billion euros, 26km collider circumferance and so on!

BBC has a very nice introductionary section on this, I highly recommend it.

To be honest, I only read more about this project after watching that rap video, very good idea by the "rapper" who I am sure helped raise more attention to the project.

Strongest man in the world...

Hossein Rezazadeh announced his retirement few days.... Noooooooooooooooo

Now I miss the chance of telling everyone how "the strongest man in the world" is from my country (kinda).... such a shame also about retiring before getting another gold medal in Beijing...

At least we won't be seeing the whole "ya aboul fazl" crap again..

Ouch

My favorite is the ginga with the blank expression

What have I been up to

Well not much really, almost exclusively uni related:

_ I do not like to work with this classmate of mine, we worked on an assignment due on Friday. She is probably much smarter than me but put two intense/perfectionists together in a team and you can't get any good work out of them...I felt muted and unable to contribute to the assignment (apart from building the computer models) so ended up agreeing with whatever she wrote. She was also obsessed with editing the very small bits I added to the report aggggghhhhh

_ Had a job interview on Wednesday, it went alright and I was asked to go for another interview this Tuesday in the company's office. Not sure what to say, the company is tiny but does very interesting stuff. They have no "graduate programme" which can work in my advantage since it will probably allow me to get holidays back to Oman whenever I want. Biggest issue is that it is in Christchurch, I would like to live in another city. Unfortunately my mom is already expecting me to get back to Oman once I finish.

_ Got a contact through my lecturer to do a bit of "consultancy" work. The person wants to know why a certain mining company is buying less of their products. I will probably won't be able to help much but its good experience.

_ I still lament humanity and how fake friendship is in this day and age.. sigh

_ I know the importance of team work when you "get out there in the real word" but I am sure if certain people do not care about their work/project they would be fired, unfortunately this is not the case here at uni. Had another case study were 2 members of a team of 5 were not doing anything... and when I tell one of them in a stern way to complete this task I get called a "dick" siiiiiigh and worse of all I didn't give him a piece of my mind the wanker

_ I have to finish my research project and hand it in by Monday. I haven't started writing anything yet and typically they should be between 20-40 pages long so let's see how it goes.

On that note I think I should go and make a start at least.

What about Africa?

Last week we had a Process Control lab as part of one of my courses and it involved 6 other students (forming two groups). There was also the lab demonstrator (postgrad student from Nigeria, call him B).

I will spare you the technical details, but the lab involved two sets of identical tanks with water flowing throw them continuously and then going through the drain while maintaining a constant level. They have two sets so that two experiments could be done simultaneously, for both groups. Anyway the first part we did the experiments in part of our groups but for the second one apparently one of the tank's sensors wasn't working so we did the second part together.

Classmate: "Should we stop the water supply to Tank A"
B: "No do no worry about it"
Me: "What about the steam heating the water? we're just wasting steam for nothing"
B: "You pay your fees, correct?Do not worry about it!" *heavy African accent*

I was a millisecond away from bursting my typical quote "BUT THINK OF AFRICAAAAAAAAAA" until I remembered he's Nigerian. Ahh it would've been soo sweet if I said that and see his reaction, damn.

Actually this reminds me of the hypocrisy surrounding me, wasn't earth hour a while ago where everyone turned their lights off? (I didn't as I wasn't home at that time, wouldn't have turned it off anyway) well NZ and espeically my university seems to really endorse this whole "environmental awareness etc..." am all for that but I find it annoying that in Christchurch they never turn the shops lights off at night, this was the first thing I noticed when I first went to town at night and all the retail shops had their lights left on. Also driving back from uni at 2-3 am I always see many MANY departmental buildings leaving their lights on.

Instead of doing some of the many things I have to finish (start on one of the 8 university related work I have to submit within 2 weeks, apply for graduate jobs etc..), I decided to sharesome of my favorite music/songs.
note that I find most of the videos rubbish.. but the music makes up for it, at least for me.

My favorite song, Sear me III by My Dying Bride:


Nightwish - The Carpenter

Lacrimas Profundere - Melantroduction

X Japan - Love Replica

Ensiferum-Lost In Despair

Pimping...ohh yaa

I have just been recently adding crap to my blog to make it look slightly more cool-er. Added a flicker badge and a shout box after adding the visitor map a while ago..

It just feels much more productive than studying for the test I got or doing any of my assignments :D

Oh and it feels all those "widgets" as I found them called are like the facebook applications, you add them and remove them within days.