At Imperial College, the month of May is associated with the annual graduation ceremony. This brought about two aspects to me: a looking back at the ceremony of 2009, when I received my M.Sc. and first D.I.C. (hopefully a second will follow when I complete my Ph.D.!) and a looking forward to the ceremony of 2010, when my old room-mate and "bro" was about to receive his D.I.C. and thus a reunion of 2 old roomies. A reunion which came about only a few weeks after a previous one, for this same good old buddy traveled all the way from China to Malta for our wedding. Needless to say, the reunion meant a recollection of the many adventures shared in London, a re-enactment of many a trip to the pubs in the W8 area of London and also lots of food and talk.
On the Graduation Wednesday, we headed off for a fishy dinner at Victoria, courtesy of the graduate, where I experienced some of the nastiest alcoholic consumptions ever; some sort of Portuguese variant of grappa which was utterly awful and alcohol content whose numeric description was nothing but disturbing, to both mind and liver alike. A night finished off at one of our favourite pubs, which trip was concluded by my receipt (and not theft!) of a very interesting Guinness pint mug which now forms part of my own collection.
Friday night was somewhat different from the usual trip to a pub, for some Chemistry society at Imperial threw a free party, with food, wine and live music. The first was limited, but the wine was flowing and good, while the music was...well, after wine any music sounds good! It was good fun but was not enough, for after all was done we headed to yet another of our favourite W8 pubs and finished off the night there...till the bell rang, of course.
On Sunday, I had an unusual trip to an unusual pub near Waterloo. I discovered the concept of an "open mic", where aspiring musicians can sign up to play in a pub hosting the "open mic", for free. For the past couple of weeks I had been playing with 2 colleagues from Imperial and we created a number of our own songs and decided it would be good to play in public. And there you go, we headed off to this place in Waterloo for a debut performance. One minor detail: I had to use the piano at the venue since my instrument is stranded back in Malta. And this piano was probably last tuned in the last millennium, literally speaking of course! The piano and guitar together were way out of tune and thus I had no choice but sadly not play! Any disappointment was soon forgotten since the night ended up with a good Chinese meal!
Before my dear friend headed back to China for his mission there, he handed me a design task which I welcomed with great pleasure. More than the design itself, which was limited to formulating an architectural layout for 3 floors of offices and 1 floor of apartments within an existing block (which is terribly boringly shaped with the most unattractive elevation ever), I was yearning to do some real design amidst my focused Ph.D. work which does not entail any design work at all. So it was really a blessing to spend a couple of days sketching, designing and draughting plans for this project. A project which turned out to be well liked by the client and which hopefully kicks off, making it my first solo project overseas and in the Far East!
And on a similar note: some time last week, my wife and I attended this presentation by William "Bill" Baker, who was the mastermind behind the tallest building in the world, the Burj Dubai (or Khalifa as it is now referred to). The talk was well delivered and not boring at all, and it made me somehow yearning structural engineering and design much more than ever! If I could only design a highrise which is 10% of the Burj! What a dream! As Baker said, "A tall building is a dream realised in steel and concrete"...so true...
In the meantime, I was working hard on my Ph.D. work, with some heavy mathematical computation work being done...obviously I will not bore anyone with describing all the stuff I am doing, but let me just say that it is quite intensive: even computers are finding it hard to keep up with the work...I was handling thousands of numbers a day, compiling data, plotting charts and interpreting results of my models and equations...I simply cannot imagine what people did back in the days when all was done by hand...God bless computers!
I think this is all I can recall from the last couple of weeks...but I think I will have a bit more to say in the upcoming post...for it will include my first trip to Malta since the wedding two months ago! Oh yes, by the way, two months already! Watch out for this space - more coming up soon!
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