Two more weeks of my summer holiday left, before I have to fly back to the festering sore that is London. I've been doing the usual holiday activities, or rather, the usual holiday non-activities, e.g. lazing about and sleeping. As in last summer, I have a bunch of things that I've planned out to do in summer, but again I'm too darn lazy to do it.

Sooner of later though, I'll HAVE to push myself to do some things. I jokingly asked a friend still studying in Catholic High if she wanted me to give a talk for the Sixth-Formers' Society, and to my surprised (and alarm), she promptly said yes and has already pencilled me in to talk to a bunch of students this coming Friday. I have virtually no idea what to talk about. At this point, I think I'll introduce myself and my studies (physics/astronomy undergrads are rather scarce in Malaysia, let alone those studying abroad), and carry on to try and give a flavour of astronomical research. I'm not sure how to make my experiences in STScI fit in though. I've started creating the Powerpoint presentation a few days ago, but so far I'm still at the 'Hello' stages. Any suggestions and/or ideas are most welcomed.

I also have a couple of articles to write. I promised an article on nuclear fusion for Nexus News back in London, which was originally intended to be due late last month, but now I managed to ask it to be put into the next issue instead, which gives me a couple months' breathing space. Still, it might not be too good to procrastinate to badly on that. It will involve considerable amounts of research to get the thing written up.

Another one is something I want to try and sell to New Straits Times...I managed to get an interview with Stephen Beckwith, the director of STScI, while I was there, there are some very interesting material that I think can be written into an article for the general public. First however, I need to get the interview transcribed out of the very cheap digital voice recorder that I used for the interview...so cheap in fact, that it does not have a fast-forward or skip function, so that every time I want to hear something, I have to play the whole thing from the beginning, which is EXTREMELY annoying. Hence, I haven't really transcribed much of the interview yet. And there's the little matter of trying to sell the article to NST....

And there's the little matter of my recital in October. Still need a lot of practise to get up to scratch, but here I am sitting on my arse. Joy...